Artificial intelligence: Univ. Grenoble Alpes preselected to host a 3IA institute

The Grenoble project "MIAI@Grenoble Alpes" was preselected by the government on Tuesday 6 November to host an interdisciplinary artificial intelligence institute (3IA) with three other French sites (Nice, Paris, Toulouse). The program comes with a total grant of 100 million euros over four years.
The MIAI project (Multidisciplinary Institute in Artificial Intelligence) aims to develop a world-class interdisciplinary research network around artificial intelligence, offer attractive teaching for students and professionals of all levels, support innovation in major companies, SMEs and startups and finally, inform and interact with citizens on all aspects of AI.

Two key application areas: health and environment/energy


Research at the MIAI will focus on research programmes corresponding to four main areas (1. learning, reasoning and perception, 2. natural and artificial intelligence, 3. embedded AI and hardware architectures for AI and 4. AI and society) and two fields of application, health and the environment, the latter being addressed partly via new developments in energy.

A well-structured, high-performance ecosystem


For Eric Gaussier, project coordinator and director of the Grenoble Informatics laboratory (LIG, CNRS/Grenoble INP/Inria/UGA), "it means success for an ecosystem that is able to mobilise and recognition for Grenoble's many current strengths. The resources allocated will fund doctoral and post-doctoral grants, international exchanges and research projects put forward by industry with concrete applications. For example, health becomes ‘smart health’ with AI, fulfilling the promises of medicine's P4 vision (predictive, personalised, preemptive, participatory). Artificial intelligence can be used to fight climate change and propose solutions to reduce atmospheric pollution and other climate-friendly innovations. For example, we propose to integrate new methods of data mining and machine learning to predict climate evolution based on space observations and to predict landslides and earthquakes."

Since obtaining the IDEX, Univ. Grenoble Alpes has launched a process to structure and integrate its academic and research sectors, with strong involvement from economic partners and local authorities. The success of the Grenoble IDEX reflects the region’s goal of coordinating to be ready to respond to the current major social challenges, including artificial intelligence.


The 3IA call for expressions of interest


In the context of the national artificial intelligence (AI) programme announced by the French president, the government has decided to support a limited number of research, training and innovation centres in the field, around which all French potential will be organised.

This call for expressions of interest aims to identify the research, training and innovation centres in France eligible for the interdisciplinary artificial intelligence institute (3IA) label. The four preselected sites must then submit a detailed proposal before 15 January 2019 to obtain their 3IA label and final grant following an assessment by the international panel. The program comes with a grant of 100 million euros over four years.

Read the press release from the Ministry of Higher Education, Research and Innovation
Read the previous press release, “Artificial intelligence: Grenoble ready to host an institute”

See the article on Univ.Grenoble Alpes website