Inria Chile Associated Teams are joint research projects between researchers
from Inria, in France, and researchers abroad, which define a work frame which includes a
scientific objective, a research plan and a bilateral exchange program. These teams are an
essential element of the international policy of Inria, as well as one of the main tools to
promote international scientific collaboration and strengthen its strategic alliances in the
world.
In the Inria Chile Journées Scientifiques 2022, these teams were protagonists and
presented their advances in different sessions, according to their specific themes.
The first to participate was FOAM (Accelerated First-Order Methods for Machine
Learning), which investigates accelerated first-order methods for machine learning,
including optimal convergence rates in statistical learning, convex stochastic optimization,
variational inequalities and fixed-point problems under performance estimation.
Cristóbal Guzmán, assistant professor at the University of Twente and the
Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, presented the results of this project in the
scientific session "Artificial intelligence and machine learning", where he explained how
they will have applications in multiple areas, including data analysis. astronomical data,
seriation problems and training of generative adversarial models (GANs).
On the same day, in the session “New computational paradigms”,
GreenAI+SusAIn was presented. This project, which brings together more than 30
scientists, addresses the challenge of reducing the energy consumption of Artificial
Intelligence algorithms, implemented in the context of high-performance computing.
This group combines unique scientific expertises on this critical environmental
topic with the goal of leveraging existing hardware and software infrastructures to provide
new tools and recommendations for the scientific community on designing and
implementing. adequate use of AI algorithms. Romain Rouvoy, full professor at the
University of Lille and member of the SPIRALS Team of Inria, was the one who presented
this project.
In the same session, Nicolas Tabareau, senior researcher, leader of the
GALLINETTE Team, presented GECO (Incremental Verification and Robust Testing in
Engineering for COq), which seeks to bring significant improvements to the Coq test
wizard with both a theoretical and practical approach, covering fundamentals and novel
methods, language design and concrete tools, and validation through specific case studies.
The end result will be a series of improvements to the Coq test wizard
(frameworks, tactical language), along with guidelines and demonstrations of its
applicability in realistic scenarios. Éric Tanter, professor of the Department of Computer
Science at the University of Chile, and leader of the GECO team on the Chilean side, was
also present at the session.
On day 2 was the turn of the BlueEdge Associated Team (Artificial Intelligence
and optimization for cleaner biotechnological processes), which participated in the session
"Understanding weather and climate", whose speaker was Olivier Bernard, from the
BIOCORE Team of the Inria center of the University Côte d'Azur. In this project, work is
carried out within the framework of innovative processes through the use of microalgae in
wastewater and aquaculture systems, with the aim of recycling nitrogen, carbon and
phosphorus to reduce the flow of pollutants in the natural environment.
At BlueEdge, experimental pilot systems and process models are developed,
respectively. Inria Chile participates in this project by designing advanced Artificial
Intelligence algorithms for data-driven supervision, which can also be implemented thanks
to the ODIN+ software.
During day 3, in the scientific session "Modeling nature and society", 3 of these
projects were presented, whose common denominator is to understand and provide
solutions to environmental problems, SymBioDiversity; health, MAGMA; and logistics and
security, Bio-Sel; all from mathematical modeling.
The first of them was SymBioDiversity (Symbolic and Numerical Mining and
Exploration Of Functional Biodiversity), in which numerous researchers from the Center
for Mathematical Modeling (CMM) of the University of Chile collaborate, who are in
charge of modeling ecosystems, and of Inria Chile, contributing to the line of data mining
applied to biodiversity. For its part, the PLEIADE team from the Inria center of the
University of Bordeaux and a researcher from the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile, an
expert in biodiversity, are researching systems biology and biodiversity.
This project was presented by Clémence Frioux, a researcher at the Inria center
of the University of Bordeaux, who explained how the mathematical models that are
being developed must be able to "reflect the reality of biological systems", allowing a
simpler approach to enable their understanding. , but informative enough to allow the
formulation of hypotheses.
Then, the Associated Team MAGMA (Modeling and understanding of the
anticipation of movement in the retina), whose objective is to understand how the visual
system accumulates information and solves problems inherent to neural computing, its
dynamics and implementations for simulations, studies the mechanisms underlying
anticipatory response and predictive coding observed in the mammalian retina, with a
particular emphasis on lateral connectivity (amacrine cells and gap junctions). Their work
and results were presented by the leader of the BIOVISION Team of the Inria center of the
Université Côte d'Azur, Bruno Cessac. Researchers from the University of Valparaíso, the
University of Bío-Bío, and the Federico Santa María Technical University also collaborate in
this project.
The researcher presented the advances and new knowledge generated by
MAGMA, specifically how they have managed to numerically express the theory of
dynamic response.
The session was closed by the BIO-SEL team (BIlevel Optimization in Security,
Energy and Logistics), in which researchers from Inria Chile, the Center for Mathematical
Modeling of the University of Chile, the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile and the
INOCS Team collaborate. of Inria. This Team focuses on bi-level programming, a subfield of
optimization, which is applied to logistics and security problems.
The presentation was made by Martine Labbé, professor at the Free University of
Brussels and researcher of the INOCS Team, who highlighted the relevance of bi-level
optimization and its development, since it offers tremendous opportunities in terms of
solving problems of optimization, by providing "a very appropriate framework to
understand many applications in energy projects" and how relevant the Franco-Chilean
bilateral collaboration is for the development of research and innovation in this line.
Finally, on the fourth day, Paola Goatin, leading researcher of the ACUMES team, from the Inria center of the Université Côte d'Azur, presented NOLOCO+NOTION. This working group, which brings together researchers from the University of Concepción, the University of Bío-Bío, the University of Versailles, and the University of Córdoba (Colombia), addresses the theoretical and numerical questions that arise in the mathematical study of conservation laws with non-local flux functions. In addition, it seeks to design more efficient numerical algorithms to accurately calculate solutions of non- local conservation laws, both through a careful choice of quadrature formulas and the selection of adapted high-order methods.
