Section: Partnerships and Cooperations

International Initiatives

The third and last year of the Associate Team “IT-SG-WN” with the EECS department of UC Berkeley in the USA, funded from 2011 to 2014, was completed by a one month visit of Prof. Anantharam in Paris in June 2013 and a visit of F. Baccelli in Berkeley in November 2013. This Associate Team participated in the Inria@SiliconValley initiative. It led to several joint publications on Information Theory: http://www.di.ens.fr/~baccelli/IT_SG_WN_web_site.htm

• Structured Large-Scale Machine Learning

  Project summary: Machine learning is now ubiquitous in industry, science, engineering, and personal life. While early successes were obtained by applying off-the-shelf techniques, there are two main challeges faced by machine learning in the « big data » era : structure and scale. The project proposes to explore three axes, from theoretical, algorithmic and practical perspectives: (1) large-scale convex optimization, (2) large-scale combinatorial optimization and (3) sequential decision making for structured data. The project involves two Inria sites and four MSR sites.

  As part of this project Florian Bourse (student at ENS) did an internship supervised by Marc Lelarge and Milan Vojnovic. Marc Lelarge visited MSR Cambridge and Milan Vojnovic visited Inria.

• Social information networks

  Project summary: Online Social networks provide a new way of accessing and collectively treating information. Their efficiency is critically predicated on the quality of information provided, the ability of users to assess such quality, and to connect to like-minded users to exchange useful content. To improve this efficiency, we develop mechanisms for assessing users’ expertise and recommending suitable content. We further develop algorithms for identifying latent user communities and recommending potential contacts to users.

  As part of this project Rui Wu (student at UIUC) did an internship supervised by Marc Lelarge and Laurent Massoulié.

Anne Bouillard is participating in the joint lab Inria-Alcatel-Lucent and collaborated with B. Ronot [18] .

Anne Bouillard is collaborating with Giovanni Stea from the University of Pisa, Italy.

Marc Lelarge is part of the IFCAM project: Application of optimal control and game theory in communication networks (PIs: Rajesh Sundaresan (Indian Institute of Science) and Eitan Altman (Inria))