Section: New Results

Creation of the SIERRA project-team

From WILLOW alone to WILLOW and SIERRA

The WILLOW team officially started in the Spring of 2007. From the start, it was clear that machine learning was a key ingredient to new breakthroughs, and our activities have steadily grown in this area. In three short years, WILLOW has grown into a mature group of about 30 people, and it divides its activities between computer vision, machine learning, and the cross-pollination of the two fields, with video as one of the core research areas. We have been very successful, with many publications in all the major international conferences and leading journals in both areas, but we are a large group with very diverse interests, ranging from camera geometry to statistics, and from image retrieval to bioinformatics applications of structured sparse coding. With the creation of the SIERRA project-team, the core machine learning activities of WILLOW have been be transferred to the new group.

The two teams continue collaborating with each other (they remain co-located at the INRIA site in central Paris), but have a sharper focus on their respective computer vision and machine learning activities.

SIERRA

The SIERRA project-team was created by the INRIA on January 1st 2011 and is headed by Francis Bach, who received in 2009 a Jr. ERC grant.