Section: Partnerships and Cooperations

Regional Initiatives

Le Bois Santé (LBS)

Participants : Emmanuel Bresso, Marie-Dominique Devignes [contact person] , Malika Smaïl-Tabbone.

The project ”LBS – Le Bois Santé – #38017” is funded by the European Regional Development Fund (FEDER) and the French “Fonds Unique Interministériel (FUI)” in the framework of the BioProLor consortium. This project is coordinated by “Harmonic Pharma”, a start-up specialized in the identification of active principles in natural products. The aim of LBS is to exploit wood products in the pharmaceutical and nutriment domains. Concerned people in the team are working on data management and knowledge discovery about new therapeutic applications.

The BioProLor consortium is composed of 5 enterprises and 7 academic research teams, which were funded for 3 years (2010–2013) by AME (“Agence pour la Mobilisation Economique”) for the design of compounds with high added-value which originate from plants in Lorraine. Finally, it should be noticed that the PhD Thesis work of Emmanuel Bresso was taken in charge by Harmonic Pharma (CIFRE contract, 2009-2013).

PEPS Mirabelle EXPLOD-Biomed

Participants : Adrien Coulet, Marie-Dominique Devignes [contact person] , Gabin Personeni, Malika Smaïl-Tabbone.

This project initiates a collaboration with geneticists from the Hospital of Nancy, namely Philippe Jonveaux and Céline Bonnet. The aim of the EXPLOD-Biomed project is to propose novel knowledge discovery methods applied to Linked Open Data for discovering gene that could be responsible for intellectual deficiencies. Linked Open Data are available on-line, interconnected and encoded in a format which can be straightforwardly mapped to ontologies. Thus they offer novel opportunities for knowledge discovery in biomedical data. Here, geneticists are playing the role of experts, guiding the different steps of the knowledge discovery process.

Hydreos

Participant : Jean-François Mari [contact person] .

The research project Hydreos (http://www.hydreos.fr/fr ) is aimed at evaluating the quality of water. Actually, water resources relies on many agronomic variables, including land use successions. Accordingly, one objective of this research project is to have a better understanding of the changes in the organization of a territory. The data to be analyzed are obtained by surveys or by satellite images and describe the land use at the level of the agricultural parcel. Then there is a search for detecting changes in land use and for correlating these changes to groundwater quality.

The systems ARPEnTAge (see §  5.2.2 ) and CarottAge (see §  5.2.1 ) are used in this context, especially by agronomists of INRA (ASTER Mirecourt http://www6.nancy.inra.fr/sad-aster and UMR Costel Rennes http://www.univ-rennes2.fr/costel ). In addition, we participated in various meetings of researchers involved in the study of quality of groundwater in Alsace-Lorraine.

This year, or research work focused on collecting and preprocessing satellite data sampled in a territory in Brittany where there is an important phytoplanktonic biomass and Ulva species mass proliferation risk.

Contrat Plan État Région” (CPER)

The links between the Regional Administration and LORIA are materialized through the so-called “Contrat Plan État Région” (CPER) which is running from 2007 to 2013. The associated scientific program is called “Modélisations, informations et systèmes numériques” (MISN) and includes two tracks in which the Orpailleur team is involved.

• “Modeling Bio-molecules and their Interactions” (MBI).

  The general objective of this project is to study how domain knowledge can be taken into account for improving the modeling of biomolecules and their interactions, and the modeling of biological systems (http://bioinfo.loria.fr ). Six scientific projects are currently under development and involve collaborations with computer scientists and people working either in biology or chemistry. This project is coordinated by Marie-Dominique Devignes.

• An Inria experimental research platform is currently developed in the framework of MBI (http://bioinfo.loria.fr/Plateforme%20MBI ), which is aimed at sharing data and computing resources. The specific features of this platform are relative to biomolecules modeling, to classification and to data integration for data mining. The platform is a constituent of the North-East node of RENABI –“Réseau National des Plateformes Bioinformatiques”– together with the platforms in Strasbourg, Reims, Lille, and Nancy-INIST.

• “Traitement Automatique des Langues et des Connaissances” (TALC).

  TALC stands for “Automatic Processing of Languages and Knowledge”. The general objective of TALC is to study the relations existing between knowledge discovery, knowledge representation, reasoning, and natural language processing. In the framework of TALC, the Orpailleur team plays an important role as the research themes of the team are closely related to those of TALC. Actually, research projects are currently under development on knowledge management and decision support involving in particular the Kasimir and the Taaable systems.