Section: Partnerships and Cooperations

International Initiatives

Participation In International Programs

Facepe Inria Project: CM2ID

Participants : Amedeo Napoli [contact person] , Chedy Raïssi.

This research project called “Combining Numerical and Symbolical Methods for the Classification of Multi-valued and Interval Data (CM2ID)” involves the Orpailleur Team at Inria NGE, AxIS at Inria Rocquencourt (Yves Lechevallier) and the computer science laboratory of the University of Recife (Prof. Francisco de A.T. de Carvalho). The project aims at developing and comparing classification and clustering algorithms for interval and multi-valued data. Two families of algorithms are studied, namely “clustering algorithms” based on the use of a similarity or a distance for comparing the objects, and “classification algorithms in Formal Concept Analysis (FCA)” based on attribute sharing between objects. The objectives here are to combine the facilities of both families of algorithms for improving the potential of each family in dealing with more complex and voluminous datasets.

Finally, a workshop was organized in April 2013 , namely the “French-Brazilian Workshop on Numerical and Symbolic Methods of Data Analysis -WFB2013” (http://www.cin.ufpe.br/~wfb2013/ ).

Fapemig Inria Project: IKMSDM

Participants : Amedeo Napoli [contact person] , Chedy Raïssi.

This Fapemig – Inria research project, called “Incorporating knowledge models into scalable data mining algorithms” involves researchers at Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais in Belo Horizonte –a group led by Prof. Wagner Meira– and the Orpailleur team at Inria Nancy Grand Est. In this project we are interested in the mining of large amount of data and we target two relevant application scenarios where such issue may be observed. The first one is text mining, i.e. extracting knowledge from texts and document categorization. The second application scenario is graph mining, i.e. determining relationship-based patterns and use these relations to perform classification tasks. In both cases, the computational complexity is large either because the high dimensionality of the data or the complexity of the patterns to be mined. Loïc Cerf from UFMG visited the Orpailleur team in January 2013 while Chedy Raïssi visited UFMG in May 2013.

Pronex Brasilia

Participant : Bernard Maigret [contact person] .

In this research project, the goal is to identify, using virtual screening techniques that we developed, new compounds against tropical diseases (e.g. trypanosome, dengue and mycosis) in collaboration with several Brazilian laboratories among which the Department of Biology at University of Brasilia, together with the Harmonic Pharma start-up. Through this collaboration, several PhD and postdocs came to the lab for one year training with our home-developed virtual screening engine (VSM-G). This project is in part supported by the Brazilian CNPq agency. Fruitful results were already obtained leading to several papers in preparation and patents. These patents concern the discovery of new putative treatment of strong mycosis due to fungi particularly virulent in South America. These patents were funded by the University of Brasilia, Embrapa and Harmonic Pharma.

International collaborations in Mining complex data

Participants : Mehwish Alam, Aleksey Buzmakov, Melisachew Chekol, Victor Codocedo, Adrien Coulet, Elias Egho, Ioanna Lykourentzou, Amedeo Napoli [contact person] , Chedy Raïssi, Jean-Sébastien Sereni, Mario Valencia.

PICS CNRS CAdOE

A collaboration involves the Orpailleur team, “Université du Québec à Montréal” (UQAM) in Montréal with Prof. Petko Valtchev and Laboratoire LIRMM in Montpellier with Prof. Marianne Huchard. This collaboration is supported by a CNRS PICS project (2011-2014), which is called “Concept Analysis driving Ontology Engineering” and abbreviated in “CAdOE”. The research work within this project is aimed at defining and implementing a semi-automatic methodology supporting ontology engineering based on the joint use of Formal Concept Analysis (FCA) and Relational Concept Analysis (RCA). This year the work was mainly focused on RCA and some important papers were published [33] , [57] .

Miscellaneous

• An on-going collaboration involves the Orpailleur team and Sergei Kuznetsov at Higher School of Economics in Moscow (HSE). Amedeo Napoli visited HSE laboratory in March 2013 (with the support of HSE) and met Sergei Kuznetsov several times during the year. In addition, Alexey Neznanov from HSE Moscow visited the Orpailleur team in May 2013 while Dmitry Ignatov visited the visited the Orpailleur team in September 2013.

  These visits were the occasion of preparing a publications. Moreover, Sergei Kuznetsov and Amedeo Napoli, together with Claudio Carpineto organized a workshop related to the ECIR Conference in Moscow in March 2013 on “Formal Concept Analysis meets Information Retrieval” (http://www.hse.ru/en/org/hse/fcair ).

• A so-called AGAUR Project funded by UPC Barcelona involves Amedeo Napoli and Jaume Baixeries who is an Associate Professor at UPC Barcelona (Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya). Both researchers have worked, jointly with Mehdi Kaytoue, on the characterization of functional dependencies in many-valued data with FCA and pattern structures [38] .

• A PHC Zenon project (Cyprus) with Florent Domenach, associated professor at the University of Nicosia in Cyprus was finished at the end of last year. This project was entitled “Knowledge Discovery for Complex Data in Formal and Relational Concept Analysis” (KD4CD) and is aimed at studying and combining different types of classification process in the framework of FCA. As a result of this collaboration, some papers were published this year, among which one at the ICFCA Conference in Dresden [49] , [61] .

• A PHC Proteus project (Slovenia) with Riste Škrekovski, professor at the University of Ljubljana ended at the end of 2013. This project was entitled “Graphs for combinatorial chemistry and complex networks”. Several manuscripts are under submission.

• LEA STRUCO is an “Associated International Laboratory” of CNRS between IÚUK, Prague, and LIAFA, Paris. It focuses on high-level study of fundamental combinatorial objects, with a particular emphasis on comprehending and disseminating the state-of-the-art theories and techniques developed. The obtained insights shall be applied to obtain new results on existing problems as well as to identify directions and questions for future work. Jean-Sébastien Sereni is the contact person for LEA STRUCO which was initiated when Jean-Sébastien was a member of LIAFA.

• At present, Mario Valencia is the international coordinator of the MathAmSud project 13MATH-07 “Structural an algebraic problems on graph theory” (2013–2015). This project is funded by the following research institutes: CNRS in France, MinCyT in Argentina, CAPES in Brazil and CMM in Chile.