Section: Partnerships and Cooperations

International Initiatives

Inria Associate Teams

• HYPERION: Large-scale statistical learning for visual recognition: Zaid Harchaoui and Cordelia Schmid have an ongoing collaboration resp. with Pr. Jitendra Malik (EECS) and Pr. Nourredine El Karoui (Stat. dpt.) of UC Berkeley in the fall 2011. This collaboration has been supported by the associated team “Hyperion” and the France-Berkeley Fund (dates: June 2012-Dec. 2013). The collaboration is focusing on large-scale statistical learning for computer vision, ranging from the high-dimensional statistics aspects to real-world applications on large image and video datasets. Several visits of members of each institution and co-supervision of students happened in 2012, 2013, 2014. As part of the “Hyperion” associated team, two papers were published resp. in CVPR'14 and ICML'14, and one paper is currently in revision.

Inria International Partners

• UC Berkeley: This collaboration between Bin Yu, Jack Gallant, Yuval Benjamini, Adam Bloniarz (UC Berkeley), Ben Willmore (Oxford University) and Julien Mairal (Inria LEAR) aims to discover the functionalities of areas of the visual cortex. We have introduced an image representation for area V4, adapting tools from computer vision to neuroscience data. The collaboration started when Julien Mairal was a post-doctoral researcher at UC Berkeley and is still ongoing. We are planning to welcome one student from UC Berkeley during the summer 2015 to work on this project.

• University of Edinburgh: C. Schmid collaborates with V. Ferrari, associate professor at university of Edinburgh. Vicky Kalogeiton started a co-supervised PhD in September 2013; she is bi-localized between Uni. Edinburgh and Inria. Her subject is the automatic learning of object representations in videos.

• MPI Tübingen: C. Schmid collaborates with M. Black, a research director at MPI. In 2013, she spent one month at MPI and worked with a PhD student, S. Zuffi, and a postdoctoral researcher, H. Jhuang. C. Schmid has continued this collaboration in 2014 and spent also one month there.

Participation in Other International Programs

• France-Berkeley fund: The LEAR team was awarded in 2014 a grant from the France-Berkeley fund for a project between Julien Mairal and Pr. Bin Yu (statistics department, UC Berkeley) on “Invariant image representations and high dimensional sparse estimation for neurosciences”. The award amounts to 10,000 USD for a period of one year, from November 2014 to November 2015. The funds are meant to support scientific and scholarly exchanges and collaboration between the two teams.