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Section: Partnerships and Cooperations

International Initiatives

Participation In International Programs

Ciência Sem Fronteiras

Participant : Amedeo Napoli [contact person] .

Program “Ciência Sem Fronteiras” is a Brazilian research fellowship which provides a funding for the stay of a visiting French researcher in Brazil at Universidade Federal Pernambuco Recife for three years. The on-going project is called “Formal Concept Analysis as a Support for Knowledge Discovery” and is aimed at combining FCA methods with numerical clustering methods used by Brazilian colleagues. This project is supervised in Brazil by Professor Francisco de A.T. de Carvalho (CIn/UFPE).

The project aims at developing and comparing classification and clustering algorithms for complex data (especially 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.

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.

Inria Associate Team: Snowflake

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

Snowflake (http://snowflake.loria.fr/ ) is an Inria Associate Team which started in 2014. It is aimed at facilitating the collaboration between researchers from the Inria ORPAILLEUR team and the Stanford Center for Biomedical Informatics Research, Stanford University, USA. The main objective of Snowflake is to improve biomedical knowledge discovery by connecting Electronic Health Records (EHRs) with LOD (Linked Open Data). Such a connection could allow to complete domain knowledge w.r.t. EHRs. The initial focus of Snowflake is the identification and characterization of groups of patients w.r.t. reactions to drugs. Identifies features associated with such groups of patients could be used as predictors of over- or under-reactions to some drugs. The considered use case is related to pharmacogenomics drugs, i.e., drugs known to cause variable effects depending on the genetic profile of patients. Data associated with pharmacogenomics drugs and their mechanisms are available in LOD and, once connected to EHRs, they can be used to classify drugs and then patients presenting a specific reaction profile to a given group of drugs.

Explorer Programme

Participant : Chedy Raïssi [contact person] .

Chedy Raïssi visited the MIT Lab (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MIT http://web.mit.edu/ ) during one month between July and August 2014. The objective of this research visit was the following.

Over the last decade, the annual turnovers generated by the electronic entertainment industry went beyond those of both cinema and music industries, making video game production a highly profitable business. In parallel with the game industry growth, watching video-game live streams is becoming an increasingly popular way of entertainment. Given the shared interests, between Orpailleur team and the GameLab at MIT, in emerging broadcasting platforms for games and work on analytics, Chedy Raïssi started a productive collaboration with researchers from the GameLab at MIT where we he explored for one month the potential for future collaborations between the MIT and Inria on this interesting new topic.

Miscellaneous

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.

  • The team had a Fapemig – Inria research project between 2009 and 2013, called “Incorporating Knowledge Models into Scalable Data Mining Algorithms” (IKMSDM). The IKMSDM project involved 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 were interested in the mining of large amount of data with two relevant application scenarios: text mining and graph mining. This year, contact and work was going on, focusing on the preparation of a joint publication on the notion of skylines for tensor data.

  • An on-going collaboration involves the Orpailleur team and Sergei Kuznetsov at Higher School of Economics in Moscow (HSE). Amedeo Napoli visited HSE laboratory several times (with the support of HSE) while Sergei Kuznetsov visited Inria Nancy Grand Est several times too. The collaboration is materialized by the joint supervision of the thesis of Aleksey Buzmakov and the organization of scientific events, and in particular the workshop FCA4AI whose fourth edition will take place this year in July at IJCAI 2014 (see http://www.fca4ai.hse.ru ).

  • 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.