Section: Partnerships and Cooperations

National Initiatives

ANR Project Physionomie

Participants : Jakob Verbeek, Shreyas Saxena, Guosheng Hu.

Face recognition is nowadays an important technology in many applications ranging from tagging people in photo albums, to surveillance, and law enforcement. In this 3-year project (2013–2016) the goal is to broaden the scope of usefulness of face recognition to situations where high quality images are available in a dataset of known individuals, which have to be identified in relatively poor quality surveillance footage. To this end we will develop methods that can compare faces despite an asymmetry in the imaging conditions, as well as methods that can help searching for people based on facial attributes (old/young, male/female, etc.). The tools will be evaluated by law-enforcement professionals. The participants of this project are: Morpho, SensorIT, Université de Caen, Université de Strasbourg, Fondation pour la Recherche Stratégique, Préfecture de Police, Service des Technologies et des Systèmes d’Information de la Sécurité Intérieure, and Thoth. The project ended in June 2016.

ANR Project Macaron

Participants : Julien Mairal, Zaid Harchaoui [University of Washington] , Laurent Jacob [CNRS, LBBE Laboratory] , Michael Blum [CNRS, TIMC Laboratory] , Joseph Salmon [Telecom ParisTech] .

The project MACARON is an endeavor to develop new mathematical and algorithmic tools for making machine learning more scalable. Our ultimate goal is to use data for solving scientific problems and automatically converting data into scientific knowledge by using machine learning techniques. Therefore, our project has two different axes, a methodological one, and an applied one driven by explicit problems. The methodological axis addresses the limitations of current machine learning for simultaneously dealing with large-scale data and huge models. The second axis addresses open scientific problems in bioinformatics, computer vision, image processing, and neuroscience, where a massive amount of data is currently produced, and where huge-dimensional models yield similar computational problems.

This is a 3 years and half project, funded by ANR under the program “Jeunes chercheurs, jeunes chercheuses”, which started in October 2014. The principal investigator is Julien Mairal.

ANR Project DeepInFrance

Participant : Jakob Verbeek.

DeepInFrance (Machine learning with deep neural networks) project also aims at bringing together complementary machine learning, computer vision and machine listening research groups working on deep learning with GPUs in order to provide the community with the knowledge, the visibility and the tools that brings France among the key players in deep learning. The long-term vision of Deep in France is to open new frontiers and foster research towards algorithms capable of discovering sense in data in an automatic manner, a stepping stone before the more ambitious far-end goal of machine reasoning. The project partners are: INSA Rouen, Univ. Caen, Inria, UPMC, Aix-Marseille Univ., Univ. Nice Sophia Antipolis.