Section: Overall Objectives

Presentation

The last two years have been a turning point for the team. Of course, since its creation in 2003, TAO activities had constantly but slowly evolved, as old problems were being solved, and new applications arose. But recent abrupt progresses in Machine Learning (and in particular in Deep Learning) have greatly accelerated these changes also within the team. It so happened that this change of slope also coincided with some more practical changes in TAO ecosystem: following Inria 12-years rule, the team definitely ended in December 2016. The new team TAU (for TAckling the Underspecified) has been proposed, and the creation process is on-going. At the same time important staff changes took place, that also justify even sharper changes in the team focus. During the year 2018, the second year of this new era for the (remaining) members of the team, our research topics have now stabilized around a final version of the TAU project.

Following the dramatic changes in TAU staff during the years 2016-2017 (see the 2017 activity report of the team for the details), the research around continuous optimization has definitely faded out in TAU (while the research axis on hyperparameter tuning has focused on Machine Learning algorithms), the Energy application domain has slightly changed direction under Isabelle Guyon's supervision (Section 4.2), after the completion of the work started by Olivier Teytaud, and a few new directions have emerged, though yet too young to have given any visible fruit, around the robustness of ML systems (Section 3.1.2). The other research topics have been continued, as described below.