French Institute for Research in Computer Science and Automation

The National Institute for Research in Digital Science and Technology (Inria) (French: Institut national de recherche en sciences et technologies du numérique) is a French national research institution focusing on computer science and applied mathematics. It was created under the name French Institute for Research in Computer Science and Automation (IRIA) (French: Institut de recherche en informatique et en automatique) in 1967 at Rocquencourt near Paris, part of Plan Calcul. Its first site was the historical premises of SHAPE (central command of NATO military forces), which is still used as Inria's main headquarters. In 1980, IRIA became INRIA. Since 2011, it has been styled Inria. Inria is a Public Scientific and Technical Research Establishment (EPST) under the double supervision of the French Ministry of National Education, Advanced Instruction and Research and the Ministry of Economy, Finance and Industry. Administrative status Inria has nine research centers distributed across France (in Bordeaux, Grenoble-Inovallée, Lille, Lyon, Nancy, Paris-Rocquencourt, Rennes, Saclay, and Sophia Antipolis) and one center abroad in Santiago de Chile, Chile. It also contributes to academic research teams outside of those centers. Inria Rennes is part of the joint Institut de recherche en informatique et systèmes aléatoires (IRISA) with several other entities. Inria Nancy is part of the joint LORIA (Laboratoire Lorrain de Recherche en Informatique et ses Applications) with CNRS and the University of Lorraine. Before December 2007, the three centers of Bordeaux, Lille and Saclay formed a single research center called INRIA Futurs. In October 2010, Inria, with Pierre and Marie Curie University (now Sorbonne University) and Paris Diderot University started IRILL, a center for innovation and research initiative for free software. Inria employs 3800 people. Among them are 1300 researchers, 1000 Ph.D. students and 500 postdoctorates. Research Inria does both theoretical and applied research in computer science. In the process, it has produced many widely used programs, such as: Bigloo, a Scheme implementation CADP, a tool box for the verification of asynchronous concurrent systems Caml, a language from the ML family Caml Light and OCaml implementations Chorus, microkernel-based distributed operating system CompCert, verified C compiler for PowerPC, ARM and x86_32 Contrail CYCLADES, pioneered the use of datagrams, functional layering, and the end-to-end strategy, concepts adopted in TCP/IP and the Internet. Eigen (C++ library) Esterel, a programming language for State Automata Geneauto — code-generation from model Graphite, a research platform for computer graphics, 3D modeling and numerical geometry Gudhi — A C++ library with Python interface for computational topology and topological data analysis Le Lisp, a portable Lisp implementation medInria, a medical image processing software, popularly used for MRI images. GNU MPFR, an arbitrary-precision floating-point library OpenViBE, a software platform dedicated to designing, testing and using brain–computer interfaces. Pharo, an open-source Smalltalk derived from Squeak. Rocq, a proof assistant scikit-learn, a machine learning software package Scilab, a numerical computation software package SimGrid SmartEiffel, a free Eiffel compiler SOFA, an open source framework for multi-physics simulation with an emphasis on medical simulation. TOM, a pattern matching language ViSP, an open source visual servoing platform library XtreemFS XtreemOS, a grid distributed operating system Zenon, an extensible automated theorem prover producing checkable proofs Inria furthermore leads French AI Research, ranking 12th worldwide in 2019, based on accepted publications at the Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems. History During the summer of 1988, the INRIA connected its Sophia-Antipolis unit to the NSFNet via Princeton using a satellite link leased to France Telecom and MCI. The link became operational on 8 August 1988, and allowed INRIA researchers to access the US network and allowed NASA researchers access to an astronomical database based in Strasbourg. This was the first international connection to NSFNET and the first time that French networks were connected directly to a network using TCP/IP. The Internet in France was limited to research and education for some years to come. References Sources Abbate, Janet (1999). Inventing the Internet. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press. ISBN 978-0-262-01172-3. Further reading Beltran, Alain; Griset, Pascal (2007). Histoire d'un pionnier de l'informatique: 40 ans de recherche à l'Inria [Story of a computer pioneer: 40 years of research at INRIA] (in French). EDP Sciences. ISBN 978-2-86883-806-3. External links Media related to INRIA at Wikimedia Commons Official website