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INTERNATIONAL VISIBILITY
INTERNATIONAL EXPOSURE AND RELATIONSHIPS
International challenges
The Institute first of all contributes to reinforcing the visibility of the Université Côte d´Azur community at the European level, in particular through its participation in the "Ulysseus" European University project, of which AI is a priority theme. An Innovation Hub dedicated to AI aims to federate academic AI skills in the alliance, but also ecosystems more broadly, so as to be able to feed research and innovation in AI at the European Union level, and to position member institutes together for future calls for projects of the European Commission.
The Institute is also involved in the AI4media project, a Center of Excellence founded as part of the H2020 European program, which aims to develop artificial intelligence tools for the media, multimedia and audiovisual industries. As part of this project, our Institute is actively participating in the "International Artificial Intelligence Doctoral Academy" (AIDA), the objective of which is to become a European benchmark in teaching AI at the doctoral level. It should be noted that the first course of this academy was given in the Fall 2020 by Prof. Marco Gori, an international chair of the Institute.
Internationally, the Institute shines through the bilateral collaborations of chairholders, and through institutional collaborations, in particular the strategic partnerships of Université Côte d´Azur with Université Laval in Canada (co-supervision of 3 doctoral theses in AI, a collaboration which resulted in a publication in Nature Communications, a MITACS Global grant for a UCA student who will visit Université Laval for 3 months, etc.), and with the University of Santiago in Chile (UCA-CNRS-INRAE) with which joint research in modeling is applied to agriculture and biocontrol. Discussions are also underway for the development of Franco-German partnerships with Munich, with the Fondazione Bruno Kessler in Italy, and with the Insight Centre in Dublin.
3IA Côte d'Azur, stakeholder of the Digital Innovation & Intelligence Artificial Lab
The Institute and OTESIA are also stakeholders of the Digital Innovation & Intelligence Artificial Lab, created in 2020 as part of the U7+ alliance, and whose initial work led to the drafting by the participating universities of a common position paper on the “Role of universities in the production of ethical and responsible AI”.
Finally, we should mention events such as the SophI.A Summit conference and the Deep Learning School, which each year attract around 500 researchers, academic partners and students from different regions of the world.
The Institute thus intends, through various partnerships and visible actions, to strengthen its international positioning. The Institute has also set up several tools to enhance its international appeal:
The Institute has already hired 3 international chairholders
They will spend 12 months on the Côte d’Azur to develop research collaborations and provide teaching: • Prof. Marco Gori (Siena Artificial Intelligence Lab, Italy) • Prof. Sebastien Ourselin (King's College London, UK) • Prof. David Wales (University of Cambridge, UK) Three additional international chairs will open in 2022.
The Institute also offers several visiting professor packages each year.
There has been poor uptake of this scheme since 2019 due to the health crisis (7 invitations were issued and only 4 of them were accepted due to international travel restrictions). The program will be relaunched in 2022.
It is worth noting that all these actions for the visibility of our Institute, and more generally of the network of 3IA Institutes, seem to be effective as the “3IA model” is quite visible abroad.
Several foreign states or research agencies have contacted us to find out about this model of institute, in particular the State of Sao Paulo (Brazil), Saudi Arabia, Israel and Japan. A first visit of the Japan Science and Technology (JST) research agency was held in December 2021.
