The joint INRIA-Microsoft Research Centre

 

Parc Orsay Université 28, rue Jean Rostand 91893 Orsay Cedex France Web site.

 

Inaugurated on January 11, 2007, the joint Research Centre INRIA-Microsoft Research marks the continuation of the cooperation that started several years ago. Based in Orsay, its paths of research are on the formal methods and IT tools for science.

 

Inaugured on January 11, 2007, the joint Research Centre is based in Orsay, France. Under the management of the INRIA Research Director, Jean-Jacques Lévy, the center employs around 15 research engineers.

The joint Research Centre will conduct long-term research into formal methods, software security and IT methods and tools designed for science.

This event marks the continuation of the cooperation that was started by relationships between individual researchers at INRIA and Microsoft and has since seen a number of successful institutional cooperation projects emerge, and also by a shared ambition to make fundamental progress that will be beneficial to both science and society.

 

Two paths of research and one ambition

•	Synergy and cooperation
	To make progress in information technology research in fields of common interest and on the basis of the existing, and occasionally informal, cooperation between research engineers at INRIA and Microsoft.
•	A laboratory located close to Paris
	To allow the Microsoft research engineers from all over the world (Cambridge, USA, China, India) and the INRIA research engineers to work together in brand new premises situated in Orsay and to manage and supervise the researchers, be they PhD post-graduates, post-PhD researchers or guest researchers.
•	Make progress in science and interdisciplinary research
	Modern science can only progress with the help of powerful information technology tools, the use of simulation and modeling techniques, the acquisition of increasingly huge volumes of data, the automated processing of this data and the innovative methods designed to view and handle this data. The Research Centre's long-term goal is to support the progress of scientific research by achieving progress in the realm of information technology research.

Two paths of research

•

Formal methods - The goal is to contribute to the progress of programming languages and to the very design of software using mathematical methods, instead of the empirical methods based on know-how and experience that are generally referred to as software engineering. The purpose of this initiative is to improve quality, reliability and security. Research in this direction started in 2006 with three projects.

•

IT tools for science - Several projects will be launched in this field in 2007. They include the "Re-activity" project, presented during the inauguration on January 11, 2007, that is based on cooperation between Wendy Mackay, research director at INRIA Futurs Research Centre in France, and Mary Czerwinski, Microsoft Senior Researcher research engineer in Redmond, USA.