INRIA, France's national computer research lab, announces a new president

Paris - December 16, 2003 - Michel Cosnard becomes the new president of INRIA following a decree signed by Jacques Chirac, the President of France. Michel Cosnard takes over from Bernard Larrouturou, recently appointed Chief Executive Officer of CNRS.

Michel Cosnard was born in 1952. He received his Engineering Degree in Computer Science from ENSIMAG (Grenoble, France), his Master's degree in Applied Mathematics from Cornell University (USA) in 1975 and his Doctorat d'Etat in Computer Science from the Université de Grenoble (France) in 1983.

In 1979 he joined the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (France). In 1987, he became Professor of Computer Science at the Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon (France) where he has founded the Laboratoire d'Informatique du Parallélisme (LIP). He served as Chairman of the LIP until 1997.

In 1997, he became director of the research unit of INRIA in Lorraine and of LORIA (Laboratoire Lorrain de Recherche en Informatique et ses Applications) . In june 2001, he has been nominated director of the INRIA Research Unit in Sophia Antipolis (Nice) and Professor at the Ecole Supérieure en Sciences Informatiques (ESSI) of University of Nice - Sophia-Antipolis.

His research interests are in the design and analysis of parallel algorithms, in the complexity analysis of automata and neural nets. From january 2001, he has been appointed Director of the National Research Program on Grid Computing by the Ministry of Research .

In 1994, Michel Cosnard was awarded a national prize from the French National Academy of Science. In 1995, he received the IFIP Silver Core and in 2003, the Charles Babbage Award.

Michel Cosnard has published more than 100 papers related to parallel processing (in Journal of the ACM, IEEE Transactions of Parallel et Distributed Systems, Theoretical Computer Science, Discrete Applied Mathematics, Complex Systems, Neural Networks, American Mathematical Monthly).

Press contacts

INRIA :

Christine Genest Vincent Coronini

Tél : 01 39 63 55 18 Tél : 01 39 63 57 29

Ketchum Agency:

Yasmina Madafi Sana Berkaoui

Tél : 01 53 32 55 90 Tél : 01 53 32 55 71