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Paris, May 3, 2006
By an order of the President of the Republic signed on May 2, 2006 and
published in the Official Journal on May 3, Michel
Cosnard has been named as Chairman of INRIA. In accordance
with INRIA's internal regulations, the Chairman will also assume
the responsibilities of the Institute's CEO. He succeeds Gilles
Kahn who passed away on February 9, 2006.
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Michel Cosnard © INRIA / C. Lebedinsky |
Michel Cosnard is a Professor at the Polytechnic School of the University of Nice-Sophia Antipolis, Director of the INRIA Sophia Antipolis research unit and member of the board of the “Secured Communicating Solutions” cluster in the Provence Alpes Côte d'Azur region. He already served as INRIA's CEO from December 2003 to May 2004, but he asked to step down from this position following the sudden death of his son.
Michel Cosnard is a worldwide specialist in algorithm, especially in the design and analysis of parallel algorithms and grid computing. He has also worked on the automaton and neural network complexity. He is the author of over 100 published works in the most prestigious journals of the field. He is Editor-in-Chief of Parallel Processing Letters, Member of the Editorial Board of Journal of Parallel Computing, and he has served as editor of IEEE Transactions of Parallel and Distributed Systems. He has written two books and supervised 27 theses. He has been awarded the following prizes: the Academy of Science Alfred Verdaguer Award (1994), the IFIP Silver Core Award (1995), the Charles Babbage Award from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Computer Society (2003).
Born in 1952, Michel Cosnard graduated from ENSIMAG with an engineering degree in Computer Science and Applied Mathematics. He obtained a Master's degree in Applied Mathematics from Cornell University in the US, before going on to complete his PhD in Computer Science from the University of Grenoble. He joined CNRS in 1979 as a researcher and 9 years later, in 1987, he was appointed as Professor of Computer Science in the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Lyons where he went on to create the Parallel Computing Research Laboratory (LIP), and served as its director until 1997. From September 1997 to December 2000, he was Director of both INRIA Lorraine's research unit and of LORIA (Research Laboratory in Computer Science and its Applications). Since June 2001, he has been Director of the INRIA Sophia Antipolis research unit and also Professor at the Polytechnic School of the University of Nice-Sophia Antipolis. From 2001 to 2003, he is the Director of the ACI (Action Concertée Incitative) “globalisation of computer resources and data (GRID)” for the French Ministry of Research. During 2003 and 2004 he was manager of GEIE ERCIM (European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics). In 2004, he was elected President of “PERSAN”, a training and research centre in Sophia Antipolis-Nice and he actively participated in the creation of the global “Communicating Secured Solutions” cluster.
The mission of the French National Institute for Research in Computer
Science and Control is to carry out research in Information and Communication
Sciences and Technologies (ICST). Through six research units located
in seven major regions*,
INRIA employs a workforce of 3,600 people, including 2,800 scientists
(from INRIA and associate organisations). INRIA’s annual budget
is €160 million (excluding VAT), 20% of which comes from its
own resources (contracts, licences). INRIA plays a decisive role
in five areas of research: communicative, cognitive, symbolic, numerical
and biological systems.
INRIA develops many partnerships with industry and fosters technology
transfers and business creation (80 enterprises) in
the field of ICST, in particular through its affiliate, INRIA-Transfert,
who operates four seeding funds.
International partnerships involve receiving and recruiting foreign
students, as well as numerous exchanges among researchers. Priority
is given to geographic regions with high economic potential: the
European Research Area, Asia and North America, while maintaining
basic activity with South America, Africa and the Middle East.
* Aquitaine, Bretagne, Lorraine, Ile-de-France, Nord
Pas de Calais, Provence Alpes Côte d'Azur and Rhône-Alpes.
More information: http://www.inria.fr
INRIA
Vincent Coronini - Tel.: + 33 1 39 63 57 29 - Mail: vincent.coronini@inria.fr
