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| Scientific and Technological Orientation Council (COST) | Research Teams | Exploratory Actions | Collaborative Research Initiatives | Large-scale Initiative Actions | Associate Teams | International | European Partnerships | Researchers'News | Michel Monpetit prize | Jacques-Louis Lions prize | International academic and research endowed chairs | SUPCOR: ANR support unit |
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Frédéric Boyer was born in 1967 and is currently senior lecturer at the Ecole des Mines in Nantes and a member of the robotics team at the Communication and Cybernetics Research Institute (IRCCyN), also in Nantes.
After graduating as mechanical engineer, he went on to complete a Masters in Mechanics Research at the INP in Grenoble, before receiving CIFRE funding (training through research programme) for his PhD in robotics at Hispano Suiza. His thesis was supervised by Philippe Coiffet (from the LPP Robotics Laboratory in Paris). Today he is coordinator of the ROBEA "Robot Anguille” project at CNRS that is due to be extended as part of the "RAAMO" (Robot Anguille Autonome en Milieu Opaque) project. This project has received backing from the French National Research Agency (ANR). This year Frédéric Boyer received the Monpetit Prize for the ensemble of his achievements in research. His research concentrates essentially on the dynamics of multiple body systems, the dynamics of Lie groups, geometrically accurate solid mechanics theory, attitude control of satellites, and - over the last few years - he has made a conscious effort to focus his work on hyperredundant robot locomotion inspired by living organisms. Mr. Boyer’s work is based on geometric mechanics and aims to consider the dynamics of the systems studied - from their initial writing to their operation for simulation and control - directly in the geometric spaces in which they "live". Working from this perspective enabled him to propose new models (deformable robots, robotic arms on shuttles, cables, snake robots, etc.) that were sufficiently precise to be used for rapid simulation (simulation of deformable structures for virtual reality as part of collaboration with the CEA in particular) and control.
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The Montpetit Prize was awarded to Pierre Comon,
senior research scientist at CNRS,
Department of Computing, Signals and Systems.
Both recipients are specialists in the development of the LUSTRE and SCADE computer languages
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Paul Caspi and Nicolas Halbwachs,
Verimag Department, Grenoble, 2004 Monpetit-INRIA Academy of Science prizewinners |
Paul CASPI is a former student of the Ecole Polytechnique
(1967) and holds a Ph.D. in automatic control. He currently is Research
Director at CNRS at the Verimag Department in Grenoble. His work concern
the applications of computing to automatic control, from the points of
view of software, hardware and functioning safety. He belonged to several
evaluation committees for critical real time systems and was an evaluator
for the Certifer railway certification organization. Nicolas HALBSWACHS
holds a Ph.D. in computer science (1978). He spent his whole career in
Grenoble, where he currently is Research Director at CNRS and Deputy Director
of Verimag. His work is on programming languages, compilation, formal verification
methods and tools and test methods and tools for critical, embedded, real
time systems.
The idea of a programming language that is simultaneously well adapted to the
culture of automatic control engineers and well conceived from the point of
view of computer science in such a way as to be used for critical applications,
was born in 1984 following Nicolas HALBWACHS's Ph.D. thesis.
This language, called Lustre, is based on two principles: it is declarative
and synchronous. It is declarative under the form of systems of recurrent equations,
in order to describe everything the system is meant to do while retaining some
leeway in terms of implementation, and it is synchronous in order to describe
activities that occur in time. These concepts were recognized as belonging
to the school of synchronous languages such as Esterel and Signal. Compilers
and formal verification and test tools were then developed for the language.
As early as 1986, two former doctoral candidates of the team, Eric Pilaud and
Jean-Louis Bergerand, were hired by Merlin Gérin. They applied the concepts
of Lustre to build the SAGA software workshop, with which they developed the
programmed emergency stop systems for the 1450MW Framatome nuclear plants.
Another former doctoral student, Daniel Pilaud, was hired by Verilog to do
a market study on the potential of the concept and realized that Aérospatiale
had used a similar concept (SAO) to program the computerized flight controls
of the A320 Airbus. The idea of a joint SAGA-SAO tool dawned and a joint CNRS-Verilog
department called Verimag was founded in 1993 to develop such a tool. The result,
called SCADE, progressively replaced SAO at Airbus Industries and was finally
chosen to program the flight controls and automatic pilot systems of the A380.
SCADE has thus become a de facto standard in European avionics, together with
other success in railway and automotive industry.
François
CARDOSO, age 45, is a former student of the Ecole Normale Supérieure
and holds an Agrégation in physics. He obtained his Ph.D. in 1984
at the Paris VI University on "Quantitative ultrasound imaging." His
thesis advisor was Mathis Fink. Jean-François Cardoso is Research
Director at CNRS and holds a position at the Information Processing and
Communication Department of Télécom Paris.
Jean-François
Cardoso is a pioneer in the so-called "source separation" or "analysis
in independent components" statistical
signal processing methods. The applications are varied in telecommunications,
bioengineering, image processing, audio signals and even in astronomy.
Signal processing is a field of great importance in information science
and technology. J.-F. Cardoso turned out to be one of the best theoreticians
in the field and a astute specialist in modeling actual situations and
potential applications. He achieved significant international stature
and is the author of over one hundred publications.
Source separation or analysis in independent components attempts to reconstitute
unknown signals that have been distorted and mixed up in an unknown fashion
prior to being observed. The only available information is that these signals
come from independent sources. This problem is currently the source of
much fundamental and applied work in France and abroad. J.-F. Cardoso contributed
to the theoretical foundation of the field of source separation. He thus
designed several algorithms to optimally express and use, depending on
the application, the property of statistical independence that is at the
heart of these methods.
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Paul Louis GEORGE is a senior research scientist at INRIA Rocquencourt. He was awarded the prize for his remarkable success in designing, implementing and developing very high performance anisotropic adaptive meshes in scientific computing, especially for fluid mechanics problems presenting boundary layers and shocks. |
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Senior research scientist at INRIA for his remarkable contributions to the mechanical and mathematical modeling of complex, in particular mobile and legged, robots, their control and stabilization, a source of difficult nonlinear mathematical problems. |
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Michel SORINE is senior research scientist at INRIA Rocquencourt. He was awarded the prize for his contributions to the development of advanced methods in automatic control and their implementations in industrial problems. |
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Senior research scientist at INRIA Rennes, for his work in signal processing, automatic control, real time system modeling and the study of adaptive systems. |
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Senior research scientist at INRIA Rocquencourt, for his work on the performance of the crucial algorithms in symbolic computing, communication protocols, random resource allocation and cryptography. |
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Senior research scientist at INRIA Rocquencourt, for his contributions to the analysis and control of complex stochastic systems, both from the point of view of mathematics and physics. |
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Senior research scientist at INRIA Rocquencourt, for his contributions to the semantics of parallel computing and programming languages, and for the development of software tools adapted to the handling of programs and the generation of programming environments. |
