Section: Partnerships and Cooperations

International Initiatives

INRIA International Partners

We are cooperating with a number of labs worldwide without contract commitment.

SwRI: in 2007, INRIA signed a collaboration agreement with the Southwest Research Institute (San Antonio, Texas, USA) for the joint development of autonomous vehicle technologies, focusing on the areas of perception, intelligence, command and control, communications, platforms and safety. SwRI is one of the oldest and largest nonprofit applied research and development organizations in the U.S. The partnership will conduct joint research and exchange intellectual property to foster rapid technology and system advancements in vehicle autonomy. In 2011, This collaboration agreement has been reconducted for four more years.

Keio University (Japan): IMARA has established links with Jun Murai Lab at Keio University in Japan since 2005, which led Thierry Ernst to join IMARA in 2006. Since then, we are working with Keio University and other labs in Japan and in France grouped into the Nautilus6 project which is working on IPv6 mobility enhanced mechanisms allowing continuous access to the Internet while on the move. From this cooperation, we were able to hire a PhD student who completed his MSc at Keio University. In addition, three labs from Keio University with different backgrounds (automatic vehicles, electric vehicles and Internet communications) have joined forces into the so-called co-Mobility project aiming at developing the vehicle of the future. The intersection between Keio University's activities on this project and IMARA is a tremendous set of common research topics and as such we have been invited to a Co-Mobility workshop in Japan in January.

University of Tokyo (Japan): During his 1-year stay within IMARA Dr. Yoshio Mita's (associate professor at Tokyo University) was successful into organizing a private workshop between University of Tokyo and IMARA. It was held in July and gathered 10 researchers from Japan. From this workshop a number of new collaboration items were identified, including on the communication research topic in which there was not previous cooperation with University of Tokyo. In 2009 and 2011, INRIA and the University of Tokyo organized two bi-national workshops at INRIA. In 2011, this workshop was held on January 6th at INRIA Rocquencourt with the participation of 25 people from both laboratories. We are likely to enforce our cooperation with University of Tokyo in the coming years.

NICTA (Australia): After first contacts established in 2007, a PhD student started his work on a join PhD program between NICTA and IMARA. This student is currently working in Australia. Our commitment on this joint PhD supervision guarantees an outstanding cooperation with NICTA. In addition to the ongoing joint PhD supervision, IMARA has welcomed an intern from NICTA who worked on security applied to ITS architecture communications.

ESPRIT (École Supérieure PRivée d'Informatique et de Technologie, Tunis, Tunisia): IMARA is welcoming interns from this private school for the past 2 years and hired them as engineers. A joint seminary, involving IMARA, HIPERCOM, ESPRIT and ENSI took place in February 2010. A wider cooperation has been decided, based on the common interest in vehicular adhoc networking and more particularly geonetworking (geographic addressing and routing). ESPRIT and IMARA started in February 2010 the development of an open-source implementation of IPv6 GeoNetworking conforming with the specification of the FP7 GeoNet project now adopted by ETSI TC ITS. This code will be published as open-source early 2011.

NAIST (Nara Institute of Sciences and Technologies – Nara – Japan): IMARA and NAIST are extending their cooperation on ITS communication architecture based on the work realised by a PhD student from NAIST who is spending more than half his PhD course at IMARA. An AYAME proposal has been submitted but this funding program has been aborted due to lack of funding on the Japanese side (JSPS). However, NAIST has secured an internal funding allowing to send interns in 2011.

We also maintain longstanding bilateral relations with the following centers:

• University of Moscow (V. Malyshev);

• University of Saint-Petersburg (R. Iasnogorodski);

• IPPI, Dobrushin's Laboratory, Academy of sciences, Moscow (A. Rybko);

• several teams in USA (Berkeley, Columbia, Monterey, AT&T);

• The Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute, Korea;

Visits of International Scientists

• Professor Adriano Alessandrini (University of Rome La Sapienza, CTL Lab) visited IMARA from February to April 2011

• Professor Plamen Petrov (Technical University of Sofia, Mechanical department) visited IMARA from July to September 2011

• Dr. Joshue Perez Rastelli (University of Carlos III, Robotics Lab) visited IMARA from September to November 2011

Participation In International Programs

French-Asian cooperation: in the context of the Asian-French project CityHome, very close collaboration were driven between INRIA's IMARA and E-Motion project-teams and Asian laboratories such as: NTU (Singapore), Dept. of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering Graduate School of Science and Technology Kumamoto University (Japan), Department of Automation of the Shanghai Jiao Tong University (SJTU University, China) and the Information and Communication Engineering and the Intelligent Systems Research Center at the SungKyunKwan University (SKKU), (Korea). A new similar project has started (PAMM) announcing new visits between the partners and new collaboration around autonomous vehicles and intelligent systems.