Section: Partnerships and Cooperations

National Initiatives

FUI Sumatra

Participants : Frédéric Alexandre, Thalita Firmo Drumond, Xavier Hinaut, Randa Kassab, Nicolas Rougier, Thierry Viéville.

This FUI project, supported by the Aerospace Valley Innovation Pole, gathers two industrial groups (Safran Helicopter and SPIE), three research labs and four SME. Its goal is to provide contextualized information to maintenance operators by the online analysis of the operating scene. We are concerned in this project with the analysis of visual scenes, in industrial contexts, and the extraction of visual primitives, categories and pertinent features, best decribing the scenes, with biologically inspired neuronal models.

Firstly, this is an opportunity for us to revisit the principles of deep network architectures by adapting principles that we will elaborate from the context of the hierarchical architecture of the temporal visual cortex. Secondly, we intend to exploit and adapt our model of hippocampus to extract more heterogenous features. This project is an excellent opportunity to associate and combine our models and also to evaluate the robustness of our models in real-world applications.

ANR SOMA (PRCI)

Participants : Nicolas Rougier, Remya Sankar.

This project is a convergence point between past research approaches toward new computational paradigms: adaptive reconfigurable architecture, cellular computing, computational neuroscience, and neuromorphic hardware:

1. SOMA is an adaptive reconfigurable architecture to the extent that it will dynamically re-organize both its computation and its communication by adapting itself to the data to process.

2. SOMA is based on cellular computing since it targets a massively parallel, distributed and decentralized neuromorphic architecture.

3. SOMA is based on computational neuroscience since its self-organization capabilities are inspired from neural mechanisms.

4. SOMA is a neuromorphic hardware system since its organization emerges from the interactions between neural maps transposed into hardware from brain observation.

This project represents a significant step toward the definition of a true fine-grained distributed, adaptive and decentralized neural computation framework. Using self-organized neural populations onto a cellular machine where local routing resources are not separated from computational resources, it will ensure natural scalability and adaptability as well as a better performance/power consumption tradeoff compared to other conventional embedded solutions.

ANR MACAQUE40

Participant : Nicolas Rougier.

Most of the theoretical models in economics proposed so far to describe money emergence are based on three intangible assumptions: the omniscience of economic agents, an infinite time and an extremely large number of agents (not bounded). The goal of this interdisciplinary study is to investigate the condition of apparition of a monetary economy in a more ecological framework provided with the assumption that the market is made up of a finite number of agents having a bounded rationality and facing a time constraint.

In this study, we propose a generic model and environment of monetary prospecting. Our first objective is to artificially identify structural (trading organisation, agents specialisation) and cognitive conditions (learning skills, memory and strategic anticipation abilities, tradeoff exploration/exploitation) that allowed money emergence. This will provide relevant environmental constraints that we will use during our manipulations in the laboratory. The agents that will be involved in these manipulations will be of two types: non-human primates (rhesus macaques) and humans.

Project Motus of the ANSES

Participant : André Garenne.

The MOTUS project (MOdulaTion dU Signal RF et effets sur le cerveau : approche in vivo et in vitro) is financed by the ANSES (the french national agency for health security). This 3 years project is studying the effects of GSM-RF on living matter and especially neuronal activity and development. Our main involvement concerns electrophysiological data and spike trains analysis as well as the development of pharmacological protocols to test GSM-RF effects hypotheses. Altogether, our experimental findings provide evidence for dose-dependent effects of RF signals on the bursting rate of neuronal cultures and suggest that part of the mechanism is nonthermal (publication in Journal of Neurophysiology). In an attempt to elucidate the depressing effect of GSM on in-vitro neuronal activity, pharmacological studies have also been realized on cortical cells.