Section: Highlights of the Year

Highlights of the Year

The year 2018 was marked by the following events:

• Creation of the team. The team MOSAIC started in January 2018 at the Inria Grenoble Rhône-Alpes Research Center and is part of the laboratoire de reproduction des plantes (RDP research unit) at ENS de Lyon campus. Romain Azaïs joint the team in March 2018 and Guillaume Cerutti was hired as an Inra research engineer in September 2018.

• Edition of Statistical Inference for Piecewise-deterministic Markov Processes. Piecewise-deterministic Markov processes form a class of stochastic models with a sizeable scope of applications. Such processes are defined by a deterministic motion punctuated by random jumps at random times, and offer simple yet challenging models to study. The issue of statistical estimation of the parameters ruling the jump mechanism is far from trivial. Responding to new developments in the field as well as to current research interests and needs, the book “Statistical Inference for Piecewise-deterministic Markov Processes” edited by Romain Azaïs and Florian Bouguet [10] gather 7 chapters by different authors on the topic. The idea for this book stemmed from a workshop organized in Nancy in the 2016-17 winter.

• Invited talk at the Jacques Monod conference in Roscoff. Christophe Godin was invited in Sep 2018 at the prestigious Jacques Monod series of international conferences in Roscoff, France, to present an overview of the current research on phyllotaxis. The talk was entitled Phyllotaxis at the era of molecular and computational biology: the revival of an old enigma and prepared with Teva Vernoux.

• First prototype of the software platform Gnomon. A first, fully functional, prototype of the Gnomon software platform, dedicated to the modeling and simulation of plant and animal morphogenesis, was developed during a series of intensive coding sessions in Lyon and Sophia-Antipolis. This new concept of platform dedicated to the study of morphogenesis was presented in November 2018 to a panel of modelers and biologists at the RDP lab, who will contribute next year to the further testing and refining the platform. This prototype is a clear milestone and results from a strong collaboration between the Inria software engineering group from Sophia-Antipolis (who provides the software architecture kernel - DTK)) and the Mosaic team and is supported by Inria (Action de Developpement Tecnologique, ADT).