18 Postdoctoral Fellowship at Inria, France

The postdoctoral position addresses the challenge to build a “human-centered digital word” with innovative interactive systems providing “adaptive and personalized interactions with humans” for supporting “their wellbeing and health”. Additionally, this PhD program is primarily based on interdisciplinary approach of individuals’ intrinsic motivation (curiosity) as critical ingredient for synergistic human-computer interactions. Today, very few studies provide information on the impact of intrinsic motivation and curiosity on the inter-individual variability of learning across life span or on their neuro-protective role against the aging effects or attentional disorders.

The Odyssey team (Inria, Ifremer & IMT Atlantique, France) is seeking a postodctoral researcher to work on ocean internal tide dynamics. The postdoc will work in the ModITO project (Modelling the Internal Tide in the Ocean), which aims at improving our understanding of ocean internal tides and its mapping from satellite altimeter data, in particular in the context of the forthcoming SWOT mission. The main objective of the project is to develop and exploit a simplified dynamical model of internal tides dedicated to the assimilation of data from satellite altimeter and other sources of observations (e.g. surface drifters). The work is expected to have a great impact in the physical oceanography community: on the one hand, mapping the internal tide field — and more precisely separating the internal waves from the balanced motions — is of critical importance in the context of the SWOT mission. On the other hand, a better quantification of the internal tides and the related dynamical processes are key to better understand the ocean circulation and improve parametrizations of ocean models.

Developing models and inference methods that can explain the variability observed in single-cell datasets is a fundamental step toward the understanding of origins and consequences of heterogeneity of microbial populations. Several methods have been proposed for the inference of stochastic models of gene expression from population-snapshot data, that is, quantitative single-cell measurements of gene expression and other properties (cell size) in cell samples drawn from a growing population at different times. In general, existing modelling and inference methods to not explicitly account for the fact that cell growth is heterogeneous across individuals of an isogenic population. To take into account this fact and possible consequences on observed gene expression levels, individual-based modelling and inference approaches are necessary, however, their exploration is currently limited.

The Inria Université Côte d’Azur center counts 37 research teams as well as 8 support services. The center’s staff (about 500 people) is made up of scientists of different nationalities, engineers, technicians and administrative staff. The majority of the center’s research teams are located in Sophia Antipolis and five of them are based in an Inria antenna in Montpellier. The Inria branch in Montpellier is growing in size, in accordance with the strategy described in the institution’s Contract of Objectives and Performance (COP). The postdoc researcher will work in the context of the ANR project CoREACT (Coq-based Rewriting: towards Executable Applied Category Theory) colocated in IRIF (UP), LIP (ENS-Lyon), LIX (École Polytechnique) and Sophia-Antipolis (Inria).

The memory hierarchy of HPC platforms keeps becoming even more complex. Now that all processors have multiple levels of caches, memory itself is changing with the advent of different technologies with different performance characteristics. Heterogeneous memories first appeared in HPC several years ago with the Intel Xeon Phi processor. Custom strategies were implemented to place bandwidth-sensitive data buffers on the appropriate memory. The emergence on non-volatile memory DIMMs (that may be used either as fast storage or as slow but high-capacity memory) brought similar questions. Moreover several ARM and x86 platforms are going to combine HBM and DRAM on the road to exascale. There is a critical need for software stacks to learn portable ways to identify different kinds of memories, to abstract their characteristics in terms of performance, and to decide where to allocate which data buffer.

The overall goal of this project is to investigate how computer tools can help capturing and reproducing the typicality of traditional 2D animations. More precisely, we plan to address the following two challenges:

1. How to interactively generate in-betweening frames from a sparse sequence of rough drawings to swiftly explore different animation choices and motion designs.
2. How to stylize the geometry and motion of a 3D animation to allow its seamless integration into a 2D animation.

These two objectives target tasks that are currently tedious to perform by artists; they currently rely on manual techniques or ad‐hoc solutions that severely limit artistic creativity and drastically increase production times. The solutions that we will develop in the project should be compatible with regular animation workflows and should provide adequate controls to artists that should remain at the center of the computer‐human interaction loop.

The present postdoctoral project is part of a collaborative project between the Atlantis project-team from the Inria Research Center at Université Côte d’Azur,  (2) Thales R&T in Palaiseau, France, which is the main multidisciplinary research center of Thales group, and one of the main world players in professional electronics (3) and Nanoe in Ballainvilliers, France, whcih is  a SME (Small and Medium Entreprise) specialized  in development and fabrication of innovative ceramic materials for the industries.

The postdoc will develop approaches to the coexistence and interaction of different communication technologies in the vehicular context. In particular, VLC, 802.11 and V2X will be considered. The algorithms will be developed in simulation (based on simulation tools such as NS3) and when possible a validation will be carried out on prototypes/test benches on the basis of a Software Defined approach. A vulnerability and susceptibility study will be conducted and the postdoc will have to generate different denial of service or packet injection attacks and test/validate the robustness of the multi-technology approach against the different attacks generated. The metrics to consider for robustness are maintaining connectivity, packet loss, latency. Decisions to switch from one technology to another will be based on the optimal approaches developed by Lamih with a view to the energy consumption of the system which must be minimized.

This postdoc position is open at Inria in the context of the Software Heritage project, on the topic of
large-scale empirical analysis of open source code artifacts, such as source code files and commits, as captured by state-of-the art distributed version control systems (VCSs). Inria is a national research institute dedicated to digital sciences that promotes scientific excellence and transfer. Inria employs 2,400 collaborators organised in research project teams, usually in collaboration with its academic partners. This agility allows its scientists, from the best universities in the world, to meet the challenges of computer science and mathematics, either through multidisciplinarity or with industrial partners.

Defrost team at Inria (https://team.inria.fr/defrost/) focuses on the modeling, simulation and control of soft deformable robots (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soft_robotics). Our vision is that future robots don’t have to be «rigid» but made of complex deformable structures, composed of stiff and soft regions, close to organic materials that we can find in the nature. Soft robotics opens very attractive perspectives in terms of new applications, reduction of manufacturing costs, robustness, efficiency and security. It could result in great advances in robotics in the next years.

ACENTAURI est une équipe de robotique dirigée par Ezio MALIS qui étudie et développe des robots autonomes et intelligents qui collaborent entre eux pour réaliser des tâches difficiles dans des environnements complexes et dynamiques. L’équipe aborde les problèmes de perception, de décision et de contrôle pour la collaboration multi-robot en proposant une approche hybride originale de l’intelligence artificielle basée sur les modèles et les données et en étudiant des algorithmes efficaces. L’équipe se concentre sur les applications telles que les systèmes multi-robot rondiers pour la surveillance de l’environnement et le transport de personnes et de marchandises. Dans ces applications, plusieurs robots partagent des informations multi-capteurs provenant éventuellement de l’infrastructure. L’efficacité des approches proposées est démontrée sur des systèmes robotiques réels comme les voitures et les drones en collaboration avec des partenaires industriels.

This Post-doc subject is proposed in the context of the ROAD-AI Challenge involving the Cerema and the Inria Team ACENTAURI. ACENTAURI is a robotic team located in Sophia Antipolis that studies and develop intelligent, autonomous and mobile robots that collaborate between them to achieve challenging tasks in dynamic environments. The team tackle perception, decision and control problems for multi-robot collaboration by proposing an original hybrid model-driven/data driven approach to artificial intelligence and by studying efficient algorithms. The team focus on robotic applications like environment monitoring and transportation of people and goods. In these applications, several robots will share multi-sensor information eventually coming from infrastructure. The effectiveness of the proposed approaches are demonstrated on real robotic systems like cars AGVs and UAVs together with industrial partners.

(18) Postdoctoral Fellowship Position

Postdoc Fellowship Position summary/title: Development of a multi-robot system for accurate infrastructure inspection

Deadline : 2023-01-08

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