Institut national de recherche en informatique et en automatique
Encyclopedia
The National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Control is a French
France
The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...

 national research institution focusing on computer science
Computer science
Computer science or computing science is the study of the theoretical foundations of information and computation and of practical techniques for their implementation and application in computer systems...

, control theory
Control theory
Control theory is an interdisciplinary branch of engineering and mathematics that deals with the behavior of dynamical systems. The desired output of a system is called the reference...

 and applied mathematics
Applied mathematics
Applied mathematics is a branch of mathematics that concerns itself with mathematical methods that are typically used in science, engineering, business, and industry. Thus, "applied mathematics" is a mathematical science with specialized knowledge...

.
It was created in 1967 at Rocquencourt
Rocquencourt
Rocquencourt is a commune in the Yvelines department in the Île-de-France in north-central France.It is mostly known for:* hosting a research unit of INRIA ;...

 near Paris
Paris
Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...

, part of Plan Calcul
Plan Calcul
Plan Calcul was a French governmental program to promote a national or European computer industry and associated research activities.The plan was approved in July 1966 by president Charles de Gaulle, in the aftermath of two key events that made his government worry about French "computer sovereignty"...

. Its first site was the historical premises of SHAPE
Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe
Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe is the central command of NATO military forces. It is located at Casteau, north of the Belgian city of Mons...

 (central command of NATO military forces).

INRIA is a Public Scientific and Technical Research Establishment (EPST) under the double supervision of the French Ministry of National Education, Advanced Instruction and Research
Minister of National Education (France)
The Ministry of National Education, Youth, and Sport , or simply "Minister of National Education," as the title has changed no small number of times in the course of the Fifth Republic) is the French government cabinet member charged with running France's public educational system and with the...

 and the Ministry of Economy, Finance and Industry.

Administrative status

INRIA has 8 research centers and also contributes to academic research teams outside of those centers.

Before December 2007, the three centers of Bordeaux, Lille and Saclay formed a single research center called INRIA Futurs.

In October 2010, INRIA, with Pierre and Marie Curie University
Pierre and Marie Curie University
The Paris VI University , or the Pierre and Marie Curie University , is a university located on the Jussieu Campus in the Latin Quarter of the 5th arrondissement of Paris, France....

 and Paris Diderot University started IRILL
IRILL
The Innovation and research initiative for free software is a French research center.This centre was created in September 2010 by INRIA with Pierre and Marie Curie University and Paris Diderot University and is located at the INRIA in Paris. Roberto Di Cosmo is the director of IRILL.IRILL aims to...

, a center for innovation and research initiative for free software.

INRIA employs 3800 people. Among them are 1300 researchers, 1000 Ph.D. students and 500 postdoctorates.

Research in Computer Science

INRIA does both theoretical
Theoretical computer science
Theoretical computer science is a division or subset of general computer science and mathematics which focuses on more abstract or mathematical aspects of computing....

 and applied research in computer science. In the process, it has produced many widely used programs, such as
  • CaML
    Caml
    Caml is a dialect of the ML programming language family, developed at INRIA and formerly at ENS....

    , a language from the ML
    ML programming language
    ML is a general-purpose functional programming language developed by Robin Milner and others in the early 1970s at the University of Edinburgh, whose syntax is inspired by ISWIM...

     family
    • Caml Light and OCaml implementations
  • Bigloo
    Bigloo
    Bigloo is an implementation of the Scheme programming language developed at the French IT research institute INRIA. Its orientation is towards providing tools for effective and diverse code generation that can match the performance of hand-written C or C++. The Bigloo system contains a Scheme...

    , a Scheme implementation
  • Coq
    Coq
    In computer science, Coq is an interactive theorem prover. It allows the expression of mathematical assertions, mechanically checks proofs of these assertions, helps to find formal proofs, and extracts a certified program from the constructive proof of its formal specification...

    , a theorem prover
  • CADP, a tool box for the verification of asynchronous concurrent systems
  • Graphite
    Graphite
    The mineral graphite is one of the allotropes of carbon. It was named by Abraham Gottlob Werner in 1789 from the Ancient Greek γράφω , "to draw/write", for its use in pencils, where it is commonly called lead . Unlike diamond , graphite is an electrical conductor, a semimetal...

    , a research platform for computer graphics, 3D modeling and numerical geometry
  • SmartEiffel
    SmartEiffel
    SmartEiffel is a free Eiffel compiler. The compiler translates Eiffel code either to C or Java bytecode. Hence it can be used to write programs that run on virtually any platform for which an ANSI C compiler or a Java virtual machine exist....

    , a free Eiffel compiler
  • Scilab
    Scilab
    Scilab is an open source, cross-platform numerical computational package and a high-level, numerically oriented programming language. Itcan be used for signal processing, statistical analysis, image enhancement, fluid dynamics simulations, numerical optimization, and modeling and simulation of...

    , a numerical computation software package
  • Esterel
    Esterel
    Esterel is a synchronous programming language for the development of complex reactive systems. The imperative programming style of Esterel allows the simple expression of parallelism and preemption...

    , a programming language
    Programming language
    A programming language is an artificial language designed to communicate instructions to a machine, particularly a computer. Programming languages can be used to create programs that control the behavior of a machine and/or to express algorithms precisely....

     for State Automata
  • TOM
    Tom (pattern matching language)
    Tom is a programming language particularly well-suited for programming various transformations on tree structures and XML based documents. Tom is a language extension which adds new matching primitives to C and Java as well as support for rewrite rules systems...

    , a pattern matching language
  • Pharo
    Pharo
    Pharo is a fork of Squeak, an implementation of the object-oriented, dynamically typed, reflective programming language Smalltalk.Appearing in 2008, Pharo focuses on removing unessential code from Squeak and serves as the reference implementation of Seaside, a web application framework for...

    , an open Smalltalk implementation.
  • OpenViBE, a software platform dedicated to designing, testing and using brain-computer interfaces.


Further reading

Alain Beltran, Pascal Griset, Histoire d'un pionnier de l'informatique: 40 ans de recherche à l'Inria, EDP Sciences, 2007, ISBN 2868838065
The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
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