Developped by the start-up Global ID, Idiap and HES-SO Valais, a new biometric identification system will soon be available at a good price. This technology should be especially interesting for emerging countries.
Supported by the SenseCityVity research team in Mexico and Switzerland in 2017, the project "Education for Water Protection in Colombia" will participate at the 8th World Water Forum in Brasilia (March 2018), with additional support of the OEI (Organizacion de Estados Iberoamericanos para la Educación, la Ciencia y la Cultura).
This type of loan is granted to promising young companies of Western Switzerland in phase of prototyping and commercial development. Since 1994, the FIT has financed innovative technological projects and startups with a total of 33 million Swiss francs of loans and grants. These companies have created more than 1000 jobs in Switzerland so far.
In January and February 2018, Dr. David Ginsbourger, head of Idiap's Uncertainty Quantification and Optimal Design group, has been invited by the prestigious Newton Institute of Cambridge to give two talks.
Jobs, economy, recognition systems, machines capable of learning on their own: Artificial Intelligence is about to revolutionize our society. Science progresses and the wide public is aware of these revolutions.
For the 6th year in a row, Bilan magazine published its selection of the 50 Swiss start-ups to invest in. This year, three start-ups from Valais, chosen for their particularly innovative technologies and promising business plans, figure on the list.
The TACT-HAND project in which Idiap participates was featured in the annual magazine Micro&Nano (p.42-43) from Micronarc, the Western Switzerland Micro-nanotech Cluster:
Researchers at Idiap and EPFL have been working with psychologists to understand how people form first impressions from photos. They focused on how people respond to properties available on Airbnb. Better analysis of human behavior should allow scientists to program machines capable of making more “human” decisions.
On Monday Feb 6th, ams, a worldwide supplier of high performance sensor solutions, announced the acquisition of KeyLemon for an undisclosed amount [1].
The thesis presents generative mixture models for learning robot manipulation skills from a few human demonstrations, and providing assistance to a human operator in performing these skills at a distance under limited bandwidth and communication delays. The models are based on invariant task-parameterized representations of hidden semi-Markov models that allow segmentation and reproduction of manipulation skills, while generalizing effectively across different environmental situations such as size, position, and orientation of objects in the environment.
David Ginsbourger, head of the Uncertainty Quantification and Optimal Design group at Idiap Research Institute was awarded a professor title by the University of Bern with effect from February 1st 2018.
Following a very strict evaluation process – comprising the nomination by Idiap's management and a formal approval by the Scientific College - , Idiap is pleased to announce the promotion of three of its researchers to Senior Researchers:
An article, co-authored by Prof. Andrei Popescu-Belis, has received the Best Paper Award at the International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (IJCNLP). The article presents the research of Dr Nikolaos Pappas - a postdoc at the Idiap Research Institute in Martigny - under the supervision of Prof. Popescu-Belis, former head of Idiap’s Natural Language Processing group.
Secure access to computers thanks to facial and voice recognition software on the cutting edge of technology; develop an active principle based on Alpine herbs that allows limiting oxidation of natural cosmetic products or enhanced solar energy by means of new battery chargers... Valais possesses all the ideal structures for research, development and valorization of innovative projects. 11 fundamental research chairs, 10 applied research institutes, 6 technological sites for the development of projects and 1 economic development tool: Valais, innovation accelerator!
For many years the Idiap research institute has worked on reproducible research and developed several tools for this such as Bob or the BEAT platform.
The Idiap collaborators can now register to the Idiap Alumni LinkedIn group
The work by Trung Phan and Daniel Gatica-Perez (Social Computing Group) on analysis of Instagram patterns of food consumption in Switzerland was covered in Swiss news:
Idiap is proud to award James Newling and Gulcan Can for their outstanding work.
David Ginsbourger is invited to take part in the Isaac Newton Institute programme "Uncertainty quantification for complex systems: theory and methodologies" (3rd January 2018 to 29th June 2018). He will stay in Cambridge for several weeks distributed over January-February and April 2018.
Dr Sébastien Marcel, one of the Idiap senior researcher and head of the Biometrics Security & Privacy group, has been elevated by IEEE to IEEE Senior Member.
Identification at a low price thanks to finger vein patterns
