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 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.
Prof. Daniel Gatica-Perez (Social Computing Group) gave a talk about his work in Latin America and Switzerland at the First European Seminar on Urban Data Science in Amsterdam.
James Henderson, who has joined Idiap in September 2017 and is now leading Idiap's Natural Language Understanding group, has recently been appointed as Action Editorfor the "Transactions of Association for Computational Linguistics (TACL)" journal.
The paper "Multilingual Hierarchical Attention Networks for Document Classification" by Nikolaos Pappas and Andrei Popescu-Belis has received the Best Paper Award at the 8th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing, held on November 27-December 1 in Tapei, Taiwan.
This thesis presents visual analysis methods for complex ancient Maya writings, specifically a promising crowdsourcing approach to build a large glyph dataset, competitive data-driven visual representations, and interpretable visualization methods that can be applied to explore various other Digital Humanities datasets.
LYON, France – In its final field test, the Speaker Identification Integrated Project (SiiP) successfully demonstrated the system’s innovative capabilities as language independent voice recognition system.
Moka Studio is born in Martigny Valais in 2009.
The SWISKO project, in which Idiap's Social Computing Group participates in collaboration with DomoSafety SA, the University of Bern, La Source School of Nursing Sciences, and the Home Care Association of the Canton of Neuchatel (NOMAD), was featured in the Magazine ASD (Aide et Soins a Domicile).
The Valais/Wallis workshop on Artificial Intelligence 2 was held in Martigny at the Idiap Research Institute on November 10th 2017.
David Ginsbourger is invited to give a talk at BayesOpt 2017 ("Bayesian optimization for science and engineering"). The workshop will take place in Long Beach, USA, on the last day of the NIPS conference (December 4-9 2017).
The Idiap Research Institute develops a new imaging system for research. The precision instrument has been built together with the air base of Sion and could be used by companies and the Universities of Applied Science of the Canton.
Koemei (former Idiap start-up) technology is now branded SPEXIAN.
Thales has selected nine startup companies to join a six-month, cybersecurity-focused business development program led by the company at the Station F startup campus in France.
The Steering Board of the ACM International Conference on Multimodal Interaction (ICMI) has announced that the recipient of the 2017 Community Service Award is Prof. Daniel Gatica-Perez, Head of the Social Computing Group at Idiap.
The Idiap startup Eyeware obtained a seed loan of CHF 100’000 from the Foundation for Technological Innovation (FIT)
