Idiap Research Institute

Idiap Research Institute

Company type	Non-profit organization
Founded	Martigny, Switzerland (1991)
Founder	Municipality of Martigny Canton of Valais EPFL University of Geneva Swisscom
Headquarters	Centre du Parc Rue Marconi 19 P.O. Box 592 1920 Martigny Switzerland
Key people	Hervé Bourlard (Director)
Number of employees	100 (2008)
Website	www.idiap.ch

The Idiap Research Institute is an independent, non-profit research foundation located in Martigny (Valais, Switzerland). Inaugurated in 1991, and accredited by the State and Federal Governments, the Idiap Research Institute is affiliated with the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, EPFL (LIDIAP is the EPFL laboratory of the Idiap Research Institute) and the University of Geneva. The Idiap Research Institute carries out research and developments in the areas of Speech Processing, Computer Vision, Information Retrieval, Biometric Authentication, Multimodal Interaction and Machine Learning.

The Idiap Research Institute is also the Leading House of the National Centre of Competence in Research (NCCR) on Interactive Multimodal Information Management (IM)2

History

The Idiap Research Institute, located in Martigny (Switzerland) and initially referred to as “Institut Dalle Molle d’Intelligence Artificielle Perceptive” (Dalle Molle Institute for Perceptual Artificial Intelligence), was founded in 1991 by the Dalle Molle Foundation for the Quality of Life, the Municipality of Martigny, the Canton of Valais, the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), the University of Geneva and Swisscom as the third of three independent non-profit research institutes in Switzerland:

ISSCO, Geneva	IDISA, Lugano	IDIAP, Martigny
(1973: Linguistic AI)	(1988: Cognitive AI)	(1991: Perceptual AI)

Legally, its status as a foundation guarantees it great autonomy and gives it access to public scientific research financing while positioning it as a neutral and credible intermediary between the academic world and industry.

As its inception the Idiap Research Institute consisted of about 10 people active mainly in the field of speech recognition. A first phase of development in 1996 saw the planned withdrawal of the Dalle Molle Foundation and the arrival of the current director, Hervé Bourlard, employed at the time by an institute in Berkeley, California. After having celebrated its 10^th anniversary in 2001 with the granting of the National Centre of Competence in Research for Interactive Multimodal Information Management (IM)2, the years 2002 to 2004 were marked by very strong growth exemplified by the construction of a second building. A period of consolidation, in terms of personnel, infrastructure, and financing, has followed. Fifteen years after its beginnings, the Idiap Research Institute had approximately 100 employees, 85 of whom are researchers representing 23 nationalities, and among them several from the far corners of the world.

Relocation to Centre du Parc

Idiap's premises since August 2007 (Centre du Parc)

Idiap's premises since August 2007 (Centre du Parc)

Idiap's premises until August 2007 (Villa Tissières)

“The current premises no longer meet our growing needs for more space.” It is in these words that Jean-Albert Ferrez, Deputy Director of the Idiap Research Institute, started his announcement about the institute’s move to the journalists at the press conference organised on 30 May 2007 at Centre du Parc. In 1991, when it was founded, the institute accommodated its 10 employees on one floor of Villa Tissières. By spring 2007, the number of employees had increased to around one hundred and occupied two floors of the villa, one floor of the UBS building and the whole of the Pavillon Dalle Molle. “This geographical dispersion was preventing social links being formed within the institute and was therefore harming the dynamics of various groups and projects” explains Jean-Albert Ferrez.

The Mayor of Martigny and President of the Idiap Foundation Concil, Olivier Dumas, was aware of this problem of lack of space, and got in touch with Groupe Mutuel in Spring 2007. At this time the insurer was completing the construction of its new administrative premises in the town centre, therefore freeing up those that is was occupying, and which it owns, at Centre du Parc. Very quickly the institute’s management weighed up the advantages of a possible move. The premises can be used in their current condition, needing only some minor work, including the installation of a specific cooling system in the computer server’s room. The rented area can easily accommodate 120 people and there are many ways in which the building could be extended. The increase in support from the city of Martigny and sponsoring by Groupe Mutuel were the final incentives in convincing the institute to take the move. In August 2007, the institute moved all of its employees and activities to Centre de Parc, in the “conference” part of the building. To accompany this change of location and to symbolically mark the start of a new era, the institute has also given itself a new logo.

File:Idiap old.png

Idiap's logo used until 2007

Idiap Research Institute and EPFL sign a joint development plan

In February 2008, through Federal Councillor Pascal Couchepin, the Federal Department of Home Affairs (FDHA) announced that it was quadrupling its support to the Idiap Research Institute for the next four years (CHF 6.5 million for 2008-2011). In the institute's buget, ~75% of the resources come from projects, and only ~25% from institutional support. With this subsidy granted by the State Secretariat for Education and Research (SER), the institute will be able to established a solid financial basis.

This support was accompanied by two major conditions, granting by the Canton of Valais and the Municipality of Martigny of at least an equivalent amount for the same period, and consolidation of the partnership with the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) to better integrate the institute in the Swiss academic scene and offer it security for the future. The joint development plan for the 2008-2011 was signed on July 2008. The plan in question aims to further improve the integration and supervision of Idiap Ph.D. students, increase the academic visibility of the researchers and step up exchanges between scientists from the two institutions.

In 2008, as part of the development plan signed with EPFL, the institute started to revise its organization chart, which should be completed in 2009. The scientific and administrative structures will be fleshed out, the management will include new scientific members, some of the senior researchers will benefit from EPFL academic recognition and the director will be supported by an assistant.

Awards

Every year the Idiap Research Institute grants two awards to its Ph.D. students: the Idiap Paper Award and the Idiap Research Award (both equally valuable)

| Year	| Idiap Research Award	| Idiap Paper Award	| Paper title
2008	Deepu Vijayasenan	Tatiana Tommasi	Discriminative cue integration for medical image annotation
2007	Pierre Ferrez	-	-
	Guillaume Lathoud	Florent Monay and David Grangier	A Discriminative Approach for the Retrieval of Images from Text Queries
2005	Dong Zhang	Florent Monay and Pedro Quelas	Modeling Scenes with Local Descriptors and Latent Aspects
2004	Mathew Magimai Doss	Guillaume Lathoud	Unsupervised Location-based Segmentation of Multi-party Speech
2003	Ronan Collobert
2002	Alessandro Vinciarelli

External links

• Idiap Research Institute's website
• IM2 Interactive Multimodal Information Management