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J. Mariani, F. Meunier
LIMSI: an important interdisciplinary laboratory in the field of Engineering Sciences
LIMSI continues working in 1994 with the will to be an important Engineering Sciences interdisciplinary laboratory, in agreement with the mission it has been given. This implies that the laboratory needs to develop its interdisciplinarity. Pluridisiciplinarity in the coexistence of its two departments: "Mechanical and Chemical Engineering" (MCE) and "Human-Machine Communication" (HMC), but also transdisciplinarity within those two departments. For example, in the relationship between the numerical simulation methods and the experimental approach in the Mechanical and Chemical Engineering department, with a common effort in Computational Fluid Dynamics and Process Engineering. In the Human-Machine Communication Department, one aim is to gather in a common effort computer scientists, Signal Processing and Information Theory specialists, linguists, psycholinguists, cognitive psychologists and even a specialist of the socio-economics of innovation. Thus, while LIMSI is primarily attached to the CNRS "Engineering Sciences" Department (SPI), it also has close relationships with the "Social and Human Sciences" (SHS) and "Life Sciences" (SdV) departments. This is the first year we received a budget coming from the SHS Department. We are evaluated by 4 sections of the National Scientific Advisory Committee: section 07 (Information Science and Technology), section 10 (Energy, Fluids and Reactive Media, Process Engineering), section 34 (Representations, Languages and Communication), and, since 1993, section 29 (Mental Functions, integrative neurosciences, behaviour).
In one way, it is a melting pot, where we can experiment interdisciplinarity, as a major priority for CNRS. But interdisciplinarity experimentation is carried out with the concern that the acquired knowledge or the developed models can be applied to a real environment. Comparing models with reality, and valorizing the results, in agreement with the Engineering Sciences way of thinking, unifies the spirit of the laboratory. In this way, LIMSI stays in harmony with its origins aiming at modeling various real world phenomena, from aerodynamical flows to the speech signal, and at validating its models against the reality of applications. To remain an important laboratory at the international level, LIMSI needs to gather the various necessary components, with a sufficient size to follow up with excellent research, internationally in face of tough competition.
These dynamics take place in the surroundings of Orsay, where the partnership with Universities Paris VI and Paris XI induces our active participation in education, and allows us to get top students, and to cooperate with other laboratories working in related areas (IEF, IOTA, LRI, FAST, LEMFI, ASCI...) within flexible structures.
LIMSI and the strategy of CNRS : "Production and Communication to help humans"
LIMSI enters into many priority topics of the Strategic Planning blueprint of CNRS, such as "Problems of optimization in Process Engineering" (with a better Physics-Chemistry interaction), topics in "Communication to help humans", in the Cognitive Sciences and the Language Engineering fields, and finally, in "Big challenges of Society", with the research on clean processes. It stands under the general heading of "The study and design of production and communication systems aimed at helping humans". Indeed, the research carried out in the laboratory often results in systems which will help human beings to deal with their environment, either to create less polluting refrigeration processes or to help humans to better communicate with machines.
LIMSI also fits perfectly well in the Strategic Program of the Engineering Sciences Department of the CNRS. It is directly involved in the priority research program "Intelligent Machines and Structures", with a mission to develop a multimodal human-machine communication (MHMC) (speech, vision, gesture) platform in this program. These operations are supported by an internal Program Action, which complements the Incentive Actions which had a great success in the laboratory for several years. The Program Action is accompanied by the creation of a competence network, and industrial partnership. This project also involves a study on a new definition of management logics of R&D. Indeed, it seems important and necessary to look after the social and economic implications of those researches, before the regulation and social demand are fixed, while conducting the technical aspects of those researches. The laboratory is also naturally directly involved in other axes, such as "Extreme conditions and coupled phenomena" and "Energetic Systems and clean processes".
In the framework of the actions launched commonly by the Engineering Sciences (SPI) and the Social and Human Sciences (SHS) departments at CNRS, the laboratory is active in the "Cognition, Intelligent Communication and Language Engineering" program, as this program is managed jointly by R. Martin, Director of Inalf, and J. Mariani, Director of Limsi. In this framework, the study of the relationships between Image, Gesture and Language has been initialised, in conjunction with the MHMC Platform project. An action on the evaluation of morphosyntactic parsers has also been launched, which has the participation of many laboratories (GRACE). LIMSI is also a participant in the "Production Systems" program, where it conducts a project on CAD which has also some relationship with the MHMC Platform basic project.
Finally, LIMSI had a major involvement in the CNRS interdisciplinary research program "Cognisciences", where it is responsible for the regional Paris-South network and which provided support for the creation of the "Human Cognition" team at LIMSI during 4 years. We are also well involved in the new "Cognitive Sciences" Scientific Interest Group (GIS), as G. Vignaux is one of the deputy-director of that GIS.
LIMSI slightly modified its scientific structure in 1993. The "Mechanical and Chemical Engineering" Department is now divided into three groups : "Fluid Dynamics", "Transfer Dynamics" and "Energetics". This new structure better reflects the scientific actions of the Department, and corresponds more to the research fields that are addressed than to the methods which are developed to address them. The integration of the Fluid Thermodynamics Laboratory (LTF) began in October 1993. The members of this laboratory are joining the Adsorption Group to create a new group, called "Energetics". They will bring their traditional activities concerning Cryogeny and will initialize a new activity on Thermoacoustics. The "Human Cognition" team has progressively merged in the Human-Machine Communication Department since January 1992, and is now a full part of the laboratory with cooperative actions conducted with each of the 3 other groups of the Department. This team is composed of cognitive psychologists (from the Life Sciences Department). It brings to the Department its knowledge of human abilities and of human cognitive mechanisms, in order to help design machines which have similar capacities and which are able to conduct dialogs with humans. The "Human-Machine Communication" Department has conducted an internal audit in 1993-1994, which brought it to restructurate itself, looking for a better balance among the various groups, focusing the activities on speech processing, reinforcing the activities related to multimodality and launching transversal actions (MHMC Platform, seminars and reading meetings, resources and evaluation).
The plans are to develop both departments. In Mechanical and Chemical Engineering, one of the objectives in the Fluid Dynamics and Transfer groups is to focus on instability studies and on the simulation of turbulent external and internal flows, based on stability analyses and direct or large eddy simulations. There is also the general wish to develop activities in Experimental Fluid Mechanics, in order to complement the activities in the field of Computational Fluid Dynamics. A new research theme seems to appear, fluid-structure interaction with applications in bio-mechanics, for speech production and for injection systems of engines. The experimental activities in the Energetics group will be extended from the present experimental studies on kinetics of adsorption or on adsorptive refrigeration towards a new field "thermo-acoustic refrigeration". Adsorption processes adapted to the recovery of pollutants in the hydrocarbon chain are also being studied. In the Human-Machine Communication department, the goal is to address all the different communication modes, as we think that, in the long run, it will be mandatory to simultaneously master all communication modes, in order to fully address one of them. We are presently strengthening the activities in the fields of Vision and Image. We also wish to extend our activities in acoustical and visual perception, and in Artificial Intelligence (knowledge representation and learning) through cooperation with other laboratories.
In the Mechanical and Chemical Engineering Department, we should mention in 1994 the progress in the analysis and implementation of projection methods, in the simulation of turbulent unsteady external flows around bodies with large eddy simulations and in the stability and simulations of chaotic flows in internal natural convection and in rotating disc flows. First results have also been obtained in the simulation of jets of fluids near their critical point and on the weakly non-linear corrections to Darcy's law. On the experimental side, results have confirmed the unique quality of the technique developed at Limsi to measure the various contributions to the kinetics of adsorption. A new experiment based on gravimetric and gas chromatographic measurements has been developed to measure the isotherms of co-adsorption of binary gas mixtures. An adsorptive refrigeration pilot, funded by the French gas utility GDF, is currently under tests. A study of phase change heat exchanger for an adsorber is just starting in the framework of a European Eureka program. Excellent research results have been obtained again this year by the Speech Communication group, in the framework of the "Speech and Language Processing" ARPA program, which was opened to non-american laboratories in 1992, on the "Wall Street Journal" baseline task (now NAB: North American Business News), with a vocabulary which raised up from 20.000 words to 65,000 words, in the continuous speech and speaker independent mode, that put it among the top international laboratories. The laboratory has also results in multimodal communication, on gesture-voice integration and on modeling of spatio-temporal information. Studies have been conducted on the use of multimodal communication for navigation in cars, in plane cockpits or in space shuttles. Other studies show excellent initial results on the design of multimodal interactive information service kiosks.
The total size of the laboratory (number of persons that have been welcomed in the laboratory during the year) has risen to 265 persons in 1994 (compared to 200 in 1991). The number of permanent people has increased from 73 to 94 persons during the same time, primarily as a consequence of the arrival of the "Human Cognition" group. The integration of the LTF laboratory will increase the total number of people by about 10 persons, including 6 permanent staff. The rate of increase of the two departments is the same. Three CNRS researchers have been recruited (G.P. Bonneau, L. Tuckerman, X. Briffault). A specialist in Socio-Economics, C. Henry, and two senior CNRS researchers, G. Vignaux and J.P. Hochart (part time) also joined the laboratory. We should stress the large increase of the number of Professors and Assistant-Professors (from 2 academics in 1980 to 28 now), thanks to our university relationship policy. We have welcomed two assistant professors in 1994 (E. Gadoin in Mechanics and R. Gherbi in HMC). We are now very close to our objective, that we think is good for a research CNRS laboratory, of 20 % researchers, 20 % professors and assistant-professors, 20 % Engineers, Technicians and Administrative staff, and 40 % PhD Students, even if this ratio is not attained in each group but globally. We should reach this equilibrium with the integration of the LTF laboratory.
The total budget has increased (from 5.0 MEcu in 1991 to 6.8 MEcu). The budget without salaries also increased this year (1.9 MEcu), following two successive decreases, and is even higher than the highest budget we ever reached, in 1991 (1.8 MEcu). This increase is due to the start of new CEC contracts, and to the renewal of industrial contracts.
The total number of publications reached 275 this year (from 255 in 1991), with a small increase of the reviewed publications (from 136 to 167). The number of Doctoral thesis manuscripts has greatly increased with 24 doctoral theses over the last two years compared to 11 in 1990-1991. The average duration of the doctoral theses has been reduced (3 years and a half, on average for science theses performed in the laboratory in 1993-1994). Although the SPI Department has asked that the laboratory Scientific Council meeting takes place only every two years, we still produce a scientific report annually and, since last year, an English version of this report has been made and sent worldwide (500 copies in French and 350 in English for 1994).
A budget has been given by the CNRS Engineering Sciences department for buying experimental equipment in Adsorption and a virtual reality equipment in Non-Verbal Communication, which have been asked for many years. Our investment in Computer equipment has continued. The renewing of the local network with the ATM technology, for which we asked a special budget from CNRS, is now a high priority, as the network slow transmission rate is no longer acceptable with respect to the present workstations speed. This renewal will go with the settlement of the national Renater network. We need a fast enough link with the IDRIS CNRS computer center, in order to use their vectorized and massively parallel computers. We also need a powerful connection with the national and international networks, for the purpose of remote Human-Machine Communication studies.
Especially within the last years, there have been important developments linked to the cooling with gazeous-solid system. Those developments are carried out through the SNEA (Elf-Aquitaine), which is in charge (CNRS license) of the industrial transfer of the research activities conducted in this field at LIMSI and at the IMP of Perpignan. Grants from the ADEME have been obtained through the SNEA. Seven new contracts were obtained in the "Speech Communication" Group in 1994, including two contracts with France Télécom, for the processing of voice through telephone, and three contracts in the framework of the "Language Research and Engineering" program of the CEC. The contracts in the HMC Department are not exclusively related to the research conducted in "hard" sciences. We should mention, for example, that the "Human Cognition" group has obtained one contract with Renault on the study of guidance and navigation systems on cars, two contracts with DRET (Ministry of Defense) on "Cognitive Maps Elaboration" and "Vigilance and Attention Load" and a PhD grant with French EDF (Electricity National Agency) on "Decision Aid for Maintenance Operations".
National and International relations
The participation of LIMSI in the national and international research networks has been reinforced, and the number of foreign visitors has increased. LIMSI is very active in the "Computational Fluid Dynamics" CNRS Coordinated Research Network (GDR MFN) (where it has organised several workshops). In the "Human-Machine Communication" network (GDR-PRC CHM), it is responsible for the DALI Dialog action, and in the Interdisciplinary CNRS Cognisciences program, on Cognitive Sciences, it manages the Paris-South research subnetwork and participates in the "Space Representation" national action. It also coordinates the Francophone Network for Language Engineering (Francil) of Aupelf-Uref, which was launched in 1994. It actively participates in the launching of the European Language Resources Association (ELRA), which was founded in early 1995. The laboratory has several actions in the CEC Human Capital and Mobility program, in order to promote researchers exchange mechanisms and organisations of Euroconferences. It is in charge of three of these actions. The laboratory is also in the Erasmus program, and participates in several DRET and CEC (Intas, Peco, Copernicus) actions, in order to increase the relationships with the Central and Eastern European countries.
Our policy is to keep good relationship with University, through the responsability of two third cycle DEAs at LIMSI ("Cognitive Sciences" and "Fluid and Transfer Dynamics") and through the increase of the number of professors and assistant-professors. We are heavily involved in two new second cycle courses: "Physics and Mechanics of Continuous Media" (which is now running and is called "Mechanics") and "Cognitive Sciences". These will ensure a coherent connection with the already existing DEAs and a recruitment of quality students. A third cycle DESS "Ergonomics, product design and safety" has also been started by Pr J.P. Rossi in 1994.
25 July 1995