History

Founded in 1991, Idiap celebrated its 30 years of activity in 2021. From its foundation to its anniversary, we present here several events that make up the history of our institute.

 

2021 Celebration of Idiap 30th anniversary during numerous events, such as a public open house day with hundreds of visitors.

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2020 Creation of two research groups in brand new fields: Energy Informatics & Genomics and Health Informatics

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2019 Idiap becomes first non-US site of the Center for Identification Technology Research (CITeR)

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2018 Idiap launches a brand new artificial intelligence applied master

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2018 KeyLemon, Idiap's spin-off, is acquired by Apple's supplier AMS.

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2017 Launch of the new Idiap Website

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2016 Designed for local businesses, the first Innovation Day celebrates Iadiap's 25th anniversary.

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2015 Idiaps's project Valais*Wallis Digital marks the bicentennial of Valais joining the Swiss Confederation.

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2014 The Swiss Center for Biometrics Research and Testing—the first in Europe—opens its doors at Idiap.

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2014 At the instigation of the institute’s director, seven leading figures from the world of science carry out an in-depth audit of Idiap’s activities.

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2013 Idiap’s first patents validated.

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2012 The first International Create Challenge—ICC'2012—is launched.

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2012 Creation of the Association Interactive Multimodal Information Management (AIM2)—the continuation of the NCCR IM2.

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2012 The project MediaParl begins, with the support of the Loterie Romande and Valais’ cantonal parliament.

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2012 For the first time, Idiap’s operating accounts exceed the symbolic 10 million francs mark.

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2011 First EPFL academic posts awarded to three Idiap permanent researchers.

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2011 For Idiap's 20th anniversary
a contest is organized with the police to measure how fast information is transmitted in the local community.

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2011 Idiap signs a collaboration agreement with the Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati and the International Institute of Information Technology of Hyderabad.

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2010 Idiap unveils the first version of its technology portfolio.

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2009 Opening of a showroom at the institute.

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2008 A strategic alliance is signed between Idiap and the ETH domain.

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2008 KeyLemon, developing face recognition technologies, is founded by two Idiap members, Gilles Florey and Yann Rodriguez.

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2007 Idiap moves into new premises at the Centre du Parc, Martigny.

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2007 Launch of Klewel, Idiap’s first spin-off.

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2006 Idiap celebrates its 15th anniversary and shows that a professional imitator can't fool a GMM-based speaker verification system.

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2005 Creation of IdeArk SA—the start-up incubator with the aim to develop Idiap technologies.

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2004 The funding of a new round of 16px-scale European projects (AMI/AMIDA) has a significant international impact.

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2004 Idiap's offices are too small and the Institute expands it offices to Martigny downtown.

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2003 First project with the United States government.

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2002 The 12th IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers) conference on Neural Networks for Signal Processing is the first international conference organized by Idiap in Martigny.

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2002 To follow its growth, Idiap builds the Dalle Molle Pavilion in Martigny.

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2002 Idiap is under the spot lights after analyzing Osama bin Laden recordings.

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2002 Publication by Ronan Collobert, Samy Bengio, and Johnny Mariéthoz of the Torch open-source machine learning library, which will later be developed into PyTorch by Facebook.

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2001 Coordinated by Idiap, the National Centre for Competence in Research (NCCR) Interactive Multimodal Information Management (IM2) is launched.

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1996 A new director—Professor Hervé Bourlard—comes on board.

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1995 Idiap's connection brings the internet to the Canton of Valais in collaboration with VSnet.

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1991 With the support of the Dalle Molle Foundation, Idiap first sees the light of day, taking up residence in Villa Tissières, Martigny.

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