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Annual Report 2025
by admin — last modified May 21, 2026 01:46 PM

We are pleased to present our Annual Report for 2025.

SDialog: Idiap's Open-Source Toolkit for Reproducible Conversational AI
by admin — last modified Apr 24, 2026 05:13 PM

Building reliable conversational AI systems—such as chatbots or virtual assistants like Siri or Alexa—is more challenging than it may initially appear. Although modern LLMs have improved dramatically in capability, researchers and developers still contend with a fragmented ecosystem. Datasets are often stored in incompatible formats, evaluation methodologies lack consistency, and reproducibility remains limited across studies and implementations.

New SNSF, EU and regional funding secured
by admin — last modified Apr 13, 2026 11:22 AM

The Institute has secured significant new competitive funding at national and European levels, reaffirming the excellence of its research in a challenging funding environment.

Idiap’s postdoc receives BRIDGE Proof of Concept grant for audio deepfake detector
by admin — last modified Mar 25, 2026 11:50 AM

Ajinkya Kulkarni, a postdoctoral researcher at Idiap, has been awarded an SNSF Bridge Proof of Concept grant. His project addresses one of the fastest-growing threats in digital security: voice fraud. Audio deepfakes, AI-generated recordings that convincingly mimic real voices, are already being used for identity fraud, investment scams, and political disinformation.

Idiap is looking for a new Director
by admin — last modified Mar 11, 2026 09:43 AM

With a fast-growing community composed of a strong scientific and administrative staff, the Institute is looking for a new Director to lead and drive the Institute’s growth and advance its missions.

Idiap and OPPAL Association Launch WolfCam to Reduce Human–Wolf Conflict
by admin — last modified Feb 11, 2026 05:34 PM

As wolf populations continue to expand across European mountain regions and into surrounding lowland areas, generating renewed challenges for both wildlife conservation and pastoral activities, the Idiap Research Institute and the OPPAL Association have joined forces to develop a non-lethal monitoring solution designed to prevent livestock predation.

A Risk Assessment Model For A More Comprehensive Study Of Risk Factors
by admin — last modified Jan 27, 2026 08:41 AM

In a rapidly evolving business landscape, companies are exposed to a wide range of risks, from market volatility to technological and environmental disruptions. To address this complexity, AI-driven tools are increasingly being adopted. A recent project supported by Innosuisse, carried out in collaboration with Basinghall Analytics, focused on advancing this approach.

NeurIPS 2025: Highlights from Our Research
by admin — last modified Dec 16, 2025 09:37 AM

Several publications were recently presented at NeurIPS 2025, one of the premier annual conferences on AI and machine learning. They cover advances in face recognition, large language model (LLM) training, out-of-distribution detection, and bioacoustic analysis, reflecting the wide range of expertise at Idiap.

AI for Democracy: Strengthening Switzerland’s Information Ecosystem
by admin — last modified Dec 01, 2025 02:30 PM

The Idiap Research Institute, in collaboration with the Universities of Lausanne and Neuchâtel, and cross-sectorial impact partners including the Initiative for Media Innovation (IMI), the public broadcaster RTS, Nagravision/Kudelski, and SICPA, have received support from the Hasler Foundation and the Mercator Foundation for an interdisciplinary project designed to reinforce the resilience of democracy in Switzerland as part of the "Digitalisation and Democracy" Program.

Hatef Otroshi Receives Best Doctoral Dissertation Award
by admin — last modified Sep 29, 2025 10:55 AM

The IEEE Biometrics Council has recognized Hatef Otroshi Shareza, postdoctoral researcher in the Biometric Security and Privacy group at Idiap, with the Best Doctoral Dissertation Award for the outstanding quality and impact of his research.

OpenBEERS: A Platform for Smarter, Sustainable Choices
by admin — last modified Sep 19, 2025 09:11 AM

Idiap researchers Jerôme Kämpf and David Geissbühler together with HES-SO Valais/Wallis research scientists have conceived a platform to understand and manage energy consumption in Valais region of Switzerland.

AI & Gaze: Enabling Enhanced Societal Applications
by admin — last modified Jul 16, 2025 08:56 AM

Gaze is a fundamental indicator of attention and interest, and a non-verbal cue involved in communication and social signaling, a key element across various domains such as human-computer interaction, robotics, and medical diagnosis, notably in Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) assessment. Researchers at Idiap have developed AI systems that significantly improve 3D gaze estimation in real-world environments, enabling gaze-aware systems to operate in such situations.

Idiap Senior Research Scientist Obtains Prestigious ERC Advanced Grant
by admin — last modified Jun 17, 2025 04:20 PM

James Henderson, senior research scientist at the Idiap Research Institute, has been awarded a prestigious Advanced Grant from the European Research Council (ERC) for his project BALM. This recognition highlights the excellence of his work in artificial intelligence (AI) and supports the development of innovative approaches in natural language processing (NLP).

Lightweight AI for Greater Performance
by Maxime Bourlard — last modified May 07, 2025 03:00 PM

As artificial intelligence (AI) becomes more deeply embedded in everyday tech, from smartphones to medical devices, the demand for models that are not just powerful but also efficient and lightweight is rising fast. This is especially important in settings where computing resources are limited. To meet this challenge, Idiap researchers Mutian He and Philip Garner have developed a new agile method.

Idiap opens its Bluesky account
by admin — last modified Apr 10, 2025 10:50 AM

Starting April 2025, Idiap is on Bluesky, the social media that reminishes the early days of Twitter (today X).

Improving Biometric Privacy with Generative AI
by admin — last modified Mar 31, 2025 11:36 AM

Face recognition is widely used today, from unlocking phones to enhancing surveillance systems. However, this technology often relies on large datasets of internet photos collected without consent, raising privacy and ethical concerns. To address this, researchers at Idiap have developed a synthetic (fake but realistic) face dataset, offering a privacy-friendly alternative without compromising model performance.

User-friendly Robot Empowers Individuals with Mobility Disability
by admin — last modified Feb 27, 2025 05:07 PM

Robots designed to empower people with mobility disabilities are complex and difficult to adopt, as they require sophisticated movements to complete even basic tasks. At Idiap, researchers have developed a software that allows the robot to adapt to the unique needs of these people to provide a user-friendly experience.

Sébastien Marcel receives IEEE fellowship elevation
by admin — last modified Feb 13, 2025 03:38 PM

Sébastien Marcel, senior scientist at Idiap, has been elevated to IEEE Fellow, effective January 1, 2025. The IEEE fellowship testifies “the advancement or application of engineering, science and technology, bringing the realization of significant value to society”[1].

Scientific Report 2024
by admin — last modified May 07, 2025 02:57 PM

We are pleased to share our 2024 Scientific Report, highlighting key advancements across Idiap’s research programs: Human-AI Teaming, Sustainable & Resilient Societies, AI for Life, and AI for Everyone. Additionally, the report presents Fundamental AI advances across all programs.

Detecting Factual Reporting News Sources and Political Bias: A New Approach to Media Information Analysis
by Maxime Bourlard — last modified Oct 24, 2024 10:50 AM

Predicting and analyzing political bias, as well as checking the reliability of sources, could be a game-changing solution for professionals and organizations in a society where misinformation is a daily occurrence. This is what a team at Idiap, under the supervision of Dr. Petr Motlicek, has worked on by proposing a new approach to media information analysis.

The Idiap Research Institute announces the winners of ICC 2024.
by Maxime Bourlard — last modified Aug 29, 2024 04:39 PM

The Idiap Research Institute is proud to announce the winners of the 13th edition of the Idiap Create Challenge (ICC), which took place from August 20 to 28. This hackathon, fully dedicated to artificial intelligence, brought together international developers and innovators eager to turn their ideas into prototypes.

Idiap Create Challenge 2024 - Fostering Innovation to Benefit Society
by Maxime Bourlard — last modified Aug 06, 2024 02:24 PM

Idiap Research Institute is thrilled to announce the 13th edition of its hackathon, a highly anticipated event that facilitates the translations of ideas into prototypes. This year’s hackathon, set to take place from August 20th to 28th, 2024, has received the highest number of applications ever, and promises to be one of our most exciting and competitive yet.

Doctolib acquires Idiap spin-off Typeless
by Maxime Bourlard — last modified Jul 17, 2024 04:54 PM

Doctolib, a major e-health European player, has announced the acquisition of Typeless, a spin-off from the Idiap Research Institute specializing in artificial intelligence-based voice recognition. This technological breakthrough was greatly facilitated by a year-long collaboration between Typeless and Idiap.

Idiap researchers are Lemanic Life Science Hackathon winners
by Maxime Bourlard — last modified Jul 09, 2024 11:16 AM

Tilak Purohit and Barbara Ruvolo, contributing to Idiap’s AI for Life research program, won the 1st prize at the Lemanic Life Science Hackathon organized at EPFL at the end of April 2024. The team also included EPFL Life Science bachelor's students Alexandra Psaltis, Jia Xian Jennifer Shan, and Elise Boyer Their outcome is an AI-enabled user interface prototype to support the detection of depression via speech.

Pint of Science Festival – Bridging AI and Community
by Maxime Bourlard — last modified May 06, 2024 04:13 PM

We are thrilled to announce that, for the third consecutive year, the Idiap Research Institute will participate on May 14th in the annual Pint of Science Valais Festival, taking place from May 13th to May 15th 2024. This worldwide event, renowned for its commitment to making science accessible to all, aligns perfectly with the institute’s mission to engage and inspire the broader public about the potentials and advancements in Artificial Intelligence.

Understanding neural networks for better collaborations with AI
by nicolas-filippov — last modified Apr 09, 2024 11:28 AM

Understanding and explaining how AI works is key to build trust and have better human-AI collaborations. In partnership with researchers from Lausanne, Zurich, and Adelaide, our colleague Damien Teney published an article providing a fresh explanation of neural networks’ capabilities.

A boost for innovation and industrial relations
by admin — last modified Nov 14, 2023 11:15 AM

In June, Dr. Matteo Sorci joined Idiap as Innovation Manager, bringing to the Institute his 14-year innovation expertise gained in the world of high-tech development and commercialization.

ICC 2023 hackathon winners announced
by admin — last modified Nov 14, 2023 11:16 AM

After nine days of intense work, Idiap Research Institute has announced the winners of the 12th edition of the Idiap Create Challenge (ICC) 2023. This artificial intelligence hackathon brought together engineers and creatives from several countries to transform their ideas into working prototypes with the help of the institute.

Towards energy-efficient artificial intelligence models
by nicolas-filippov — last modified Jul 26, 2023 01:19 PM

As artificial intelligence technologies reach everyday new performances, their energy cost is also increasing significantly. Idiap researchers are proposing a novel approach to address this challenge during a period of rising energy costs.

Emmanuel Senft among the new members for the Swiss Young Academy
by nicolas-filippov — last modified May 08, 2023 03:34 PM

On 1 May 2023 the Board of Directors of the Swiss Academies of Arts and Sciences elected five new members to the Swiss Young Academy (SYA). With this election, the Academies acknowledge the ideas and commitment of the newly-elected members at the interfaces between science, society and politics.

World leaders in biometrics met at Idiap
by nicolas-filippov — last modified Apr 26, 2023 05:52 PM

Idiap hosted a Biometrics Week. This one of a kind event gathered several hundreds of people from various backgrounds ranging from academia to industry. Organizers included the European Association for Biometrics and the US based Center for Identification Technology Research.

Helping people with speech disorders
by Maxime Bourlard — last modified Apr 20, 2023 03:57 PM

The Idiap Research Institute uses signal processing and machine learning to design effective tools to improve people’s daily lives, especially those with communication difficulties. Ina Kodrasi, head of the Signal Processing for Communication group, is contributing to significant advances in the field of pathological speech.

New Cross Research Group to address societal challenges
by nicolas-filippov — last modified Mar 16, 2023 04:02 PM

Created in 2022, Cross Research Groups will foster collaborations between Idiap research groups. Their aim is to have long-term impacts on society thanks to an approach mixing both business oriented solutions and interdisciplinary scientific groundwork.

Intuitive robot programming to help the watch industry
by nicolas-filippov — last modified Nov 11, 2024 09:27 AM

Luminous paints make it possible to tell the time on analogue timepieces even in the dark. These compounds are still applied manually, as conventional automation solutions are not suitable for this task. That’s why researchers from Idiap and Bern University of Applied Sciences BFH are developing a flexible robot system that can be programmed by showing it what to do.

“Today’s challenges call for human-centered approaches”
by nicolas-filippov — last modified Jan 23, 2023 01:36 PM

Head of the Social Computing research group, Daniel Gatica-Perez has contributed to Idiap’s vision of Artificial Intelligence for Society since 2002. Last year, he received two awards recognizing his long-term impact at the interface between technology and society.

Idiap awards 2022
by nicolas-filippov — last modified Nov 11, 2024 09:29 AM

Every year, the Institute nominates two students for its internal awards. In 2022, the Paper Award goes to Alexandre Bittar, and the Student Award goes to Teguh Lembono. Congratulations!

Andrea Cavallaro to be Idiap’s new director
by nicolas-filippov — last modified Dec 12, 2022 09:27 AM

In anticipation of the retirement of its current director, Hervé Bourlard, the Idiap Foundation Council is pleased to announce that Andrea Cavallaro will soon be taking over as director of the institute. He is also appointed full professor at EPFL’s School of Engineering.

Artificial intelligence to answer challenges of Mexican society
by Maxime Bourlard — last modified Nov 25, 2022 02:01 PM

Esau Villatoro, research associate at the Speech & Audio Processing group at Idiap, and his colleagues from the Mathematics Research Center (CIMAT) from Mexico have won first place in two competitions related to Natural Language Processing. The objective of these competitions is to improve important aspects of Mexican society such as tourism and communication.

Idiaper wins EPFL's EEDE Thesis Award
by nicolas-filippov — last modified Nov 23, 2022 02:27 PM

Former Idiap PhD Angelos Katharopoulos has received EPFL's Electrical Engineering Doctoral program (EEDE) Thesis Award for his outstanding research on the efficiency of deep learning models.

A speech processing system inspired by the human brain
by nicolas-filippov — last modified Oct 04, 2024 11:05 AM

Idiap researchers published a paper describing an approach to speech processing based on the properties of the human brain. Their method proved as efficient as the current standard, whilst conserving the advantage of energy efficiency. Moreover, their work is replicable thanks to open access software paving the way for future applications.

A partnership to accelerate antibiotic research
by nicolas-filippov — last modified Mar 08, 2023 04:04 PM

Accelerating the selection of potential sources of antibiotics using artificial intelligence is one of the goals of ABRoad. This project is the result of a partnership between InflamAlps, a pharmaceutical R&D company, and Idiap. Supported by The Ark Foundation, this innovative project aims to develop a digital platform enabling the selection of potential sources of antibiotics.

PyTorch becomes part of the Linux Foundation
by nicolas-filippov — last modified Oct 10, 2022 02:25 PM

Originating from a paper published by Idiap in 2002, PyTorch is one of the most important and successful machine learning software projects in the world. The Linux Foundation announced that the hosting of PyTorch will transition from Meta to its own infrastructures. This new environment will continue to foster the open source spirit provided by Idiap’s original publication.

The Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics and Idiap start a partnership
by nicolas-filippov — last modified Sep 13, 2022 03:16 PM

Bringing artificial intelligence and bioinformatics closer in Switzerland, Idiap and the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics (SIB) signed a collaboration agreement. By becoming a partner institution of SIB, Idiap ensures its groups active in bioinformatics benefit from SIB’s national network of expertise, while enabling the SIB to access its 30 years of experience in AI research.

An interactive projector to revolutionize presentations
by Maxime Bourlard — last modified Sep 09, 2022 02:04 PM

Team LaternaMagica is the winner of the 11th edition of the International Create Challenge that took place from August 16th to August 24th. This 9-Day AI Super Hackathon organized and hosted by Idiap aims to have teams that transform their idea into a prototype. This year the competition gave a special twist with two teams that took challenges proposed by BCVs.

No artificial intelligence without full mastery of maths and statistics
by nicolas-filippov — last modified Jul 27, 2022 05:27 PM

Neural networks are often among cited technologies when it comes to artificial intelligence latest exploits. The downside is that this technology can be demanding in terms of energy costs. Two Idiap researchers demonstrated that in certain cases you should rather go for classical maths rather than for the AI hype.

Fully customizable robot to develop new algorithms
by Maxime Bourlard — last modified Nov 11, 2024 09:30 AM

The Robot Learning & Interaction research group at Idiap has recently acquired a new tool. A small quadruped robot named SOLO12, whose mission will be to allow the researchers and engineers of the institute to develop new robotic applications based on artificial intelligence.

How Covid-19 taught researchers to engage and empower citizens
by nicolas-filippov — last modified May 23, 2022 03:17 PM

Researchers from Idiap, EPFL, Leuphana University Lüneburg, and UNIL published in Humanities and Social Sciences Communications results of their work conducted in the midst of the pandemic related lockdowns. Their paper highlights the potential for both theoretical and applied research.

How applied research impacted his scientific career
by Maxime Bourlard — last modified Mar 01, 2022 06:01 PM

Arriving in 2019 for a sabbatical year from the University of Mexico, Esaú Villatoro has now been working at Idiap for more than two years. Between publishing his work and adapting to Swiss life, he looks back on his experience at the institute.

Idiap is looking for its next director
by nicolas-filippov — last modified Nov 11, 2024 09:30 AM

Idiap Research Institute and the School of Engineering at EPFL invite applications for the directorship of Idiap. The successful candidate will also hold a faculty position as full professor at EPFL School of Engineering.

Idiap awards 2021
by nicolas-filippov — last modified Nov 11, 2024 09:31 AM

The Institute nominates every year two students for its internal awards. In 2021, the Best Paper Award goes to Suhan Shetty, and the Best Student Award goes to Parvaneh Janbakhshi. Congratulations!

Classifying neurons for a better understanding of Stephen Hawking's disease
by nicolas-filippov — last modified Dec 01, 2021 05:04 PM

Results from our Genomics & health informatics research group, in collaboration with the Francis Crick Institute in London, describe the use of a computational analysis method to classify images of healthy and affected by amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) motor neurons. This new technological breakthrough allows a better understanding of the disease and provides guidance for lab research.

Over 12 millions Swiss francs for more inclusive ICT
by nicolas-filippov — last modified Nov 03, 2021 01:39 PM

Access to information is a challenge for disabled people, even at a time when communications channels are increasing. An international consortium gathering researchers, as well as private and public partners, under the leadership of the University of Zurich and including Idiap and Icare from the French speaking side of Switzerland was granted 6 million Swiss francs from Innosuisse—completed by 6 million from private partners—to take up this challenge.

Idiap welcomes its first female professor
by nicolas-filippov — last modified Oct 08, 2021 11:19 AM

Head of the Computation, Cognition & Language Group at Idiap, Lonneke van der Plas was nominated professor by the University of Malta. She is affiliated to this university since 2014.

Fake faces for more ethics in biometrics
by nicolas-filippov — last modified Oct 12, 2021 09:38 AM

The lack of representativity in databases used to train facial recognition tools often creates biases. Creating a repository of fake faces can resolve these biases. Financed by the Hasler Foundation and under the supervision of Idiap Research Institute, the SAFER project gathers the University of Zurich and the company SICPA.

Idiap is training apprentices for the first time
by nicolas-filippov — last modified Sep 06, 2021 11:53 AM

The institute was inspired by the Swiss apprenticeship system to create its Masters in Artificial Intelligence, now it decided to train classic apprentices. Yana and Mattéo, our two apprentices, just started at Idiap.

Idiaper appointed Professor at the University of Lausanne
by nicolas-filippov — last modified Aug 30, 2021 11:37 AM

Head of the Biometrcs security & privacy research group at Idiap, Sébastien Marcel was appointed Professor at School of Criminal Justice (Ecole des Sciences Criminelles) of the University of Lausanne from September 1st. His nomination is strengthening an already deep rooted collaboration between the two institutions.

Data & AI: challenges for both start-ups and multinationals
by nicolas-filippov — last modified Aug 16, 2021 09:28 AM

Students from the Master’s AI completed the program offered by Idiap and Swiss Distance University. Thanks to their project integrated in a company, many of them are receiving job offers from their host company. This approach also fits businesses looking for digital skills.

Idiap and Octopeek sign a 4-year R&D partnership
by nicolas-filippov — last modified Jun 18, 2021 09:02 AM

Artificial intelligence and big data pioneers Octopeek (France) and Idiap announce a partnership. A member of Octopeek’s scientific staff will spend four years at the very heart of Idiap, culminating in a PhD—a unique opportunity to use video data to develop research on multimodal learning, and to spur innovation.

Idiap’s new strategy of national interest for the Swiss government
by nicolas-filippov — last modified Jun 17, 2021 04:48 PM

Thanks to a significant multi-million budget increase during the 2021-2024 period, Idiap’s new strategy will create over 60 highly skilled jobs, and interdisciplinary research groups dedicated to technology transfer towards businesses. This program is possible thanks to the support of the Canton of Valais and the Municipality of Martigny.

Becoming a developer to make research a reality
by Maxime Bourlard — last modified Apr 22, 2021 05:12 PM

Thanks to her master's degree in AI and her internship in the Genomics & health informatics group, Colombine Verzat discovered that she particularly enjoyed implementing research in applied projects. We look back on her journey and how this master's degree allowed her to highlight what she really wanted to bring to the world of research.

Microscopy: At the heart of images thanks to algorithms
by Maxime Bourlard — last modified Mar 26, 2021 03:16 PM

Always observe what’s smaller while maintaining the highest image quality possible. This requires ever more powerful microscopes, but computational methods can also do it. This is the subject of the thesis that Olivia Mariani successfully defended.

Importance of context in machine translation
by Maxime Bourlard — last modified Mar 18, 2021 04:59 PM

Perfect understanding of a text is not possible without context. Same goes for a computer. It cannot do a good translation without understanding what is really defined in a text. At Idiap, Lesly Miculicich conducted research to make this possible through her thesis which she successfully defended last February.

Four new researchers join the effort to shape the future of AI
by Maxime Bourlard — last modified Mar 08, 2023 04:05 PM

Idiap is developing its research capacities by hiring four new senior researchers. Two women and two men, whose goal will be to work on topics with great potential in AI and to continue to progress in areas that have already contributed to the reputation of the institute.

Idiap is an equal salary employer
by nicolas-filippov — last modified Feb 23, 2021 04:39 PM

Following an external audit, the Institute was declared to be an equal salary employer. Including more diversity remains an important goal for Idiap, as our professional environment suffers from a lack of diversity on the global scale.

A smart scooter to improve battery management
by nicolas-filippov — last modified Nov 18, 2020 04:25 PM

Ranging from bikes to cars, batteries are a key element of the electric mobility. Managing the autonomy of these vehicles is challenging. Using machine learning and smart scooters, Idiap researchers intend to enhance battery charging plans for a better mobility experience.

Android accredits Idiap's biometrics center
by nicolas-filippov — last modified Oct 21, 2020 11:45 AM

To face the increasing use of biometrics systems, Android set up its own certification standard. The biometrics center of Idiap became accredited to deliver certificates meeting these standards. This competence builds up on the FIDO accreditation obtained in 2019.

Graduating in artificial intelligence and impacting an entire company
by nicolas-filippov — last modified Sep 30, 2020 11:21 AM

The first intake of students of the on-the-job Master in artificial intelligence just graduated. Offered by Idiap Research Institute and Swiss Distance University Institute, this curriculum allowed an engineer from Syngenta to become the artificial intelligence specialist to support the digital evolution of the production site.

Swiss algorithms to help customers in a Finnish shopping mall
by nicolas-filippov — last modified Sep 09, 2020 05:17 PM

Human-robot interactions are often lacking fluidity, especially outside of the lab. Today, researchers from Idiap are publishing in open access the algorithms which allowed a robot to be used in real conditions in a shopping mall in Finland in the framework of the European project Mummer.

How the Swiss fared under partial lockdown
by nicolas-filippov — last modified Sep 07, 2020 04:24 PM

A joint study by Idiap Research Institute, EPFL, and the University of Lausanne’s Institute of Psychology has provided us with a unique snapshot of how Swiss residents experienced the partial lockdown measures resulting from the coronavirus pandemic. The findings include gender disparities, doubts about the future and hopes for change.

A million pictures to check manually
by nicolas-filippov — last modified Nov 10, 2020 05:29 PM

To diminish facial recognition biases, data sets of representative pictures are necessary. Idiap decided to go a step further by participating in the creation of an ethical data set of pictures.

« This place deserves to be welcoming »
by nicolas-filippov — last modified Jul 22, 2020 05:19 PM

The increase of the number of employees incited Idiap to recruit its own caretaker. Supported by two helpers for cleaning, he takes care of the building to keep it clean and welcoming. We followed him backstage to discover his work.

AI for medias: less fake news, more ethics
by nicolas-filippov — last modified Jul 22, 2020 05:03 PM

The European project AI4MEDIA will start in September and gather 30 partners. Idiap and HES-SO Valais-Wallis are part of it. Researchers and media actors want to contribute to a more ethical artificial intelligence in the field of medias.

Sanitary and cyber precautions, a key challenge for hospitals
by nicolas-filippov — last modified Apr 28, 2020 09:38 AM

With one million Swiss francs budget and supported by the Innosuisse agency, the CANDY project will develop and patent a contact-less scanner allowing to identify people using the venous patterns of their hands. The project is a collaboration between the Global ID start-up and Idiap Research Institute.

Promoting equality to attract more talent
by nicolas-filippov — last modified Mar 05, 2020 02:41 PM

The shortage of skilled people in computer science is more prominent now that recruitment for some jobs is done at the international level. Idiap is investing in the next generation of women in order to compete.

« We were inspired by Berkeley »
by nicolas-filippov — last modified Feb 26, 2020 01:58 PM

First contact when you arrive at Idiap, the secretariat is in charge of the administrative tasks: from human resources to accommodation management for researchers. Departing Nadine Rousseau had to share her 23 years of experience with Laura Coppey.

A new blade for Idiap’s Swiss knife
by nicolas-filippov — last modified Nov 07, 2019 03:41 PM

The system and infrastructure team is Idiap’s Swiss knife. They work on optical wire installation; they manage computing hardware; they plan our energy supply… Samuel Aymon just joined the team.

Police forces plan to use artificial intelligence to speed up their investigations
by nicolas-filippov — last modified Apr 27, 2020 07:06 PM

Coordinated by the Idiap Research Institute, the European project Roxanne gathers a large variety of national and international police forces, including Interpol, as well as scientists, large industry and private companies. Its aim is to create a computer programme able to help investigators to link various clues and uncover criminal network activities.

When a robot learns how to make traditional Swiss raclette thanks to AI
by nicolas-filippov — last modified Oct 03, 2019 11:37 AM

It took the know-how of the cheese Master Eddy Baillifard, founder of Raclett’House, and the expertise of the Robot learning & interaction group from the Idiap research institute to achieve the first raclette made by a robot. Beyond the technical challenge, the project shows the potential of learning from demonstration techniques and for a better human-robot collaboration.

Meet Bob, Idiap’s toolbox latest release
by nicolas-filippov — last modified Aug 20, 2019 12:13 PM

Bob is a signal-processing and machine learning toolbox originally developed by Idiap Research Institute. Upgrading from version 5 to 6, the last release of Bob is offering some important improvements with a focus on video support.

Teaching robots to collaborate with humans
by nicolas-filippov — last modified Jul 17, 2019 01:56 PM

Robots often lack flexibility to meet the needs of today’s small production cycles. Thanks to the European H2020 project called Collaborate led by the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki in Greece, our institute will contribute to improve collaboration between robots and humans.

Idiap becomes the world’s third biometrics certification center
by admin — last modified May 15, 2019 10:28 AM

The reference in authentication standards, the FIDO Alliance has confirmed the accreditation of Idiap’s Biometrics Center as only the third member of a what remains a very exclusive club, placing it at the heart of those security issues that make up the sensitive and fast-growing domain of biometric certification.

"Deep neural networks remain for the most part black boxes"
by admin — last modified Nov 11, 2024 09:32 AM

Artificial deep neural networks are a powerful tool, able to extract information from large datasets and, using this acquired knowledge, make accurate predictions on previously unseen data. Due to the very large number of parameters required, they are also particularly difficult to understand.

Artificial intelligence and energy, from buildings to cities
by nicolas-filippov — last modified Jul 10, 2020 10:59 AM

On May 7th 2019, Idiap will be hosting the “Artificial Intelligence & Energy” Symposium. Organized by the Centre de Recherches Energétiques et Municipales and the Idiap Research Institute, this event aims to open new perspectives in the energy research field.

How to manage the finances of an AI research institute?
by admin — last modified Mar 28, 2019 04:13 PM

Idiap’s new Financial Manager, Christophe Rossa, explains us the challenges and specificities of our institute financial aspects. Discover how his 10 years’ experience managing a casino finances is an asset for the Institute.

7.8 km of wires for a 10 times faster connection
by admin — last modified Apr 09, 2019 01:53 PM

To keep the pace with its research, our institute must be able to have a particularly fast internet connection. Idiap is currently undergoing a massive upgrade of its own network. Thank to optic fibre and new wires the network speed will increase by a factor ten.

Building a more inclusive Web supported by AI
by admin — last modified Feb 14, 2019 02:08 PM

How to empower communication among people through technology that is aware of diversity? To achieve this goal, the WeNet European project will develop a platform to connect people using ethical principles and artificial intelligence technology. Idiap is part of this project.

Like humans, robots can learn to walk
by admin — last modified Nov 11, 2024 09:33 AM

Following a comparable path, robots could learn to move and walk as human being do. The goal of the MEMMO project is to develop a unified approach to motion generation for complex robots with arms and legs.

I specialize in artificial intelligence within my company
by admin — last modified Feb 06, 2019 09:11 AM

Artificial intelligence is going back to school: Monday, February 4, 13 students upon selection are beginning their new master integrated within a company. In this new role of employee-student, they will allow their employer to acquire skills at the forefront thanks to Idiap.

By increasing its open source contribution, Idiap is getting even Qt-er
by admin — last modified Jan 22, 2019 10:33 AM

The use of graphic interfaces is a common ground in today’s software. The Qt – read it as cute – Project is working to maintain and develop an open source framework that helps build Graphical User Interface and much more. Idiap is now an official contributor to this effort.

Idiap rewarded its PhD students for their work
by admin — last modified Dec 20, 2018 05:28 PM

The best PhD student research and the best PhD student paper were awarded to Tiago de Freitas Pereira and Yu Yu. They received their prizes from Idiap’s director.

Smart energy? A challenge for Idiap and Artificial Intelligence
by admin — last modified Jul 10, 2020 11:00 AM

How to save energy, fight climate change and improve your energy supply? Be smart and use artificial intelligence. To achieve this goal Idiap Research Institute created a new research group in Energy Informatics in collaboration with the Centre de recherches énergétiques et municipales (CREM) dedicated to research in the energy field and local communities.

Idiap supports the next generation of women in computer science
by admin — last modified Nov 29, 2018 03:47 PM

The shortage of computer developers is impacting many sectors. Increasing the share of women in this area would partly address this shortage. Idiap is committed in this direction by raising girls' awareness and proposing a fellowship program for female researchers.

Using mobile data to model the drinking habits of Swiss youth
by admin — last modified Nov 27, 2018 05:08 PM

Researchers from Idiap Research Institute have carried out a study using smartphone data from young Swiss people to better understand the circumstances in which they are most likely to drink. A computer model developed based on Artificial Intelligence can estimate, with over 75% accuracy, whether alcohol was consumed on a given weekend night.

Idiap’s brand new artificial intelligence applied master
by admin — last modified Aug 08, 2019 04:29 PM

Digitalisation is impacting every business, from tourism to energy. Artificial intelligence (AI) is one of the tools that can provide a strategical asset to businesses, but the lack of experts can be a limitation when it comes to using such technologies. Thanks to the first master in AI tailored for companies’ development and in collaboration with Swiss Distance University and the Canton of Valais, Idiap Research Institute is offering a brand new solution which also creates new jobs. The target audience for this master is very broad, not only targeting the Canton of Valais.

One of our students gets the Best Student Paper Award at the 25th IEEE ICIP
by admin — last modified Oct 26, 2018 04:43 PM

Adrian Shajkofci, a PhD student in the Computational Bioimaging Group, co-advised by Michael Liebling and François Fleuret received a "Best Student Paper Award" at the 25th IEEE International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP), on October 9th 2018. This event is the world's largest and most comprehensive technical conference focused on image and video processing and computer vision. The 2018 theme was "Imaging beyond imagination".

Working together, Idiap’s unique legal approach
by admin — last modified Sep 27, 2018 02:37 PM

From European projects to intellectual property, meet Idiap’s legal advisor, Marie-Constance Landelle, whose work allows to improve Institute operations and to face new challenges.

ICC 2018, creating start-ups in Switzerland thanks to AI
by admin — last modified Aug 28, 2018 08:38 AM

How to use artificial intelligence to analyse blood samples or to detect when a child is accessing an inappropriate website? Here are some of the projects submitted for the International Create Challenge (ICC) 2018 hosted and supported by Idiap until September 18th.

Analyzing biosignals using Artificial Intelligence
by admin — last modified Oct 04, 2024 11:53 AM

What if artificial intelligence could analyze an electro-cardiogram (ECG) or a medical image scan and highlight results that physicians should be looking at in priority? Thanks to signal and image processing, and machine learning techniques, that is the goal of the new Biosignal Processing Group at the Idiap Research Institute.

Wanted: Artificial intelligence ideas
by admin — last modified Apr 30, 2018 11:03 AM

The 7th edition of the International Create challenge is looking for new ideas in the fields of Artificial intelligence. A cash prize of CHF 15’000 awaits the winning teams.

Barbara Caputo, former Idiap researcher, under the spotlights
by admin — last modified Apr 10, 2018 10:46 AM

Barbara Caputo, a former Idiap senior researcher, teaches robots to learn for themselves, from the Internet. Her RobotExNovo project has brought her the prestigious ERC Starting Grant funding of EUR 1.5 mio from the European Council.

Children education project supported by SenseCityVity at the World Water Forum 2018
by admin — last modified Mar 15, 2018 10:46 AM

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).

The Idiap startup Eyeware obtained a seed loan of CHF 100’000 from the Foundation for Technological Innovation (FIT)
by admin — last modified Mar 14, 2018 04:52 PM

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.

Modeling human behavior with Airbnb
by admin — last modified Feb 09, 2018 11:01 AM

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.

Idiap spin-off KeyLemon acquired by ams
by admin — last modified Feb 09, 2018 10:46 AM

On Monday Feb 6th, ams, a worldwide supplier of high performance sensor solutions, announced the acquisition of KeyLemon for an undisclosed amount [1].

On February 2nd, 2018, Ajay Tanwani successfully defended his PhD thesis entitled 'Generative Models for Learning Robot Manipulation Skills from Humans'
by admin — last modified Nov 11, 2024 09:34 AM

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.

3 promotions to Senior Researcher at Idiap
by admin — last modified Nov 11, 2024 09:34 AM

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:

Andrei Popescu-Belis, professor at HEIG-VD and former Idiap researcher, receives prize for best article
by admin — last modified Nov 18, 2019 09:03 AM

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.

Valais turned towards innovation
by admin — last modified Jan 22, 2018 10:45 AM

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!

On November 27 ,2017, Gulcan Can successfully defended her PhD thesis entitled 'Visual Analysis of Maya Glyphs via Crowdsourcing and Deep Learning'
by admin — last modified Dec 06, 2017 08:43 AM

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.

Creating links between innovation in healthcare and customers
by admin — last modified Nov 14, 2017 11:14 AM

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).

Idiap of Martigny develops a new imaging system for research
by admin — last modified Nov 11, 2024 09:35 AM

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.

ACM ICMI Community Service Award to Daniel Gatica-Perez
by admin — last modified Nov 18, 2019 09:06 AM

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.

"Combining Electromyography and Tactile Myography to Improve Hand and Wrist Activity Detection in Prostheses" paper posted on Technologies/ journal social media platform
by admin — last modified Nov 11, 2024 09:35 AM

The paper of Noémie Jaquier, Mathilde Connan, Claudio Castellini and Sylvain Calinon from Idiap Research Institute and DLR-German Aerospace Center, "Combining Electromyography and Tactile Myography to Improve Hand and Wrist Activity Detection in Prostheses", has been posted on /Technologies/ journal social media platform.

CREALOGIX acquires machine learning technology for data and video analytics
by admin — last modified Sep 22, 2017 08:19 AM

CREALOGIX purchases the cutting-edge artificial intelligence (AI) technology of Koemei. The solution, developed by the Swiss start-up and spin-off of the Idiap Research Institute, enables the automated conversion of audio and video content into text data for analytics and optimisation, thanks to machine learning technology. This makes it easier to exploit multimedia content. As a result, data categories that are set to grow massively in the future and whose analysis is still largely neglected by companies today, can be used efficiently. Extensive concept search as well as usage analytics further simplify handling. With these innovative AI functions, the digital banking and digital learning specialist is complementing its existing digital product portfolio.

Results of the International Create Challenge 2017
by admin — last modified Sep 20, 2017 02:13 PM

On Tuesday, September 19th, after three weeks of hard work and networking, the ICC’2017 participants found out which teams the jury had selected among the winners of the challenge. The organizers of the ICC’2017 are proud to announce the following winning teams:

Best Paper Award for the Dr Sylvain Calinon
by admin — last modified Nov 11, 2024 09:36 AM

Dr Sylvain Calinon received the 2017 Best Paper Award of the Intelligent Service Robotics (ISR) journal for his article "A Tutorial on Task-Parameterized Movement Learning and Retrieval".

Idiap Speaker Series : 'Multilingual speech recognition in under-resourced environments' (Webcast now available).
by admin — last modified Oct 06, 2017 02:57 PM

When speech processing systems are designed for use in multilingual environments, additional complexity is introduced. Identifying when language switching has occurred, predicting how cross-lingual terms will be pronounced, obtaining sufficient speech data from diverse language backgrounds: such factors all complicate the development of practical speech-oriented systems. In this talk, I will discuss our research group's experience in building speech recognition systems for the South African environment, one in which 11 official languages are recognised. I will also show how this relates to our participation in the BABEL project, a recent 5-year international collaborative project aimed at solving the spoken term detection task in under-resourced languages.

Idiap Speaker Series : 'Charisma: Measurement and outcomes' (Webcast now available).
by admin — last modified May 15, 2017 04:17 PM

Charisma has been devilishly difficult to measure; there has also been a dearth of studies estimating the causal impact of charisma on outcomes. In this seminar I will use a new definition of charisma to demonstrate how it can be manipulated, and will also show the economic impact of charisma on worker productivity. Moreover, I will discuss how charisma can be coded from archival data, and demonstrate its utility for predicting a range of outcomes including winning the U.S. presidential election, the amount of views on TED talks, and retweets of tweets.

Understanding how technology can revolutionize humanitarian work
by admin — last modified May 12, 2017 06:01 PM

A new EPFL course offers students the opportunity to learn more about how new technologies can be used by humanitarian organizations. The students critically assessed new information-sharing methods by conducting a real-life exercise using the app Civique, which was developed by the Idiap Research Institute, an EPFL partner institution.

A more secure biometric authentication system
by admin — last modified Apr 25, 2017 07:01 PM

Now EPFL's Security and Cryptography Laboratory and the startup Global ID have developed an even more secure identification system that processes data more safely than current standards and that leverages 3D vein imaging technology developed by the Idiap Research Institute in Martigny, the University of Applied Sciences in Sion (HES-SO Valais-Wallis) and Global ID.

Certificate of Advanced Studies in Biometrics and Privacy
by admin — last modified Apr 04, 2017 04:30 PM

Idiap created in collaboration with UniDistance a new Certificate of Advanced Studies (CAS) program. The goal of this program is to teach concepts and technologies in the area of Biometrics and Privacy and to provide students with a full understanding of data protection, privacy preservation, compliance with privacy regulations and potential privacy losses.

Maya glyph analysis on Horizons Magazine
by admin — last modified Apr 03, 2017 02:11 PM

The work by R. Hu, J.-M. Odobez, and D. Gatica-Perez on extraction of Maya hieroglyph strokes was covered by Horizons Magazine, the scientific magazine of the SNSF and the Swiss Academies of Arts and Sciences.

Valais/Wallis AI Workshop - Reproducibility in research
by admin — last modified Apr 03, 2017 02:12 PM

The aim of Valais/Wallis Workshops on Artificial Intelligence is to bring together engineers and researchers, from the Idiap Research Institute, HES-SO Valais-Wallis, EPFL Valais and other institutions, active in pattern analysis and machine intelligence and related applications in Security, Health or Energy.

Sécurité biométrique: Martigny séduit les Etats-Unis
by admin — last modified Mar 17, 2017 09:04 AM

L’institut de recherche Idiap de Martigny et son Centre suisse de recherche et d’évaluation en sécurité biométrique ont intégré deux programmes phares du gouvernement américain. Odin et MediFor ont pour mission de lutter contre le "spoofing" et de démasquer la propagande. Les explications de Sébastien Marcel, directeur du centre, interrogé par Anne Baecher.

L’Idiap financé par les Américains pour ses travaux sur la biométrie
by admin — last modified Mar 16, 2017 05:05 PM

Nouvelle étape pour l’Idiap de Martigny: l’institut vient d’intégrer deux projets phare du gouvernement américain dédié à la sécurité biométrique, il fait partie d’un groupe de quatre équipes qui travailleront sur ODIN….un système contre ce qu’on appelle le spoofing.

Biowatch wins in Visa’s Everywhere Initiative
by admin — last modified Mar 16, 2017 05:05 PM

Biowatch’s vein recognition technology won them € 25’000 in the Visa Everywhere Initiative, which was held for the first time in Europe. The pitch competition was kicked-off at the World Mobile Congress. Biowatch also qualified for the larger European competition which awards €50’000 and the opportunity to work with Visa.

Biowatch SA awarded first prize at the Swiss Fintech Convention 2017 in Geneva
by admin — last modified Mar 16, 2017 05:05 PM

Lausanne, Switzerland, February 3rd, 2017 - Biowatch SA won the 1st prize at the 2017 Swiss Fintech Convention held in Geneva on February 2nd, pitching its disruptive vein based biometric solution. The Swiss startup outlined several ongoing projects in the banking industry and the upcoming functional pre-products for Spring 2017.

Pedro Pinheiro awarded the EPFL PhD degree
by admin — last modified Mar 16, 2017 05:03 PM

On February 17th, 2017, Pedro Pinheiro made the public defense of his PhD thesis entitled "Large-Scale Image Segmentation with Convolutional Networks"

Biowatch SA raises CHF 1.2M seed round to finalise its disruptive wearable biometric authentication solution
by Marcel — last modified Mar 16, 2017 05:05 PM

Lausanne, Switzerland, January 17, 2017 - Biowatch SA, a Swiss start-up, has successfully closed last December an oversubscribed first financing round at CHF 1.2 million to accelerate the development of its solution on biometric authentication for wearables. This seed round is following a CHF 800k grant from the CTI in last February and a CHF 100k loan from the FIT last June. It was led by serial entrepreneur and business angel Patrick Delarive with participation from the Venture Capital fund Polytech Ecosystem Ventures and SICPA Finance. Further investments from various business angels completed the investment.

Thesis award for Dario Azzimonti
by admin — last modified Mar 16, 2017 05:03 PM

Dr. Dario Azzimonti was awarded the C. Moser Award for outstanding Ph.D. or M.Sc. theses within the Institute of Mathematical Statistics and Actuarial Science of the University of Bern.

Idiap Awards 2016
by admin — last modified Jun 17, 2024 05:21 PM

The 2016 Idiap awards have been granted to Darshan Santani and Cijo JOSE.

MAAYA project at EPFL Open Days 2016
by admin — last modified Dec 19, 2016 04:44 PM

Idiap researchers presented tools for analysis and visualization of ancient Maya hieroglyphs at the EPFL Open Days 2016 in Lausanne.

DexROV holds first official review with European Commission
by admin — last modified Nov 11, 2024 09:52 AM

Nineteen months after the undersea-operations project was launched, DexROV has successfully completed its first funding review as part of the European Commission’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation programme.

Idiap is alongside American giants with a tool that allows the "photoshopping" of voices
by admin — last modified Mar 16, 2017 05:05 PM

To speak Chinese without having to learn it or to being able to speak for yourself: these dreams may become reality thanks to the progress of speech synthesis. American informatics giants are working on it, with Adobe and its project VoCo. But they are not the only ones: the Idiap Research Institute of Martigny also specializes in this domain.

L'Idiap participe à la journée "Futur en tous genres"
by admin — last modified Mar 16, 2017 05:06 PM

Chaque année, l’Office cantonal de l’égalité et de la famille organise la journée « Futur en tous genres », anciennement « Osez tous les métiers ». Le but est de faire découvrir aux enfants les différentes possibilités d’avenir professionnel en n’ayant aucun a priori sur ces dernières.

Biometrics: for better or for worse?
by admin — last modified Mar 16, 2017 05:05 PM

It is supposedly one of the most promising solutions for protecting us from terrorist attacks. Biometrics allows identifying a person by their biological characteristics like finger prints, the iris or the face. Since the attacks of September 11, 2001, technological solutions have known a fast progress: facial recognition software, “cerebral fingerprinting”, automatic control systems for moving crowds…But can we really trust biometrics with our security? And above all, what happens if these data fall into the wrong hands?

Can science solve an 80-year-old Indian mystery?
by admin — last modified Mar 16, 2017 05:05 PM

Sébastien Marcel is an unlikely judge of beauty queens, but his face recognition expertise could finally solve the identity of an Indian woman on a precious Swiss watch.

Idiap and Y@N at the Swiss Days of Official Statistics 2016
by admin — last modified Mar 16, 2017 05:06 PM

Prof. Daniel Gatica-Perez discussed the value of geo-localized social media as a new urban data source at the Swiss Days of Official Statistics, Neuchatel, Sep. 15-16, 2016. He illustrated this emerging trend with the Youth@Night project and other recent work.

Results of the International Create Challenge 2016
by admin — last modified Mar 16, 2017 05:05 PM

On Tuesday, September 20th, after three weeks of hard work and networking, the ICC’2016 participants found out which teams the jury had selected among the winners of the challenge. The organizers of the ICC’2016 are proud to announce the following winning teams:

Recapp in the TOP 100 Swiss Startups of 2016
by admin — last modified Mar 16, 2017 05:05 PM

Recapp, an Idiap spin-off and sponsored by The Ark Foundation, is part of the top 100 Swiss Startups 2016. It's a big success for Dr. David Imseng, founder of Recapp.

Keynote on Civic Multimedia at CBMI 2016
by admin — last modified Mar 16, 2017 05:06 PM

Prof. Daniel Gatica-Perez gave a keynote talk on "Civic Multimedia, Crowdsourcing, and the Public Good" at the 14th International Workshop on Content-Based Multimedia Indexing (CBMI) in Bucharest, June 16, 2016.

Ivana Chingovska received the PhD degree from EPFL
by admin — last modified Mar 16, 2017 05:03 PM

Ivana Chingovska received the PhD degree from EPFL on May 2nd 2016 after the public defense of her doctoral dissertation entitled: "Trustworthy Biometric Verification under Spoofing Attacks: Application to the Face Mode".

Two Idiap spin-off in the Swiss Top 100 !
by admin — last modified Mar 16, 2017 05:05 PM

Two Idiap spin-off, Biowatch and Recapp, sponsored by The Ark Foundation, are part of Top 100 best Swiss start-ups 2015. The Valais is the 4th most prolific Swiss canton. Great success for these entrepreneurs.

Best Multimodal Paper Award to Nikolaos Pappas and co-authors at ICMR 2016
by admin — last modified Mar 16, 2017 05:05 PM

The paper "Multilingual Visual Sentiment Concept Matching" by Nikolaos Pappas, Mercan Topkara, Miriam Redi, Brendan Jou, Tao Chen, Hongyi Liu, Shih-Fu Chang has received the Best Multimodal Paper Award at the Annual ACM International Conference on Multimedia Retrieval (ICMR), held on June 6-9 in New York.

Fin des projets étoiles mais continuation de Valais*Wallis Digital
by admin — last modified Mar 16, 2017 05:06 PM

Le projet, Valais*Wallis Digital, mis sur pieds par l'Idiap avait été sélectionné comme projet étoile du bicentenaire de l'entrée du Valais dans la Confédération. L'année 2015 s'étant écoulée, un événement officiel réunissant tous les partenaires du projet a eu lieu pour présenter les résultats et se remémorer les bons moments autour de ce projet.

Eyeware, young Valaisan start-up and winner of the ICC’2015, featured in RTS’ radio show "Néophiles"
by admin — last modified Mar 16, 2017 05:05 PM

Kenneth Funes, whose project “Eyeware” was amongst the winners of the ICC’2015, is currently founding the start-up Eyeware in Martigny (Valais). It develops gaze and interaction technologies based on his PhD work done in the Idiap Perception and Activity Understanding group. The EyewareAssit system allows interacting with a computer via the head and facial gestures, and is particularly aimed at people with paraplegia who are unable to use a standard keyboard or mouse.

Canal9 visits the Baxter robot at Idiap
by admin — last modified Nov 11, 2024 10:00 AM

Dr. Sylvain Calinon, head of Idiap’s Robot Learning & Interaction group, receives Romain Boisset, reporter for the Canap9 TV channel. They demonstrate how Idiap’s Baxter robot learns by demonstration.

The first Reproducible Research Survey in Face Recognition
by admin — last modified Mar 16, 2017 05:05 PM

Idiap published a book chapter entitled “Face Recognition in Challenging Environments: An Experimental and Reproducible Research Survey” appearing in the Springer book “Face Recognition Across the Imaging Spectrum”.

The BEAT platform goes Open Source
by admin — last modified Mar 16, 2017 05:05 PM

After 4 years of development, the BEAT platform is now available for download as an open-source project, under the Affero GNU GPL version 3.

Biometrics will make payments more secure
by admin — last modified Mar 16, 2017 05:05 PM

Voice identification, facial recognition, fingerprint reading or heartbeat analysis: biometric identification methods will be used more and more this year on mobile phones and online payment platforms at the expense of the usual password.

Machines learn to speak Swiss-German
by admin — last modified Mar 16, 2017 05:05 PM

With regard to devices using voice control, the Swiss German population has so far been left out in the cold. At the best, smartphones, smart TVs and other tools of this kind understand High German, but have no chance when the Swiss German dialect is concerned. But this will change soon.

Idiap's DexROV project featured in RTS's CQFD radio show today
by admin — last modified Nov 11, 2024 10:00 AM

DexROV is a robot of a special kind. This underwater robot is destined to take the place of human divers for tasks in very deep water (up to 1’300 meters under the sea). The Idiap Research Institute in Martigny is in charge of developing the algorithms that will help teleoperating the two arms of this robot.

New patent on vein anti-spoofing (PAD)
by admin — last modified Mar 16, 2017 05:05 PM

Idiap published on Feb 18 2016 a PCT patent on biometric vein anti-spoofing (also called presentation attack detection) under the reference WO/2016/023582.

The Idiap Research Institute is part of an EU project (TeSLA) to authenticate student identity online throughout the e-assessment process
by admin — last modified Oct 17, 2017 11:23 AM

The project TeSLA, led by the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC), with a length of three years and a budget of seven million euros, involves universities, quality assurance agencies, research centres and technology companies from twelve countries. In total, there will be a team of around eighty professionals and eighteen months of largescale pilot tests with the participation of over 14,000 students from Europe.

SenseCityVity expands work in Mexico
by admin — last modified Mar 16, 2017 05:05 PM

Collaborative research in Mexico by the Social Computing Group at Idiap engages citizens as factors of social change and expands to several cities.

License agreement signed between Idiap & EC’s Joint Research Center to experiment BEAT platform.
by admin — last modified Mar 16, 2017 05:05 PM

The BEAT platform is an European computing e-infrastructure for Open Science proposing a solution for open access, scientific information sharing and re-use including data and source code while protecting privacy and confidentiality. It allows easy online access to experimentation and testing in computational science. The platform also provides an attestation mechanism for your reports (scientific papers, technical documents or certifications).

How do we create standards ISO ? Answers at Idiap Research Institute in Martigny Switzerland
by admin — last modified Mar 16, 2017 05:05 PM

It is a Swiss premiere. The Idiap Research Institute in Martigny receives this week delegates from all around the world that have the task of creating the famous ISO standards. They will discuss about the standards in the domain of biometrics. The Idiap researcher Sébastien Marcel explains the procedure and the stakes of this scientific meeting.

The Swiss National Library (NL) archives the website of the star-projet Valais*Wallis Digital
by admin — last modified Mar 16, 2017 05:06 PM

Within the framework of the project Swiss Web Archives, the NL – in collaboration with the cantonal libraries and specialized Swiss libraries – pursues for some time now the objective of documenting the evolution of Internet sites over the years and decades. The aim is to conserve these websites in order to make them available in the long run.

The Idiap Research Institute makes available metadata and transcriptions for the mobile biometric database MOBIO
by admin — last modified Mar 16, 2017 05:05 PM

The MOBIO database consists of bi-modal (audio and video) data taken from 152 people. The database has a female-male ratio or nearly 1:2 (100 males and 52 females) and was collected from August 2008 until July 2010 in six different sites from five different countries. This led to a diverse bi-modal database with both native and non-native English speakers.

Idiap Video amongst the 10 finalists of the Rethink Robotics Video Challenge
by admin — last modified Nov 11, 2024 10:00 AM

In the summer of 2015, Rethink Robotics, the worldwide leader in collaborative robotics research and education launched the Rethink Robotics Video Challenge. The Challenge was created to highlight the amazing work being done by the research and education community with the Baxter robot. The Challenge attracted more than 90 total entries from 19 countries around the globe. The video of Dr. Sylvain Calinon’s Robot Learning & Interaction group of the Idiap Research Institute in Martigny was selected amongst the 10 finalists.

On November 30, 2015, Maryam Habibi was awarded the EPFL doctorate for her dissertation on "Modeling Users' Information Needs in a Document Recommender for Meetings"
by admin — last modified Mar 16, 2017 05:03 PM

Maryam Habibi arrived at Idiap as a research assistant in September 2011, for the third phase of the IM2 NCCR, after an MSc at Sharif University of Technology, Iran (2010). She prepared her thesis in the EPFL Doctoral School in Electrical Engineering (EDEE), and was a member of Idiap's NLP group. Her thesis was supervised by Prof. Hervé Bourlard and by Dr. Andrei Popescu-Belis as a co-director.

Idiap is proud to collaborate with the "AISA company"
by admin — last modified Mar 16, 2017 05:05 PM

Idiap is proud to collaborate with the "AISA company" (global Swiss-based company located in Vouvry Switzerland, leading supplier of equipment offering innovative laminate and seamless plastic tube packaging production solutions)" which has won on Dec. 3 the first place for the "prix sommet UBS (The Innovation Award of UBS)

Ten-Year Impact Award to AMI Corpus Paper
by admin — last modified Mar 16, 2017 05:05 PM

The Ten-Year Technical Impact Award of the ACM International Conference on Multimodal Interaction (ICMI) 2015 was given to Jean Carletta and the AMI team, for the paper that introduced the Augmented Multi-Party Interaction (AMI) Corpus, originally published in 2005.

L'Idiap participe à la journée "Osez tous les métiers"
by admin — last modified Apr 10, 2017 05:53 PM

Chaque année, l’Office cantonal de l’égalité et de la famille organise la journée « Osez tous les métiers ». Le but est de faire découvrir aux enfants les différentes possibilités d’avenir professionnel en n’ayant aucun apriori sur ces dernières.

On October 9th, 2015, Kenneth Funes was awarded the EPFL doctorate for his dissertation entitled “3D Gaze Estimation from Remote RGB-D sensors”.
by admin — last modified Mar 16, 2017 05:03 PM

Kenneth Funes successfully defended his private examination in front of a committee of experts, composed of Prof. Dan Witzner Hansen, Prof. Louis-Philippe Morency, Dr. Ronan Boulic, Prof. Kamiar Aminian and Dr. Jean-Marc Odobez on May 29th, 2015, whereas on October 9th, 2015, he presented his public defense at EPFL, as a final step towards the completion of his PhD.

BBC collaboration to build multilingual media monitoring system
by admin — last modified Mar 16, 2017 05:05 PM

Keeping up to date with the latest news and trends is a key aspect of any organization with a global reach and outlook. Language Technology Producer Susanne Weber explains the journey that led to a new partnership to investigate and create a new way to monitor this wealth of content.

The fight against identity theft
by admin — last modified Mar 16, 2017 05:05 PM

A new research project will provide authentication and secure access to banking and other services over broadband and mobile networks by using biometric identifiers.

Hunt down thugs via their voice
by admin — last modified Mar 16, 2017 05:05 PM

During the RTS (Radio Télévision Suisse) television show CQDF, Hervé Bourlard (Director of the Idiap Research Institute) answers questions about the possibilities of voice-print verification, applied to the fight against international criminal activity.

UBImpressed at the HR-Conference Romand 2015
by admin — last modified Mar 16, 2017 05:06 PM

The UBImpressed project took part in the HR-Conference Romand, organized at the University of Lausanne, September 8, 2015. Prof. Marianne Schmid Mast and Dr. Denise Frauendorfer co-organized the workshop "Novel technologies to measure verbal and non-verbal behavior", in which social sensing technologies were introduced and demonstrated.

SenseCityVity and MCSC presented at meeting on Observatories for Tourism in Mexico
by admin — last modified Mar 16, 2017 05:06 PM

The SenseCityVity and MCSC projects were presented by Salvador Ruiz-Correa (Co-PI of the projects) at the Third Meeting of Observatories for Tourism in Guanajuato City, Mexico, on September 7-8. The meeting was co-organized by the National Ministry of Tourism (SECTUR) and the State Ministry of Tourism of Guanajuato.

ICC International Create Challenge 2015 winners announced
by admin — last modified Mar 16, 2017 05:05 PM

During a celebratory dinner on Monday, September 14th, the results of the fourth edition of the International Create Challenge, accelerator program organized by the Idiap Research Institute, were announced

BEAT tour in Brazil
by admin — last modified Mar 16, 2017 05:05 PM

From June 22 to July 3, André Anjos from the Biometrics group and one of the main architect of the BEAT platform, was invited to present the BEAT platform an online platform for reproducible research in computational science in various institutions such as the Universidade Estadual Paulista (Unesp), the Center for Research and Development (CPqD), the Universidade Federal de Juiz de Fora (UFJF) and the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro.

EU - Euresearch ROCKIT Workshop
by admin — last modified Mar 16, 2017 05:05 PM

In conjunction with Idiap Research Institute, the EU project Rockit has developed a first version of a research and technology transfer roadmap in multilingual and multimodal interaction.

New version of biometric tools for face and speaker recognition released
by admin — last modified Mar 16, 2017 05:04 PM

The Biometric group at Idiap Research Institute is releasing its new version of biometric tools for face and speaker recognition, including a number of state-of-the-art preprocessing, feature extraction, machine learning algorithms, evaluation metrics and database protocols.

Ashtosh Sapru received the PhD degree from EPFL
by admin — last modified Mar 16, 2017 05:03 PM

Ashtosh Sapru received the PhD degree from EPFL on June 29th 2015 after the public defense of his doctoral dissertation entitled: "Automatic social role recognition and its application in structuring multiparty interactions".

Laurent Nguyen receives PhD degree from EPFL
by admin — last modified Mar 16, 2017 05:03 PM

Laurent Nguyen received the PhD degree from EPFL on May 29th 2015 after the public defense of his doctoral dissertation entitled: "Computational Analysis of Behavior in Employment Interviews and Video Resumes".

Idiap Biometrics group participated to a Google ATAP research sprint
by admin — last modified Mar 16, 2017 05:04 PM

The Biometrics group was chosen by Google to participate to a confidential on-invitation-only research sprint on mobile biometrics along with more than 20 experts from 16 institutions worldwide. The group was able to carry out biometrics research on a 40 Tb dataset from 1500 data subjects.

Best student paper award for Nikhil Chacko, UCSB student, at ISBI'15
by admin — last modified Mar 16, 2017 05:04 PM

Nikhil Chacko, graduate student in electrical and computer engineering at UCSB in Michael Liebling's lab (Idiap Research Institute and UCSB), received a Best Student Paper Award (sponsored by Amazon and the IEEE Journal on Biomedical and Health Informatics) at the IEEE International Conference on Biomedical Imaging (ISBI'15), held 16-19 April 2015 in Brooklyn, NY.

SenseCityVity program concludes its first year
by admin — last modified Mar 16, 2017 05:06 PM

After a year of work, the results of the SenseCityVity project were presented at the Don Quixote Iconographic Museum by the team lead by Dr. Salvador Ruiz Correa.

The card game Valais*Mania just arrived in Valais
by admin — last modified Mar 16, 2017 05:06 PM

Last Friday, the cards and boxes of the Valais*Mania, card game of the star-project Valais*Wallis Digital (www.valais-digital.ch) that wants to celebrate Valais’ 2015 bicentenary by digitalizing the collective memory of the canton, have been delivered to the headquarters of Migros Valais in Martigny.

Collaboration between Idiap and E.S. Concept
by admin — last modified Mar 16, 2017 05:05 PM

Taking control of a soccer game on a tablet? This concept is now tested by a company from the Western part of Switzerland, E.S. Concept, that has strong links with Idiap. The game is recorded in panoramic view and redistributed in streaming. The spectator can, on demand, walk on the soccer field or change the point of view of the game.

SenseCityVity+ starts today
by admin — last modified Mar 16, 2017 05:06 PM

SenseCityVity+, the new phase of the SenseCityVity project, has started today under the support of EPFL Cooperation and Development Center (CODEV).

The Swiss Center for Biometrics Research and Testing goes European
by admin — last modified Mar 16, 2017 05:06 PM

As a consequence of the successful Kick-off Workshop of the Swiss Center for Biometrics Research and Testing, the European Association for Biometrics (EAB) and the Idiap Research Institute decided to elevate at a more European level the initiative of the Idiap Research Institute to create a cooperative research consortium towards the establishment of the European Cooperative Identification Technology Research Consortium (EAB-CITeR) In the process to establish EAB-CITeR, the resources of Idiap and the critical mass of over 160 current EAB members shall complement each other.

SenseCityVity at DigitalPolis, Paris
by admin — last modified Mar 16, 2017 05:06 PM

Daniel Gatica-Perez discussed the work done in the SenseCityVity project at the DigitalPolis Symposium in Paris, France, Jan 29-31, 2015. The symposium gathered a multidisciplinary audience developing theoretical and technical approaches to understand digital cities.

VALAIS*WALLIS DIGITAL – The collection of multimedia files in relation to Valais is officially launched
by admin — last modified Apr 07, 2017 04:23 PM

On Monday January 19th 2015, the Idiap Research Institute, together with its partners, officially kicked off its star-project “Valais*Wallis Digital”. After 2 years of intensive work, Valais*Wallis Digital, which aims at celebrating the bicentenary of Valais’ entry into the Swiss Confederation in 2015, wants to motivate the population to get out their memories in relation to the « old country », to digitize and to share them on the platform or the mobile application especially developed for the project.

Cracking the code of the unspoken language
by spano — last modified Mar 16, 2017 05:04 PM

The NOVICOM project, led by Oya Aran as Marie Curie Research Fellow and Daniel Gatica-Perez as Scientist in Charge, was featured today as a Project Story on the European Commission Horizon 2020 website. Oya is currently a SNSF Ambizione Research Fellow at the Social Computing Group at Idiap.

Best Biometrics Student Paper Award to L. El Shafey, E. Khoury, and S. Marcel
by spano — last modified Mar 16, 2017 05:04 PM

On 02 October 2014, the submitted paper by L. El Shafey, E. Khoury, and S. Marcel : "Audio-visual gender recognition in uncontrolled environment using variability modeling techniques" was awarded IAPR (International Association for Pattern Recognition) Best Biometrics Student Paper Award at the International Joint Conference on Biometrics 2014 (IJCB, 2014 29 September - 2 October 2014 at Clearwater, Florida, USA).

Meet Baxter, Idiap’s new robot
by spano — last modified Nov 11, 2024 10:00 AM

Idiap pursues its development with new scientific research groups. Recently, the institute has acquired an American robot worth CHF 30’000.-. This investment opens new perspectives, in particular thanks to the interconnection between the different domains of competencies developed in Martigny.

Idiap launches crowd funding platform
by mguetl — last modified Mar 16, 2017 05:06 PM

During a press conference on August 28, 2014 the Idiap Research Institute revealed and launched its new crowd funding platform funding.idiap.ch

New research groups at Idiap
by spano — last modified Mar 16, 2017 05:04 PM

The Idiap Research Institute is proud to announce that 2 new researchers have recently joined the research team. Sylvain Calinon and Michael Liebling will reinforce, complement and develop the Institute’s expertise and competencies in human-robot interaction and computational bioimaging.

Can Biometrics Defeat Cyberterrorists?
by admin — last modified Mar 16, 2017 05:04 PM

At Switzerland's Idiap Research Institute, one man is on the front lines of the fight against cyberterrorism. He's an expert in biometrics. The more individual the biometric, the more difficult it is to attack.

Biometric vein recognition under attack
by admin — last modified Mar 16, 2017 05:04 PM

Vein recognition is a biometric that has traditionally been seen as difficult to hack or spoof, as the biometric patterns created by the vein structure in a person’s finger are hidden from view.

Biometric identification: there is still progress to be made
by admin — last modified Mar 16, 2017 05:05 PM

Today, accessing your computer with the help of facial recognition is possible. However, by wearing a particularly realistic mask, one can fool certain biometric identification systems and open a session through another person’s identity.

SenseCityVity: Mobile sensing, urban awareness, and collective action in Mexico
by spano — last modified Mar 16, 2017 05:04 PM

SenseCityVity is a Switzerland-Mexico collaborative project between Idiap Research Institute and the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL), and the National Center for Supercomputing of the Instituto Potosino de Investigacion Cientifica y Tecnologica (CNS-IPICYT), supported by EPFL's Cooperation and Development Center (CODEV).

Report on the workshop "Comment innover dans vos réunions"
by mguetl — last modified Mar 16, 2017 05:06 PM

On February 27 2014, the workshop "Comment innover dans vos réunions" took place at the Idiap Research Institute in Martigny. François Foglia, Deputy Director of Idiap, presented the institute's activities to the workshop participants.

SNSF Early Postdoc.Mobility fellowship awarded to Edgar Roman-Rangel
by admin — last modified Mar 16, 2017 05:04 PM

Edgar Roman-Rangel (former PhD student at the Social Computing Group at Idiap and EPFL, and currently a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Geneva) has been awarded a SNSF Early Postdoc.Mobility fellowship. His project, on the area of computational archaeology, is entitled "Tepalcatl: Automatic Categorization of Potsherds". The project starts on April 1, 2014 and will be conducted at Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH).

inEvent, SILVER partner for the FRESH conference in Copenhagen, 26-28 January 2014
by admin — last modified Mar 16, 2017 05:04 PM

FRESH is a two-day conference that refreshes conferences, meetings and events and increases their effectiveness. By introducing and demonstrating the latest tools and knowledge we provide meeting planners, meeting designers, meeting producers and meeting owners with applicable improvement. All presentations, room layouts, the venue, the staging, the processes, the food… everything is new or innovative or at least interesting enough to investigate.

Idiap submission to MediaEval 2013 ranked first for the video hyperlinking task
by spano — last modified Mar 16, 2017 05:04 PM

The Idiap NLP group has participated in the search and hyperlinking task at the MediaEval 2013 evaluation campaign. The NLP group was ranked first out of eleven participants on the hyperlinking task (finding video segments related to a given one) and third out of seven on the keyword video search task.

KeyLemon facial recognition software provides a major step toward creating a truly ‘intelligent’ in-car experience.
by spano — last modified Mar 16, 2017 05:05 PM

Imagine a car recognizing the driver upon entry, automatically adjusting the settings to each person’s preferences, including your ideal seat position, temperature and even music choices. Once in motion, the vehicle notifies a distracted driver if a pedestrian is crossing the street, and even creates audible alerts when the driver is drowsy.

EU-FUNDED PROJECT TO TAKE BIOMETRIC SECURITY SYSTEMS TO THE NEXT LEVEL.
by admin — last modified Apr 10, 2017 05:53 PM

The TABULA RASA consortium, which is supported by EU research and innovation investment, has set out to identify just how well this new software works, in particular against the growing phenomenon of “spoofing ” i.e. using everyday materials such as make-up, photographs and voice recordings to subvert or directly attack biometric systems.

Best Paper Award at IEEE MMSP 2013.
by spano — last modified Mar 16, 2017 05:04 PM

The paper "Alignment of Binocular-Binaural Data Using a Moving Audio-Visual Target" by Vasil Khalidov, Florence Forbes and Radu Horaud was nominated for the Best Paper Award at the IEEE Int. Workshop on Multimedia Signal Processing (MMSP) held in Pula (Sardinia, Italy) on September 30 - October 2, 2013.

Sébastien Marcel, head of Biometrics group at Idiap, interviewed by RTS, the Swiss radio.
by spano — last modified Mar 16, 2017 05:04 PM

L’iPhone 5S possède un lecteur à empreintes digitales qui permettra de sécuriser l’accès au téléphone. Si cette technique est déjà présente dans d’autres objets, il s’agit du premier produit de consommation de masse à intégrer la biométrie. Mais quelle est la partie du corps qui se prête le mieux à la reconnaissance d’une personne dans la vie quotidienne?

ISWC/Ubicomp 2013 featured in Radio Television Switzerland.
by spano — last modified Mar 16, 2017 05:06 PM

The International Symposium of Wearable Computers (ISWC) and the International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing (Ubicomp) were held in Zurich, September 8-12 2013, and featured by Radio Television Switzerland (SRF, Schweizer Radio und Fernsehen).

ISWC/Ubicomp 2013 featured in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung.
by spano — last modified Mar 16, 2017 05:04 PM

The International Symposium of Wearable Computers (ISWC) and the International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing (Ubicomp) were held in Zurich, September 8-12 2013, and featured by NZZ, the Neue Zürcher Zeitung.

Dinesh Babu Jayagopi to join IIIT Bangalore as Assistant Professor.
by spano — last modified Mar 16, 2017 05:03 PM

Idiap Research Institute would like to congratulate Dinesh Babu Jayagopi who will join end of this year as an Assistant Professor at IIIT Bangalore. Between 2007 and 2011 he finished his Phd at Idiap, specialized in the field of Social Computing. Currently, he is a post-doctoral researcher at Idiap.

La recherche évolue de manière très rapide.
by admin — last modified Mar 16, 2017 05:06 PM

Le déferlement d’outils technologiques accélère la communication et bouleverse notre rapport au monde. Basé à Martigny, l’Idiap – qui mène des projets de recherche fondamentale au plus haut niveau – travaille à l’amélioration des relations personne-machine et à l’optimisation de la communication humaine. Ce prestigieux institut s’engage pour un progrès scientifique au service de l’homme. Interview de son directeur, Hervé Bourlard, expert mondial du traitement de la parole et également professeur à l’Ecole polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL).

Joan-Isaac Biel Tres received EPFL PhD title
by spano — last modified Mar 16, 2017 05:03 PM

On June 28, 2013, Joan-Isaac Biel Tres made the public defense of his PhD thesis entitled "Mining Conversational Social Video". He received the EPFL diploma from his doctoral advisor (Daniel Gatica-Perez.)

On June 20, 2013, David Imseng successfully defended his PhD thesis entitled "Multilingual speech recognition - a posterior based approach"
by admin — last modified Mar 16, 2017 05:03 PM

Modern automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems are based on parametric statistical models such as hidden Markov models (HMMs), exploiting 1) acoustic-phonetic models, which need to be trained on large amount of acoustic data, 2) a language model, which needs to be trained on large amount of text data and, finally, 3) a lexicon with phonetic transcription which requires linguistic expertise. Developing multilingual ASR systems, or systems that are robust to accents and dialects, is therefore a very challenging task for current state-of-the-art ASR systems.

Social computing research featured in Swiss National TV
by spano — last modified Mar 16, 2017 05:04 PM

The collaboration between Idiap's Social Computing Group and the Institute of Work and Organizational Psychology at the University of Neuchatel on analysis of nonverbal behavior in job interviews was featured in Radiotelevisione Svizzera (RSI) scientific program "Il giardino di Albert", aired on 26.05.2013.

On April 19, 2013, Nicolae Suditu successfully defended his PhD thesis entitled "Adaptive relevance feedback for large-scale image retrieval".
by admin — last modified Mar 16, 2017 05:02 PM

This work investigates several extensions of a state-of-the-art content-based image retrieval system. The two main contributions are an algorithmic extension to make it suitable for collections of one million images or more, and a novel procedure to smoothly transition from an exploratory phase to an exploitation one.

On April 26, 2013, Tatiana Tommasi successfully defended her PhD thesis entitled "Learning to Learn by Exploiting Prior Knowledge"
by admin — last modified Mar 16, 2017 05:03 PM

The work described in her thesis takes place in the context of visual recognition and category detection, in all scenarios where there is a need for learning a new category model but it is not possible or expensive, to obtain large amounts of annotated training data. The main contribution of the thesis of Tatiana Tommasi is to cast the problem of learning to learn from small samples into the max-margin classifiers framework, providing to the community principled algorithms for open ended learning of object categories from few samples. The power and generality of the results achieved in the thesis has further been demonstrated in other domains, such as control of prosthetic hands for amputees.

The Idiap Research Institute congratulates Mr Marc-André Berclaz, member of its Foundation Council, for his nomination as Operations Director of the new EPFL Valais Wallis
by spano — last modified Mar 16, 2017 05:06 PM

Mr Marc-André Berclaz has been appointed as Operations Director of the new EPFL Valais Wallis academic cluster. Marc-André Berclaz is the current director of HES-SO and has an in-depth understanding of the academic and political environment in Valais and in Switzerland as well as in the fields of the future cluster. Starting from March 2013, he will gradually take up his functions within the project, and will work fulltime as from July 2013.

The Idiap Research Institute congratulates Prof. Philippe Gillet, Vice-President of Idiap’s Foundation Council, for his nomination as President ad interim of EPFL
by spano — last modified Mar 16, 2017 05:06 PM

Professor Philippe Gillet will ensure the presidency of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology of Lausanne (EPFL) from August 2013 to January 2014. The Swiss Federal Council has named him on Wednesday, February 20 in order to replace Patrick Aebischer, who will benefit from a sabbatical leave in order to explore new forms of education.

2013-2016: 10 MCHF for Idiap within the framework of a strategic alliance with EPFL
by admin — last modified Apr 10, 2017 11:29 AM

The State Secretariat for Education, Research and Innovation (SERI) expresses once again its faith in Idiap by according a subsidy of 10 MCHF Swiss francs for the period of 2013-2016. Concurrently, Idiap strengthens its ties with the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology of Lausanne (EPFL) by renewing and reinforcing the joint development plan that unites the two institutions since 2008.

Idiap Awards 2012
by spano — last modified Mar 16, 2017 05:04 PM

Every year the Idiap Research Institute grants two awards to its students: the Idiap Paper Award and the Idiap Research Award.

TABULA RASA Spoofing Challenge, June 4-7, 2013 Madrid Spain
by admin — last modified Mar 16, 2017 05:04 PM

The TABULA RASA project is organizing a Spoofing Challenge and is inviting researchers to develop ingenious attack plans and to deceive various biometric authentications systems of different modalities that will be demonstrated at the 6th International Conference of Biometrics (ICB 2013 ). The most brilliant attempt, which will be decided on its spoofing success and originality, will be awarded with the "Best Spoofing Attack Award", accompanied by an incentive prize.

IM2 and "La Journée : Oser tous les métiers"
by spano — last modified Oct 11, 2017 11:32 AM

Since couple years, each Swiss School is participating to the Day: “Oser tous les Métiers", an initiative to give the chance to children between 10-12 years old to discover different types of professions. The children are invited to follow one of their parents at work to discover their "working environment".

Jagan Varadarajan successfully defended his PhD thesis
by spano — last modified Mar 16, 2017 05:03 PM

On 30th August 2012, Jagan Varadarajan successfully defended his PhD thesis entitled "Sequential Topic Models for Mining Recurrent Activities and their Relationships: Application to long term video recordings ", supervised by Dr. Jean-Marc Odobez.

Un challenge pour start-up à Martigny
by admin — last modified Mar 16, 2017 05:05 PM

Ils ont trois semaines pour transformer leurs idées en produit. 28 chercheurs ou entrepreneurs sont dans les starting-blocks d’un concours international inédit.

Multimodal Signal Processing: Human Interactions in Meetings
by spano — last modified Mar 16, 2017 05:04 PM

A new book on multimodal signal processing for the analysis of human communication has been published by Cambridge University Press on June 7, 2012. The book was edited by Hervé Bourlard and Andrei Popescu-Belis, with colleagues from the University of Edinburgh, and five other Idiap researchers have contributed chapters to it.

Mise au concours d'un poste de responsable de projets.
by spano — last modified Mar 16, 2017 05:03 PM

Pour faire face à la croissance continue de ses activités, ainsi qu’à certaines restructurations en interne, l’Idiap met au concours, à Martigny, le poste de "Responsable de projets"

BOB is born
by spano — last modified Mar 16, 2017 05:04 PM

After a bit less than 2 years of intense development, we are proud to announce the immediate availability of Bob 1.0 as an open-source project.

The LASEC lab and Idiap beat to the rhythm of a new common project
by spano — last modified Mar 16, 2017 05:04 PM

Idiap announced the start this month of the Biometrics Evaluation and Testing (BEAT) project funded by the European Commission under the Seventh Framework Programme (FP7) with the EPFL as a full partner, through the Security and Cryptography Laboratory (LASEC) of Prof. Vaudenay.

BEAT: New FP7 project on Security coordinated by Idiap
by spano — last modified Mar 16, 2017 05:04 PM

We are glad to announce the start this month of the Biometrics Evaluation and Testing (BEAT) project funded by the European Commission under the Seventh Framework Programme (FP7) with Sébastien Marcel as the Principal Investigator and Project Coordinator at the Idiap research institute.

The Idiap Research Institute Introduces the 'Virtual Secretary'
by spano — last modified Mar 16, 2017 05:04 PM

What about a system able not only to recognize who is speaking during a meeting but to understand the conversation and propose relevant documents like past reports, web pages as well as summaries and analyses of past meetings ? Artificial Intelligence and Speech Recognition specialists at Idiap are developing that smart automated assistant.

2010 IMD start-up competition winners - Koemei, Idiap Spin-off, selected
by spano — last modified Mar 16, 2017 05:05 PM

Every year, IMD searches for the most promising startups it can find to work with the MBA students. Over the past 13 years over 180 early-stage ventures have profited from this collaboration. Today, IMD representatives (Jim Pulcrano and Benoit Leleux) announce the twenty startups that have been selected to work with our MBA and EMBA students in 2011. Among them, Koemei (Idiap Spin-off) will participate to the venture.

L'Idiap participe à la journée "Osez tous les métiers"
by admin — last modified Apr 10, 2017 05:19 PM

La journée "Osez tous les métiers" est organisée chaque année par le Secrétariat Valaisan à l'égalité et à la famille et a pour objectif d’aider filles et garçons à choisir leur métier au-delà de préjugés liés au genre.

EURESEARCH Success Story
by spano — last modified Apr 10, 2017 05:53 PM

Euresearch the Swiss guide to European research and support for European business and innovation highlights in its recent Success Stories Newsletter the EU FP7 project MOBIO (Mobile Biometry).

New opening for an Internship position: Weighted Finite State Transducer compression for Automatic Speech Recognition
by spano — last modified Mar 16, 2017 05:02 PM

WFSTs represent a means of pre-compiling the grammars used by ASR decoders. Such pre-compiled grammars tend to lead to both quicker decoding, because duplication of weights and paths is minimised, and simpler decoder implementations, because the composition process is offline. Pre-compiled grammars are quite large, sometimes limited only by the size of the memory on the host CPU.

Joel Pinto successfully defended his PhD thesis
by spano — last modified Mar 16, 2017 05:02 PM

On July 16 2010, Joel Pinto successfully defended his PhD thesis entitled "Multilayer Perceptron Based Hierarchical Acoustic Modeling for Automatic Speech Recognition".

Idiap project CODICES broadcasted on euronews.net "Archaeology Mayan script"
by spano — last modified Mar 16, 2017 05:04 PM

Dr Daniel Gatica-Perez, (from the Idiap Research Institute, in Martigny, Switzerland): “People who are exploring ancient Maya culture – in order to try to find glyphs, they usually use catalogues and this is a classic catalogue. It’s like a telephone book. Instead of names what we have are essentially glyphs and this is a very large collection. And, essentially, if you don’t have computational means to find a glyph you don’t know or a glyph you are learning about, you probably have to parse all of these manually. And this can be time consuming.”

L'Idiap se lie à l'EPFL. (Canal 9, L.E.D)
by spano — last modified Mar 16, 2017 05:06 PM

L'Idiap se rapproche toujours plus de l'EPFL. Grâce à une alliance, les chercheurs de l'institut martignerain auront accès aux titres académiques. Cela permettra notamment à l'Idiap, qui emploie aujourd'hui une centaine de scientifiques, de conserver ses meilleurs chercheurs. Le directeur adjoint, Jean-Albert Ferrez, est l’invité de L’Emission en Direct de Canal 9.

Glyphes Maya, le logiciel qui a du caractère
by spano — last modified Apr 25, 2017 06:37 PM

En 2010, Indiana Jones troquerait certainement son fouet contre un ordinateur ou un rayon laser. Depuis quelques années, grâce à un arsenal de nouvelles technologies, les archéologues ont avancé à grands pas. Dans les inventions récentes, il y a ce moteur de recherche capable de déchiffrer l’écriture maya.

MOBIO – 1st video of a MOBIO use case is out.
by spano — last modified Mar 16, 2017 05:05 PM

The story follows the customer experience of a mobile wallet user. The level of security through biometric authentication increases with the amount of the transaction (no authentication for a soda, face authentication for a 40-Euros purchase, face and voice authentications for a cash withdrawal or a purchase above 100 Euros)

Web-Ifying the Real World
by spano — last modified Mar 16, 2017 05:04 PM

Web-fying real life is the vision of the AMI consortium, which stands for Augmented Multiparty Interaction. The consortium is the force behind two highly successful European projects, AMI and AMIDA

Idiap has a new robot platform -- Pippo!
by spano — last modified Apr 24, 2017 10:55 AM

Pippo is a PeopleBot , i.e. a mobile robot able to move indoors on flat floors. It is 112 cm high and it is equipped with a gripper, a table-sensing IR's, a precise pan-tilt camera, lasers and microphones.

First prototypes of the new microphone array from Dev-Audio
by spano — last modified Apr 24, 2017 10:55 AM

Idiap just received the new prototype of a microphone array device which includes the improvements developed during last year project (see previous news below). No more need of bulky cables (see comparison picture) which are now replaced by a simple USB connexion, but also no more need to carry an external soundcard with you; all you need is your Mac and the microphone array.

Automatic Video Captioning
by spano — last modified Mar 16, 2017 05:05 PM

Klewel in partnership with the Idiap Research Institute has conducted an AMIDA mini-project on automatic captioning of video lectures.

New Book on Multimodal signal processing
by ffoglia — last modified Mar 16, 2017 05:04 PM

Multimodal signal processing: methods and techniques to build multimodal interactive systems by Jean-Philippe Thiran (Author), Herve Bourlard (Author), Ferran Marques (Author), Academic Press Inc (23 novembre 2009), 448 pages, ISBN-10: 0123748259

Idiap Alumni on LinkedIn
by admin — last modified Apr 09, 2018 01:29 PM

The Idiap collaborators can now register to the Idiap Alumni LinkedIn group

L’ordinateur médiateur
by admin — last modified Mar 16, 2017 05:06 PM

The subject, ‘l'ordinateur médiateur’ will be broadcasted, October 6, on the TV channel TSR1 (~18h00) or TSR2 (~22h30)

IM2 Summer Institute 2009
by vdevant — last modified Mar 16, 2017 05:04 PM

This year, the IM2 Summer Institute will be held in Chavannes-de-Bogis (Best Western Hotel) from the 31st of August until the 2nd of September.

ICMI-MLMI 2009
by caymon — last modified Mar 16, 2017 05:04 PM

November 02-06, 2009, The Workshop will take place in the Boston area, Cambridge, MA, USA