Lorraine Artificicial Intelligence – LOR-AI

Université de Lorraine (UL) has a long tradition of IA research initiated in the 1970s by Prof. Haton. This research gave birth to research groups on speech recognition, knowledge discovery, multi-agent systems, robotics, augmented reality, recommender systems, etc.
UL is also internationally recognized for its work in the fields of materials, physics, energy, processes conducted, and mineral, energy and natural resources.
Recently AI has profoundly changed the approaches used in natural language processing, computer vision, and more generally many domains addressed in computer science. We are deeply convinced that many other areas will be affected in the coming years. It is therefore urgent to open new scientific fields to AI in order to increase our scientific competitiveness.

This project about Artificial Intelligence, led by the Université de Lorraine (UL), involves CNRS, Inria, Regional University Hospital Centre (CHRU) has a double objective: on the one hand, to strengthen UL areas of excellence in AI and domains tightly connected to IA, i.e. particularly Health, and on the other hand, to open other research areas to AI with the objective of leading to scientific breakthroughs.
Each proposed thesis subject concerns either a theoretical aspect of AI, or an object in the field of AI (e.g. language processing), or an application field of AI (e.g. health).  The PhD subjects cover (1) Health, Biology, Medicine, (2) physics and materials (3) Social and Human Sciences (4) Human-machine interactions and natural language processing, (5) Control, (6) Robotics and (7) Industry of the future. This project makes extensive use of the resources of UL and its partners, in terms of hosting doctoral students, training, computing platforms, etc.
This project is strongly focused on the national health priority (one third of the projects), and on research related to regional priorities or areas of excellence in the region. It also promotes interdisciplinary approaches.
In total partners of UL and UL laboratories have committed to provide 24 co-financing. 31 subjects have been submitted, but 8 supervisors also applied to the personal AI grant call whose results are not known yet. As soon as the project is launched, the steering committee will thus select theses to be funded while maintaining the main thematic balances.
The selection of candidates will be carried out by the university's doctoral schools (all concerned to varying degrees). Applicants will be selected in a transparent, open, equal and internationally accepted process of recruitment.