Inria Academy is developing an offer dedicated to companies based in particular on software distributed in Open Source by Inria and its partners. This is a contribution to the digital transformation and to digital mastery in companies while increasing the impact of digital technologies developed in our research groups.
David Simplot, Professional Education Officer in charge of Inrias's Academy creation
Strengthening the engine of the digital revolution
Software is the engine of the digital revolution, it is the building block of innovation and research in all areas of digital and researchers, engineers and software developers are the heart of this engine. Inria has a very strong software culture, having always considered free software as a multidimensional object :
- an object of scientific dissemination that is interested in the sharing of software and the impact of this dissemination within the scientific community
- an industrial object that makes the technology infrastructure cost-shared and risk-shared
- an interdisciplinary research object, focused on the application and international dissemination of knowledge
The dynamics of free software at Inria also involves the development of many open source software, because we believe that their impact will be stronger through free distribution.
The creation of the Inria Academy is a further step towards the communities in demand for the acquisition of this software for their teams.
This technological heritage is made up of nearly 1,500 references, to be shared with different structures, whether entrepreneurial or institutional, in France and in Europe.
Training courses "à la carte"
Inria Academy initially offers a training catalogue consisting of four recognized and high-performance software programs in very different fields:
- Coq : a "proof assistant", the Coq software was created at Inria more than 30 years ago to verify computer programs and mathematical theorems. It’s a valuable tool for computer scientists who use it for verification but also as a code-writing aid. It is also popular among mathematicians, seduced by its performance.
- Pharo : n opensource software development platform that is simple and stable, adaptable to any development mission, even the most critical: that's the role of Pharo. The Pharo consortium brings together a highly diverse community of users along with firms such as Synectic, Thales and Lifeware, as well as academic stakeholders such as the Faculty of Information Technology of Prague (Czech Republic) and Fundación Argentina de Smalltalk.
- SOFA : an open-source software platform for multi-physics simulation. Like any physics engine, SOFA allows to model physical systems and their evolution, such as the mechanics of deformable solids involving collision. Developed for more than 10 years, SOFA integrates today a large number of models, solvers and algorithms allowing the rapid development of new simulations.
- Scikit-learn : a free library developed in Python, a high-level programming language. It is dedicated to machine learning and can be used as middleware, with applications in fraud and spam prevention, targeted marketing, forecasting user behaviour, and optimising industrial and logistics processes.
This offer will be expanded as the most requested software is developed, so about ten software packages will be the subject of training tailored to the needs of the requesting structure.
Innovative pedagogy, the subject of scientific research at Inria
Proud to have contributed to the setting up and development of the FUN platform since its creation in 2013, Inria has continued to support this dynamic by creating the Inria Learning-Lab to produce educational resources for all audiences through MOOCs on subjects as diverse as privacy protection, digital accessibility or reproducible research, and to lead its e-education research actions.
With its recognized expertise and creativity, Inria has demonstrated its skills in innovative pedagogy in digital sciences and supports e-education research at Inria.
Inria Academy in Chile
The Inria Academy in Chile seeks to train future engineers, scientists, and decision-makers of Chile, South America, and the globe on front line deep-tech topics under the scope of actions of Inria. Through this continuing education system, Inria will support Chilean companies and French companies installed in Chile. This training offer is based on the openso urce software developed by Inria and its partners to support companies and public services in their digital transformation.
Few words about David Simplot
David Simplot is Professional Education Officer at Inria for the creation of Inria Academy since november 2019. Full professor, appointed member of the Institut Universitaire de France (IUF) in 2009, he was in charge of the Pops project-team (joint project between the University of Lille, the CNRS and Inria from 2004 to 2011) which studied connected objects. He contributed to the implementation of the FIT - Future Internet (of Things) equipment of excellence (EquipEx) and received in 2014 the Grand Prix Kuhlmann from the Société des Sciences, de l'Agriculture et des Arts de Lille for all his work. Former auditor of the Institut des Hautes Études pour la Science et la Technologie (IHEST), he has always been particularly involved in regional entities such as CITC-EuraRFID, Sophia Club Entreprises, Telecom Valley or competitiveness clusters (Picom, Matikem, Pôle SCS) or Comité Grand Lille. From 2011 to 2019, he was director of the Inria Lille - Nord Europe and Inria Sophia Antipolis - Méditerranée research centres.
