A new team in Inria Nancy - Grand Est center: Gamble

As its acronym shows, the Gamble team is interested in several lines of research, such as geometry on non-linear objects, non-Euclidean geometry. It also endeavours to look at probabilistic aspects, as the meaning of the word "Gamble", in English, demonstrates. The historical lines of research of the Vegas team concerned surface visibility problems, and this research direction persists in Gamble's "non-linear" part.

The aims of this new team are to go beyond the limitations of traditional algorithmic geometry, which usually focuses on linear objects in a Euclidean framework. When other situations arise, curved objects are generally linearised and non-Euclidean spaces approximated locally by Euclidean spaces. 

Who makes up the team?

The Gamble team follows on from the work of the Vegas project team, which was consolidated by the arrival of Monique Teillaud and me with the aim of setting up Gamble. The team currently includes six permanent researchers, three PhD students and an engineer.  

So is it more fundamental research or applied research?

The synergy between practice and theory is very important to us. We are trying to develop a great theory, and then the move over to programming our algorithms often enables us to refine this theory.

What are your industry or university partnerships, if any?

Our strategy of making our results available consists in the use of well-established software. The work on curve visualisation will be made available to potential users via Maple, a formal computing software programme. Our other results are, generally, incorporated into CGAL, the reference algorithmic geometry library; this library, in which we play a leading role, is widely available in open source and is also commercialised by GeometryFactory.