New cooperation between France and Japan with the ASPIRE program
The ASPIRE program of the Japan Science and Technology Agency (JST) supports top Japanese scientists by connecting them with the world's best talent. In December 2024, 14 projects were selected in the “ASPIRE for Top Scientists” category, each receiving up to 3 million euros over 5 years. Among them, two projects in artificial intelligence were selected, with a team from the Laboratoire interdisciplinaire des sciences du numérique (LISN - CNRS/Université Paris-Saclay) and the Groupement de recherche Modélisation, analyse et conduite des systèmes dynamiques (GDR MACS - CNRS) as international partners.
International Research Network for Computational Fabrication Fusing Interdisciplinary Information Technologies
A team from LISN has been selected to form an ASPIRE research network with Sigrid Adriaenssens, Professor at Princeton University, Takeo Igarashi, Professor at the University of Tokyo, Christian Sandor, Professor at Université Paris-Saclay and LISN member, and Bo Zhu, Professor at Georgia Institute of Technology.
Professor Igarashi, an expert in interactive computer graphics, is the winner of the prestigious ACM SIGGRAPH Significant New Researcher Award (2006) and was inducted into the ACM SIGCHI Academy (2018). Christian Sandor, specialist in augmented reality since the 2000s, led teams in Asia-Pacific before founding a team at LISN in 2024. Its aim is to study applications of artificial intelligence to augmented reality. Their work “PerfectFit: Custom-Fit Garment Design in Augmented Reality” has already won an award at ACM SIGGRAPH Asia 2023.
ASPIRE funding will promote exchanges of staff and researchers, to explore in depth the emerging field at the intersection of augmented reality, artificial intelligence and human-computer interaction. The complementary nature of the teams involved will guarantee an interdisciplinary and multicultural approach, with the potential for global impact.
Building Mathematical Foundation for Cyber Physical Dynamical Systems: Interdisciplinary Research and Human Resource Development on Control with Prediction and Learning
The second project in the “Artificial Intelligence/Information” section, entitled “Building Mathematical Foundation for Cyber-Physical Dynamical Systems: Interdisciplinary Research and Human Resource Development on Control with Prediction and Learning”, is led by Yoshio Ebihara, professor at Kyushu University, in collaboration with Dimitri Peaucelle, CNRS research director at the Laboratoire d'analyse et d'architecture des systèmes (LAAS - CNRS), representing the GDR MACS.
Launched on December 1, 2024 and scheduled to run until March 31, 2030, the project focuses on control with prediction and learning for cyber-physical systems, a rapidly evolving field combining robust automatic control and artificial intelligence. The ambition is to structure an international network of expert scientists in this field. On the Japanese side, the teams involved are those of Yoshio Ebihara at Kyushu University, Hideaki Ishii, professor at Tokyo University and Masaaki Nagahara, professor at Hiroshima University. On the French side, all GDR MACS member teams are eligible.
Each year, the project will finance 3 stays of 2 to 3 months for young French researchers in partner universities in Japan, and 2 to 3 long stays (between 6 months and 1 year) for young Japanese scientists in France. The project also includes partners in Italy (Fabrizio Dabbene, research director CNR Torino), Holland (Maurice Heemels, professor at Eindoven University of Technology) and Sweden (Karl Hendrik Johansson, professor at the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science). Summer schools are also planned for 2026 and 2028.
More information
- Akihiro Kiuchi, Anran Qi, Eve Mingxiao Li, DáVid MaruscsáK, Christian Sandor, et Takeo Igarashi. 2023. PerfectFit: Custom-Fit Garment Design in Augmented Reality. SIGGRAPH Asia 2023 XR (SA '23). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 23, 1–2. https://doi.org/10.1145/3610549.3614592