Gérard Biau, Direc­tor of the Sor­bonne Cen­ter for Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence (SCAI), an insti­tute of the Sor­bonne Uni­ver­si­ty Alliance cre­at­ed in 2019 as part of the nation­al AI strat­e­gy, describes the gen­e­sis of the project and its evo­lu­tion up to the suc­cess encoun­tered dur­ing the AMI “IA-Clus­ter”.

“With the launch­ing of the SCAI, the ini­tial aim was to bring togeth­er exist­ing forces, hith­er­to dis­persed with­in the estab­lish­ment but also among Alliance part­ners, by cre­at­ing an AIs­pe­cif­ic enti­ty that would lend it greater vis­i­bil­i­ty. The aim was twofold: first­ly, to ratio­nal­ize resources in terms of both research and train­ing, but also to scale up is activ­i­ties in order to car­ry weight in the AI field and try to win attri­bu­tion bids for nation­al, region­al or Euro­pean projects”, he explains.

A suc­cess­ful gam­ble indeed, since SCAI, with the PostGenAI@Paris pro­gram — in which UTC is ful­ly involved — was one of the 9 win­ners of the AMI “IA-Clus­ter” and was since renamed Sor­bonne Clus­ter for Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence. This suc­cess is due to the Alliance’s abil­i­ty to mobi­lize forces in a wide range of fields, rang­ing from engi­neer­ing (with UTC, for exam­ple) to social sci­ences, math­e­mat­ics and biol­o­gy. But it’s not the only one, since SCAI has won a num­ber of calls for projects, some fund­ed by the ANR, such as the AMI CMA, Sorbonne.AI, a DIM project fund­ed by the Region or a Cofund, Sound.ai, fund­ed by the Euro­pean Union.

Accord­ing to Gérard Biau, this suc­cess is shared by all the Alliance’s part­ners, includ­ing UTC, which has inher­it­ed four of the 21 Col­lab­o­ra­tive Accel­er­a­tion Projects (PACs) and is lead­ing two of them. Anoth­er sign of the clus­ter’s grow­ing cred­i­bil­i­ty is the fact that new play­ers such as the Uni­ver­sité Pan­théon-Assas, the Cnam, Sci­ence Po and the Cour de cas­sa­tion (French High court of Appeal) have joined the cluster.

Sci­ence, research, train­ing and inno­va­tion are the pil­lars on which SCAI is built. Among the objec­tives pur­sued with PostGenAI@Paris? “The first con­cerns the imple­men­ta­tion of research projects in the form of PACs involv­ing two pro­mot­ers, if pos­si­ble from two dif­fer­ent estab­lish­ments, as well as indus­tri­al­ists who, to date, have con­tributed 30 mil­lion euros to the pro­gramme. These projects will also include train­ing ini­tia­tives. The trans­mis­sion of knowl­edge is impor­tant in a con­stant­ly evolv­ing field. We have cho­sen to focus on gen­er­a­tive AI, the most up-to-date tech­nol­o­gy and to apply three major the­mat­ic areas: dis­rup­tive tech­nolo­gies, future health and resilient soci­eties. The first, dis­rup­tive tech­nolo­gies, revolves around major lan­guage or indus­tri­al safe­ty mod­els, for exam­ple. The sec­ond, a desir­able future, revolves around biol­o­gy, the envi­ron­ment and med­i­cine. Final­ly, the last theme, resilient soci­ety and edu­ca­tion, is more con­cerned with the human and social sci­ences, dig­i­tal human­i­ties, law and so on. The sec­ond stage will be to shift up a gear and seek out inter­na­tion­al projects,” con­cludes Gérard Biau.

MSD