Section: Other Grants and Activities
International relations
We are cooperating with a number of labs worldwide without contract commitment.
SwRI : in 2007, INRIA signed a collaboration agreement with the Southwest Research Institute (San Antonio, Texas, USA) for the joint development of autonomous vehicle technologies, focusing on the areas of perception, intelligence, command and control, communications, platforms and safety. SwRI is one of the oldest and largest nonprofit applied research and development organizations in the U.S. The partnership will conduct joint research and exchange intellectual property to foster rapid technology and system advancements in vehicle autonomy.
Keio University (Japan) : IMARA has established links with Jun Murai Lab at Keio University in Japan since 2005, which led Thierry Ernst to join IMARA in 2006. Since then, we are working with Keio University and other labs in Japan and in France grouped into the Nautilus6 project which is working on IPv6 mobility enhanced mechanisms allowing continuous access to the Internet while on the move. From this cooperation, we were able to hire a PhD student who completed his MSc at Keio University. In addition, three labs from Keio University with different backgrounds (automatic vehicles, electric vehicles and Internet communications) have joined forces into the so-called co-Mobility project aiming at developing the vehicle of the future. The intersection between Keio University's activities on this project and IMARA is a tremendous set of common research topics and as such we have been invited to a Co-Mobility workshop in Japan in January.
University of Tokyo (Japan) : During his 1-year stay within IMARA Dr. Yoshio Mita's (associate professor at Tokyo University) was successful into organizing a private workshop between University of Tokyo and IMARA. It was held in July and gathered 10 researchers from Japan. From this workshop a number of new collaboration items were identified, including on the communication research topic in which there was not previous cooperation with University of Tokyo. As a result from this, we participated to the internal “Associated Team” program call without success and to the Japanese-French AYAME program call to work on green transportation ITS communication technologies. The former was accepted, so we are likely to enforce our cooperation with University of Tokyo in 2009.
NICTA (Australia) : After first contacts established in 2007, a PhD student started his work on a join PhD program between NICTA and IMARA. This student is currently working in Australia. We also participated to the internal “Associated Team” program call, without success. Our commitment on this joint PhD supervision guarantees an outstanding cooperation with NICTA.
University of Murcia (Spain) : After a first contact established at the Mobile IST Summit in summer 2007 with Antonio F. Gómez Skarmeta, a PhD student from University of Murcia (José Santa Lozano) was hosted by IMARA for 3 months. He studied our communication architectures and realized some performance evaluation of our communication system using our in-vehicle testbed. The evaluation tools developed during this work will be used again to evaluate forthcoming results on geographic networking.
We also maintain longstanding bilateral relations with the following centers.
