The Computer Science Laboratory for Mechanics and Engineering Sciences (LIMSI) was a

CNRS The French National Centre for Scientific Research (french: link=no, Centre national de la recherche scientifique, CNRS) is the French state research organisation and is the largest fundamental science agency in Europe. In 2016, it employed 31,637 ...

pluri-disciplinary science laboratory in

Orsay Orsay () is a Communes of France, commune in the Essonne Departments of France, department in Île-de-France in northern France. It is located in the southwestern suburbs of Paris, France, from the Kilometre Zero, centre of Paris. A fortifie ...

, France. LIMSI academics and scholars come primarily from the

Engineering Engineering is the use of scientific method, scientific principles to design and build machines, structures, and other items, including bridges, tunnels, roads, vehicles, and buildings. The discipline of engineering encompasses a broad rang ...

and

Information Sciences Information science (also known as information studies) is an academic field which is primarily concerned with analysis, collection, classification, manipulation, storage, retrieval, movement, dissemination, and protection of information. ...

fields, but also from Cognitive Science and

Linguistics Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. It is called a scientific study because it entails a comprehensive, systematic, objective, and precise analysis of all aspects of language, particularly its nature and structure. Linguis ...

. LIMSI is associated with the

Paris-Sud University Paris-Sud University (French: ''Université Paris-Sud''), also known as University of Paris — XI (or as Université d'Orsay before 1971), was a French research university distributed among several campuses in the southern suburbs of Paris, in ...

. LIMSI also collaborates with other universities and engineering schools within the University Paris-Saclay.

History

LIMSI was created in 1972 under the leadership of Lucien Malavard, with an initial focus on Numerical

Fluid Mechanics Fluid mechanics is the branch of physics concerned with the mechanics of fluids ( liquids, gases, and plasmas) and the forces on them. It has applications in a wide range of disciplines, including mechanical, aerospace, civil, chemical and bio ...

Acoustics Acoustics is a branch of physics that deals with the study of mechanical waves in gases, liquids, and solids including topics such as vibration, sound, ultrasound and infrasound. A scientist who works in the field of acoustics is an acoustician ...

, and

Signal Processing Signal processing is an electrical engineering subfield that focuses on analyzing, modifying and synthesizing ''signals'', such as audio signal processing, sound, image processing, images, and scientific measurements. Signal processing techniq ...

. Its research themes have progressively been expanded to Speech and Image Processing, then to a growing number of themes related to Human-Computer Communication and Interaction on the one hand; to

Thermics Thermodynamics is a branch of physics that deals with heat, work, and temperature, and their relation to energy, entropy, and the physical properties of matter and radiation. The behavior of these quantities is governed by the four laws of the ...

and Energetics on the other hand. In January 2021, LIMSI was merged with the Laboratory for Research in Computer Science (LRI) into the new Interdisciplinary Laboratory for Numerical Sciences.

Research themes

LIMSI research is organized in four main themes, spanning the activities of nine research groups: Fluid Mechanics remains one of LIMSI's main research areas, with an expertise in the development of advanced numerical methodologies associated to experiments in academic configurations: the AERO and ETCM groups both contribute activities related to large-scale numerical

simulations A simulation is the imitation of the operation of a real-world process or system over time. Simulations require the use of models; the model represents the key characteristics or behaviors of the selected system or process, whereas the s ...

, to uncertainty quantification, to the characterization of fluid dynamics (instabilities,

turbulence In fluid dynamics, turbulence or turbulent flow is fluid motion characterized by chaotic changes in pressure and flow velocity. It is in contrast to a laminar flow, which occurs when a fluid flows in parallel layers, with no disruption between ...

), to the control of flows, and to multiphysic couplings; The Energetics and study of Mass and Heat Transfer theme carries out fundamental research aimed at a better understanding of transfer phenomena in

convection Convection is single or multiphase fluid flow that occurs spontaneously due to the combined effects of material property heterogeneity and body forces on a fluid, most commonly density and gravity (see buoyancy). When the cause of the convec ...

and

radiation In physics, radiation is the emission or transmission of energy in the form of waves or particles through space or through a material medium. This includes: * ''electromagnetic radiation'', such as radio waves, microwaves, infrared, visi ...

, in multiphasic and

oscillating Oscillation is the repetitive or periodic variation, typically in time, of some measure about a central value (often a point of equilibrium) or between two or more different states. Familiar examples of oscillation include a swinging pendulum ...

conditions, and at extremely low temperatures. The ETCM and TSF groups also study the analysis of large thermic systems with application to housing and

solar energy Solar energy is radiant light and heat from the Sun that is harnessed using a range of technologies such as solar power to generate electricity, solar thermal energy (including solar water heating), and solar architecture. It is an essenti ...

. The Natural Language Processing applied to spoken, written, and signed

language Language is a structured system of communication. The structure of a language is its grammar and the free components are its vocabulary. Languages are the primary means by which humans communicate, and may be conveyed through a variety of met ...

is another main research theme at LIMSI. Three groups, TLP, ILES and AA contribute to a wide spectrum of activities ranging from acoustic signal processing,

automatic speech recognition Speech recognition is an interdisciplinary subfield of computer science and computational linguistics that develops methodologies and technologies that enable the recognition and translation of spoken language into text by computers with the m ...

and synthesis, to semantic

model A model is an informative representation of an object, person or system. The term originally denoted the Plan_(drawing), plans of a building in late 16th-century English, and derived via French and Italian ultimately from Latin ''modulus'', a mea ...

ing and fine-grained question answering. It also includes

multimedia Multimedia is a form of communication that uses a combination of different content forms such as text, audio, images, animations, or video into a single interactive presentation, in contrast to tradition ...

indexing,

machine translation Machine translation, sometimes referred to by the abbreviation MT (not to be confused with computer-aided translation, machine-aided human translation or interactive translation), is a sub-field of computational linguistics that investigates t ...

, the analysis and generation of emotions in speech and text, and

information extraction Information extraction (IE) is the task of automatically extracting structured information from unstructured and/or semi-structured machine-readable documents and other electronically represented sources. In most of the cases this activity concer ...

; The research in Human-Machine Interaction theme aims at a deeper understanding and modeling of interactions between humans and artificial systems in various contexts, and along various modalities. Four research teams are concerned: AMI focuses mostly on tangible, haptic, gestural and ambient interactions, whereas CPU is more focused on verbal and non-verbal interactions with

virtual agents Virtual may refer to: * Virtual (horse), a thoroughbred racehorse * Virtual channel, a channel designation which differs from that of the actual radio channel (or range of frequencies) on which the signal travels * Virtual function, a programming ...

; interactions in virtual and

augmented reality Augmented reality (AR) is an interactive experience that combines the real world and computer-generated content. The content can span multiple sensory modalities, including visual, auditory, haptic, somatosensory and olfactory. AR can be de ...

environments are studied primarily in the AMI, VENISE and AA research groups. Many research groups share similar or related interests and application domains; this is especially the case for collaborative research projects at the frontier between Science and Arts. VIDA is a transverse action with the mission to coordinate LIMSI's activities in this domain, as well as to organize events, for instance under the umbrella of the Diagonale Paris-Saclay.

References

External links

Official website

CNRS

Paris-Sud UniversityDiagonale Paris-Saclay
{{DEFAULTSORT:Laboratoire d'informatique pour la mecanique et les sciences de l'ingenieur Research institutes in France Engineering research institutes French National Centre for Scientific Research