After nearly 10 years at the head of IRISA, Jean-Marc Jézéquel hands over to Guillaume Gravier.
A new director since January 2021
Guillaume Gravier, Research Director at the CNRS, has taken over the direction of IRISA from Jean-Marc Jézéquel, Professor at the Université de Rennes 1.
Guillaume Gravier is a former student of INSA Rouen and obtained his PhD in signal and image processing from Telecom ParisTech (formerly Télécom Paris) in January 2000. After a stay at IBM Watson, he joined IRISA in 2002 as a research fellow. He was promoted to research director in 2014 and took over the management of a research team until 2018, when he joined the laboratory management as deputy director.
Guillaume Gravier's research area is probabilistic modeling and machine learning for speech and language processing. His contributions and projects focus on description, indexing, information extraction and linking in multimedia content. Guillaume Gravier has been involved in the direction of a dozen national and international projects, in the organization of major conferences. He is the author of more than 150 international publications in major journals and conferences and has supervised or directed more than twenty doctoral theses.
Guillaume Gravier has long been involved in the animation of the scientific community, notably through the Association Francophone de la Communication Parlée, of which he was vice-president and then president from 2015 to 2018, the creation of the Speech and Language in Multimedia SIG of the International Speech Communication Association, the scientific council of the GDR Traitement automatique des langues, or his participation in the board of directors of the Pôle Images et Réseaux on behalf of the CNRS.
The outgoing management team has greatly contributed to placing IRISA at its best level of excellence in research and innovation, both internationally and in France. It is in this perspective that the new management team, with all the staff and scientists, will support Guillaume Gravier in the continuation of this ambitious strategy. Among his various priorities and in addition to the 40 industrial contracts/year, the 20 CIFRE contracts/year, the industrial chairs and the joint laboratories, the new director wishes to strengthen the anchoring of IRISA in the region and to develop links with the regional and national industrial fabric while reinforcing the international academic influence.