Isabelle Ryl heads one of the four French institutes of artificial intelligence created in 2018 as part of the French AI initiative announced by President Emmanuel Macron.
“Prairie, the Paris Artificial Intelligence Research Institute, specializes in AI but covers a lot of fields from applied mathematics to computer science with applications in all sciences, especially health,” Ryl explained.
The institute’s mission is to become a global leader in AI research and higher education, making a significant contribution to the French, European, and global economies and technologies.
AI Collaborations
Based out of the Parisanté campus in the south of Paris, Prairie boasts members from the academic community of researchers and teachers in AI, industrial members who are major actors in AI at the global level, and a group of international partners.
“Not only is the mission of Prairie to do excellent research but also to contribute to the spread of AI in society. To start this, we have to educate people in AI.
“AI is something that will be used in every field. That’s why we’re working hard at the Institute to bring AI education to all students, whether they’re studying economics, physics, or sociology. We also have to transfer this innovation into real-world practices, either by working with big companies or creating startups.”
“Collaboration with companies is very important,” Ryl emphasized. “Researchers need to know the real problems that the industry is facing each day. So collaboration is really a way to create cross-fertilization between the two worlds.”
The Future of Healthcare is Already Here
As we heard from AI and medical researcher Stéphanie Allassonière in this article about digital twins, AI has accelerated many processes for researchers. From idea, to proof of concept, to functioning startup, a researcher can easily speed up the stages in between with the help of AI.
“I'm really convinced that we have never seen such an acceleration of research than in the last few years,” Ryl told us. “And in every field. For example, there is a startup that is helping surgeons prepare for surgeries with a 3D view thanks to AI. They can go inside the bodies of people to plan how they will repair things.
“You have also people creating new molecules, new drugs using AI. That is to say, computers are proposing a few panels of possible molecules and researchers can test them. This limits the amount they have to test, perhaps to a few dozen instead of a few hundred possibilities. So this pre-selection by AI can help researchers go very fast.”
For Ryl, the next big tech innovation is already under development. “Research is all about continuous progress, but at some point, you have a breakthrough. No one can predict the next great technological breakthrough, but we can predict that it will come from research!.”
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