The Institut de recherche en informatique et systèmes aléatoires is a joint computer science research center of CNRS,

University of Rennes 1 The University of Rennes 1 is a public university located in the city of Rennes, France. It is under the Academy of Rennes. It specializes in science, technology, law, economics, management and philosophy. There are currently about students en ...

, ENS Rennes,

INSA Rennes The Intelligence and National Security Alliance (INSA) is a non-profit, nonpartisan 501(c)(6) professional organization based in Arlington Virginia for public and private sector members of the United States Intelligence Community. History ...

and

Inria The National Institute for Research in Digital Science and Technology (Inria) () is a French national research institution focusing on computer science and applied mathematics. It was created under the name ''Institut de recherche en informatiq ...

, in Rennes in

Brittany Brittany (; french: link=no, Bretagne ; br, Breizh, or ; Gallo: ''Bertaèyn'' ) is a peninsula, historical country and cultural area in the west of modern France, covering the western part of what was known as Armorica during the period ...

. It is one of the eight Inria research centers. Created in 1975 as a spin-off of the University of Rennes 1, merging the young computer science department and a few mathematicians, more specifically probabilists, among them Michel Métivier, who was to become the first president of IRISA. Research topics span from theoretical computer science, such as

formal languages In logic, mathematics, computer science, and linguistics, a formal language consists of words whose letters are taken from an alphabet and are well-formed according to a specific set of rules. The alphabet of a formal language consists of sy ...

formal methods In computer science, formal methods are mathematically rigorous techniques for the specification, development, and verification of software and hardware systems. The use of formal methods for software and hardware design is motivated by the exp ...

, or more mathematically oriented topics such as information theory,

optimization Mathematical optimization (alternatively spelled ''optimisation'') or mathematical programming is the selection of a best element, with regard to some criterion, from some set of available alternatives. It is generally divided into two subfi ...

, complex system... to application-driven topics like bioinformatics, image and video compression,

handwriting recognition Handwriting recognition (HWR), also known as handwritten text recognition (HTR), is the ability of a computer to receive and interpret intelligible handwritten input from sources such as paper documents, photographs, touch-screens and other de ...

computer graphics Computer graphics deals with generating images with the aid of computers. Today, computer graphics is a core technology in digital photography, film, video games, cell phone and computer displays, and many specialized applications. A great de ...

, medical imaging,

content-based image retrieval Content-based image retrieval, also known as query by image content ( QBIC) and content-based visual information retrieval (CBVIR), is the application of computer vision techniques to the image retrieval problem, that is, the problem of searching ...

See also