The Computer Science Laboratory for Mechanics and Engineering Sciences (LIMSI) was a CNRS pluri-disciplinary science laboratory in

Orsay Orsay () is a commune in the Essonne department in Île-de-France in northern France. It is located in the southwestern suburbs of Paris, France, from the centre of Paris. A fortified location of the Chevreuse valley since the 8th centur ...

, France. LIMSI academics and scholars come primarily from the

Engineering Engineering is the use of 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 range of more speciali ...

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. P ...

fields, but also from Cognitive Science and

Linguistics Linguistics is the science, 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 ...

. LIMSI is associated with the Paris-Sud University. 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 ...

, Acoustics, and

Signal Processing Signal processing is an electrical engineering subfield that focuses on analyzing, modifying and synthesizing ''signals'', such as sound, images, and scientific measurements. Signal processing techniques are used to optimize transmissions, ...

. 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 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 conve ...

and radiation, in multiphasic and oscillating 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. 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 ...

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 ...

and synthesis, to semantic

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

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 tradit ...

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; interactions in virtual and augmented reality 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