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

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 31,63 ...

, University of Rennes 1, ENS Rennes, INSA Rennes and Inria, in

Rennes Rennes (; br, Roazhon ; Gallo: ''Resnn''; ) is a city in the east of Brittany in northwestern France at the confluence of the Ille and the Vilaine. Rennes is the prefecture of the region of Brittany, as well as the Ille-et-Vilaine departm ...

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 o ...

. 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 Michel may refer to: * Michel (name), a given name or surname of French origin (and list of people with the name) * Míchel (nickname), a nickname (a list of people with the nickname, mainly Spanish footballers) * Míchel (footballer, born 1963), ...

, 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 Information theory is the scientific study of the quantification, storage, and communication of information. The field was originally established by the works of Harry Nyquist and Ralph Hartley, in the 1920s, and Claude Shannon in the 1940s. ...

, optimization,

complex system A complex system is a system composed of many components which may interact with each other. Examples of complex systems are Earth's global climate, organisms, the human brain, infrastructure such as power grid, transportation or communicatio ...

... to application-driven topics like

bioinformatics Bioinformatics () is an interdisciplinary field that develops methods and software tools for understanding biological data, in particular when the data sets are large and complex. As an interdisciplinary field of science, bioinformatics combin ...

image An image is a visual representation of something. It can be two-dimensional, three-dimensional, or somehow otherwise feed into the visual system to convey information. An image can be an artifact, such as a photograph or other two-dimensio ...

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 dev ...

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 deal ...

, medical imaging, content-based image retrieval.

See also