Martigny, a pretty town, located at the opposite end of the Lake of Geneva to Geneva itself, is known the world over as a centre for the study of artificial intelligence. This is principally through the presence of the IDIAP (Dalle Molle Institute for Perceptual Artificial Intelligence), a semi-private research institute affiliated with the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (30 minutes from Geneva) and the University of Geneva. The Institute carries out research in the areas of speech and speaker recognition, computer vision and machine learning.

To mark the tenth anniversary of the founding of the Institute, there is a one-day series of seminars and presentations on Friday the 16th November starting at 8.30 and continuing throughout the day.

Rich selection of innovative start-ups, VC groups and the MIT!

More than 20 venture capital companies, 15 start-ups selected for an elevator pitch, and 200 professionals are expected as well as companies from Canada, Europe and the US. An online video conference will take place with the Swiss House in Boston and the Director of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Detailed program at Link

The start-ups come from the whole region demonstrating the vitality of the interest in this domain. Each will give a 10 minute presentation. There will also be individual booths.

What is AI?

Herve Bourlard, Director of the IDIAP explains what is meant by Artificial Intelligence and Multimodal Human-Computer Interaction

"As a particular field of Artificial Intelligence, multimodal human-computer interaction covers a wide range of critical activities and applications, including recognition and interpretation of spoken, written and gestural language, computer vision, and automatic indexing and management of complex multimedia documents. Other key subthemes include the protection of information content, the control of information access, and the structuring, retrieval and presentation of multimedia information.

How to participate

Attendance at the event is free but registration is mandatory via: http://www.rezonance.ch/index.php?tab=inscription.php&date=2001-11-16&loc=sp or, if you haven't access to the web, by sending an e-mail to: mentioning: the date 16.11.01, your name, e-mail address and company name. All other details concerning times, meals and access are given on the web site.