In this week's IRIF Newsletter, a new meeting room in available at certain times. Please review and adhere to the established mission procedures, as this will facilitate the efficiency of administrative managers in their responsibilities.
Véronique Cortier granted us an interview, this is the focus of this week.
The CNRS grants a machine learning position and french courses as a foreign language are open for registration. The l'Oréal-UNESCO 2024 programme for Women in Science is now open.

Enjoy reading and have a nice weekend!

• New year's afternoon: We look forward to seeing you directly at the IHP from 4.30pm on Monday 29th of January, 2024. The adress is: Maison Poincaré, 11 Rue Pierre et Marie Curie, 75005 Paris. You will find all the information needed to find the place here. From 5.30pm, we will be able to access the Emmy Noether room for a buffet aperitif until 8:30pm. Please note that for security reasons, it will not be possible to enter the Perrin building after 18:00. On the other hand, the exit remains open all the time. If you have any issues finding the place or if you are going to be late, you will receive Juliette's phone number in an email on Monday.

• Lab council: the next lab council will be held on the 6th of February, 2024 from 13:00 to 15:00 in room 3052 with the following agenda:
  1. Replacement of the heads of the pôles ASD and PPS and of three thematic research groups : Analyse et Conception de Systèmes, Preuves et Programmes, and Modèlisation et Vérification;
  2. Presentation and support for CNRS candidates (with the presence of the heads of the thematic research groups).
  3. Discussion on the immigration law
  As usual, we recall that:
  • Members of the unit may ask for items to be added to the agenda up to eight days before the meeting, and the final agenda will be announced 7 days before the meeting on this page;
  • The lab council is open to all IRIF members, both face-to-face and remotely on Galene:conseil-labo (enter <Firstname Lastname> as the username and an empty password; you'll be able to follow the discussion but not to take part in it: no mike, no camera, no possibility to share your screen);
  • Provisional dates for all lab councils (and general meetings) up to August 2024 are available here and by subscribing to this calendrar.

• New meeting room: as a replacement for room 1007, from now until one of the central rooms undergoing renovation is returned, we will be able to use room 3058 (i.e. the UFR council room) for a predetermined number of slots. More specifically, the following slots have been reserved for room 3058:
  • Tuesday 11am-12.30pm: combi seminar
  • Tuesday 14h-16h: graphs seminar
  • Wednesday 10.30am-12.30pm: algocomp seminar
  • Thursday 2pm-4pm, AutCat or SMS working group
  • Friday 2pm-4pm “higher categories” working group (from 9 February)
    —- —- —- —- —-
    
  • The room key is available from the IRIF secretariat.
    The video remote control and a wireless communication box are in the drawer of the table in the room. They must be returned there. An instruction manual will be in the room.
    The room must be left in the same condition as it was before the seminar/working group.

• Missions:
  • Contract holders will again be notified when a mission is declared on their grant.
  • All requests for missions for members must be made via Etamine
  • After returning from the mission, please send scanned proofs of payment in PDF format. For assignments carried out via notilus, you must make your own expense claims.
  • WARNING NOTILUS - do not press the “-” sign as this will cancel the mission completely. You will have to start again from the beginning.
  • WARNING CNRS emails - concerning the reimbursement of transport costs, institutional emails are sent to CNRS mailboxes, please check them regularly.
  • Data protection - travelling abroad: When you travel abroad on business, data protection measures must be respected. Please consult this note for a reminder.

• French as a foreign language: French courses for foreigners are back. If you are interested, please contact formation@irif.fr. It is 12-14 sessions of 1.5 hours per week led by the same trainer.

• [VERY IMPORTANT] CNRS email: if CNRS is your employer, then you have a cnrs.fr email (that you may have to activate). CNRS is using this email more and more to send you important information such as evaluations documents, career deadlines, administrative procedures: e.g., see next item. It is important that you consult this mail regularly.

• CNRS 2023 annual review of reimbursement of local transportion costs (FORFAITS NAVIGO): Please submit your request for transport reimbursement via the ARIANE application before 9 February 2024, accompanied by a photocopy of both sides of your travel card and proof of the travel ticket used between January 2023 and December 2023. If no reply is received or if the reply is late or incomplete, the CNRS will be obliged to suspend payment of the transport reimbursement with retroactive effect to 1st September 2023. You should have received this information on your cnrs.fr account.

• Thesis milestones: The online defence procedure is divided into 3 stages:
  1. Composition of the jury: The doctoral student must check the pre-registered information, enter his/her jury and the two summaries (French and English) of his/her thesis and publications. It is then up to the thesis director to check that everything is correct, validate online and send the jury composition with signatures on both pages back to Amina Harditi.
  2. Reports: They are sent by email to the doctoral student and his/her thesis supervisor after validation by the doctoral school supervisor, and then posted on the defence website.
  3. Authorisation for the defence: The doctoral student must enter the information relating to their thesis defence (time, room, building address, etc.). They must also make their pre-defence deposit with the library service. At the same time, the thesis director will receive an email to provide the Compilatio certificate, stating that there is no plagiarism in the thesis.
  4. New Rule: From this year 2024, training in research ethics is compulsory in order to be able to defend a thesis. All doctoral students must provide a certificate of participation in this training to the doctoral school , without which the defence procedure cannot begin.

• A reminder of the direction, co-direction and and co-supervision at doctoral school 386: The thesis director is responsible for the scientific direction of the doctoral project, which may be carried out with a co-director (who holds an Habilitation à Diriger des Recherches or has applied for an Autorisation à Diriger une Thèse). The main purpose of co-supervision is to enable the thesis to have a dual scientific expertise, in particular to combine two distinct research fields or skills. Co-supervisors may be asked to supervise a thesis, even without an HDR. See the precise terms and conditions. The doctoral school council sets the maximum number of doctoral students supervised by a thesis director as follows:
  • 300% supervision and a maximum of six doctoral students supervised by the same HDR.
  • A maximum of 2 PhD students enrolled in 1st year in the same academic year per HDR (“flow”).
    The ED administration must be notified immediately of any change of thesis director.

• QueeRIF: This week's inaugural queeRIF-meetup was a great success! With a total of 14 people attending, we had a very nice time together and decided to make this a regular thing. For further coordination/finding a good time slot, we established a chat group using the Signal messenger. Please contact the person announcing the meetup on the members mailing list, if you would like to be added to the Signal group.

• Véronique Cortier lecture - DTS: the next speaker of the Distinguished Talks Series on February 7, will be Véronique Cortier. The subject of her talk is “Electronic voting: design and formal verification”. You can find the abstract here.

We are delighted to offer a new Distinguished Talks Series for 2024!

Véronique Cortier, CNRS research director at LORIA, will give a talk on Wednesday, 7th of February 2024, on the suject Electronic voting: Design and formal verification.
This interview gives us insight into how e-voting fits into our society, the main difficulties encountered in designing protocols, the use of zero knowledge proofs and the risks involved.

“Even defining something as simple as vote secrecy is difficult, and there is still no academic consensus on how to state mathematically that my vote is secret, for example. Because the value of my vote is not secret. If I vote A or B, they are not secret; they are public. You know A and B, in this case, since they are the political candidates. So what you should not know is what I voted for. This is what is difficult to analyze.”

• Eitan Tadmor talks: Eitan Tadmor (University of Maryland), winner of the FSMP Chair of Excellence in 2023, will give a doctoral-level course entitled Emerging Behavior in Collective Dynamics in February-March 2024. The sessions will be held on Wednesdays from 2pm to 5pm from 7 February to 27 March 2024 at the Institut Henri Poincaré (11 rue Pierre et Marie Curie), in room 314 (salle Pierre Grisvard) - with the exception of the session on Wednesday 27 March, which will be held in room 201 (salle Maryam Mirzakhani). Find the summary and all the information about this course on the website.

• CNRS Machine learning position: A multimodal machine learning data scientist for biomedical applications position has open. Expertise in programming, Machine Learning, data analysis are mandatory. Background in Physics, Analytical chemistry, biomedical research and innovation will be highly appreciated. The selected candidate will be supported to candidate to CNRS sections 7 / 10 / 51 of the 2024 session. More information here.

• For Women in Science - L'Oréal-UNESCO 2024: The call for applications for the 2024 edition of the L'Oréal-UNESCO France Young Talents for Women in Science programme will open. The L'Oréal Foundation will be awarding 35 grants in France, at least 5 of which will be dedicated to researchers carrying out their research work in the French Overseas Territories, of €15,000 each to doctoral students and €20,000 each to post-doctoral students. The deadline for applications is Monday 26 February 2024. Here's the digital application platform.

• CNRS researcher positions: the deadline for applications is February 9. Admissions juries will be held in late June/early July.

• Faculty positions are open at IRIF : two MCF and one full professor, see the following page.

Partner newsletter : Les lettres arrivent sporadiquement aux membres de l'IRIF. Elles sont donc listées ci-dessous.

• CNRS Hebdo édition du 19 janvier 2024
• La newsletter de l'Agence nationale de la recherche de janvier 2024
• La lettre innovation du CNRS de janvier 2024
• Lettre du CNRS Interne du 26 janvier 2024