CominLabs, short presentation

``Original text dated 2012:''

To foster research and innovation at highest international level, the french government has launched the program "Investissements d'Avenir". As part of the former, the program "Laboratoires d'Excellence" is assigned 1 billion Euros in capital, for a 10 years period. The CominLabs are an initiative selected as part of the "Laboratoires d'Excellence" program by the French ministry of research and education. It has been assigned 40 Million Euros in capital, resulting in an effective annual funding of 1.4 Million Euros for a 10 year period. The CominLabs has been the only Laboratoire d'Excellence selected in the area of software sciences.

The CominLabs federate the best teams from Bretagne and Nantes regions in the broad area of telecommunications, from electronic devices to wide area distributed applications "over the top". The scope of CominLabs covers research, education, and innovation. While being hosted by academic institutions, the CominLabs build on a strong industrial ecosystem made of large companies and competitive SMEs.

The CominLabs seek innovative contributions in the following directions:

  • Governing a scientific community: By being a widely distributed lab, the CominLabs will either become the next bureaucratic layer of research management with its calls and reports, or must innovate in its method of work. We have decided to go for the second alternative. To this end, the CominLabs and their ecosystem will establish themselves as a scientific social network, the CominTogether, operating on top of the CominWeb, CominLabs' web site. The pair {CominTogether, CominWeb} is meant to become one of the major outcomes of the CominLabs.
  • Research: While covering the full range of telecommunications area, the CominLabs possess their strongest assets in the following sub-areas: Electromagnetic devices, antennas, and systems for communications; Optical devices and communication systems; Channel, network, and source coding (video, speech, and media); Wide area applications over the top (clouds, social networks, services, multimedia, communicating objects); Communication and information technology for the medical sector. A primary objective of the CominLabs will be the launching of innovative research projects combining the above assets.
  • Education: the CominLabs aim to fundamentally transform education and training in the field of Information and Communication Sciences and Technologies in Brittany and Pays de la Loire for the next ten years by introducing new interdisciplinary diploma and favouring mutualisation and internationalization. Networked teaching and innovative pedagogy will support the distributed involvement of the partners.