Unit Côte d'Azur

Located in Sophia Antipolis, Europe’s first technopole, the ELLIS Unit Côte d’Azur aims to advance fundamental AI research and ensure transfer to key domains such as health, digital infrastructures, creative industries, and intelligent mobility.

The ambition of the Unit is to promote societal and economic impact by growing a new generation of AI researchers capable of bridging academia and industry, thanks to strong, existing ties with major industrial actors such as Amadeus, ARM, SAP, Kyndryl, Orange, Bosch, Renault Group, and Thales Alenia Space, along with numerous SMEs and startups. 

The ELLIS Unit Côte D’Azur promotes open and reproducible AI research, by promoting open access publications, open source repositories, open weights models, and everything necessary to inspect, replicate and validate research output.

Research focuses on three pillars. 

• AI Foundations: fundamental methods for machine learning, generative modeling, and computer vision, with a focus on Bayesian inference, uncertainty quantification, representation learning and robustness. 
• AI for Health: methods that learn effectively from limited, heterogeneous, or imperfect medical, biological and genetic data, for analysis, diagnosis, prognosis, and clinical decision support, integrating methodological and clinical research. Emphasis on a bidirectional link between clinical practice and algorithmic innovation, ensuring validation on real-world health problems. 
• Systems and Knowledge Management for AI: frugal, scalable, and explainable data and computational infrastructures that support robust and trustworthy AI. Energy-efficient and privacy-preserving federated learning, resource-aware optimization of LLMs, knowledge representation and reasoning, through semantic technologies, knowledge graphs and symbolic embeddings.