AI pioneers Octopeek and Idiap announce R&D partnership
Tech
18 June 2021
A member of Octopeek’s scientific staff will spend four years at the Idiap Research Institute, culminating in a PhD – a unique opportunity to use video data to develop research on multimodal learning, and to spur innovation.
French company Octopeek has been providing businesses with big data and AI consulting and training services for the past 10 years. Keen on investing in the research and development of ever more innovative, ethical, and responsible solutions, Octopeek has just announced a partnership with Switzerland’s Idiap Research Institute, a renowned global leader in artificial and perceptual intelligence.
The partnership will enable Samy Tafasca, a data scientist at Octopeek, to carry out a PhD at Idiap on the topic of multimodal learning based on video data. Under the supervision of Jean-Marc Odobez, head of Idiap’s Perception & Activity Understanding research group, Tafasca will be able to draw on Idiap’s resources and the support of its research teams.
The key value of ethical and efficient AI research
“At Octopeek, research is quite simply the motor of our ability to innovate,” explained Octopeek co-founder Mahmoud Zakaria in a press release. “Thanks to our long-standing proximity with the academic and scientific community, we can accompany companies in their deployment of efficient, ethical AI and big data strategies. The trust that Idiap has placed in us is proof that companies have an active role to play in the technological revolution brought about by the data age.”
“Integrating this partnership will come very naturally to Idiap,” said Jean-Marc Odobez. “The modeling and analysis of what we call unstructured data, including the information flows contained in video, is a very active research field and one in which Idiap has strong expertise.”
The partnership between Idiap and Octopeek was made possible thanks to the Service de l’économie, du tourisme et de l’innovation (SETI) of the canton of Valais, in collaboration with GGBa. “SETI’s mission, in collaboration with the GGBa, is to identify companies with know-how and potential and with complementarities with our ecosystem,” explained Dominique Luyet, case manager at SETI. “The objective is to encourage the creation of high-added-value companies and jobs in Valais. The collaboration between Idiap and Octopeek is a perfect example of this, and we naturally hope that it will strengthen the presence of companies such as Octopeek in the canton. It’s clearly a win-win partnership.”
