Meeting attendees:

ENSIMAG: two-year prep school (at high school after baccalaureate) plus three years at university. ENSIMAG is one of six areas in the Grenoble Institute of Technology and specializes in “Informatics, Applied Mathematics, and Telecommunications”.

UJF is the “science university”, including computer science.

Time to bachelors, master, PhD = 3 years, 5 years, 8 years.

Studies combine mathematics and informatics.

Juniors at Purdue could take 1st year masters courses.

Degree programs include a five month project.

Sonia Belaid from ENSIMAG is coming to Purdue. (Student last year was Sabrina Aouichi.)

Students are required to study English (students in engineering program more so than others).

James Crowley: Co-director of international masters program. INRIA affiliation. CMU graduate with Walter Tichy. Global INP seeking bi-lateral and dual degree programs. Connections with CMU, University of Pennsylvania, Virginia Tech, and Georgia Tech. Will likely visit Purdue in September/October 2010.

Three possible interactions: semester exchange, joint diploma, and masters program (one year abroad to finish after BS degree).

MoSIG program: Master of Science in Informatics at Grenoble, http://mosig.imag.fr. Joint program with UJF. All in English (lectures, exams can be in English or French and answers may be in French). Targets include Brazil, India, and China.

M1 and M2 years: M1 is the “right math” to get through M2 (typically statistics and discrete math). 2nd semester includes presentation skills. Research internship includes a four-week project, six-page paper, and presentation.

LIG: Laboatoire D'Informatique de Grenoble (http://lig.imag.fr). Grenoble Informatics Laboratory. Large effort: 300 faculty plus 200 graduate students.

ST Microelectronics is located in Grenoble. Strong connection to university. Also, Orange has labs nearby. Sun was in Grenoble but has now largely pulled out.

At UJF…

All courses in French. Team projects. Lab being built for HCI (Center for Ambient Intelligence).

Large projects (14K lines of code in C and Java).

Internships active. Few to US (e.g., UCSD). Many local.

MBA partnerships avalable. Competitions, including one-night challenge. Projects in robotics and for Android devices.

Director of IMAG to become director of ENSIMAG in November.

Research themes of LIG include infrastructure, interaction, software, and knowledge. Small, less than 50 French students, plus international students mostly from Brazil and elsewhere in South America, plus China, and the Mediterranean.

Another research theme: Ambient and Sustainable Informatics (ASI).

PILSI: International Software and Smart Systems Cluster (http://www.grenoble-isere.com/eng/News/Software-and-smart-systems-welcome-to-Pilsi). Common view of all labs, funding structure. Teaching programs of the universities has not been merged, but research has been (into the LIG).

10 students have gone to Purdue from Grenoble in recent years. None the other way.

Demonstrations: Software engineering, HCI, automatic translation.