27 January 2022 – The French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), the Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR), and NUS renewed an agreement on Tuesday to continue its joint research collaboration through the IPAL.
The IPAL is a French-Singaporean International Research Laboratory formed in 1998 through a partnership with CNRS, A*STAR and NUS. It is a lab based in Singapore and has physical sites located at both A*STAR and NUS Computing.
The agreement renewal was signed between Professor Reginald Tan, Executive Director of the Science and Engineering Research Council at A*STAR, Professor Antoine Petit, the CEO of CNRS, and Professor Mohan Kankanhalli, the Dean of NUS Computing and Provost’s Chair Professor of Computer Science. Prof Kankanhalli was also one of the founding co-directors of the lab.
“I hope to see more French researchers coming to our campus, interacting with us and our A*STAR colleagues, and for our NUS colleagues to go over to France,” said Prof Kankanhalli, who also mentioned that he personally benefitted and grew as a researcher from the close interactions he had with his French colleagues.
“I am very confident of future successes of IPAL,” he added.
His Excellency Marc Abensour, the Ambassador of France to Singapore, and three current co-directors of the IPAL – NUS Computing Associate Professor Ooi Wei Tsang, Professor Christophe Jouffrais from CNRS, as well as Dr. Joo Hwee Lim from A*STAR – were also present at the signing ceremony.
The agreement solidifies the renewal of the lab until 2025, and paves the way for more ground-breaking collaborative research, where researchers can work together to harness and integrate knowledge and skills from various disciplines to create better solutions to address complex real-world problems.
NUS Computing has been co-leading IPAL since its inception, creating new collaboration opportunities to augment the various areas of research and enrich the capabilities of NUS faculty and students. Research themes include artificial intelligence, data science, natural language processing, and cybersecurity, among others.
Since it began, the IPAL agreement has been renewed thrice: once in 2011, once in 2015, and now in January 2022.
In the current agreement, more than 10 faculty members across three NUS faculties – the School of Computing, the College of Design and Engineering, and the College of Humanities and Science – are involved in IPAL.
