At the end of February, Saagie and LITIS announced the creation of L-LiSa, a joint laboratory dedicated to artificial intelligence. Fourteen employees work in this labcom, co-directed by Romain Picot Clemente (Saagie R&D Manager) and Clément Chatelain (Lecturer at INSA Rouen and researcher at LITIS), set up in January 2021. Saagie engineers and LITIS researchers will contribute their expertise to solve certain problems related to health or air quality control.

Launched in 2013 in Rouen by Arnaud Muller, Saagie is a software company that accelerates the production of data projects. Its DataOps platform enables the management of the entire data life cycle.

Arnaud Muller explains:

“DataOps is nothing more and nothing less than a way to bring together two worlds that don’t always go hand in hand: innovation and control, Data Lab and information system. I created Saagie to meet a real need within companies – that of making management between different technological platforms more fluid within the framework of a data project – in order to gain in productivity and serenity.”

As an extension of DevOps and DataOps and with the same goals of collaboration and agility, Saagie now offers MLOps tools, providing methods specifically tailored to the machine learning model.

In 2018, the company announced the creation of a lab where it would volunteer its expertise and skills in Big Data and artificial intelligence. According to Arnaud Muller, the founder, ” public/private cooperation and research, the ability of stakeholders to analyze and make the most of their data are the best ways to make AI the cornerstone of innovation for the common good.”

The lab had received various support, including that of LITIS (Laboratory for Computer Science, Information Processing and Systems). This research unit in information science and technology attached to the University of Rouen Normandy (URN), the University of Le Havre Normandy (ULHN) and the National Institute of Applied Sciences of Rouen Normandy (INSARN), brings a recognized expertise in deep learning for the analysis of sequences, images or signal processing in the broadest sense. LITIS has numerous projects in various fields of application: document analysis and image recognition, health, intelligent cars…

To carry out these projects, the laboratory needs efficient tools and methods to rapidly deploy its methodological developments to industrial or institutional partners.

The L-LiSa Common Lab

Saagie and LITIS have decided to combine their efforts and skills in an attempt to provide answers to certain problems encountered in the implementation of deep learning techniques, particularly weakly supervised learning, the robustness of models and the multimodal aspect of data.

The project, coordinated by Clément Chatelain and funded by the ANR to the tune of 350,000 euros, will be structured around methodological developments in two applications:

• The first will be dedicated to medical data (patient data for lymphoma treatment, MRI image recognition, image segmentation to detect lymphoma) in collaboration with the Henri Becquerel cancer center,
• The second concerns the processing of user data for the Saagie product. The expertise thus acquired by Saagie should enable it to address several industrial issues on behalf of future customers.

Jérôme Trédan, CEO of Saagie, states:

“We have been working with Litis for some time and the idea of creating a structure that formalizes this collaboration was a crucial step for us. By launching the L-LiSa LabCom with Litis, Saagie aims to design algorithms to improve the user experience. Even if the applications and socio-economic sectors concerned by these techniques are numerous, Saagie’s ambition is not to invest in them all. We prefer to focus on uses that are driven by common good issues such as the fight against pollution or the detection of pathologies.

For his part, Clément Chatelain states:

“We are delighted with this collaboration with Saagie. With this project, our ambition is to implement a strategy between industry and academia aimed at producing economic value and innovation.

Translated from Saagie et le LITIS annoncent la création d’un laboratoire commun dédié à l’IA