On December 17, IBM inaugurated a new co-innovation center dedicated to artificial intelligence, in the presence of its president Beatrice Kosowski and the Secretary of State for Digital Cédric O. Located on the Saclay plateau, this research and co-innovation center, now officially inaugurated, has been open since the beginning of 2021 and 200 researchers, teachers, data scientists and business developers of various profiles are already actively collaborating there.

On April 9, 2019, IBM unveiled the premises of its new co-innovation and research center for artificial intelligence in Orsay, on the Paris-Saclay site, and announced that its IBM Business Automation Intelligence with Watson project would be run from its French laboratories. More than two years later, this center dedicated to AI was inaugurated in the presence of the sub-prefect Alexander Grimaud, the secretary of state for digital, Cédric O, François Durovray, president of the Essonne departmental council, Grégoire de Lasteyrie, president of the Paris-Saclay agglomeration community and regional councillor of Île de France, and for IBM France, Béatrice Kosowski.

The new R&D center, which focuses on AI, is the largest IBM center to be set up in France, ahead of those in Sofia Antipolis, Montpellier and Pornichet, and is part of the government’s AI Plan. The company’s aim is to develop artificial intelligence projects and, in the future, quantum projects on a global scale. To do this, it will need to recruit, Beatrice Kosowski explains:

“We are recruiting researchers, pointures and all types of roles to serve any type of need including data scientists and architects. We aspire to establish a collaborative model based on international stimulation.”

IBM Group has already completed several AI projects with the support of its teams of 10 different nationalities – in the field of medical, autonomous boats and data explicability.

Harley Davis, vice president France Lab and IBM’s hybrid cloud division explains:

“We are working on data mining to understand for example fraud phenomena in payments with STE.”

Half of the employees are part of the teams of Ilog, acquired by IBM in 2008. For Harley Davis:

“All the technologies we develop, everything we do, is for global use.”

An international team in Saclay

The hiring of the teams at this center has followed IBM’s policy of encouraging the dynamic of exchange, sharing points of view, and varied approaches to analysis to enrich the research, and some thirty foreigners work with the French teams.

When it comes to the choice of Paris-Saclay as the location for the R&D centre, “it was imperative to be here” according to Harley Davis. For IBM, this location allows it to attract natural talent and a favourite land for mathematics (Saclay is the leading university in the Shanghai ranking in this category) and to bring together companies, public and private research with IBM, which accounts for 20% of French research.

For Cédric O, supporting such a project led by American suppliers is in line with France’s AI policy:

“American power is based to a large extent on attracting international talent and their ability to capture investment. This is the dialectic we need to achieve, the objective is obviously to strengthen the technological base and the French and European sovereignty. But we need to attract the masses, we need this international dimension”.

Beatrice Kosowski wants to reassure:

“We are a cloud player with a whole series of trusted technologies in Germany and soon in Madrid and a new generation of MZR cloud that we have privately at BNP-Paribas with certification levels very close to SecNumCloud for example with C5 in Germany. We will continue to invest in very specific technologies to boost security and the degree of trust. Concerning sovereign cloud offers, our approach is to have alliances with players who have SecNumCloud labels, but we are considering other possible approaches. Not all economic players might want to go to a SecNumCloud offering for reasons of high prices and will consider our cloud and our technology.”

Cedric O stressed the importance of such a collaboration in Paris-Saclay, France must not become transparent and must instead rise to the global challenges against the US and China.

Translated from Quelles recherches dans le centre de co-innovation parisien dédié à l’intelligence artificielle d’IBM ?