Discovering the members of the consortium: focus on the Centre Inria d'Université Côte d'Azur

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Published on October 24, 2025 – Updated on October 24, 2025
Dates

on the October 27, 2025

Interview de Maureen Clerc Directrice du Centre Inria d'Université Côte d'Azur membre du consortium 3IA Côte d'Azur
Interview de Maureen Clerc Directrice du Centre Inria d'Université Côte d'Azur membre du consortium 3IA Côte d'Azur

Interview of Maureen Clerc, Director of the Centre Inria d'Université Côte d'Azur.

The 3IA Côte d'Azur Institute is a consortium led by Université Côte d'Azur, comprising prestigious establishments: Centre Inria d'Université Côte d'Azur, CNRS, EURECOM, Inserm, and Skema Business School (since 2019), plus Centrale Méditerranée and École de l'Air et de l'Espace (since 2024).

Today, let's take a closer look at the Centre Inria d’Université Côte d’Azur, through an interview with its Director, Maureen Clerc.

Could you briefly present your establishment?

Inria is the National Institute for Research in Digital Science and Technology. At the national level, Inria conducts more than 300 research and innovation projects with its 3,500 scientists, engineers, and support staff, in partnership with universities and the digital ecosystem (companies, entrepreneurs, public stakeholders).

At its center in Sophia Antipolis, around thirty project teams explore fields such as artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, networks, digital health, and agro-ecology.


For what reason(s) did your institution join the 3IA Côte d'Azur consortium?

AI is an integral part of our research, whether for the foundations of AI or its applications, particularly in healthcare. The consortium seems very important to us for bringing together local forces to collaborate on complex subjects requiring a diversity of expertise. For example, to create AI solutions for healthcare that are actually implemented, a wide diversity of skills is needed: clinical, mathematical, computer science, and even legal, given the sensitivity of medical data.


What prospect(s) in connection with AI do you envisage for your school?

In research, in addition to the important questions raised by AI (frugality, evaluation, privacy protection), we are also interested in the hybridization of AI with ‘mechanistic’ simulation methods, which leverage underlying physical or biological phenomena. This could improve the understanding of these phenomena while contributing to the explainability of AI decision-making.

Photo credits: © Inria / Photo B. Fourrier