EDITO

LIRIMA has been evaluated in last September. The aim was to make an assessment on the laboratory's activity for the 2015-2018 period, to record evolutions compared to the previous period and to make recommendations for the future. The outcome of the evaluation is rather positive and we are confident that the partners of LIRIMA will continue the adventure and program a third season of LIRIMA, which will result in a new headquarters, a new management team and an updated agreement.

LIRIMA III will have to focus on two main issues. First, it will be necessary to strengthen the animation of the laboratory. LIRIMA is a laboratory without walls where colleagues cannot meet in front of the coffee machine. LIRIMA's scientific days allow teams to exchange and find synergies, but this is not enough. It would be useful to set up a regular seminar with external speakers to attract the interest on topics relevant to the African continent. These seminars could thus also contribute to the second challenge, which is to make Inria researchers aware of opportunities to develop research in collaboration with African colleagues. The workshops we had the opportunity to organize during the scientific days of LIRIMA (Big data, Tunis 2017), CARI (HPC and SKA project, Stellenbosch 2018) or in partnership with CIRAD (Digital Agriculture, Montpellier 2018) are also opportunities to bring together Inria and African researchers on topics that can be developed with our partners (CIRAD, IRD, Centres Pasteur...).

In this regard, we are pleased that following the success of the workshop on Digital Agriculture that took place in Montpellier on April 3-4, 2018 , it was decided to organise a second such meeting in Senegal in April 2019, which will provide the opportunity to invite more colleagues from West and Central Africa.

Eric Badouel, Moussa Lo

Directors of LIRIMA

FOCUS

LIRIMA Evaluation Seminar

In September 18-19 the Scientific Council organized with the help of Inria the evaluation of LIRIMA for the period 2015-2018. The evaluation was based on the teams' activity reports, their oral presentations in plenary sessions and individual interviews between each team and experts in the field. We thank Prof. Maurice Tchuenté and the LIRIMA Scientific Council for managing the scientific aspects of the evaluation seminar and Laura Norcy for its organization.

The Scientific Council has acknowledged the quality of the research produced and welcomed the teams' success in meeting the challenge of combining the production of fundamental results with a good anchoring in social reality through relevant case studies,. Moreover the teams have found a good level of focus with clearly stated and well identified research issues. This was noted as a positive shift for LIRIMA compared to its first period (2009-2014) when many LIRIMA teams were more like laboratories bringing together various - sometimes opportunistic - themes and with too broad a spectrum. Nevertheless, there are still areas for improvement, such as the need to strengthen interactions between teams working on related or complementary topics.

CARI 2018

The fourteenth edition of CARI, the African Conference on Research in Computer Science, took place in October 14-16 at STIAS conference center in Stellenbosch, South Africa.
It was the first time that CARI took place in an English speaking country with the aim to reduce the linguistic barrier between African researchers and to foster collaboration between French-speaking and English-speaking communities. We hope that this edition contributed to a better visibility of CARI in the English-speaking community and that this community will be more committed to CARI in the coming years. It is also the first time that CARI was organized jointly with another conference, namely ICTAC, the International Conference on the Theoretical Aspects of Computing. This was a great opportunity to share invited speakers with a bigger audience.

CARI has evolved into an internationally recognized event in Computer Science and Applied Mathematics. The scientific program, which reflects the richness and the diversity of the research done on the African continent consisted of 28 scientific contributions, selected from 100 submissions, together with invited talks delivered by acknowledged experts.

The conference was preceded by a research school on the Formal Methods for Computing, co-organized by CARI and ICTAC with the following tutorials whose slides can be found at https://www.ictac.org.za/tutorials.html:

· Yves Bertot (Inria Sophia Antipolis - Méditerranée) : Interactive Theorem Proving and Program Development
· Vincent Cheval (Inria Nancy - Grand Est) : Verification of Security Protocols : From Confidentiality to Privacy
· Peter Thiemann (Universiät Freiburg) : Derivation beyond Reguler Languages
· Martin Leucker (Universität zu Lübe) : Runtime Verification : Some Basics and Some Latest Developments
· Thomas Meyer (University of Cape Town) : An Introduction to Description Logics
· Willem Visser (Stellenbosch University) : Symbolic Execution for Java
· Ina Schaefer (Technische Universität Braunschweig) : The Correctness-by-Construction Approach to Programming

The next CARI will be organized at Ecole Polytechnique de Thiès in Senegal under the supervision of Professor Oumar Niang. The conference will be preceded by a research school on the Mathematics of Artificial Intelligence and Application to Robotics and Big Data.

AGENDA

Second edition of the Workshop on Digital Agriculture in Africa!

According to the participants, the first edition was very interesting and stimulating. The list of talks can be found on the website here.

Following this success, it was decided to organise a second edition in Senegal in April 2019. More details will be available soon on LIRIMA website : http://lirima.inria.fr/seminaires/

UPCOMING DEADLINES

CIMPA: pending calls

You can view the pending calls in the last newsletter

IST-Africa May 2019: Call for Papers

IST-Africa Week 2019 is the fourteenth annual Ministerial-level Technology Research and Innovation Conference. It brings together senior representatives from leading public, private, education and research, societal and funding organisations around the world to share knowledge and experience of ICT-enabled Innovation, Science and Technology related Adoption, Policy and Research in the context of the Sustainable Development Goals.

Deadlines
• Online Submission Deadline: 15 December 2018
• Provisional Acceptance: 09 February 2019
• Submission of Final Paper: 09 March 2019
• Presenter Registration: 09 March 2019

READ ON THE WEB

Creation of the "French-speaking network of fablabs of West Africa" with 11 founding members

The first French-speaking Network of Fablabs of West Africa has been launched on November 10 in Cotonou during Make Africa Festival 2018