IVADO-Inria initiative: 8 Projects Selected as Part of the Franco-Quebec Exchange Program Around Artificial Intelligence and Launch of a 2nd Round

In April 2025, IVADO and Inria announced the organization of a Franco-Quebec exchange program around artificial intelligence (AI), with the aim of facilitating encounters and strengthening existing links between the French and Quebec research ecosystems in the field of AI.

This program offers financial support for research stays of 2 to 5 weeks, between mid-June and mid-November 2025, enabling Quebec professors to stay in France, and French researchers to visit Quebec, as part of an existing collaboration or a new Franco-Quebec collaboration. Projects in the priority themes specified in the call, such as AI in healthcare, responsible AI, machine learning, or AI applied to the environment and materials (among others), are encouraged.

In light of the initiative’s success, IVADO and Inria are pleased to announce a second call for applications. Interested researchers are invited to submit their applications by July 20, 2025 for visits that will take place before the end of November 2025. Full details of eligibility, themes supported, funding and application procedures are available here:

IVADO website: https://ivado.ca/en/call-for-applications-ivado-inria-initiative/
Inria website: https://project.inria.fr/inriacanada/initiative-ivado-inria/ 

The scientific exchange projects selected for the 1st round are :

• The first two projects are co-financed by IVADO (travel to France) and Inria (travel to Quebec).

1. David Ardia (HEC Montréal) + Serge Darolles (Université Paris Dauphine/PSL, AI Cluster PostGenAI@PARIS)
Field: Finance / Artificial Intelligence (Financial Data Science & Natural Language Processing)
Project: Evaluating the real-time use of large language models to predict stock returns from multilingual financial news, aiming to improve transparency and reliability in algorithmic trading.

2. Étienne Laliberté (Université de Montréal) + Alexis Joly (équipe Inria IROKO, centre Inria de l’Université Côte d’Azur, Pl@ntNet)
Field: Ecology / Artificial Intelligence
Project: Developing AI methods to identify tropical tree species and estimate their relative cover from high-resolution drone images, using herbarium specimens to overcome training data limitations.

3. Jocelyn Maclure (Université McGill) + Thierry Ménissier (Université de Grenoble, MIAI Cluster)
Field: AI Ethics / Public Policy
Project: Developing a policy framework for the transparent design and governance of generative AI agents, with a focus on anthropomorphism, user perception, and the ethical implications of socio-technical human–AI interactions.

4. Maxime Polleri (Université de Laval) + Benoît Pelopidas (Centre de Recherches Internationales, Sciences Po)
Field: AI Ethics / Nuclear Security Studies / Digital Epistemology
Project: Investigating how generative AI systems reproduce and shape nuclear imaginaries, with a focus on epistemic bias, misinformation, and the development of ethical and educational tools to govern nuclear discourse in AI-generated content.

5. Philippe Després (Université de Laval) + Maureen Clerc (Centre Inria de l’Université Côte d’Azur)
Field: AI in Medical Imaging / Federated Learning / Multimodal Foundation Models
Project: Exploring Quebec–France collaborations on secure, federated, and multimodal AI in medical imaging, focused on lesion detection and characterization in cancer using large annotated datasets and the PARADIM platform.

• The following projects are funded by IVADO (travel to France) 

6. Jean-Baptiste Poline (Université McGill) + Marco Lorenzi (équipe Inria EPIONE, centre Inria de l’Université Côte d’Azur)
Field: Neuroinformatics / Federated Learning
Project: Developing a federated learning infrastructure to model the progression of neurodegenerative diseases using distributed neuroimaging data, integrating the Nipoppy and FedBioMed platforms within the ENIGMA-PD consortium.

Jean-Baptiste Poline (Université McGill) + Camille Maumet (Équipe Inria EMPENN, centre Inria de l’Université de Rennes / IRISA)
Field: Neuroinformatics / Data Sharing Infrastructure
Project: Improving interoperability between the Shanoir and Neurobagel platforms to enable federated queries and cohort construction across neuroimaging datasets, supporting robust machine learning research in neurodegeneration.

• The following projects are funded by Inria (travel to Quebec)
  

7. Marius Rolland (équipe Inria INOCS, centre Inria de l’Université de Lille) + Thibaut Vidal (Polytechnique Montréal)
Field: Decision-making under uncertainty, operational research, scenario clustering techniques
Project: Combining scenario reduction and optimization to optimize supply chain and mobility management systems, as well as power grids, both of which are subject to uncertainties.

 8. Federica Granese (équipe Inria MARIANNE, centre Inria de l’Université Côte d’Azur) + Pablo Piantanida (MILA, ILLS, Université McGill, ETS Montréal, CNRS)
Field: Detection of misinformation produced by humans or AI
Project: Bring together recent advances in fake news identification and synthetic text detection with frequency analysis and in-depth semantic analysis.

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