The French-Mexican Laboratory of Informatics and Automatic Control (LAFMIA) is a Mixed International Unit (UMI 3175) founded in 2008 by the French National Research Council (CNRS). The UMI is the strongest collaboration that the CNRS can have with a foreign country (only ten of them in the world). LAFMIA is composed by a joint French-Mexican network of Universities and Research centers and excellence poles, such as the University Joseph Fourier (UJF), the Polytechnic Institute of Grenoble (INP), the Technological University of Compiegne (UTC) in France, and the Research and Advanced Studies Centre of the Mexican Polytechnic Institute (CINVESTAV) and the Mexican Council of Science and Technology (CONACyT) in Mexico.
Researchers at LAFMIA are strongly involved in national projects in France and Mexico, and as well as in international projects. They contribute to the definition of general and well-defined solutions that can be exploited in important industrial contexts in both Mexico and France. Through the strong interaction between industry, research centers and universities, LAFMIA allows to enrich the French-Mexican relationships in areas of interest for the French and European community, actively contributing especially for what concerns the innovation and the industrial development.
The members of LAFMIA also participate in Master and Doctoral programs both in Mexico and in France. They contribute to the education and development of high quality candidates that are often co-tutored by professors and researchers belonging to French and Mexican universities.
Research
The scientific project of the LAFMIA in computing science focuses on the following challenges: pervasive systems, information and services administration on heterogeneous devices and networks, server clusters on a worldwide scale (WWW, computational grids), and bio-inspired algorithms addressing optimization problems.
The scientific project on Automatic control concerns the following topics: autonomous driving vehicles; treatment and distribution of water; modeling and control of electromechanical systems; and vision systems for mobile robotics.