French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) is a multidisciplinary French public research organization under the supervision of the Ministry of Higher Education, Research and Innovation. It is the main French research organization:

• Budget: 3.3 billion euros

• 33,000 researchers

• 1,144 laboratories in France and abroad

Scientific collaboration between CNRS and China dates back to the cooperation agreement between CNRS and the Chinese Academy of Sciences signed in October 1978, which closely followed the intergovernmental agreement on scientific cooperation between France and China (January 1978).

Since 1995, CNRS has set up an office in Beijing, currently housed on the premises of the French Embassy. This CNRS office covers China as well as Mongolia.

CNRS is the pioneer in terms of scientific cooperation between France and China. It implements about a hundred projects, including 29 structuring actions (laboratories/projects/international research networks). CNRS is involved in a majority of French Chinese co-publications.

Mr. Philippe Arnaud, CNRS China office director was welcomed at UTSEUS by Mr. LIU Wanyu (dean) and Mr. Marc Bondiou (French dean), and was able to present the development tools of CNRS international partnerships.

Conversely, the deans and a professor-researcher representative of UTSEUS were able to explain the structure of the institute and some of the research activities, in particular the French Chinese international research project "MétisLab", coordinated in China by Mr. LIU Wanyu.

"MétisLab" - Medical Engineering and Theory in Image and Signal Laboratory - is a French-Chinese research project in the field of medical image processing,selected and supported by CNRS since 2014.

As an international research project labeled by CNRS, this project associates students, professors and researchers for a new time period 2019-2023:

• in France: several partners in Lyon (INSA, university and hospital)

• in China: several partners, Shanghai University as well as Harbin Institute of Technology (HIT) and Harbin Medical University.

During its 1st stage 2014-2018, MétisLab has reached the achievement of 7 PhD theses, 16 co-publications and 13 conference papers.

Mr. Fabien Pfaender, professor-researcher at UTSEUS, presented his work in the field of data science applied to complex urban systems: (1) strategy and methods for collecting massive heterogeneous urban data (texts, traces of movement, transportation, cartographic data or images, especially satellite images); (2) systematic representation of cities in the form of street graphs enriched with the collected data; (3) analysis, comparison and modeling of urban systems from complex graphs; (4) collaborative interdisciplinary applications (sociology, urban planning, logistics, etc.) for knowing better cities founded in a Sino-European framework.

Other areas of research currently under development at UTSEUS have also been mentioned: cyber-physical systems, nanophotonics, steels and additive manufacturing.

In June 2018, Mr. Antoine Petit, CEO of CNRS, who accompanied Mrs. Frédéric Vidal, Minister of Higher Education, Research and Innovation, have visited UTSEUS.

Meeting of French Chinese institutes at UTSEUS on June 18, 2018

(Mrs. Frédérique Vidal, Minister of Higher Education, Research and Innovation in the center, M. Antoine Petit, CEO of CNRS in the 1st row, 2nd from the left)