Le Monde Informatique : November 26, 2004

Anniversary of C.I.D.

  Philippe Vincent (right), president of the C.I.D., accompanied by Jean-Marie Zemb, honorary professor at le Collège de France, opened the twenty fifth anniversary proceedings.

The « Centre de Hautes Etudes Internationales d'Informatique Documentaire (C.I.D.) » celebrated the 25th anniversary of its foundation on November 9, 2004, at the Institut de France. A prestigious place for this celebration but the association deserves such a setting to honour its work bring together documentalists, computer researchers and library users together to push forward progress computerized information retrieval.

For 25 years, the CID has organized symposia, seminars, debates, conferences, and working groups in France and abroad as well as producing an international congress named RIAO every three years. The CID is also produces studies and surveys for public or private societies in France or abroad. It also publishes the proceedings of seminars and conferences and a quarterly review since 1980.

In these last 25 years, the CID worked on many subjects involving using computers to find information, often well in advance of the appearance of new technologies. In 1980 it was already dealing with the problem of hypertext, shortly thereafter working on creating dynamic links. A little later, expert systems were applied to information retrieval. Then in 1991, meta-structures were added to the texts (providing the basis of language SGML which then morphed into XML). Later on, CID interested its community in subjects such as the multithematics analysis of long texts, treating several subjects, looking for the right part of the text.

In addition to surveying work achieved during these 25 years, the celebration paid tribute to the great men who participated in the C.I.D.: Etienne Wolff, member of the Academie Française, Académie des Sciences and also Académie de Médecine, also a well known specialist of embryology and a philosopher; André Lichnerowicz, professor of mathematics and physics and member of the Académie des Sciences, professor at the Collège de France; and Pierre Aigrain, former minister, member of the Académie des Sciences and one of the founder of the Académie des Technologies in Paris.

This association was not content to remember past glories. It also took the occasion to continue educating as Luc Devroye, professor at the McGill University in Montreal gave a brilliant conference on Random Tree Structures and their Application in Various Domains, domains among which are found algorithms such as those used by Google.

Bernard Lemaire
(translation by Gregory Grefenstette)