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On July 12, 2018, the opening ceremony for the University of Lille Satellite Office at Shinshu University was held at the Faculty of Engineering, Nagano Campus. This Satellite Office serves as Lille University's first office in Asia and aims to further enhance international academic exchange activities.

Prior to the ceremony, the representatives from both universities, including Vice President Francois-Olivier SEYS of the University of Lille and Mr. Jean-Christophe AUFFRAY, the Science and Technology Counselor of the French Embassy in Tokyo, and Shinshu University President HAMADA Kunihiro and Vice President TANAKA Kiyoshi (International Exchange Office), conducted a meeting in which they discussed the results of the collaboration and expressed the strong wish to strengthen our future partnership.

Thereafter, the Satellite Office nameplate was set up under the applause of the guests. The University of Lille Vice President SEYS expressed his intention to further strengthen the collaboration with Shinshu University by saying, "In addition to collaborative research in the field of computational intelligence, we will dispatch students in a wide range of fields such as business & economics and information technology, and we would like to increase the number of students from Shinshu University." Mr. AUFFRAY, from the French Embassy, emphasized that "It is important for France to collaborate with Japan and I am very much looking forward to the initiatives taken by both universities."

In February 2014 Shinshu University and the University of Lille established the International Academic Exchange Agreement and since then both universities have been working on an international collaborative research and education program centered on Computational Intelligence (CI). In this framework, the 1st International Workshop on Computational Intelligence was conducted by the International Collaboration Laboratory (LIA-MODO), a collaborative research association, established in July 2017.

The establishment of this Satellite Office is a further step to meet the high expectations towards the two Universities' collaboration in the future.