Initiatives in support of our research

AT CEA-LIST we encourage engagement with the academic research community and participation in basic and exploratory research. We believe this is an essential means of supporting our people in their research. France’s national Priority Research Programs and Infrastructures (PEPR) were created as part of the government’s France 2030 strategy. They focus on medium- and long-term research likely to lead to scientific breakthroughs. What makes these initiatives unique is that, in addition to providing the resources necessary for ambitious research, they are also building national communities around strategic research topics.

CEA-List is playing a major role in these national initiatives and is currently involved in nineteen of them in varying capacities, from contributing to or coordinating specific projects to leading entire PEPRs. We are also co-leading (with other large research organizations like CNRS, Inria, and ITM) two PEPRs particularly strategic to CEA-List’s research: one on AI and another on cloud computing. We are also either coordinating or contributing to several key projects as part of PEPRs on cybersecurity and on future networks. These projects encourage the formation of new partnerships, but they also foster cooperation between research organizations, which creates opportunities to exchange ideas and identify synergies around topics common to or related to several PEPRs.

National program agencies

The new National Program Agencies round out the PEPRs by delegating the implementation of research and innovation programs that respond to key economic challenges to leading research organizations. CEA-List is heavily involved in two National Program Agencies, one on architecture, systems, infrastructures, and components (led by the CEA) and one on algorithms, software, and use cases (led by Inria).

In 2025, these National Program Agencies initiated new industry-building programs to support France’s industrial competitiveness and sovereignty:

• CAMELIA is addressing high-performance, low-power components for AI. CEA-List and Inria are co-leading this program, which will build on the advances in frugal and Edge AI driven by the PEPR on artificial intelligence.
• Another program, PHOENIX, is developing sovereign systems for heterogeneous high-performance computing. PHOENIX is co-led by CEA-List and CNRS and will leverage microelectronics programs spanning technologies, architectures, and design environments.
• The EDT (Engineering Digital Twins) program will build a systems engineering platform for Digital Twins. In the area of AI evaluation and safety, CEA-List is making contributions to AI cybersecurity, the safety of AI-based systems, and controlling bias in generative AI.