 In 1980, when I was younger than now, what we did to solve this kind of problem was to write a Fortran program, this kind of Fortran program, okay? So we write by hand the program, we have to punch cards and to put them in the computer and it was a very cumbersome work, but it was the way we did it. Fortran program, you know, Fortran is a very old language. But what happens is that after 1980, there is a revolution in numerical computation. It was possible for people to write X equal, this simple equation like you write it by hand by using an interpreter that was in interface between the libraries, numerical libraries, and the user. And this was made by people making a program called MATLAB. At this time, MATLAB was written in Fortran and it was a domain public program, completely free, more than free. At the same time, in reality, the French research institute for computer science and control, government institute in France, at the same time in 1980, based on this domain public MATLAB program was made another kind of program called BLEZ, then called BASIL, then sold by a subsidiary of DINRIA. And I'm explaining that to tell you that the reason why SILAB is so close to MATLAB is that SILAB is based on the original MATLAB. So the philosophy, so the programming language, so everything is very close. But time after time, they separate. So what happens to this kind of program is that it didn't work very well. It was not very well selling BASIL and the other software like that because time after time, all the other software died because MATLAB change was written in C and it began a proprietary program and a very good one and all the other died. So this BLEZ, then BASIL program came back to INRIA in 1990 and people from INRIA were wondering what do we do with that? There is now a standard called MATLAB. MATLAB is used by everybody and so if you sell SILAB, we are not going to sell one SILAB. So the idea was in 1994 to give it to the world and to everybody. You can see that in 1994, it's the beginning of what we call free and open source program. It was only the beginning, so we put it for free on the Internet. So what is the situation today? I'm talking about software for scientific numerical computation. This kind of software, not specialized software. I'm not talking about software specialized in statistics, in finite elements, in mechanics, but all purpose numerical computation. These kinds of software are used everywhere today, in universities and in companies and the situation now is very simple. There is only one such kind of program. It's called MATLAB, it's not free, it's proprietary and it's very, very expensive. So we propose an alternative, an alternative is SILAB-psychos, MATLAB Simulink, SILAB-psychos, which is free, free of charge and open source since 1994. So I wanted to tell you this small story to explain why SILAB exists now. We thought that the only way for us to survive was to give SILAB. So now I will present the structure around SILAB and around SILAB-psychos, which is we call it an open source numerical computation platform. So I will speak about SILAB consortium, the structure around SILAB, a little about SILAB software very briefly because my colleague will speak a lot about the software. The results, is there any results and a very small conclusion. The problem is that we need to ensure a future for the software. A software cannot rely only on a few people in a research institute. And what people wanted is to have development know who is developing the software, is there maintenance, is there assistance, promotion and so on. So the only way to do that was to ensure the future is to group people around SILAB. So to group academics and companies. And to make all the other kind of job, we need to make a team. And at this time of the story, I need to speak about a very bad thing. And this bad thing, I'm sorry, is money. So we need to have money. We need to have funding. Because we need to have a team dedicated completely to the development of SILAB software. For that, we need to hire people. So hiring people means we need to pay them because people need to drink, need to eat. So the fantasy is saying that you can make software like this without paying anybody and without no money is not true. I'm sorry, we need money. And the money for making the team came from the companies and the academics around SILAB and by INRIA. For what doing this? Because our software is open source. Our software is free of charge. It's given like this. But we want that this software be a professional software, like any kind of other software that you can pay. And for that, we need to have a high quality and professional open source software. It's the reason why we wanted to have a team, a dedicated team, to develop and take in charge this software. So we can say that today SILAB is a professional software. But it's free of charge and open source. So the construction was created in 2003 with 10 members. And now it has 25 members. All the members give money in order to hire people in the team to make promotions and so on. You can see here that there are many French companies, a few German, Switzerland, and Italian companies, and European one. Carmakers like Peugeot and Renault, you can see also very big company like EADS with the European construction making Airbus, for instance. The CNES, which is the National Institute for Rockets, Ariane. EDF, French company for electricity. Thales, the defense company. And another company, very big and very small also, that are part of SILAB construction. This is very important because we can see here that SILAB is mainly used like MATLAB in company making cars, making planes, making rockets, in defense, and in energy. All these kind of domains use a lot software like MATLAB and SILAB. So who is in charge of SILAB today? So the key players of SILAB, first, is INRIA. Because INRIA hosts SILAB consortium. It's a legal responsibility. The SILAB consortium is not a legal entity. It's INRIA today. And it gives a lot of money. It funds five positions in the team. And then the funding of SILAB consortium, where companies give money. People say, why giving money to have a free software? Because everybody can go on the internet and get SILAB. So why am I going, me, to give money for that? Because I can take it for free. It's a very interesting question, very hard to answer. The only answer we found is, OK, you don't want to get money, so there is no SILAB. So if you want to have an alternative to MATLAB, if you want to have a software, a high quality software, compared to MATLAB, you need to give money. And more than that, you will be in charge of the future of SILAB. So today, the SILAB is taken in charge by SILAB consortium, not INRIA, not researcher. SILAB consortium decides about the future of SILAB, the future of development, and so on. So there is a team I was talking about. This team, with the help of external developers, has 10 people today in the team. It's not enough. We hope to have more people in the future, and I think that we have more 12 or 13 very soon. So this is the team at INRIA Rock & Core, making SILAB today. This team deals of the kernel of SILAB. What I am talking about kernel is the SILAB you get on the internet. It's a very big kernel, because there are a lot of functionalities. But in fact, it's not all the kind of toolboxes you can find in the world or in any domain. We are not competent to do that, so we only take in charge this big kernel. We call SILAB. And I'm talking about this big kernel, so we have also a lot of contribution. And we need to have a lot of toolboxes in the future. We already have, but we need to have more. And for that, you can play a role in SILAB. So very simple thing. How can you use SILAB? SILAB is very easy to use. I use SILAB for making additions and multiplications like a super calculator, because it's very easy to do. You can also use it as a calculation engine. You have your software, you put SILAB in it, and you use SILAB in the software to make computations. You don't even see SILAB anymore, but you use it. And you can make toolboxes. So the advantage of a software like MATLAB is that when you use SILAB, you use all the functionalities of SILAB. There are 1,400 functions in SILAB. You can use them. And you have free language, very simple to use, very simple to use for engineers. It's a language made for making matrix computations. I think that is an awful language for computer scientists, but we don't care. It's very easy to use. And you have the interpreter. So if it is simple to make things like that in SILAB, imagine that you made your own algorithms or in any domain in C program. And you want to give it to the world. A very simple way to do is to make it as a toolbox and you use the SILAB vector to be used in the world. But all I say here can be said also for MATLAB. But now there is a difference. And the difference is the fact that SILAB is open source and SILAB is for charge. This is that if you develop a big software based on MATLAB and you distribute it on every computer, when you put your software, you need to have MATLAB. So you need to pay for it. With SILAB, you don't need because it's free. As SILAB is open source and there is a functionality or something you don't like or you want to change or you want to add, you can modify SILAB channel. For instance, add data type or things like that. And you have the complete control of the software because we have a source. In domain like defense or military domains, it's very important not to be dependent on a black box. You don't know what is in the black box and you are completely linked, bound to the proprietary of a software. I told you Broad Spectrum works under every kind of computer and it came with already a large number of toolboxes for making graphics, for making simulation, for making control optimizations, signal processing, statistics and so on. And you already have a number of functions in SILAB when you get it. So Sycos, you know that Simulink in MATLAB, we have Sycos in SILAB. Ramin, we'll talk about Sycos later, but it's very important because this is a software that is used a lot with car makers and plane makers and so on. They are able to model and to simulate all the kinds of physics and dynamic physics of a car or a plane using Sycos or Simulink. The latest SILAB version is the SILAB 4.1 from December 2006. Well, what is important in this latest version is the Windows version first that is improved and works now very fast and very well. The graphics that is now completely mature, you know, at the beginning in 2003, we had an old graphics and we changed it completely. It took us a long time to do that because it was very complicated to do. And now we have a graphic with objects where we can access the property of each part of the object in the graphics. And we have also a graphics editor which allows when you have a graphics to change interactively all of the parts of a graphics. And I told you that our SILAB language is very similar to MATLAB language, but it's not exactly the same. There is a difference of syntax and semantics. So what we did is that we made a lot of very easy to use functions for graphics that are exactly the same as MATLAB function, like plot, like surf, like bar, like pi, and so on. So for people using MATLAB, it's very simple to use graphics in SILAB because it's exactly for the very important function is exactly the same syntax and semantics as in MATLAB. And you should know that more than 70% of people using MATLAB in the world only get data and make visual ingestion by using graphics. So this is very important to do that. The problem with SILAB is that we don't sell anything. So we don't have a list of customers. So the only way to know if SILAB is used is to see how many people are downloading SILAB from our website. I know that a lot of people say that this has no meaning because we don't know what people do with SILAB or with the software that they download. But we can see that since 2003 to now, there is a growth of downloading of SILAB, which is very regular. And now we are about 23,000 downloads each month from our website. We can see here the percentage of versions of SILAB download. For instance, what is very interesting to see is that the version 4.0 and 4.1 is more than 40%. So this means that there is a growth very important of the downloads of SILAB. We also have a website. Our website is visited by a lot of people in the world, is www.silab.org. And now we have more than 2,000 distinct visitors a day. Well, I told you that SILAB comes from French, but other people are using SILAB in the world. First, France is part of the world. So SILAB is used a lot in France by universities, by companies in SILAB consumption. And we have many programs funded by French government where we participate with giving us money to the development of SILAB. In Europe, SILAB is used by companies and also used by an important project, European-funded project. I will say just a few words because it would be important for the future. This project is called ARTIS and is for embedded system. It's a very important, it's the biggest project in embedded system for Europe. And what is interesting is that in this project, we will do a very interesting thing, which is the generation of C codes from SILAB programs. You write a SILAB program and we will be able to generate C codes. But not a C code with the interpreter of SILAB or very big things, but a very simple and standalone C code with a minimum number of functions of libraries needed for it. This is very important because this can be used to put the code in a chip, in FPGA or in a processor. So you write this in SILAB because it's easier to write this in SILAB than in C and you generate C codes very small directly in the processor. This is the beginning of we already worked in this project a few months ago and I think we will have the first version at the end of this year. MATLAB is not able to do that. We go to China since 2001 and what we do in China is numerous conferences about SILAB and since 2002, a contest. This is the yearly SILAB contest where students in China can make a toolbox for SILAB. And it's a way for SILAB to be known in China. In China, the situation is different I think than other countries because in 2001, nobody knew about SILAB in China. So since 2002, there is a SILAB early contest. In 2005, SILAB is used in secondary schools for making in mathematics, for statistics, for algorithm. And we discussed at the beginning of this year to create a partner consortium in China, a partner of SILAB consortium. Since 2006, we are doing the same thing in Japan, collaboration with institutes and the SILAB contest in Japan. It was held in 2006 and it is in 2007 now. India is the beginning, I think, of a very big story. And we have North America with collaboration with National Instruments. National Instruments, the company will sell cards for getting data from sensors and get them on a PC. And then they sell a software called LabView. This LabView software is able to get the data and to treat them. But they don't have the full power of a software like SILAB. So we collaborate with them in order to have an interface between LabView and SILAB. LabView is a software used everywhere in the world. So if people need in the future to make computation, they will show SILAB because of the interface. And it's free. We are also involved with National Instruments and other companies in what we called the Numerical Mathematic Consortium. This Numerical Mathematic Consortium is a consortium for the standardization of the semantics of the mathematical function for numerical computation. When you use MATLAB, SILAB, Mathematica, MathCAD, and every time the semantics is not the same. So the idea is to change this. We also have many contribution now of people making contribution for SILAB. I don't want to go into all the items, but you should know that now a lot of people think about, ah, I made my algorithms. Why not put them into SILAB? And in SILAB website, we have also a lot of toolboxes that you can download. Conclusion, I would like to say that since 2003, SILAB is a success because now people, in academics people, and also industry, think that SILAB is a real professional product that can use it as any kind of product. And that a lot of people using SILAB in the world. But a lot of work has to be done. We need to continue to improve SILAB, to improve the interface, to improve the documentation, to improve the numerical algorithms into SILAB. You need also to have a lot of contribution for SILAB in every domain. One difference between MATLAB and SILAB is that MATLAB has a lot of toolboxes in every domain. SILAB has not enough. And we need to continue to do the promotion for SILAB, like we are doing this in India, for instance. So to conclude, what we need is your help to help us adding new functionality, adding new toolboxes, and using SILAB. I think that is the only way for us to succeed and to make SILAB the most used numerical software in the world.