It conducts research in the areas of speech processing, computer vision, information retrieval, biometric authentication, multimodal interaction and machine learning.

Its purpose was to investigate the application of artificial intelligence to human perception in general, and to recognition and analysis of patterns in particular.

In 1996, with the participation of the town of Martigny, the canton of Valais, the EPFL, the University of Geneva and Swisscom, it became a research foundation independent of the Dalle Molle foundation, and shortly after changed its name to Idiap Research Institute.

[4] Idiap is one of the four Swiss research organisations founded by the Dalle Molle foundation, of which three are in the field of artificial intelligence.

Idiap was home to the National Centre of Competence in Research IM2 project on "Interactive Multimodal Information Management".