Section: Research Program

Introduction

Our goal is to address technological issues as well as investigate their impact on society. We believe that addressing both directions simultaneously is essential. More precisely, we focus on the following two objectives:

• Technologies for global intermediation platforms, at reach for unbounded number of users;

• Trans-disciplinary investigations on the global impact of the new intermediation means.

We focus on intermediation platforms, for their increasingly fundamental role in our societies. Intermediation platforms are online systems which offer services to their users, which are well-tuned with their expectation, thanks to the knowledge the platform has accumulated on usage. Search engines and social networks are fundamental examples of intermediation platforms. More generally, intermediation platforms intermediate between producers of services and consumers of services in two-sided markets, with generally one side subsidizing the other. Intermediation will generalise beyond people to things, such as producers or consumers of energy for instance. The capacity to intermediate "in the cloud" with no presence in the physical world in which the market is deployed, by working purely on data with algorithms and in particular learning techniques, is at the heart of the revolution which reshapes our societies.

Platforms ensure a gatekeeping function, always in direct contact with their users, providing them with the most relevant information or contact. They also generate an ecosystem. To do so, platforms allow existing industries as well as new applications proposed by developers to build new services on top of their API. Their impact goes far beyond the Web, while they disrupt step by step all sectors of the economy, transportation, press, education, to name a few.

So far as computer science is concerned, we focus on the technologies used for intermediation, which are at the basis of the largest existing online systems. For the transdisciplinary questions, we focus mostly on the new equilibria that is resulting from the evolution of power balances due mostly to intermediation platforms.