ANR project Involved

Participants : Amr Al-Zouhri Al-Yafi, Patrick Reignier [correspondant] .

The partners are G-SCOP, LIG (Prima, IIHM), CEA Liten, PACTE, Vesta Systems and Elithis.

The project focuses on bringing solutions to building actors for upcoming challenges in energy management in residential buildings. Many technical solutions have been proposed so far, but without sufficiently considering sufficiently actors as key. It is generally considered that energy management can be done by measurement and computation means with few contributions of actors. The project explores a new paradigm: a user centric energy management system, where user needs and tacit knowledge drive the search of solutions. These are calculated thanks to a flexible energy model of the living areas. The system is personified by energy consultants with which building actors such as building owners, building managers, technical operators but also occupants, can interact with in order to co-define energy strategies, benefiting of both assets: tacit knowledge of human actors, and measurement with computation capabilities of calculators. Putting actors in the loop, i.e. making energy not only visible but also controllable is the needed step before large deployment of energy management solutions. It is proposed to develop interactive energy consultants for all the actors, which are energy management aided systems embedding models in order to support the decision making processes. MIRROR (interactive monitoring), WHAT-IF (interactive quantitative simulation), EXPLAIN (interactive qualitative simulation), SUGGEST-AND-ADJUST (interactive management) and RECOMMEND (interactive diagnosis) functionalities will be developed.

ANR Project CEEGE

CEEGE is a multidisciplinary scientific research project conducted by the Inria PRIMA team in cooperation with the Dept of Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Bielefeld. The primary impacts will be improved scientific understanding in the disciplines of Computer Science and Cognitive Neuro-Science. The aim of this project is to experimentally evaluate and compare current theories for mental modeling for problem solving and attention, as well as to refine and evaluate techniques for observing the physiological reactions of humans to situation that inspire pleasure, displeasure, arousal, dominance and fear.

In this project, we will observe the visual attention, physiological responses and mental states of subject with different levels of expertise solving classic chess problems, and participating in chess matches. We will observe chess players using eye-tracking, sustained and instantaneous face-expressions (micro-expressions), skin conductivity, blood flow (BVP), respiration, posture and other information extracted from audio-visual recordings and sensor readings of players. We will use the recorded information to estimate the mental constructs with which the players understand the game situation. Information from visual attention as well as physiological reactions will be used to determine and model the degree to which a player understands the game situation in terms of abstract configurations of chess pieces. This will provided a structured environment that we will use for experimental evaluation of current theories of mental modelling and emotional response during problem solving and social interaction.

The project is organised in three phases. During the first phase, we will observe individual players of different levels of chess expertise solving known chess problems. We will correlate scan-path from eye tracking and other information about visual attention to established configurations of pieces and known solutions to chess problems. This will allow us to construct a labeled corpus of chess play that can be used to evaluate competing techniques for estimating mental models and physiological responses. In a second phase, we will observe the attention and face expressions of pairs of players of different levels of chess ability during game play. In particular, we will seek to annotate and segment recordings with respect to the difficulty of the game situation as well as situations which elicit particularly strong physiological reactions. In the final phase, we will use these recordings to evaluate the effectiveness of competing techniques for mental modelling and observation of emotions in terms of their abilities to predict the chess abilities of players, game outcomes and individual moves and player self reports. . Results of our work will be published in scientific conferences and journals concerned with cognitive science and cognitive neuroscience as well as computer vision, multi-modal interaction, affective computing and pervasive computing. Possible applications include construction of systems that can monitor the cognitive abilities and emotional reactions of users of interactive systems to provide assistance that is appropriate but not excessive, companion systems that can aid with active healthy ageing, and tutoring systems that can assist users in developing skills in a variety of domains including chess.

EquipEx AmiQual4Home - Ambient Intelligence for Quality of Life

Participants : Stanislaw Borkowski, Sabine Coquillart, Joelle Coutaz, James Crowley [correspondant] , Alexandre Demeure, Thierry Fraichard, Amaury Negre, Patrick Reignier, Dominique Vaufreydaz, Nicolas Bonnefond, Remi Pincent.

Ambient Intelligence, Equipment d'Excellence, Investissement d'Avenir

The AmiQual4Home Innovation Factory is an open research facility for innovation and experimentation with human-centered services based on the use of large-scale deployment of interconnected digital devices capable of perception, action, interaction and communication. The Innovation Factory is composed of a collection of workshops for rapid creation of prototypes, surrounded by a collection of living labs and supported by a industrial innovation and transfer service. Creation of the Innovation Factory has been made possible by a 2.140 Million Euro grant from French National programme "Investissement d'avenir", together with substantial contributions of resources by Grenoble INP, Univ Joseph Fourier, UPMF, CNRS, Schneider Electric and the Commune of Montbonnot. The objective is to provide the academic and industrial communities with an open platform to enable research on design, integration and evaluation of systems and services for smart habitats.

The AmiQual4Home Innovation Factory is a unique combination of three different innovation instruments: (1) Workshops for rapid prototyping of devices that embed perception, action, interaction and communication in ordinary objects based on the MIT FabLab model, (2) Facilities for real-world test and evaluation of devices and services organised as open Living Labs, (3) Resources for assisting students, researchers, entrepreneurs and industrial partners in creating new economic activities. The proposed research facility will enable scientific research on these problems while also enabling design and evaluation of new forms of products and services with local industry.

The core of the AmiQual4Home Innovation Factory is a Creativity Lab composed of a collection of five workshops for the rapid prototyping of devices that integrate perception, action, interaction and communications into ordinary objects. The Creativity Lab is surrounded by a collection of six Living Labs for experimentation and evaluation in real world conditions. The combination of fabrication facilities and living labs will enable students, researchers, engineers, and entrepreneurs to experiment in co-creation and evaluation. The AmiQual4Home Innovation Factory will also include an innovation and transfer service to enable students, researchers and local entrepreneurs to create and grow new commercial activities based on the confluence of digital technologies with ordinary objects. The AmiQual4Home Innovation Factory will also provide an infrastructure for participation in education, innovation and research activities of the European Institute of Technology (EIT) KIC ICTLabs.

The AmiQual4Home Innovation Factory enables a unique new form of coordinated ICT-SHS research that is not currently possible in France, by bringing together expertise from ICT and SHS to better understand human and social behaviour and to develop and evaluate novel systems and services for societal challenges. The confrontation of solutions from these different disciplines in a set of application domains (energy, comfort, cost of living, mobility, well-being) is expected to lead to the emergence of a common, generic foundation for Ambient Intelligence that can then be applied to other domains and locations. The initial multidisciplinary consortium will progressively develop interdisciplinary expertise with new concepts, theories, tools and methods for Ambient Intelligence.

IRT Silver Economy

IRT Silver economy is a multi-year collaboration between the PRIMA team of Inria, Université Grenoble Alpes, CEA LETI and Schneider Electric to develop smart devices and services for healthy ageing. The project is funded by the IRT nanoelec and has begun during the final months of 2015.

Within this project, Inria PRIMA and Schneider Electric are have begun development of a smart LW infrared imaging sensor for fall detection. The target system would build on a embedded integrated sensor system constructed by PRIMA with Schneider electric in 2014 and 2015.

FUI PRAMAD

Participants : Maxime Portaz, Amaury Negre, Dominique Vaufreydaz [correspondant] .

Pramad is a collaborative project about Plateforme Robotique dÁssistance et de Maintien à Domicile. There are seven partners: