Section: Overall Objectives

Overall Objectives

The DICE team has been created in February 2013 as an "action exploratoire" of Inria to initiate multidisciplinary research on the economy of data resulting from the digital revolution and its impact on all sectors of our society including its political organization.

With the growth of Web 2.0 systems, social data has become a fundamental resource of the economy, much like raw materials. A resource, which is as essential as crude oil, and on which our societies now fully rely. Data is harvested and transformed by industries that grow at an unprecedented pace. Digital corporations offer extremely valuable services, which attract hundreds of millions of users. These corporations generate ecosystems, which become as essential as public utilities and support millions of developers. The new utilities also challenge societies by making obsolete fundamental aspects of their organization, and by generating new imbalances at global scale. At the heart of these changes, is the new capacity to intermediate on two-sided markets, purely in the cloud, that is without having any presence in the physical world were the interactions are taking place.

The objective of DICE is to study the complex dependencies between technological, social and economic systems of the digital age, and to propose technical contributions as well as socio-political analyses. We aim to further investigate the impact of the digital revolution on political systems, anticipated by the French philosopher Michel Serres as expressed in Inria's 2020 Plan. "if the vast volume of global data [$\cdots$] were to become accessible to as many people as possible [$\cdots$], such an event would be liable to put political institutions and the sciences that study them on a new path, perhaps more quickly than we expect." Michel Serres also insists on the role of computer scientists in studying this revolution and its social impact.

Our contributions target both technical and theoretical aspects of the economy of intermediation platforms. Such platforms are digital intermediaries between users and services. They work on a global scale.

Our aim is threefold:

• We study from technological as well as social, economic, political, and geopolitical points of view, the new ecosystems emerging from the services offered by platforms based on mediating social data, which are reshaping the very form of our organizations;

• We propose technological solutions that answer some of the challenges faced by our societies, such as the concentration of data, the resulting asymmetry of information, and the subsidiarity of computation, that could contribute to better distribute the knowledge among stakeholders;

• We contribute to improve the knowledge of the information society and its implications among specialists as well as non specialists, in the public opinion as well as at the political level.