Section: Research Program

Research Program

Our research programs is structured into three complementary research axis : models, languages and systems, allowing us to develop our multi-disciplinary approach while validating each progress in the related specific fields of computer science ranging among computer music, multi-modal system design, reactive and real-time programing, typed functional programming, formal languages, graph representation theory, applied algebra, logic in computer science, etc.

Inverse semigroup theory has recently been shown [13], [7], [12] [20] to unify most string-based, tree-based or even graph-based modeling approaches. It thus provides a consistent and robust mathematical framework to model the sequential, parallel and reactive aspects of temporal media. Developing the mathematical foundations of our proposal amounts to:

• studying the combinatorial and algorithmic properties of the emerging algebra-based model of structured temporal media,

• developing formal techniques and tools for expressing and verifying properties of temporal media programs especially with a view towards capturing temporal media programing by constraint satisfaction approaches,

• deriving from the known generators of these models adequate sets of application-oriented modeling functions.

Functional programming is the key link between well-defined mathematical structures and their computerized realizations. Based on functional programming frameworks such as Haskell (See  [31] for an historical presentation of the Haskell programming language.), we are prototyping a Domain Specific Language (DSL) [10] [15] dedicated to the programming of interactive temporal media programming. In this research axis, we aim more specifically at

• designing a robust and modular software architecture that allows to reuse existing pieces of software as well as simply combining them together with new ones,

• defining and implementing a DSL for programming interactive multimedia systems via a simple algebra-based high-level and multi-scale control and combination layer,

• finding the right balance between generic views of temporal media when seen as abstract temporal frames and their specializations when representing concrete gestures, sound, audio, videos, animations, etc.

• developing a robust and mathematically well-founded representation of systems and of their behaviors, both programmatic and visual,

• developing and evaluating the adequacy of the GUI induced by this representation when used by artists,

• relating the new models with more classical models of music formalisms and, beyond, other temporal media such as animations, videos, etc.