Section: Overall Objectives

Presentation

AxIS is carrying out research in the area of Information and Knowledge Systems (ISs) with a special interest in evolving large ISs such as Web-based Information Systems. Our core goal is to provide knowledge, methods and tools to support better design, evaluation and usage in the digital world, i.e. to improve the overall quality of ISs, to ensure ease of use to end users and also to contribute to user-driven open innovation as a way to foster innovation,

Our researches are organized to support the disruptive process of continuous innovation in which design is never ended and relies on very short test-adapt-test cycles. According to the constant evolution of actual and future ISs, to reach this goal, it is necessary to involve the users in the design process and to empower them, so that they can become codesigners as co-creators of value. This is a new way to anticipate the usage and its analysis and also to consider maintenance very early in the design process.

To achieve such a research, we have set up in July 2003 a multidisciplinary team that involves people from different computer sciences domains (Data Mining & Analysis, Software Engineering) and from cognitive sciences domains (Ergonomics, Artificial Intelligence), all of them focusing on information systems. Our goal is of course to improve efficiency of data mining methods but also to improve the quality of results for knowledge discovery in information systems. The originality of AxIS project-team is to adopt a cognitive and inter-disciplinary approach for the whole KDD  (KDD: Knowledge Discovery From Databases.) process and for each step (preprocessing, data mining, interpretation).

To address this challenge, relying on our scientific foundations (see our 2007 activity report, Section Scientific Foundations), we had a first 4 years step dedicated to the design of methodological and technical building blocks for IS mining (usage, content and structure) mainly in Web mining. The next four years were dedicated to provide original methods in mining data streams and evolutive data in the context of Web but also in sensor based applications. The last third period, we are putting our main efforts in the sub-objective 3 related to methods and tools for designing and evaluating user experience and supporting user-oriented innovation. In this period a great effort concerns the dissemination of our methods and tools inside the FocusLab experimental platform whose goal is to support the analysis of individual and collective user experience.