Section: New Results

Highlights of the Year

The Internet of Things: A new equipments of excellence

Inaugurated last autumn, the very large scale IoT-LAB platform (https://www.iot-lab.info ) is strengthening the capabilities of the FIT equipment of excellence dedicated to the Internet of Things. Offering a unique wide-ranging collection of equipment, these laboratories are available to both researchers and commercial companies alike.

IoT-LAB is a large-scale experimental platform for communicating objects and networks of sensors. It enables the rapid deployment of experiments and the collection of large amounts of data. It includes over 2700 sensor nodes, distributed over six sites in France, offering a wide range of different processor architectures and radio components. IoT-LAB is available for use on line. It is already used by over 300 users in forty countries, including around ten commercial companies. As of the end of October 2014, some 10 000 experiments had already been carried out.

Graph-based signal processing

Our first results towards the definition of a digital framework for signal processing on graphs constitutes an important outcome of DANTE's activity in 2014. Our participation to this emerging discipline was marked with several scientific recognitions: publication in the main DSP conference [14] , involvement in the first ANR project focusing on this theme and retained for funding (2015-2019), we are in charge of the organisation of a Special Session dedicated to “Methodologies for signal processing on graphs" at Eusipco conference (2015).

Complex contagion process

Diffusion of innovation can be interpreted as a social spreading phenomena governed by the impact of media and social interactions. Although these mechanisms have been identified by quantitative theories, their role and relative importance are not entirely understood, since empirical verification has so far been hindered by the lack of appropriate data. Here we analyse a dataset recording the spreading dynamics of the world's largest Voice over Internet Protocol service to empirically support the assumptions behind models of social contagion. We show that the rate of spontaneous service adoption is constant, the probability of adoption via social influence is linearly proportional to the fraction of adopting neighbors, and the rate of service termination is time-invariant and independent of the behavior of peers. By implementing the detected diffusion mechanisms into a dynamical agent-based model, we are able to emulate the adoption dynamics of the service in several countries worldwide. This approach enables us to make medium-term predictions of service adoption and disclose dependencies between the dynamics of innovation spreading and the socioeconomic development of a country. This work was recently published in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface.