Section: Partnerships and Cooperations

National Initiatives

Labex Comin Labs projects

CominLabs is a Laboratoire d'Excellence funded by the PIA (Programme Investissements d'Avenir) in the broad area of telecommunications.

HEMISFER

Participant : Rémi Gribonval.

• Acronym: HYBRID (Hybrid Eeg-MrI and Simultaneous neuro-feedback for brain Rehabilitation)

• http://www.hemisfer.cominlabs.ueb.eu/

• Research axis: 3.1

• CominLabs partners : EPI VISAGES; EPI HYBRID; EPI PANAMA

• External partners : EA 4712 team from University of Rennes I; EPI ATHENA, Sophia-Antipolis;

• Coordinator: Christian Barillot, EPI VISAGES

• Description: The goal of HEMISFER is to make full use of neurofeedback paradigm in the context of rehabilitation and psychiatric disorders. The major breakthrough will come from the use of a coupling model associating functional and metabolic information from Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) to Electro-encephalography (EEG) to "enhance" the neurofeedback protocol. We propose to combine advanced instrumental devices (Hybrid EEG and MRI platforms), with new man-machine interface paradigms (Brain computer interface and serious gaming) and new computational models (source separation, sparse representations and machine learning) to provide novel therapeutic and neuro-rehabilitation paradigms in some of the major neurological and psychiatric disorders of the developmental and the aging brain (stroke, attention-deficit disorder, language disorders, treatment-resistant mood disorders, …).

• Contribution of PANAMA: PANAMA, in close cooperation with the VISAGES team, contributes to a coupling model between EEG and fMRI considered as a joint inverse problem addressed with sparse regularization. By combining both modalities, one expects to achieve a good reconstruction both in time and space. This new imaging technique will then be used for improving neurofeedback paradigms in the context of rehabilitation and psychiatric disorders, which is the final purpose of the HEMISFER project.

TEPN

Participant : Rémi Gribonval.

• Acronym: TEPN (Toward Energy Proportional Networks)

• http://www.tepn.cominlabs.ueb.eu/

• Research axis: 3.1

• CominLabs partners : IRISA OCIF - Telecom Bretagne; IETR SCN; IETR SCEE; EPI PANAMA

• Coordinator: Nicolas Montavont, IRISA OCIF - Telecom Bretagne

• Description: As in almost all areas of engineering in the past several decades, the design of computer and network systems has been aimed at delivering maximal performance without regarding to the energy efficiency or the percentage of resource utilization. The only places where this tendency was questioned were battery-operated devices (such as laptops and smartphones) for which the users accept limited (but reasonable) performance in exchange for longer use periods. Even though the end users make such decisions on a daily basis by checking their own devices, they have no way of minimizing their energy footprint (or conversely, optimize the network resource usage) in the supporting infrastructure. Thus, the current way of dimensioning and operating the infrastructure supporting the user services, such as cellular networks and data centers, is to dimension for peak usage. The problem with this approach is that usage is rarely at its peak. The overprovisioned systems are also aimed at delivering maximal performance, with energy efficiency being considered as something desired, but non-essential. This project aims at making the network energy consumption proportional to the actual charge of this network (in terms of number of served users, or requested bandwidth). An energy proportional network can be designed by taking intelligent decisions (based on various constraints and metrics) into the network such as switching on and off network components in order to adapt the energy consumption to the user needs. This concept can be summarized under the general term of Green Cognitive Network Approach.

• Contribution of PANAMA: PANAMA, in close cooperation with the SCEE team at IETR (thesis of Marwa Chafii), focuses on the design of new waveforms for multi carrier systems with reduced Peak to Average Power Ratio (PAPR).

ANR INVATE project with IRT b<>com France

Participants : Rémi Gribonval, Nancy Bertin, Mohamed Hafsati.

• Thesis on 3D audio scene decomposition for interactive navigation

• Duration: 3 years (2016-2019)

• Research axis: 3.2.2

• Partners: IRT b<>com, Inria-Rennes, IRISA

• Funding: ANR INVATE project (PIA)

The objective of this thesis is to develop tools to analyze audio scenes in order to identify, locate, and extract the sources present in the scene to re-spatialize them according to the user head orientation and the movement of the user in the targeted virtual scene.

OSEO-FUI: voiceHome

Participants : Nancy Bertin, Frédéric Bimbot, Romain Lebarbenchon, Ewen Camberlein.

• Duration: 3 years (2015-2017)

• Research axis: 3.2

• Partners: onMobile, Delta Dore, eSoftThings, Orange, Technicolor, LOUSTIC, Inria Nancy

• Coordinator: onMobile

• Description: The goal of the project is to design and implement a multi-channel voice interface for smart home and multimedia (set-top-box) appliances.

• Contributions of PANAMA are focused on (i) audio activity monitoring and wake-up word detection and (ii) audio source localization and separation. In both cases, the issue of energy frugality is central and strongly constrains the available resources. We expect from this cooperation to make progress towards operational low-resource audio source separation schemes and we intend to investigate compressive sensing for the characterization of audio and voice activity.