Section: Partnerships and Cooperations

National Initiatives

Equipex FIT (Futur Internet of Things)

Participant : Éric Fleury [correspondant] .

FIT was one of 52 winning projects in the Equipex research grant program. It will set up a competitive and innovative experimental facility that brings France to the forefront of Future Internet research. FIT benefits from 5.8 million euro grant from the French government Running from 22.02.11 – 31.12.2019. The main ambition is to create a first-class facility to promote experimentally driven research and to facilitate the emergence of the Internet of the future.

ANR GRAPHSIP (Graph Signal Processing)

Participants : Paulo Gonçalves [correspondant] , Éric Fleury, Thomas Begin, Mikhail Tsitsvero.

Duration of the project: October 2014 - October 2018.

An increasing number of application areas require the processing of massive datasets. These data can often be represented by graphs in order to encode complex interactions. When data vectors are associated with graph vertices, a so-called graph signal is obtained. The processing of such graph signals includes several open challenges because of the nature of the involved information. Indeed graph theory and signal and image processing methodologies do not combine readily. In particular, such a combination requires new developments, allowing classical signal processing methods to work on irregular grids and non Euclidean spaces. Considering the significant success of classical signal processing tools, it appears essential to generalise their use to graph signals. The GRAPHSIP project aims at developing a set of advanced methods and algorithms for the processing of graph signals: multi-scale transforms and solutions of variational problems on graphs. The major outcomes of this project are expected to lead to significant breakthroughs for graph data processing. The project will also focus on two novel applications on instances of graph signals: brain networks and 3D colour point clouds. They will exemplify and illustrate the proposed methodological advances on emerging applications.

ANR SoSweet

Participants : Jean Pierre Chevrot, Éric Fleury, Márton Karsai [correspondant] , Jean-Philippe Magué [PI] .

Duration of the project: November 2015 - November 2019.

The SoSweet project focuses on the synchronic variation and the diachronic evolution of the variety of French used on Twitter. The recent rise of novel digital services opens up new areas of expression which support new linguistic behaviours. In particular, social medias such as Twitter provide channels of communication through which speakers/writers use their language in ways that differ from standard written and oral forms. The result is the emergence of new varieties of languages. The main goal of SoSweet is to provide a detailed account of the links between linguistic variation and social structure in Twitter, both synchronically and diachronically. Through this specific example, and aware of its bias, we aim at providing a more detailed understanding of the dynamic links between individuals, social structure and language variation and change.

ANR DylNet

Participants : Márton Karsai [correspondant] , Jean Pierre Chevrot, Jean-Philippe Magué, Éric Fleury.

Duration of the project: September 2016 - September 2020.

The DylNet project aims to observe and to characterise the relationships between childhood sociability and oral-language learning at kindergarten. With a view to this, it takes an multidisciplinary approach combining work on language acquisition, sociolinguistics, and network science. It will be implemented by following all the children ($\approx 220$) and teaching staff in one kindergarten over a 3-year period. The use of wireless proximity sensors will enable collection of social contacts throughout the study. The data on sociability will be linked to the results of language tests and recordings of verbal interactions used to follow the children's progress on both a psycholinguistic level (lexicon, syntax, pragmatics) and a sociolinguistic level (features showing belonging to a social group). The aim is to better understand the mechanisms of adaptation and integration at work when young children first come into contact with the school context.

Inria PRE LIAISON

Participants : Márton Karsai [correspondant] , Éric Fleury.

Duration of the project: November 2017 - December 2019.

This project implements unsupervised deep learning approaches to infer correlations/patterns that exist between dynamic linguistic variables, the mesoscopic and dynamic structure of the social network, and their socio-economic attributes. This interdisciplinary project is positioned at the crossroads of Natural Language Processing (NLP), Network Science, Data Science and Machine Learning.

More precisely, we develop a joint feature-network embedding, named AN2VEC (Attributed Network to Vector), which ultimately aims at disentangling the information shared by the structure of a network and the features of its nodes. Building on the recent developments of Graph Convolutional Networks (GCN), we use a multitask GCN Variational Autoencoder where different dimensions of the generated embeddings can be dedicated to encoding feature information, network structure, or shared feature-network information separately. This method thus defines a range of models whose performance in embedding a given data set varies depending with the allocation of dimensions. By exploring the behaviour of these models on synthetic data sets having different levels of feature-network correlation, we show (i) that embeddings relying on shared information perform better than the corresponding reference with unshared information, and (ii) that this performance gap increases with the correlation between network and feature structure, thus confirming that our embedding is able to capture joint information of structure and features.

Inria & HCERES

Participants : Éric Guichard [correspondant] , Éric Fleury.

Bilateral project on the evolution of the Multi/inter-disciplinary of SHS.

An increasing number of researchers in SHS has the desire to develop new researches with computer scientists or mathematicians because they want to apply new methodologies (according to various or numerous data) or to develop older ones, which can now be easily implemented online. Some also develop a reflexion on their discipline, with the idea that epistemological questions are revitalized by the internet. This reality invite them to discuss with philosophers or with other SHS scientists who have the same intuition (eg: cartography, visualisation).

The project is hence to measure these new forms or inter-multi-disciplinarity. The main source will be the publications of all academics of French SHS laboratories, to find out who writes a paper with somebody of a different discipline and/or laboratories. All data are anonymized,

Inria IPL BetterNet

Participant : Éric Guichard.

An Observatory to Measure and Improve Internet Service Access from User Experience (https://www.inria.fr/en/research/research-teams/inria-project-labs).

BetterNet aims at building and delivering a scientific and technical collaborative observatory to measure and improve the Internet service access as perceived by users. In this Inria Project Lab, we will propose new original user-centered measurement methods, which will associate social sciences to better understand Internet usage and the quality of services and networks with a particular focus on geography and cartography.