Section: Bilateral Contracts and Grants with Industry
Bilateral Contracts with Industry
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Participants: E. Bourrand, L. Galárraga, E. Fromont, A. Termier
Context. AdvisorSLA is a French company headquartered in Cesson-Sévigné, a city located in the outskirts of Rennes in Brittany. The company is specialized in software solutions for network monitoring. For this purpose, the company relies on techniques of network metrology. AdvisorSLA's customers are carriers and telecommunications/data service providers that require to monitor the performance of their communication infrastructure as well as their QoE (quality of service). Network monitoring is of tremendous value for service providers because it is their primary tool for proper network maintenance. By continuously measuring the state of the network, monitoring solutions detect events (e.g., an overloaded router) that may degrade the network's operation and the quality of the services running on top of it (e.g., video transmission could become choppy). When a monitoring solution detects a potentially problematic sequence of events, it triggers an alarm so that the network manager can take actions. Those actions can be preventive or corrective. Some statistics gathered by the company show that only 40% of the triggered alarms are conclusive, that is, they manage to signal a well-understood problem that requires an action from the network manager. This means that the remaining 60% are presumably false alarms. While false alarms do not hinder network operation, they do incur an important cost in terms of human resources.
Objective. We propose to characterize conclusive and false alarms. This will be achieved by designing automatic methods to “learn” the conditions that most likely precede the fire of each type of alarm, and therefore predict whether the alarm will be conclusive or not. This can help adjust existing monitoring solutions in order to improve their accuracy. Besides, it can help network managers automatically trace the causes of a problem in the network. The aforementioned problem has an inherent temporal nature: we need to learn which events occur before an alarm and in which order. Moreover, metrology models take into account the measurements of different components and variables of the network such as latency and packet loss. For these two reasons, we resort to the field of multivariate time sequences and time series. The fact that we know the “symptoms” of an alarm and whether it is conclusive or not, allows for the application of supervised machine learning and pattern mining methods.
Additional remarks. This is a pre-doctoral contract signed with AdvisorSLA to start the work for the PhD of E. Bourrand (Thèse CIFRE) while the corresponding administrative formalities are completed.
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ATERMES 2018-2021 - Univ Rennes 1
Participants: H. Zhang, E. Fromont
Context. ATERMES is an international mid-sized company, based in Montigny-le-Bretonneux with a strong expertise in high technology and system integration from the upstream design to the long-life maintenance cycle. It has recently developed a new product, called BARIERTM (“Beacon Autonomous Reconnaissance Identification and Evaluation Response”), which provides operational and tactical solutions for mastering borders and areas. Once in place, the system allows for a continuous night and day surveillance mission with a small crew in the most unexpected rugged terrain. BARIER™ is expected to find ready application for temporary strategic site protection or ill-defined border regions in mountainous or remote terrain where fixed surveillance modes are impracticable or overly expensive to deploy.
Objective. The project aims at providing a deep learning architecture and algorithms able to detect anomalies (mainly the presence of people or animals) from multimodal data. The data are considered “multimodal” because information about the same phenomenon can be acquired from different types of detectors, at different conditions, in multiple experiments, etc. Among possible sources of data available, ATERMES provides Doppler Radar, active-pixel sensor data (CMOS), different kind of infra-red data, the border context etc. The problem can be either supervised (if label of objects to detect are provided) or unsupervised (if only times series coming from the different sensors are available). Both the multimodal aspect and the anomaly detection one are difficult but interesting topics for which there exist few available works (that take both into account) in deep learning.
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Participants: E. Fromont, A. Termier, L. Rozé, G. Martin
Context. Peugeot-Citroën (PSA) group aims at improving the management of its car sharing service. To optimize its fleet and the availability of the cars throughout the city, PSA needs to analyze the trajectory of its cars.
Objective. The aim of the internship is (1) to survey the existing methods to tackle the aforementioned need faced by PSA and (2) to also investigate how the techniques developed in LACODAM (e.g., emerging pattern mining) could be serve this purpose. A framework, consisting of three main modules, has been developped. We describe the modules in the following.
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A town modelisation module with clustering. Similar towns are clustered in order to reuse information from one town in other towns.
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A reallocation strategy module (choices on how to relocate cars so that the most requested areas are always served). The aim of this module is to be able to test different strategies.
Additional remarks. This is a pre-doctoral contract to start the work for the PhD of G. Martin (Thèse CIFRE) while the corresponding administrative formalities are completed.
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