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Section: Partnerships and Cooperations

National Initiatives

LabEx Persyval, Project RHUM, “Robots in Human Environments”

Participants : Thierry Fraichard, Rémi Paulin, Patrick Reignier.

Partners: GIPSA, Inria, LIG, LJK and TIMC.

Dates:[Sep. 15-Dec. 19].

The RHUM project from the LabEx Persyval (ANR-11-LABX-0025-01) brings together ten teams from different labs from the Grenoble academic scene: GIPSA, Inria, LIG, LJK and TIMC. Its goal is to tackle scientific problems related to active perception, navigation in human environments, learning and adaptation of robots behaviors for social interaction. PERVASIVE contributes to the navigation in human environments aspects.

ANR Project Involved

Participants: Amr Al-Zhouri Al-Yafi, Patrick Reignier.

Other Partners: UMR G-SCOP, UMR LIG (Persuasive Interaction, IIHM, Getalp), CEA Liten, PACTE, Vesta Systems and Elithis.

Dates: Jan 2015 to Dec 2018

The ANR project Involved focuses on bringing solutions to building actors for upcoming challenges in energy management in residential buildings. The project explores a user centric energy management system, where user needs and tacit knowledge drive the search of solutions. These are calculated using a flexible energy model of the living areas. The system is personified by energy consultants with which building actors such as building owners, building managers, technical operators but also occupants, can interact with in order to co-define energy strategies, benefiting of both assets: tacit knowledge of human actors, and measurement with computation capabilities of calculators. Putting actors in the loop, i.e. making energy not only visible but also controllable is the needed step before large deployment of energy management solutions.

The project will develop interactive energy consultants for all the actors, providing energy management aided systems embedding models in order to support the decision making processes. MIRROR (interactive monitoring), WHAT-IF (interactive quantitative simulation), EXPLAIN (interactive qualitative simulation), SUGGEST- AND-ADJUST (interactive management) and RECOMMEND (interactive diagnosis) functionalities will be developed.

ANR Project CEEGE: Chess Expertise from Eye Gaze and Emotion

Participants: James Crowley, Dominique Vaufreydaz, Rafaellea Balzarini, Thomas Guntz

Other Partners: Dept of NeuroCognition, CITEN, Bielefeld University

Dates: Jan 2016 to Dec 2019

CEEGE is a multidisciplinary scientific research project conducted by the Inria PRIMA team in cooperation with the Dept of Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Bielefeld. The primary impacts will be improved scientific understanding in the disciplines of Computer Science and Cognitive NeuroScience. The aim of this project is to experimentally evaluate and compare current theories for mental modelling for problem solving and attention, as well as to refine and evaluate techniques for observing the physiological reactions of humans to situation that inspire pleasure, displeasure, arousal, dominance and fear.

In this project, we will observe the visual attention, physiological responses and mental states of subject with different levels of expertise solving classic chess problems, and participating in chess matches. We will observe chess players using eye-tracking, sustained and instantaneous face-expressions (micro-expressions), skin conductivity, blood flow (BVP), respiration, posture and other information extracted from audio-visual recordings and sensor readings of players. We will use the recorded information to estimate the mental constructs with which the players understand the game situation. Information from visual attention as well as physiological reactions will be used to determine and model the degree to which a player understands the game situation in terms of abstract configurations of chess pieces. This will provide a structured environment that we will use for experimental evaluation of current theories of mental modeling and emotional response during problem solving and social interaction.

The project is organized in three phases. During the first phase, we will observe individual players of different levels of chess expertise solving known chess problems. We will correlate scan-path from eye tracking and other information about visual attention to established configurations of pieces and known solutions to chess problems. This will allow us to construct a labeled corpus of chess play that can be used to evaluate competing techniques for estimating mental models and physiological responses. In a second phase, we will observe the attention and face expressions of pairs of players of different levels of chess ability during game play. In particular, we will seek to annotate and segment recordings with respect to the difficulty of the game situation as well as situations that elicit particularly strong physiological reactions. In the final phase, we will use these recordings to evaluate the effectiveness of competing techniques for mental modeling and observation of emotions in terms of their abilities to predict the chess abilities of players, game outcomes and individual moves and player self reports. Results of our work will be published in scientific conferences and journals concerned with cognitive science and cognitive neuroscience as well as computer vision, multimodal interaction, affective computing and pervasive computing. Possible applications include construction of systems that can monitor the cognitive abilities and emotional reactions of users of interactive systems to provide assistance that is appropriate but not excessive, companion systems that can aid with active healthy ageing, and tutoring systems that can assist users in developing skills in a variety of domains including chess.

CDP EcoSesa - Cross Disciplinary Project of the ComUE UGA

Participants: James Crowley, Patrick Reignier, Rafaellea Balzarini Dates: Jan 2017 to Dec 2020

Cities and their energy systems are undergoing profound transformations. Electric Power networks are being transformed from centralized, high capacity, generating plants, dimensioned to meet peak loads to decentralized, local, production based on intermittent renewable sources. This transformation is made possible by integration of information and energy technologies, new energy materials and components, and the rapid spread of pervasive computing. The result is a change in the socio-economics of energy distribution, and a change in the role of users from passive consumers to active participants in a dynamically fluctuating energy market. Many cities worldwide have initiated research projects and experiments to accelerate the spread of clean technologies. However, these initiatives generally focus on a specific issue that depends on the priorities and preferences of the local decision makers and stakeholders. At the same time, academic research has generally been confined to specialized silos in energy materials and management systems, in Social Sciences as well as in Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), resulting in piecemeal knowledge.

The vision of Eco-SESA is to address the problems resulting from the transition to clean decentralized energy production based on renewable sources with a holistic integrated humansystem approach. The project will address the development of Safe, Efficient, Sustainable and Accessible energy systems, from the individual end-user to dynamic communities of stakeholders at the district and grid levels.

Pervasive is involved in two research front of the project :

  • Interactive systems to involve occupants of buildings

  • Emerging behaviors from individual to communities

ANR VALET

Participant : Dominique Vaufreydaz.

Partners: Inria (Pervasive and Chroma teams for Inria Rhône-Alpes, RITS in Paris), Ircyyn (Nantes), AKKA (Paris)

Dates:[2016-2018].

 

The ANR VALET project investigates two aspects of car sharing. In the first one, a novel approach for solving vehicle redistribution problem is proposed by managing an autonomous platoons guided by professional drivers. The second aspect concerns autonomous parking of shared cars when they arrived at their destination parking lot. In this project, our researches address the prediction of pedestrians’ behaviors during urban fleet movements and during parking phases. The PhD student (Pavan Vashista) recruited in this project focus on integrating models of human behaviors to evaluate the risk that surrounding pedestrians encounter the trajectory of the VALET vehicles. His PhD thesis started in February 2016 is co-supervised by Anne Spalanzani (Chroma team) and Dominique Vaufreydaz.

ANR HIANIC

Participant : Dominique Vaufreydaz.

Partners: ARMEN and PACCE teams from LS2N laboratory (Nantes), Inria (Pervasive and Chroma teams for Inria Rhône-Alpes, RITS in Paris), MAGMA from LIG laboratory (Grenoble).

Dates:[2018-2021].

 

The HIANIC project proposes to endow autonomous vehicles with smart behaviors (cooperation, negotiation, socially acceptable movements) to address problems that arise when autonomous cars are mixed with pedestrians in urban shared environment. It aims at developing new technologies in term of autonomous navigation in dense and human populated traffic. In order to contribute to urban safety and intelligent mobility, the HIANIC project also explores the complex problem of sociable interactions between pedestrians and cars while sharing the same urban environment.

In this project, Dominique Vaufreydaz works jointly with the Chroma team on perceiving pedestrians and their behaviors around autonomous cars and on interaction between autonomous vehicles and pedestrians.

LabEx Persyval - Project MicroBayes: Probabilistic Machines for Low-level Sensor Interpretation

Participants: Emmanuel Mazer, Raphael Frisch Other Partners: Laurent Girin (GIPSA Lab), Didier Piau (L'Institut Fourier)

Dates: Nov 2016 to Nov 2019

The project MicroBayes builds on results of the recently completed EC FET Open project BAMBI to explore a new technique for Blind source separation and acoustic signal location using a new form of Bayesian Computer. The techniques have recently been demonstrated using a software simulation. Current plans are to implement and demonstrate the Bayesian computer using an FPGA. By the end of the project we expect to produce a hardware implementation suitable for use in low-cost low-power applications.

Competitivity Clusters

James Crowley is on the scientific committee for the Minalogic Competitivity Cluster. Minalogic is the global innovation cluster for digital technologies serving France’s Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes region. The Scientific Committee advises the pole of strategy, advises local industry in proposal preparation, reviews FUI project proposals, and makes recommendations about labelling and support of project proposals.