Section: Partnerships and Cooperations

Regional Initiatives

Idex Lyon ACADEMICS

Participants : Paulo Gonçalves, Rémi Gribonval, Marion Foare, Amélie Barbe, Gaetan Frusque.

The project brings together a consortium of 4 teams from Laboratories of Université de Lyon (UdL) and will form a working group with complementary expertise in machine learning (deep learning, statistical learning, data mining), in data science (complex data analysis, adaptive and/or data-driven methods, network science) and in the studies of climate modeling and of computational social science. It comprises:

• Laboratoire Informatique du Parallélisme (LIP): P. Gonçalves (PI), M. Karsai (PI for Comp. Social Sc.)

• Laboratoire de Physique (LP): P. Borgnat (Coordinator), F. Bouchet (PI for Climate)

• Laboratoire Hubert Curien (LabHC), Université Jean Monnet: M. Sebban (PI)

• Laboratoire d'InfoRmatique en Images et Systèmes d'information (LIRIS): C. Robardet (PI)

The impacts of the project will stem from the efficiency of our proposed methods to learn from complex and dynamic data, and if so, future applications will naturally follow in many areas: social science and study of social interactions, climate and environmental science but also in technological networks, neuroscience with the study of brain networks and more generally in any domain where effective dynamical models of complex situations are to be learned from data. All these situations go beyond the current classical applicative frameworks of ML (time measurements, 2D images, or texts) and compel us to work out a major scientific breakthrough.

ISI Torino / Dante

Participant : Márton Karsai [correspondant] .

Duration of the project: October 2016 - October 2020.

This project involves M. Karsai and L. Gauvin (ISI Torino) and funded by the IXXI Complex System Institute. The purpose of this project is to investigate the presence and the importance of higher-order correlations in dynamical networks. As the first attempt to address this problem we applied autoencoder, a recent representation using deep neural networks, on modelled and small-scale real temporal networks. However, since the results were trivial on the modelled network and not convincing on the real one we decided to take a different approach during the second phase of the project. We involved an ISI PhD student Maddalena Toricelli, to work out a method for temporal network embedding. Our idea is to extend the node2vec representation of static networks for time-varying structures, by using a local random walk to explore the structural-temporal neighbourhood of a node. Based on such local information we can effectively propose an embedding, which captures the temporal and structural properties of nodes in a temporal network.

FIL PerfWiFi

Participants : Guérin-Lassous Isabelle [correspondant] , Grünblatt Rémy.

Duration of the project: January 2019 - December 2020.

The goal of the project PerfWiFi is to set up a Wi-Fi experimental platform that will be, in the future, open to interested researchers. This platform consists in devices (cards, routers) implementing the last versions of Wi-Fi (Wi-Fi 5 and Wi-Fi 6) and with different chipsets from different manufacturers. This platform will also be interconnected to a fleet of UAVs equipped with Wi-Fi interfaces. The Wi-Fi devices are chosen to be as open as possible in order to have a large set of possibilities in terms of parameterization of the Wi-Fi parameters.

In 2019, a first version of the platform has been set up along with a set of software tools to automatically launch Wi-Fi experiments. The first experiments can monitor, during a long period, all the possible Wi-Fi channels and their medium use ratio. We intend to provide these data via an open website.

FIL ALIENOR

Participant : Begin Thomas [correspondant] .

Duration of the project: January 2019 - December 2020.

The goal of ALIENOR (ArtificiaL IntElligence-assisted NetwORks) is to develop an approach to dynamically select adequate values for the IEEE 802.11 parameters related to the Rate Adaptation (RA) mechanism to the WLAN context. The search for an adequate setting for the RA parameters is made complex due to the vast number of parameters (e.g., the used amendment of 802.11, the channel transmission rate, the number of competing nodes, the Frame Error Rate (FER), the offered load, and the transport protocol to name a few) that may affect a WLAN behavior.

In ALIENOR, we propose to explore a new approach to determine an adequate setting of the RA parameters using a data-driven approach based on techniques of Machine Learning (ML) in Artificial Intelligence (AI). Our approach consists of three stages. First, we will build a large dataset of measurements that will serve as the training set. Second, we will use ML techniques to discover a function that fits the mapping between the dataset output and the inputs. Lastly, WLAN devices will embed and use this learned function to predict (approximately) what will be their attained throughput under various possible settings of their RA, and then select their best option.

ENS Lyon project Vehicular project

Participants : Begin Thomas [correspondant] , Guérin Lassous Isabelle, Busson Anthony.

Duration of the project: January 2017 - December 2020.

The goal of this project is to design new performance tools to improve the sharing of communication resources in vehicular networks. In particular, we focus on the use case of delivering a Video on Demand service to vehicles traveling along a highway. Through the development of a simple and yet accurate performance modeling approach, we were able to demonstrate the feasibility of using IEEE 802.11p to deliver video content to vehicles. Our work also underlines the benefit of blocking the lowest transmission rates for the sake of a collective gain in terms of attained throughput and interruption time in the video playback. This somehow surprising property derives from the well-established performance anomaly of 802.11-based networks.