Section: Application Domains

Industry

We present below our industrial collaborations. Some are well established partnerships, while others are more recent collaborations with local industries that wish to reinforce their Data Science R&D with us (e.g. Energiency, Amossys).

• Resource Consumption Analysis for Optimizing Energy Consumption and Practices in Industrial Factories (Energiency). In order to increase their understanding of factory operation, companies introduce more and more sensors in their factories. Thus, the resource (electricity, water, etc.) consumption of engines, workshops and factories are recorded in the form of times series or temporal sequences. The person who is in charge of resource consumption optimization needs better software than classical spreadsheets for this purpose. He/she needs effective decision-aiding tools with statistical and artificial intelligence knowledge. The start-up Energiency aims at designing and offering such pieces of software for analyzing energy consumption. The CIFRE PhD thesis of Maël (defended 16/12/2019) aimed at proposing new approaches and solutions from the data mining field to tackle this issue.

• Security (Amossys). Current networks are faced with an increasing variety of attacks, from the classic “DDoS” that makes a server unusuable for a few fours, to advanced attacks that silently infiltrate a network and exfiltrate sensitive information months or even years later. Such intrusions, called APT (Advanced Persistent Threat) are extremely hard to detect, and this will become even harder as most communications will be encrypted. A promising solution is to work on “behavioral analysis”, by discovering patterns based on the metadata of IP-packets. Such patterns can relate to an unusual sequencing of events, or to an unusual communication graph. Finding such complex patterns over a large volume of streaming data requires to revisit existing stream mining algorithms to dramatically improve their throughput, while guaranteeing a manageable false positive rate. We collaborated on this topic with the Amossys company and the EMSEC team of Irisa through the co-supervision of the CIFRE PhD of Alban Siffer (located in the EMSEC team, defended 19/12/2019). Our goal was in particular to design novel anomaly detection methods making minimal assumptions on the data, and able to scale to real traffic volumes.

• Car Sharing Data Analysis. Peugeot-Citroën (PSA) group’s know-how encompasses all areas of the automotive industry, from production to distribution and services. Among others, its aim is to provide a car sharing service in many large cities. This service consists in providing a fleet of cars and a “free floating” system that allows users to use a vehicle, then drop it off at their convenience in the city. To optimize their fleet and the availability of the cars throughout the city, PSA needs to analyze the trajectory of the cars and understand the mobility needs and behavior of their users. We tackle this subject together through the CIFRE PhD of Gregory Martin.

• Multimodal Data Analysis for the Supervision of Sensitive Sites. ATERMES is an international mid-sized company 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 BARIER TM(“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. The CIFRE PhD of Heng Zhang aims at developing a deep learning architecture and algorithms able to detect anomalies (mainly persons) from multimodal data. The data are “multimodal” because information about the same phenomenon can be acquired from different types of detectors, at different conditions, in multiple experiments.

• Root Cause Analysis in Networks. AdvisorSLA is a French company specialized in software solutions for network monitoring. For this purpose, the company relies on techniques of network metrology. By continuously measuring the state of the network, monitoring solutions detect events (e.g., 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 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. Thus, the CIFRE PhD of Erwan Bourrand proposes to characterize conclusive and false alarms. This will be achieved by designing automatic methods to “learn” the conditions that most likely precede 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.