Past Projects

The ANR HyperAgents project aims to enable the deployment of world-wide hybrid communities of people and autonomous agents on the Web. HyperAgents is led by Olivier Boissier, MINES Saint-Étienne. Partners are MINES Saint-Étienne, INRIA,
Univ. of St. Gallen (HSG, Switzerland)

The ANR HyperAgents project aims to enable the deployment of world-wide hybrid communities of people and autonomous agents on the Web. For this purpose, HyperAgents defines a new class of multi-agent systems (MAS) that use hypermedia as a general mechanism for uniform interaction such that they are:

(i) aligned with the Web architecture to inherit the properties of the Web as a world-wide, open, and long-lived system, and
(ii) transparent and accountable to support acceptance by people. We refer to this new envisioned class of Web-based MAS as Hypermedia MAS.

The HyperAgents project proposes:

(1) to define an architectural style for Hypermedia MAS that induces the above-mentioned properties,
(2) to define declarative languages and mechanisms for specifying, enacting, and regulating interactions among people and autonomous agents in Hypermedia MAS,
(3) to develop an open-source software infrastructure for Hypermedia MAS that enables the deployment of hybrid communities on the Web, and
(4) to demonstrate the deployment of prototypical hybrid communities in two application areas: (i) Industry 4.0 and (ii) tackling online disinformation.

To undertake this investigation, the project consortium brings together internationally recognized researchers actively contributing to research on autonomous agents and MAS, the Web architecture, Semantic Web, and to the standardization of the Web. Being able to harness the collective power of Web-scale hybrid communities and to focus it on specific problems would have extensive implications in a broad range of domains: for manufacturers, it could enable distributed intelligent manufacturing at global scale; for citizens, it could enable access to transparent and trustworthy online information.

We expect that the work conducted in this project will break new ground in AI and Web research and that its applications will cut across society.

HyperAgents is led by Olivier Boissier, MINES Saint-Étienne. Partners are MINES Saint-Étienne, INRIA,
Univ. of St. Gallen (HSG, Switzerland)

Workshop on Hypermedia Multi-Agent Systems 2019

ETSI SmartM2M tackles IoT, interoperability, and Semantic Interoperability challenges, contributing to the digital transformation of industry sectors in Europe. The Smart Applications REFerence standard ontology (SAREF) is a key flagship to reach semantic interoperability in IoT and Web-based applications where digitized assets play a central role.

We contribute to the development of the newest version of SAREF and some of the SAREF extensions. We lead the specialist task forces (STFs) aiming to define the collaborative development workflow of SAREF, the official SAREF ontology portal https://saref.etsi.org , and the continous integration and deployment of SAREF using DevOps approaches tailored for ontology engineering. More specifically, we were/are involved in the following STFs:

• lead of STF 556: Consolidation of SAREF and its community of industrial users, based on the experience of the EUREKA ITEA 12004 SEAS project – https://portal.etsi.org//STF/STFs/STFHomePages/STF556
• contributor to STF 566: SAREF extensions for Automotive, eHealth/Ageing-well, Wearables and Water – https://portal.etsi.org//STF/STFs/STFHomePages/STF566
• lead of STF 578: Specification of the SAREF development framework and workflow, and development of the Community SAREF Portal for user engagement – https://portal.etsi.org//STF/STFs/STFHomePages/STF578

CoSWoT objectives are to propose a distributed WoT-enabled software architecture embedded on constrained devices with two main characteristics: (1) it will use ontologies to specify declaratively the application logic of devices and the semantics of the exchanged messages; (2) it will add reasoning functionalities to devices, so as to distribute processing tasks among them.
CoSWoT is led by Frédérique Laforest, INSA Lyon. Partners are INSA Lyon, MINES Saint-Étienne, INRAE, Mondeca

The Internet of Things connects physical devices offering sensing or actuating with their vicinity. The ever-growing capabilities of devices allow to imagine new architectures including them as first class citizens. New added-value applications can then be envisioned in smart agriculture, smart buildings, smart cities, energy and water management, e-health and ageing well… The Web of Things (WoT) allows to describe the devices semantics, bridging the gap between the different domain and service descriptions. In today WoT architectures, physical devices can be located at distance from systems that perform reasoning. A centralised approach does not take advantage of the devices capabilities and induces suboptimal data transfers as well as server overload. Besides, many devices are now smart enough to discover each other, exchange data, and collectively make decisions.

CoSWoT objectives are to propose a distributed WoT-enabled software architecture embedded on constrained devices with two main characteristics: (1) it will use ontologies to specify declaratively the application logic of devices and the semantics of the exchanged messages; (2) it will add reasoning functionalities to devices, so as to distribute processing tasks among them. Doing so, the development of applications including devices of the WoT will be highly simplified: our platform will enable the development and execution of intelligent and decentralised smart WoT applications despite the heterogeneity of devices.

In CoSWoT, WoT applications will rely on a platform hosting the base services. Besides traditional services, it will host extensions that correspond to two scientific barriers:

(1) the use of ontologies as a generalized model for exchanges between heterogeneous devices. A joint statement from AIOTI WG3, IEEE P2413, oneM2M, W3C positions ontologies as key enablers for semantic interoperability on the WoT. However research questions remain concerning (i) the adequacy of existing ontologies to the target application domains; (ii) the applicability of theoretical principles developed in a variety of protocols and standards, in the context of data streams; (iii) the discovery of heterogeneous devices, their services and how to solicit them.

(2) distributed and embedded incremental reasoning. Devices become powerful enough to offer storage and processing; new architectures appear, based on edge computing including devices such as sensors and actuators. The data streams provided by sensors require to perform incremental reasoning tasks. Research questions remain on (i) how to embed reasoning in devices with various capacities, it requires specific optimizations; (ii) how to efficiently distribute reasoning tasks among devices.

Smart agriculture is a typical application domain of such WoT architectures, where the surveillance of cultivated fields requires various sensors that push streaming data, which must be collected and reasoned upon to take decisions executed by actuators. Smart buildings is another such typical application domain where added-value application services involve other verticals such as energy management, e-health, or ageing well. We will define use cases and requirements for smart agriculture and smart buildings, run simulations, and then lead real experiments.

The CoSWoT platform will foster the decoupling of the development of software and the development of hardware, so as to ease the emergence of a new economic sector in the digital industry around WoT applications development, disconnected from the development of the smart devices themselves.

CoSWoT is led by Frédérique Laforest, INSA Lyon. Partners are INSA Lyon, MINES Saint-Étienne, INRAE, Mondeca

This project is financed by the French ANR CONTINT 2013 program.

The objective of this project is to help the Collaborative Creation of Contents and Publishing using Opportunistic networks to support the emergence of Ephemeral and Spontaneous Social Networks. It aims at proposing a set of scientific and software innovative solutions for the provision of services with intermittent connectivity, the definition of an infrastructure for the collaborative management of services in the context of Ephemeral and Spontaneous Social Networks, and an analysis of the value adapted to this context. See the official ANR C3PO website.

Funders:

• French ANR CONTINT2013 program

Partners:

• Connected Intelligence team of the Hubert Curien laboratory, UJM Saint-Étienne (coordinator),
• DICE INRIA/CITI lab at INSA Lyon,
• Casa Team of the IRISA lab,
• LEMNA, Mines de Nantes
• ChronoCourse

Coordinator:

• Connected Intelligence team of the Hubert Curien laboratory, UJM Saint-Étienne

Machines and agents have more and more autonomous functions and consequently are less and less supervised by human operators or users. Therefore, especially when machines interact with humans, we need to ensure that they do not harm us/them or threaten our/their autonomy, especially decision autonomy. Consequently, the question of an ethical regulation or control of such autonomous agents is raised and has been discussed by several authors such as Wallach and Allen. As stated by Picard, the greater the freedom of a machine, the more it will need moral standards.

Let’s consider to motivate this problematic the trolley and footbridge dilemmas. Assume that a runaway trolley is hurtling down a track towards five people, whereas there is a single person on a neighbouring track, and two people (a thin one and a fat one) on a footbridge under which the trolley will pass. The trolley dilemma is as follows: should the driver change tracks, killing one to save five? The footbridge dilemma is: should the thin man push the fat man over the footbridge to suddenly stop the trolley? More generally, both dilemmas raise the question: considering an agent A that can make a decision that would benefit many other agents but, in doing so, an agent B would be unfairly harmed, under what circumstances would it be moral for agent A to violate agent B’s rights in order to benefit the group?

The objectives of the eThicAa project are twofold:

1. definition of what should be a moral autonomous agent and a system of moral autonomous agents
2. definition and resolution of ethical conflicts that could occur 1) inside one moral agent, 2) between one moral agent and the (moral) rules of the system it belongs to, 3) between one moral agent and a human operator or user, 4) between several artificial (moral) agents including or not human agents.

Ethical conflicts are characterized by the fact that there is no “good” way to solve them. Nevertheless, when a decision must be made, it should be an informed decision based on an assessment of the arguments and values at stake. When several agents are involved, this may result in one agent taking over the (decision or action) authority from the others.

eThicAa proposes to study the four cases of ethical conflicts that could occur in moral autonomous agents or between moral autonomous agents and humans on two chosen applicative domains: robotics and privacy management. For instance, in the robotic domain, eThicAa should be able to manage the ethical conflicts between one artificial agent and one human operator. To this end, we will consider a UAV (Unmanned Air Vehicle) jointly operated by a human operator and an artificial agent. Assuming that the UAV is in an emergency situation and must be crashed, the only two options being either very near the operator’s headquarters (where many operator’s colleagues work) or very near a small village, which decisions must be made by the autonomous agent?

The case of privacy management will consider ethical conflicts between multiple artificial agents and human users; we will consider a social network where the privacy policies of the accounts owned by humans are controlled by moral autonomous agents. Assuming that two users feud and broadcast some private data about the other one in a common circle of friends, what should be the privacy policy of the society of agents including the agents owned by those feuding users?

From the implementation and experimentation of those scenarios, eThicAa aims at providing a formal representation of ethical conflicts and of the objects on which they are about. The project also aims at designing explanation algorithms for the human user and autonomous agents’ arguments and values to make informed ethical decisions. Consequently, the outcome of eThicAa will be a framework and recommendations to design moral artificial agents, i.e., how their autonomous functions should be controlled to make them act according to context-dependent moral rules and to deal with ethical conflicts involving other artificial or human agents, whether moral or not.

MOOCTAB aims at creating a tablet-based platform dedicated to lifelong learning (primary, secondary, higher, and continuous) using an on-demand MOOC platform with the following characteristics:

• It is based on existing open-source MOOC platforms (for example, EdX for high school and continuous education) but new functionalities will be added;
• Data will be stored on a local secured cloud (usage of European Cloud servers, main European provider) thus maintaining independence;
• MOOC will be used through tablets with an intuitive interface and a secured connection (and sometimes after payment, depending on use case) thanks to strong management of material fleet and identification usage adapted to each use case;
• This platform will be quite open to allow the addition of other use cases afterward, whether it will be in e-education or other applications such as secured document management.

In the context of smart cities, the deployment of multiple sensors provides access to numerous data streams in real time. The open publication of sensor data brings innovation opportunities by combining the usual benefits of open data with those of real-time updates. Indeed, open data ensures transparency and, in principle, allows anybody to develop services that were never envisioned by data providers. Real-time updates allow one to consider the development of new services beyond the traditional use of open data, e.g., for logging evolution and conducting a posteriori analysis. We can therefore contemplate the creation of an ecosystem of smart open urban services. While publishing sensor data via an open data platform, such as Grand Lyon’s “Smart Data” platform, is a first step towards our goal, it is now necessary to propose solutions to facilitate uses and usages of real-time open data. As a matter of fact, these data are practically difficult to understand, find and eventually exploit. This is even truer when data is coming from raw stream of sensor data because constraints on processing and communication capabilities impose minimizing transmitted information.

Consequently and in order to enable the development of a smart open city service ecosystem, we want to provide (1) technological solutions to help leverage open sensor data for city application developers, and (2) guidance to the actors of the open sensor data environment by analysing the stakeholder strategies, defining usage scenarios and terminologies. To this aim, we combine a social analysis of actor expectations, requirements and practices, with a technological and theoretical expertise in online data and knowledge processing and engineering. The social component of our proposal will ensure a better understanding of expectations and needs of various categories of real time open data users. The technological component is based on existing Semantic Web technologies as well as stream processing techniques. This will expectedly result in enriching and publishing stream data to an open platform, taking into account the new paradigm of linked data, stream data and reasoning. This major shift will be achieved by building new ontologies related to smart cities when necessary as well as a formalism for querying and combining streams in such a context. Additionally, by combing our work in the social and technological domains, we will define search and browsing capabilities that we will implement according to the identified expectations and needs. Finally, when those tools will be effectively developed, we will show their utility by providing a demo application that uses them and further study the usage scenarios. Our planned application will offer an intelligent transportation system that helps vehicle drivers to better find parking spots, with possible testing in the city of Lyon.

Environmental, economic and sustainability challenges of continuously increasing energy consumption are present all over the world. Meeting the challenges requires crossindustry cooperation and the means for consumers to influence their energy consumption in terms of the quantity and type of energy consumed. The SEAS project will address the problem of inefficient and unsustainable energy consumption, which is due to a lack of sufficient means to control, monitor, estimate and adapt the energy use of systems versus the dynamic use situations and circumstances influencing the energy use. The objective of the SEAS project is to enable energy, ICT and automation systems to collaborate at consumption sites, and to introduce dynamic and refined ICT-based solutions to control, monitor and estimate energy consumption. An additional aim is to explore business models and solutions that will enable energy market participants to incorporate micro-grid environments and active customers.

More information on SEAS

Water-M is an ITEA3 European project with 21 partners from Finland, France, Romania and Turkey. The goal of the Water-M project is to develop an architecture for intelligent management of water distribution. The project takes into account the current and prospective needs of all types of actors: managers, delegates, administrators, legislators, user communities, and consumers in the residential, industry and the Tertiary sector.

Only 2.5% of the world’s water is fresh water. In recent decades, the human population has increased by a factor of 3, but at the same time water demand has increased by a factor of 6. Water is a finite resource that should be carefully managed. However, more than 50% of the world’s population lives in areas with a water sustainability problem. In this regard, water industries are using SCADA technologies to support their business processes, but this is clearly not enough. To solve the water sustainability problem, which is compounded by the water process complexity, a major upheaval of the water industry is needed with the introduction of novel concepts, such as GIS integration, quality management programs or real-time data management. In this context, ICT technologies are needed to drive these challenges. The scope of the Water-M project enables the creation of new products and services to build a unified water business model that will benefit European Union water stakeholders. The Water-M project combines real-time monitoring and operational control, service-oriented approaches and event driven mechanisms in the water management domain.

For more information: https://itea3.org/project/water-m.html

WDAqua (Answering Questions using Web Data) is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Innovative Training Network (ITN).

Smart infrastructures and citizens’ participation in the digital society are increasingly data-driven. Sharing, connecting, managing, analyzing and understanding data on the Web will enable better services for citizens, communities and industry. However, turning web data into successful services for the public and private sector requires skilled web and data scientists, and it still requires further research. WDAqua aims at advancing the state of the art by intertwining training, research and innovation efforts, centered around data-driven question answering. Question answering is immediately useful to a wide audience of end users, and we will demonstrate this in settings including e-commerce, public sector information, publishing and smart cities. Steps to answering a question are (1) understanding a spoken question, (2) analyzing the question’s text, (3) finding data to answer the question, and (4) presenting the answer(s). Every individual research project in WDAqua connects at least two of these steps.

For more information: http://wdaqua.eu

Description: having the ambition to propose a modeling and simulation environment for designing complex systems such as aircrafts.
The originality of the project lies in enabling several different optimization and uncertainty techniques to collaborate within the same system and taking into account all different dimensions of the problem during the resolution. This is done by using adaptive multi-agent technology to solve the complex system design.

Project Manager: Marie-Pierre Gleizes/IRIT

Involved Collaborators: Gauthier Picard

Duration: 2009 –

Partners: AIRBUS, ARTAL, SNECMA, UPETEC, ARMINES, ENSM-SE, IMT, INRIA and ICA

Website: http://www.irit.fr/id4cs/

To meet these objectives, the UNUOC project mobilizes and develops a set of research in the field of digital sciences addressing issues of virtual community, individual-centered privacy management, and the deployment and management of communicating objects and digital services within an ambient intelligence framework. The aim is to build and deploy the technical and digital infrastructure connecting the digital world and the physical world, no longer just connecting all computers and all individuals, but also all objects.

Project Manager: École des Mines de Saint-Étienne – Department of Computer Science and Intelligent Systems

Involved Collaborators: Olivier Boissier, Philippe Beaune, Philippe Jaillon, Xavier Serpaggi

Duration: 2011-2013

Partners: Machine Learning/LHC, SATIN/LT2C, Cité du Design

It is generally agreed that trust is a key concept in nowadays information technologies, which applies not only in contexts where security is in focus. Beyond system reliability, it ensures its usability by both human and artificial agents. Numerous works in sociology, psychology, philosophy and cognitive science on the one hand, and in computer science on the other, show that trust is a complex notion with multiple facets. While the concept is used by now in many applications, there is still no consensus about a clear-cut and unified definition.
In this project, we propose to start from Castelfranchi et col.’s theory of social trust, which is certainly one of the best established theories among the above-mentioned disciplines. We are going to confront its analysis to the specific needs in security in order to extract the required key elements, and complete it by some notions that are required in implementations and a priori absent from the theory (such as trust dynamics, the link with the topic notion,…). We are also going to formalize the resulting theory in logic, and implement the properties that have thus been laid bare within agent platforms. The latter step will be done at two levels, viz. the individual and the collective level.

Project Manager: Andreas Herzig

Involved Collaborators: Olivier Boissier

Duration: 2006-2010

Partners: Institut de Recherche en Informatique de Toulouse (IRIT), Ecole des Mines de Saint-Étienne – Department of Computer Science and Intelligent Systems, Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technologies (ISTC)

It is generally agreed that trust is a key concept in nowadays information technologies, which applies not only in contexts where security is in focus. Beyond system reliability, it ensures its usability by both human and artificial agents. Numerous works in sociology, psychology, philosophy and cognitive science on the one hand, and in computer science on the other, show that trust is a complex notion with multiple facets. While the concept is used by now in many applications, there is still no consensus about a clear-cut and unified definition.
In this project, we propose to start from Castelfranchi et col.’s theory of social trust, which is certainly one of the best established theories among the above-mentioned disciplines. We are going to confront its analysis to the specific needs in security in order to extract the required key elements, and complete it by some notions that are required in implementations and a priori absent from the theory (such as trust dynamics, the link with the topic notion,…). We are also going to formalize the resulting theory in logic, and implement the properties that have thus been laid bare within agent platforms. The latter step will be done at two levels, viz. the individual and the collective level.

Project Manager: Andreas Herzig

Involved Collaborators: Olivier Boissier

Duration: 2006-2010

Partners: Institut de Recherche en Informatique de Toulouse (IRIT), Ecole des Mines de Saint-Étienne – Department of Computer Science and Intelligent Systems, Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technologies (ISTC)