Digital society and information represent major societal challenges: contacts between individuals, relations of the individual with the environment, the socio-economic world and the labor organization, etc.
The Society based on digital technology implies to work on the issues related to hardware and software as well as using multidisciplinary approaches.
Ambient intelligence, nomadisme and electronic technologies
The development of mobile equipments and networks induces to large changes of the interface between humanity and the environment. Reactivity, adaptation, and pro-activity lead to the growth of the ambient intelligence. The concept is built around the ‘internet of things’. This emergence is based on numerous energy efficient or autonomous devices, sensors, and processors which communicate spontaneously via reliable, safe, fast, adaptative, and fault-tolerant protocols and «middleware».
Digital contents: Why? What? How?
The digital contents are produced and interrogated at various levels of organization of our societies. The study of the modeling, the synthesis or the production, the indexation of data, the exchange, the analysis and the processing (as for the assistance for discovering knowledge or decision making process) of the digital content in various domains such as culture and patrimony, digital entertainments, manufacturing industries, and the safety of equipment and people.
Connected companies
In a globalized and competitive economic environment, the competitiveness of the companies embedded in networks of massively connected systems depends on their ability to interact with the all players. This requires new management models of the industrial and logistics processes involving international, environmental, legal, and ethical dimensions, new management and change management principles for a higher agility, and new collaborative practices.
Data and services
The Web became an applicative infrastructure developed at a large scale. The deployments of services and the dissemination of large volumes of data correspond to the needs of digital society. The design of new architectures designed for services on Web-based systems is required.
These architectures will allow the discover, the integration of services, and the processing of large amounts of more or less structured data meeting the requirements of adaptability, privacy, and safety.
Social interactions, human/system and system/system
The study and/or design of systems in which several agents, humans, devices, or softwares are interacting is still a challenge. It is possible to study such complex systems, in particular from observation through the traces left by the interactions (which is the case of on-line social networks, human-machine interactions, or machine-machine « logs »). As for the studies on the collaborative practices and human learning using « serious games » and real or virtual simulators, these researches require scientific expertise in cognitive sciences and human and social sciences.