Major themes that are central to the design of large future information and communication systems.
The DigiCosme laboratory of excellence: a research and education project helping the digital revolution benefit everyone
The DigiCosme project places information and communication sciences at the centre of the Université Paris-Saclay. DigiCosme brings together 300 researchers and as many PhD students, spread over the sites at 11 LabEx member institutions: CEA, CNRS, Ecole Polytechnique, Supélec, Inria (Institut national de recherche en informatique et en automatique – Institute for Research in Computer Science and Automation), Université Paris-Sud, Ecole Centrale Paris, ENS Cachan, ENSTA, ParisTech, Institut Mines-Télécom and Université de Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines.
New challenges in the digital world: data, programs and distributed architectures
The DigiCosme LabEx takes the view that, in both the business world and in everyday life, the phenomenon of dematerialisation has become commonplace. The digital is replacing physical devices and now documents, transactions, transport and scientific experiments rely heavily on IT.
The digital revolution, access to and analysis of massive data, and "Big Data" open up unprecedented opportunities in terms of knowledge dissemination and production, but also in terms of optimal resource management. Digital data is transformed and transmitted for a fraction of the cost of physical data. It is available almost everywhere, and by almost everyone, through light hardware devices like smartphones and tablets.
And research within the LabEx aims to address three challenges in the digital revolution:
- Overall dependence on the adequate functioning of software and information systems, which makes the consequences of failures or cyber attacks (paralysis of services, large-scale fraud, etc.) critical.
- The Challenge of Big Data: masses of data are not directly useful; they must be transformed into usable knowledge, taking into account the context and the business objective (for example, improving predictive needs analysis or fighting against fraud).
- Networked organisation: The size of the problems faced has more than one centralised approach. The digital scale-up is based on a distributed architecture and networked design of algorithms and data.
DigiCosme will be used to support an ambitious education program in the area of ICST, from a bachelor’s to a doctorate degree, with the aim of updating ICST in initial joint education programs, in relation to ICST's importance in personal and professional life. It will focus on consistent training for students with research and innovation issues.
Interdisciplinarity and diversity of partners
In this context, DigiCosme proposes to address fundamental model and algorithm issues, but also to work on applications which will be widely interdisciplinary. This laboratory of excellence benefits from the diversity of partnerships and interaction with the Systematic competitive cluster. It will strengthen the links between the field of ICST and other disciplines such as:
- mathematics (optimisation problems);
- physics (statistical physics, e-science, bio-inspired architectures for nanotechnologies);
- biology (data mining);
- humanities and social sciences (understanding the issues of the information society).
Laboratoire d'excellence (labex)