Thematic years

In our digital world, information science plays a leading role in many areas and particularly in the field of health. Here are just a few examples:

• tomorrow's medicine will use data science to analyze heterogeneous masses of data on diseases, patients, genomics, etc. to propose a personalized, preventive, predictive and participatory approach;
• traditional medical imaging (EEG, MRI, ultrasound) is regularly being enriched by new, more precise and faster techniques moving towards 3D or 4D imaging;
• robotics is increasingly providing valuable assistance for surgeons.

Obviously, the development of these new approaches requires multidisciplinary research involving researchers in information science and biological and medical sciences.

The thematic year and some of its different facets will be illustrated by two conferences open to the public and three scientific conferences in 2019 and early 2020.

The objective of this thematic year was to emphasize the importance of integrating human factors into the development of digital systems. How is the human factor taken into account in the design, control, safety, operation and evolution of these systems? How should the distribution of tasks and interactions between humans and autonomous systems be modelled and organized? These interdisciplinary questions are central to the INS2I and particularly involve the human and social sciences and life sciences.

The thematic year involved a conference open to the public on the subject of the interaction between humans and the digital sphere.

Communicating objects are becoming increasingly common in our daily lives and include smartphones, cars, physical activity monitoring devices, etc. The data they collect, produce and exchange represent multiple technological and scientific challenges as do their specific performance, energy consumption and security limits. Research in this field naturally draws on the full range of topics studied at the INS2I.

Security is present in many forms within the scientific scope of information science - cryptology, verification, communication protocols, vulnerabilities, protection of personal data, searching for weak signals, physical security especially in embedded systems, operational reliability, digital watermarking, etc.

The thematic year involved a conference open to the public on the subject of Computer security: myths and reality. You can find the videos of the conference speeches and presentations on the Sécurité research network website.

Technological advances in data storage and indexing, access to heterogeneous and massively distributed data sources, optimization of such access using parallel architectures and high network throughput make it possible to search for and analyze data within acceptable time scales. This thematic year provided the opportunity to initiate an editorial project which led to the publication in March 2017 of the collaborative book "Les Big Data à découvert" ("Big Data exposed", CNRS Éditions).