Researcher's speaking
The complete digitalization of information recently brought about a radical
technological break in the area of communication. This break results in a multiplication
of services and a plurality of networks, which translate into explosive market growth.
In return, the increase in demand for new features, quality, capacity and reliability
generates new technological challenges.
The main trend is to integrate diverse media, audio, video, text and virtual reality, within what are called interactive multi- or hypermedia documents. Beyond these innovative features, commercial reality demands high performance editing and content presentation tools. These tools must be very easy to use through advanced human-machine interfaces that can integrate natural language. Intelligent agents that offer assistance and mediation services are also rendered necessary.
The evolution of services is part of a strong move toward transparence and independence from networks and terminals, which make the Internet and Intranet into special targets for development. Tomorrow's application should take into account mobility, multimedia in heterogeneous distributed environments and allow for group work and cooperation in synchronous or asynchronous modes.
The huge growth of communication applications and of the quantity of information exchanged will pose performance problems in terms of access to information. The new cache and distributed object systems are already trying to solve these problems. More globally, they are trying to solve the problem of information exchange and processing by hiding the complexity of the underlying media (systems and networks). The commercial shift of the Internet is creating needs in terms of security, access control and personalization of transactions.
A major challenge to the mastery of the complexity of communication applications is posed by the seamless design of systems. This requires complete control of the quality of the software chain and leads to the introduction of formal methods into the design process, such as specification proof or automatic test generation. Efficient tools capable of measuring and analyzing online behaviors in order to ensure the management and follow-up of complex systems must be invented.
These technological challenges are as many research directions for INRIA teams and the CNRS and university teams who work with them. The 8th INRIA-Industry meeting "Computer Science for Telecommunications and Multimedia" will present more than 50 innovative research applications to an international audience from industry. The meeting will take place on November 26, 1998 in Paris.
