ICST Context and Key Issues

Information and communication science and technologies are present in virtually all sectors of human activity. They play an essential role in accelerating scientific and technological progress and increasing productivity and growth. They have completely revolutionized the ways in which we communicate, interact, and produce; they have also led to profound social changes. INRIA has prepared its 2008-2012 Strategic Plan outlining how it will contribute to the societal and economic challenges of our era.

1.1 Societal Issues

The greatest challenge in social terms is to improve living conditions for all of mankind, narrowing the gap between North and South and protecting the earth's environment. This challenge raises the issues of seeking sustainable development, improving health, taking into account the aging population, and providing universal access to knowledge.

Modeling and simulation techniques can be used to observe and predict, in an increasingly precise manner, the impact that natural phenomena and human activity have on the environment. They can help to find sustainable solutions to the needs of the world (for a population that will soon exceed 9 billion people), most notably pertaining to the issue of food, by helping to develop a new agronomy, but also pertaining to the issue of energy, by helping to develop new systems to control energy consumption or to manage renewable energy.

ICST also plays a crucial role in the health industry by providing new technology that enables health professionals to better understand, diagnose, and care for patients with cancer, neuro-degenerative illnesses, and major viral diseases.

The latest progress in modeling and biological and medical imaging, in robotized assistance surgery system technologies, and in molecular computing have brought much hope. Through these technologies, public health will benefit from less intrusive and more adapted home tele-monitoring, telemedicine and prevention techniques.

The demographic changes and aging of the population present problems relating to autonomy, security and transportation. The supervision, biometry, and cryptography technologies enable intervention in the fields of personal, property and data exchange security and protection. The techniques of geo-location, customized spatial information, and computerized driver assistance may also contribute to optimizing individual and collective transportation systems.

ICST is a determining factor in industrial innovation and economic growth. The design and production of goods has become considerably more effective and flexible, leading to customized products with enhanced features and high added value.

Services are also affected. Electronic commerce between companies, and increasingly between individuals, is experiencing spectacular growth.

Finally, networking between businesses and people has brought about changes in work organization that will be enhanced by collaborative work methods named collective intelligence (consulting internet users for studies, but also resolutions of problems on a vast scale). All of this significantly changes education, training, learning, access to information and knowledge, as well as the knowledge ratio.

This significant progress now makes it possible to envision scenarios that until now revealed something that was just science fiction. They also lead to questions relating to rights and ethics such as the protection of privacy, liability, intellectual property, individual freedoms, and legal responsibilities.

Progress of this magnitude also requires cooperation between information and communication sciences and technologies, and human and social sciences.

1.2 Scientific and Technological Challenges

Today, the digital platform has been taken to the next level with extremely complex systems. Internet now links 2 billion people; new communication architectures raise questions of heterogeneity, interoperability, upgradeability, adaptability, as well as intelligent interaction and technological transparency. The scale of the data volume and complexity to be processed has also changed radically. The web has to provide access to semantic content that is increasingly diverse, rich and complex. The algorithms used in these areas will have to be revised to cope with the changed expectations for scale, quality and intelligence of processing, and also to provide faster reaction time and enhanced interactivity and suitability for users.

These drastic changes result in a revision of the traditional algorithms. The technological innovations of the future will not resemble our current computers that are reaching their limits in terms of performance; rather, they will have to integrate massive parallelism processing, and will be based on optical, quantum or biological mechanisms. ICST is also at the heart of most of the major interdisciplinary challenges of our age, relating to material, life, and agriculture sciences. Vital scientific and technological challenges must be overcome in order to understand life and observe, analyze and model biological functions at all levels - molecules, cells, organs and complete organisms. For these digital sciences, the challenges will include developing representations and complex, heterogeneous models integrated into sensors and data, and implementing them in efficient computing and developing processes for organizational and information searches, synthesis and optimization, verification and proof, forecasting, simulation and precise visualization. The ICST possibilities range from nana-biotechnology, lab-on-a-chip technology, bioinformatics and multimodal imaging to modeling a highly complex organ such as the brain.

1.3 The National and International Environments

The International Context

ICST is one of the main priorities in research worldwide; it represents an expenditure of nearly $200 billion dollars in R&D. The United States, China, Japan and Europe are the four major R&D investors. In the United States, ICST financing is stimulated by emphasis from military programs, while in Japan it is stimulated by private investments. In Europe, it is mainly stimulated by public investment.

In the United States, R&D essentially involves high-performance computing, networks, man-machine interaction, data management, security, as well as software engineering applied to socio-economic issues such as training, education and telecommunications. In China, ICST research is becoming increasingly focused on intelligent perception, advanced computing technologies, networks, virtual reality and security. Japan focuses on ubiquitous computing, supercomputers and robotics.

The European Context

The European Research Area was implemented to coordinate research and innovation within the European Union, and to fulfill the objectives of the Lisbon Treaty (3% of the Member States’ GDP dedicated to R&D). The 7th Framework Program (FP), for the period of 2007-2013, outlines the major courses of action within four major programs:

1. Cooperation: Implementation of cooperative R&D action plans between manufacturers and research organizations.
2. Ideas: Development of forward-thinking fundamental research programs, managed by the European Research Council (ERC).
3. People: Increased mobility of the European Union’s research personnel.
4. Capacities: Support for major research infrastructures.

The National Context

France, due to its size and means, is not in the best position with regard to worldwide scientific production. It must therefore reaffirm its national priorities concerning these crucial fields. This is the case for ICST, which is in and of themselves innovative, as well as the numerous socio-economic sectors.

In fact, these are national research priorities, as the means allocated to them illustrates: ANR: 20% of its budget; AII: 45% of its budget; DGE: 45% of FCE support).

The most important French players in ICST research are:

1. The institutes of higher education: training, research and innovation assignments.
2. Research organizations: Assignments of elaborating and conducting research strategies, specializing in certain themes, partnerships with the university and socio-economic world, and coherence between research and valuation.
3. Funding agencies: Provision of resources for competitive programs implementing national policy. 

Furthermore, the research and higher education clusters (PRES), as well as thematic advanced research networks (RTRAs), provide the structural framework for an improved dynamic between universities, major schools and research organizations, thus developing internationally visible excellence clusters. Coupling in the industrial field along with competitiveness clusters favor the transfer of technology.

1.4 INRIA’s Ambition and Positioning

INRIA has to overcome major scientific and technological ICST challenges. On the one hand, it expects to hold an important position within the eight national excellence centers combining higher education and innovation, and on the other hand, contributing to assisting the clusters in reaching the highest international levels in information and communication science and technologies. INRIA's work is part of this ambitious project to build the European research area by:

1. Participating in projects supported by The European Research Council
2. Participating in the implementation of large-scale action plans such as the “European technological platforms” within the context of the Cooperation program
3. Striving to create joint project-teams with major players in European research.

INRIA also pursues the development strategy that falls within the framework of its quadrennial contract with the French government, through the creation of large-scale research centers.

Its 8 centers are already very involved in the competitiveness clusters pertaining to the Institute’s themes, inasmuch as the regional vocation clusters, as those on a worldwide scale, including System@tic, Minalogic, SCS and Aerospace Valley. The Institute's teams are currently involved in some sixty cluster projects. In addition, they are also major stakeholders in nearly 120 ANR projects, of which the majority involve industries. INRIA is also a founding member of two thematic advanced research networks: Digiteo in Saclay and Infectiologie in Lyon; they are also associated with three others: Mathematical Sciences in Paris, Agronomical Sciences in Montpellier and Nanosciences in Grenoble. INRIA is involved in four of the nine research and higher education clusters (PRES) that were launched in 2007.