Information, Computation and Communication Everywhere

Today all sectors of activity are affected by communication technologies and infrastructures. At this point in time, objects can communicate with one another autonomously. This field raises numerous scientific issues relating to protocols and communication networks, distributed computing, and the knowledge and service web. Today, the Institute has very solid skills and high international visibility with regard to these issues. INRIA’s priorities relate to the Internet of the future, which is geared toward producing new algorithmic and architectural bases to correct the structural weakness of the Internet and design a new network. The work will also pertain to the overlay networks on the internet that permit a very large number of pairs to share documents. The operator network problems will be studied to better control wireless networks, and to improve band sharing and services. New architectural models and distributed algorithms will enable failures, configurations, costs, performance and security to be managed more efficiently. Very high-performance programmable control methods, capable of scheduling network resources in real-time, will be developed for optical networks. The Institute will continue studying new distributed control algorithms for self-organizing networks, in order to allow users to always be connected in the best possible manner.

« INRIA’s priorities relate to the Internet of the future, which is geared toward producing new algorithmic and architectural bases to correct the structural weakness of the Internet and design a new network. »

Changing to a knowledge and service web implies being able to control a considerable volume of heterogeneous data, as well as having new features that meet users’ needs. Access to semantic content depends on the convergent development of two approaches: those based on XML and other associated languages, and those from the semantic web for the expression and use of knowledge. The research will pertain to, most specifically, problems relating to representation of knowledge, learning, and automatic processing of the natural language. This management also requires the merging of information that comes from multiple and heterogeneous sources. Finally, there also needs to be features that enable the user to be a producer of information. Another emerging concept that deserves special consideration is that of autonomous information systems with components capable of self-supervision, self-protection, self-optimization, self-correction and self-configuration.

With ubiquitous calculation, the calculation power accessible to a user may now be based on vast resources available at low cost and distributed on a large scale. Computing grids raise problems relating to distributed middleware, network-centered operating systems, resource management and programming models that take into account the intrinsic complexity of the grids.