Spotlight on the research challenges

> Networks of the future

The Networks of the Future challenge covers the following main areas: control over the ubiquity, transparency and generalized mobility of users and services, the development of peripheral networks (ad hoc, meshed, opportunistic, cognitive radio …), the evolution in the architecture of the future internet, and the techniques of the internet of services: composition, cloud, virtualization… It also raises the issues of functional safety and security.
Historically, it is one of the Télécom group of the Institut Mines-Télécom’s areas of excellence.

> Communicating objects

Technological progress in microelectronics and integration and embedded software, combined with ubiquitous networking capacities, mean we can now envisage the deployment of countless (ultimately, several hundred billion) communicating objects such as trigger sensors, RFID tags and their upgrades, and autonomous robots. We have arrived at the concept of the internet of objects, or the Real world Internet which forms the link between the physical world (environment, people, objects…) and the digital world of services (ambient intelligence). There will be substantial applications in terms of services in highly varied domains (transports, health, entertainment, energy and sustainable development, production and supply chain, home automation services, intelligent cities, etc.).

> Media of the future

The Media of the future challenge concerns the setup of fluid communication environments (ambient communication, ubiquitous services, composition of services), the techniques of editing, aggregating and disseminating multimedia communications, and the roll-out of knowledge creation, exchange, processing, access and storage environments. In this challenge, the Institute has a solid position in signal, sound, image and multimedia content processing, and in knowledge processing tools: extraction, indexation, learning.

> Uses and digital lives

This challenge is about observing and understanding the very wide-ranging changes occurring in the  uses, services, business models, etc. linked to the dissemination of ICT in society: changes in uses, organizations and production modes relating to ubiquity and generalized mobility, control over digital abundance, impacts on value chains, practices and social links, and impacts on the cognitive structures of people, businesses and society in relation to the evolutions of representations and tools and the production of digital traces. This is a specialty of the Télécom group of the Institut Mines-Télécom, which alongside its technical skills has developed a strong skill set (around 100 people) in human, social and management sciences.