PhD Position at EMSE St-Etienne

A PhD studentship is available at ENS Mines Saint-Etienne. The deadline to postulate is *7th of May*.

He/she will be supervised by Professor Flavien Balbo and assistant Professor Antoine Zimmermann (ISCOD team, iscod.emse.fr).

Scientific context:

Intelligent transportation systems (ITS) aims at improving public transports, logistics and traffic management by utilising new hardware infrastructures (such as, sensors and communication networks) with modern information technologies for simulation, real-time control, data and knowledge management and exploitation. This opens new issues for the collection, storage and distribution of information related to travellers and goods. More specifically, information sources and services are numerous, multi-scale, heterogeneous and independent. As an example, recommending a multimodal route demands access to data and services that belong to independent operators, and that are difficult to combine. Therefore, one of the major objectives of ITS is to propose an adapted answer to the needs and dynamic context of travalers, thanks to a combined use of multiple services, data sources and partially formalised knowledge.

Doctoral issue:

In this context, the goal of this PhD thesis is the design of a generic framework to collect and share information and services in the transportation domain. Information and services are proposed by multiple operators in order to offer flexible and adapted advanced services to the travelers. The resulting middleware has to process heterogeneous and multi-scale information. The middleware design will be based on multi-agent and semantic web technologies.

More precisely, the design of the shared information space will exploit open ontologies and linked data to integrate and to access heterogeneous and distributed data or service sources. The explicitation and context awareness of users will be based on the research of the ISCOD team and will be adapted to the transportation domain. Finally, the deployment of the middleware in an open and distributed environment will benefit from the research on interaction and coordination models in the multi-agent domain with the integration of the mobility dimension.

Additional Information:

The ISCOD laboratory belongs to the Henri Fayol institute that is a Joint Research Unit (JRU) of ARMINES and its partner school ENS Mines Saint-Etienne that deals with industrial management, systems engineering and information technology. Its objectives are to develop and explore advanced methods, models and tools to improve the overall performance of organisations, companies, and businesses, from both social responsibility and sustainable development perspectives. One of its research activities contribute to the development of a transparent and intelligent mediation infrastructure between the strongly interconnected digital world (contents and services) and real world (things and people). The models, technologies and applications that are developed within the group address the challenges of Decentralisation, Cooperation and Openness that are at the core of current ITs application (Web intelligence, Ambient Computing). The main research subjects
 investigated are multi-agent-o
 riented
 computing, information retrieval, semantic technologies, trust and privacy, artificial intelligence.

Candidate Profile:
The ideal candidate should have an MSc or equivalent degree in computer science or mathematics and should be able to work in a collaborative environment.

Background knowledge and/or previous experience in the following areas, will be considered favorably:
 - Multi-agent System,
 - Semantic https://sogo.emse.fr/SOGo/so/flavien.balbo/Mail/0/folderDrafts/newDraft1398439584-1/edit#Web,
 - Software engineering.

Contact:

Email the following documents:
 - CV,
 - Motivation letter, 
 - A copy of your grades of the last year or years (especially the current year if you are a Master student), if you do not yet have the official paper for the current year, please send us the grades by email and you will be able to provide the official paper later.
 - optionally, letters of recommendation.

to
   - Flavien Balbo : Flavien [dot) Balbo [at) emse (dot] fr
   - Antoine Zimmermann : Antoine (dot] Zimmermann (at] emse [dot) fr