PhD proposal MINES Saint-Etienne

ANR CoSWoT - Semantic Interoperability on the Internet of Things

Integrate the ANR CoSWoT (Constrained Semantic Web of Things) project, and contribute to the development of research in interoperability and semantic reasoning for the field of Intelligent Building and Digital Agriculture.

The Ecole des Mines de Saint-Etienne, founded in 1816, is a member of the Institut Mines-Télécom - France's leading group of engineering and management grandes écoles, positioned on the major changes of the 21st century: digital, environmental and energy, industrial and educational transformations.

Saint-Etienne is a welcoming and dynamic city with a wide range of leisure activities (various sports, national drama centre, opera, city of design...), at the gateway to nature (Pilat massif, Loire gorges...) but with quick access to major cities (less than an hour from Lyon and three hours from Paris by TGV).

The Henri Fayol Institute, one of the school's 5 training and research centers, brings together professors in industrial engineering, applied mathematics, computer science, environment and management around the theme of overall business performance. The institute is strongly involved in the flagship projects of the Industry of the Future and the City of the Future.

Join a multicultural team, passionate, internationally recognized in the field of Semantic Web and Multi-Agent Systems, which will push you to exceed your limits and give the best of yourself!

The Internet of Things connects physical devices offering sensing or actuating with their vicinity. The ever-growing capabilities of devices allow to imagine new architectures including them as first class citizens. New added-value applications can then be envisioned in smart agriculture, smart buildings, smart cities, energy and water management, e-health and ageing well.

The scientific context of this Ph.D. thesis is the French ANR project CoSWoT (Constrained Semantic Web of Things), whose objectives are to propose a distributed WoT-enabled software architecture embedded on constrained devices with two main characteristics: (1) it will use ontologies to specify declaratively the application logic of devices and the semantics of the exchanged messages; (2) it will add reasoning functionalities to devices, so as to distribute processing tasks among them. Doing so, the ambition of the CoSWoT project is to greatly simplify the development of applications including devices of the WoT, by enabling the development and execution of intelligent and decentralised smart WoT applications despite the heterogeneity of devices.

Many non-interoperable IoT data models co-exist and even compete with each other at the application layer. For example EnOcean EEP, Zigbee ZCL, Bluetooth GATT, OCF oneIoTa, oneM2M SDT, etc. This Ph.D. focuses on the problem of semantic interoperability [ISO/IEC 21823-3:2021] between heterogeneous and potentially constrained devices and services. The main objectives of this Ph.D. is to tackle semantic interoperability despite the heterogeneity of data formats and service API specifications, i.e., across platforms.

Application

Applicants are required to hold a Master in computer Science with distinction. Good autonomy, and good interpersonal skills.

Applications are expected by October 22th 2021, to fill the position December 1st 2021 or January 1st 2022. Interested candidates should submit a resume, cover letter, and master transcripts by e-mail to antoine.zimmermann@emse.fr and maxime.lefrancois@emse.fr with the reference: PhD_CoSWoT_2021