Keynotes - Valérie Issarny, Inria
Participatory Systems in the Digital Era: A Services Computing Perspective
Valérie Issarny, Inria
Date/Time: Friday October 23, 19:00 - 20:20 UTC
Abstract
There is no doubt that digital technologies have changed, and will keep changing, the fabric of society. They have transformed the way humans interact, consume information and, as a consequence, influence the physical world. This especially holds for civic engagement for which digital technologies hold the promise of sustaining engagement at a very large scale through dedicated participatory systems.
In this talk, I will concentrate on the design of participatory systems using services computing, with particular emphasis on the challenges that lie ahead. Starting with two examples of urban participatory systems, respectively dedicated to environmental pollution monitoring and collective actions, I will illustrate how base services technologies allow overcoming the technical heterogeneity and large scale inherent in the target systems. However, participatory systems come with specific challenges associated with sustaining the engagement of a large and highly heterogeneous crowd of participants. I will then highlight research directions toward overcoming the challenges arising, which lie in revisiting service-based middleware so as to foster social interoperability and interactions among participants but also the connected digital things that bring valuable knowledge about the physical environment pertaining to the focus of the participation.
Brief Biography
Valérie Issarny holds a “Director of research” position at Inria, the French institute for research in Digital sciences, where she led the ARLES research team until 2013, investigating distributed software systems leveraging wirelessly networked devices, with a special emphasis on service-oriented systems. She studies middleware solutions easing the development of distributed collaborative services, including mobile services deployed over smartphones and interacting with sensors and actuators. From 2013 to 2018, she coordinated the Inria CityLab program dedicated to smart cities and promoting citizen engagement; the program was developed in collaboration with CITRIS at University of California Berkeley, targeting urban-scale experiment in Paris and California cities. Related projects included Ambiciti on urban pollution monitoring through participatory sensing and crowd sourcing, and SocialBus on a middleware solution enabling interactions across social media to support democratic assembly and collective actions. Valerie has published over 200 technical papers. She is associate editor of ACM TAAS, ACM TIOT, IEEE TSC and IEEE TSE. To know more, visit: http://valerie-issarny.me/