SPARTA is a European project bringing together leading researchers in cybersecurity to respond to new challenges facing our increasingly connected society.

SPARTA: defining cybersecurity in Europe

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Projets européens H2020The EU H2020 program is continuing its efforts to establish scientific communities in Europe through the SPARTA project dedicated to cybersecurity. This 3-year project will bring together researchers to take up the new cybersecurity challenges: providing defense against new attacks, offering protection in highly-connected computing environments and artificial intelligence security. Hervé Debar, a researcher in cybersecurity at Télécom SudParis participating in SPARTA, explains the content of this European initiative led by the CEA, with the participation of Télécom ParisTech, IMT Atlantique and Mines Saint-Etienne.

 

What is the goal of SPARTA?

Hervé Debar: The overall goal of SPARTA is to establish a European cybersecurity community. The future European regulation on cybersecurity proposes to found a European center for cybersecurity competencies in charge of coordinating a community of national centers. In the future, this European center will have several responsibilities, including leading the R&D program for the European Commission in the field of cybersecurity.  This will involve defining program objectives, calls for proposals, selecting projects and managing their completion.

What scientific challenges must the SPARTA project take up?

HD: The project encompasses four major research programs. The first, T-SHARK, addresses the issue of detecting and fighting against cyberattacks. The second, CAPE, is aimed at validating security and safety features for objects and services in dynamic environments. The third, HAII-T, offers security solutions for hardware environments. Finally, the fourth, SAFAIR, is aimed at ensuring secure and understandable artificial intelligence.

Four IMT schools are involved in SPARTA: Télécom SudParis, IMT Atlantique, Télécom ParisTech and Mines Saint-Étienne. What are their roles in this project?

HD: The schools will contribute to different aspects of this project. The research will be carried out within the CAPE and HAII-T programs to work on issues related to hardware certification and security, or the security of industrial systems. The schools will also help coordinate the network and develop training programs.

Where did the idea for this project originate?

HD: It all started with the call for proposals by the H2020 program for establishing and operating a pilot cybersecurity competencies network. As soon as the call was launched, the French scientific community came together to prepare and coordinate a response. The major constraints were related to the need to bring together at least 20 partners from at least 9 countries to work on 4 use cases. The project has been established with four national communities: France, Spain, Italy and Germany. It includes a total of 44 partners from 13 countries to work on 4 R&D programs.

Which use cases will you work on?

HD: The project defines several use cases—this was one of the eligibility requirements for the proposal. The first use case is that of connected vehicles, verifying their cybersecurity and operational safety features, which could be integrated into a test vehicle like EuroNCAP. The second use case will look at complex and dynamic software systems to ensure user confidence in complex computer systems and study the impact of rapid development cycles on security and reliability. The intended applications are in the areas of finance and e-government. Other uses cases will be developed over the course of the project.

What will the structure and coordination look like for this SPARTA community?

HD: A network of organizations outside SPARTA partners will be required to coordinate the community. The organizations that have been contacted are interested in the operations and results of the SPARTA project for several reasons. Two types of organizations have been contacted: professional organizations and public institutions. In terms of institutions, French regions, including Ile-de-France and Brittany, are contributing to defining the strategy and co-funding the research. In terms of professional organizations, the ACN (Alliance pour la Confiance Numérique) and competitiveness clusters like Systematic help provide information on the needs of the industrial sector and enrich the project’s activities.

 

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SPARTA: a diverse community with bold ambitions

The SPARTA consortium, led by the CEA, brings together a balanced group of 44 stakeholders from 14 Member States. In France, this includes ANSSI, IMT, INRIA, Thales and YesWeHack. The consortium is seeking to re-imagine the way cybersecurity research, innovation, and training are performed in the European Union through various fields of study and expertise and scientific foundations and applications in the academic and industrial sectors. By pooling and coordinating these experiences, competencies, capacities and challenges, SPARTA will contribute to ensuring the strategic autonomy of the EU.

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click

From personal data to artificial intelligence: who benefits from our clicking?

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Clicking, liking, sharing: all of our digital activities produce data. This information, which is collected and monetized by big digital information platforms, is on its way to becoming the virtual black gold of the 21st century. Have we all become digital workers? Digital labor specialist and Télécom ParisTech researcher Antonio Casilli has recently published a work entitled En attendant les robots, enquête sur le travail du clic (Waiting for Robots, an Inquiry into Click Work). He sat down with us to shed some light on this exploitation 2.0.

 

Who we are, what we like, what we do, when and with whom: our virtual personal assistants and other digital contacts know everything about us. The digital space has become the new sphere of our private lives. This virtual social capital is the raw material for tech giants. The profitability of digital platforms like Facebook, Airbnb, Apple and Uber relies on the massive analysis of users’ data for advertising purposes. In his work entitled En attendant les robots, enquête sur le travail du clic (Waiting for Robots, an Inquiry into Click Work), Antonio Casilli explores the emergence of surveillance capitalism, an opaque and invisible form of capitalism marking the advent of a new form of digital proletariat: digital labor – or working with our digits. From the click worker who performs microtasks, who is aware of and paid for his activity, to the user who produces data implicitly, the sociologist analyzes the hidden face of this work carried out outside the world of work, and the all too-tangible reality of this intangible economy.

Read on I’MTech What is digtal labor?

Antonio Casilli focuses particularly on net platforms’ ability to put their users to work, convinced that they are consumers more than producers. “Free access to certain digital services is merely an illusion. Each click fuels a vast advertising market and produces data which is mined to develop artificial intelligence. Every “like”, post, photo, comment and connection fulfils one condition: producing value. This digital labor is either very poorly paid or entirely unpaid, since no one receives compensation that measures up to the value produced. But it is work nevertheless: a source of value that is traced, measured, assessed and contractually-regulated by the platforms’ terms and conditions for use,” explains the sociologist.

The hidden, human face of machine learning

For Antonio Casilli, digital labor is a new form of work which remains invisible, but is produced from our digital traces. Far from marking the disappearance of human labor with robots replacing the work they once did, this click work challenges the boundaries between work that is produced implicitly and formally recognizable employment. And for good reason: microworkers paid by the task or user-producers like ourselves are indispensable to these platforms. This data serves as the basis for machine learning models: behind the automation of a given task, such as visual or text recognition, humans are actually fueling applications by indicating clouds on images of the sky, for example, or by typing out words.

“As conventional wisdom would have it, these machines learn by themselves. But to train their algorithms to calibrate, or to improve their services, platforms need a huge number of people to train and test them,” says Antonio Casilli. One of the best-known examples is Mechanical Turk, a service offered by the American giant Amazon. Ironically, its name is a reference to a hoax that dates back to the 18th century. An automaton chess player, called the “Mechanical Turk” was able to win games against human opponents. But the Turk was actually operated by a real human hiding inside.

Likewise, certain so-called “smart” services rely heavily on unskilled workers: a sort of “artificial” artificial intelligence. In this work designed to benefit machines, digital workers are poorly paid to carry out micro-tasks. “Digital labor marks the appearance of a new way of working which can be called “taskified,” since human activity is reduced to a simple click; and “datafied” because it’s a matter of producing data so that digital platforms can obtain value from it,” explains Antonio Casilli. And this is how data can do harm. Alienation and exploitation: in addition to the internet task workers in northern countries, more commonly their counterparts in India, the Philippines and other developing countries with low average earnings, are sometimes paid less than one cent per click.

Legally regulating digital labor?

For now, these new forms of work are exempt from salary standards. Nevertheless, in recent years there has been an increasing number of class action suits against tech platforms to claim certain rights. Following the example of Uber drivers and Deliveroo delivery people, individuals have taken legal action in an attempt to have their commercial contracts reclassified as employment contacts. Antonio Casilli sees three possible ways to help combat job insecurity for digital workers and bring about social, economic and political recognition of digital labor.

“From Uber to platform moderators, traditional labor law—meaning reclassifying workers as salaried employees—could lead to the recognition of their status. But dependent employment may not be a “one-size-fits-all” solution. There are also a growing number of cooperative platforms being developed, where the users become owners of the means of production and algorithms.” Still, for Antonio Casilli, there are limitations to these advances. He sees a third possible solution. “When it comes to our data, we are not small-scale owners or small-scale entrepreneurs. We are small-scale data workers. And this personal data, which is neither private nor public, belongs to everyone and no one. Our privacy must be a collective bargaining tool. Institutions must still be invented and developed to make it into a real common asset. The internet is a new battleground,” says the researcher.

Toward taxation of the digital economy

Would this make our personal data less personal? “We all produce data. But this data is, in effect, a collective resource, which is appropriated and privatized by platforms. Instead of paying individuals for their data on a piecemeal basis, these platforms should return, give back, the value extracted from this data, to national or international authorities, through fair taxation,“ explains Antonio Casilli. In May of 2018, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) came into effect in the European Union. Among other things, this text protects data as a personality attribute instead of as property. Therefore, in theory, everyone can now freely consent—at any moment—to the use of their personal data and withdraw this consent just as easily.

While in its current form, regulation involves a set of protective measures, setting up a tax system like the one put forward by Antonio Casilli would make it possible to establish an unconditional basic income. The very act of clicking or sharing information could give individuals a right to these royalties and allow each user to be paid for any content posted online. This income would not therefore be linked to the tasks carried out but would recognize the value created through these contributions. In 2020, over 20 billion devices will be connected to the Internet of Things. According to some estimates, the data market could reach nearly €430 billion per year by then, which is equivalent to a third of France’s GDP. Data is clearly a commodity unlike any other.

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En attendant les robots, enquête sur le travail du clic (Waiting for Robots, an Inquiry into Click Work)
Antonio A. Casilli
Éditions du Seuil, 2019
400 pages
24 € (paperback) – 16,99 € (e-book)

 

Original article in French written by Anne-Sophie Boutaud, for I’MTech.

 

Hospitals

Improving organization in hospitals through digital simulation

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How can we improve emergency room wait times, the way scheduled hospitalizations are managed and cope with unexpected surges of patients? Vincent Augusto, a researcher in healthcare systems engineering at Mines Saint-Étienne is working to find solutions to these problems. He is developing programs based on digital simulation, aimed at optimizing influxes of patients and waiting times at the hospital, especially in emergency care facilities.

 

Chronic emergency department saturation and unacceptable wait times for receiving care are regularly listed among areas in need of improvement. Several of these areas have been studied: taking preventive action beforehand to reduce influxes of patients, organization within emergency departments, managing hospitalizations in advance. Vincent Augusto and his team from the MedTechDesign living lab at the engineering and healthcare center at Mines Saint-Étienne have developed models that contribute to these last two areas by providing valuable information. “We worked on successive projects with hospitals to develop programs using digital simulation. The principle is that any system can potentially be monitored and reproduced based on the data it generates; being able to process this data in real time would help to optimize resources. Unfortunately, major inequalities exist in terms of computerization from one hospital to another.”

Vincent Augusto is specialized in modeling, analyzing and managing inflows of patients in hospitals. “At the hospital in Firminy, we modeled unforeseen arrivals in the emergency department to get a better idea of the number of beds required and to improve planning for scheduled patients.” The departments schedule hospitalizations for patients needing diagnostic scans or treatment. However, since it is difficult to predict the number of available places in advance, scheduled hospitalizations must sometimes be canceled at the last minute, forcing patients to wait longer to receive care. On the other hand, the shortage of beds leads to overcrowded emergency services. Improving the management of the internal and external flow of patients in hospitals is therefore of utmost importance.

A modular digital twin

At the university hospital (CHU) in Saint-Étienne, the team developed a digital twin for the emergency department. This twin helped assess the different measures that could be implemented to improve emergency operations. Vincent Augusto explains how this was developed: “First, there is an on-site observation phase. We collect data using existing software. Next, there is a development phase in which we seek to understand and model the flow of patients in the department and create an initial model on paper that is confirmed by the department staff. We can then create a digital assessment model that reproduces the way the emergency department operates, which then undergoes a validation phase.”

The researchers use the department’s activities from the previous year to accomplish this. They enter the data into the system and check if the indicators predicted by the model match those recorded at the time. This approach involves three different components: the first analyzes the patient care circuit, the second analyzes human resources based on type of activity and the third focuses on the organization and interdependence of the resources. “Once this model has been validated, we can use the modular system to test different scenarios: we can alter the human resources, simulate the arrival of an inflow of patients, reduce the wait time for taking further tests—such as scans—or the time required to transfer a patient to a hospital ward,” the researcher explains.

The first measure tested was to divide emergencies into three groups: serious emergencies (road accidents, respiratory problems, etc.), functional emergencies (sprains, wounds requiring stitches, etc.) and fast functional emergencies (requiring care that can be quickly provided). Upon entering, the patients are directed to one of these three groups led by different teams. According to Vincent Augusto and the system users, “this makes it possible to clearly assess the savings in terms of time and costs that are related to organizational changes or an increase in human resources, before any real changes are made. This is a big plus for the departments, since organizational changes can be very time-consuming and costly and sometimes have only a small impact.”

The real impact the organizational measures would have on emergency department operations was assessed and made it possible to continue work on another potential area for improvement: the creation of a psychiatric section within the emergency department, with beds reserved for these patients. To help draw up the plans for the future emergency services, the team from Mines Saint-Étienne is developing a virtual reality interface to directly and realistically view flows of patients more easily than the indicators and charts generated by the digital simulation system. The goal is to optimize the patient circuit within the department and the medical care they receive.

Improving hospitals’ resilience in unexpected events

This method also offers management support for crisis situations involving a massive influx of patients to the emergency department in the event of disasters, attacks or epidemics. “The system was developed to manage, in addition to the usual flow of patients, an exceptional yet predictable arrival of patients,” the researcher explains. It is therefore useful in voltage plans: exceptional situations that push the system beyond its capacity. In these cases, the department must face a critical situation of responding to hospital emergencies that can lead to a French emergency “white plan” being declared, in which non-priority activities are cancelled.

To accomplish this, the program is updated in real time via a direct connection to the hospital’s computer systems. It can therefore determine the exact state of the department at any time. By entering a varying number of patients with specific pathologies in a given situation (flu-related respiratory difficulties, gunshot wounds, etc.), the simulation can determine the most effective measures to take. This is what the engineers call an operational tool. “In the short and medium term, the departments now have a tool that can help them optimize their response to the problems they face and improve the care patients receive,” concludes Vincent Augusto.

Original article in French written by Sarah Balfagon, for I’MTech.

AFA 7 nouveaux projets, German-French Academy

Industry of the future: The German-French Academy launches seven new projects

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Following a call for proposals launched by the German-French Academy for researchers at IMT and TUM (Technische Universität Munchen), seven projects were selected in October 2018. The projects focus on key topics for the German-French Academy for the Industry of the Future. A French-German platform for AI will soon be launched.

 

The selected projects focus on six topics: AI for the industry of the future, advanced manufacturing, advanced materials, supply chain and logistics, energy efficiency, and industrial design and processes. They will be funded by the German-French Academy for the Industry of the Future founded by IMT and TUM, for the initial seed stage.

For Christian Roux, Executive Vice President for Research and Innovation at IMT, “The German-French Academy is expanding its scope of exploration to provide solutions to strategic topics related to the industry of the future in order to support and accelerate the digital transformation of French and German industry.”

Alloy Design for Additive Manufacturing (ADAM)

This project focuses on additive manufacturing, in particular through laser melting (LBM, Laser Beam Melting). It aims to optimize the choice of the alloy composition used in this additive manufacturing process so as to limit defaults and optimize mechanical properties in the final product. This optimization will be based on processing large amounts of data collected by the research team at Mines Saint-Étienne, and on experimentation resources equipped with very high-speed cameras at TUM.

Additive Manufacturing for the Industry of the Future

This project aims to analyze the impact of the introduction of additive manufacturing in industry, focusing on three main areas. The first area involves industrial organization (supply chain, use of opensource materials, integration in new innovation ecosystems), the second concerns companies (new duties, new skills, new business models) and the final area focuses on organizational changes in the design process (new possibilities for design, mass customization, user-centered design etc.). The changes resulting directly from the introduction of additive manufacturing itself will also be studied.

Smart Artificial Intelligence based Modeling and Automation of Networked Systems (AI4Performance)

This project is intended to develop a smart approach for testing and evaluating networked systems (while collecting data at the same time). The process will be based on using innovative learning methods (Graph Neural Network) on data provided by partners Cisco and Airbus. This will involve analyzing the impact of changes (increase in the number of users, integration of new sub-systems, virtual machines etc.), detecting bottlenecks and analyzing the root cause as well as detecting malfunctions.

Data-driven Collaboration in Industrial Supply Chains (DISC)

Against the backdrop of digital transformation of industry, this project focuses on supply chain optimization through collaboration, especially in terms of incentives for information sharing. The approach will rely on methods derived from game theory to improve the decision-making process, which is increasingly decentralized as a result of digital transformation.

Modeling and decision-making platform for Reconfigurable, Digitalized Servitized Production systems (RDS-Production)

This research project aims to develop methods for designing reconfigurable production systems based on modeling interoperable components and software (using digital twins), AI techniques and operational research for decision-making support in reconfigurations, service life cycle approaches for production system equipment, and multi-criteria decision-making methods.

Smart Sensor Technology with Decentralized Processing Architecture

This project seeks to develop a new approach for taking sensors into account in systems such as automobiles or eHealth. The process will use smart sensors to distribute and process data starting from the sensor level, in different layers, so that through this multi-layer and adaptable system, storage and processing needs will be distributed in an optimized way to ensure security, reliability, robustness and scalability.

A French-German platform for AI

Joint Platform and Tools for Artificial Intelligence based on Data-Intensive Research and Data Governance.

TeraLab, IMT’s artificial intelligence platform, and TUM will work together to create a shared platform for AI. This will allow researchers at both institutes and their industrial partners to work in close collaboration through shared, secure access to data. The project also includes the possibility for researchers to showcase their research and results, with the development of tools that can test the algorithms and data sets used. This secure, neutral and trustworthy service will facilitate the reproducibility of results within a shared framework of good practices.

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For five years IMT has been developing Teralab, an AI platform aimed at accelerating research and innovation, giving researchers, innovative companies and industrial players the opportunity to work together in a secure, sovereign, neutral environment using real data.  

A true success story of the Investissements d’avenir (Future Investments) program, TeraLab is now involved in 60 industrial projects and is a key player in three H2020 projects on industry (MIDIH, BOOST 4.0, AI4EU). It has been awarded the “Silver i-Space” label at the European level for three years.

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Browse all articles on the German-French Academy for the Industry of the Future

 

 

Wi6labs

Wi6labs: customized sensor networks

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Wi6labs, a start-up incubated at IMT Atlantique, installs connected sensor networks for municipalities and industries. What makes this startup so unique? It offers custom-developed private networks that are easy to install. When it comes to controlling energy networks, water supply and monitoring air quality, the solution proposed by Wi6labs is attractive due to its simplicity and the savings it offers. The startup is part of the IMT delegation to CES 2019 in Las Vegas.

 

It all started three years ago. In July 2016, the mayor of Saint-Sulpice-la-Forêt, a municipality located 10km northeast of Rennes, France, became aware of a leak in the city’s water system. For one year, the municipality’s water bill had been constantly increasing. All in all, the water leaked was equivalent to 26 Olympic-sized swimming pools. The fact that this leak was discovered came as a relief to the mayor. But how could he prevent undetected occurrences like this from happening again? To avoid wasting more water, Saint-Sulpice-la-Forêt contacted a local start-up: Wi6labs.

“We proposed installing sensors in the water system,” recalls the start-up’s founder, Ulrich Rousseau. “In just one night, these objects can detect and locate a leak.” Satisfied with the results, the mayor renewed the partnership to monitor the temperature and energy consumption in public buildings. The sensor network revealed, for example, that the town’s school was being heated at night and during school vacations. By adapting its practices based on data from the connected sensors, the municipality saved €7,400 of its annual energy expenditure of €50,000 over the next year. “The investment of €20,000 for installing our solution paid for itself in three years,” Ulrich Rousseau explains.

For Wi6labs, the Saint-Sulpice-la-Forêt experience was a pilot experiment used to test the start-up’s relevance. The operation’s success allowed them to propose this solution to other local municipalities and companies. Each time, there was a common theme: a water leak. “It’s our starting point with customers. They all deal with this problem and are convinced that our approach will help them manage it,” he explains. Once the system is installed for the water meter and the initial data is retrieved, the changes in practices aimed at reducing the water bill provide convincing proof for continuing with the operation.

The start-up then eventually offers its customers solutions for monitoring air quality and adjusting gas consumption. In their partnership with Keolis, a public transport operator, Wi6labs developed a sensor network to inform the company of the number of passengers using its buses in real time. “We study specific cases, for both municipalities and companies, and we respond with a customized solution that meets a wide range of needs,” Ulrich Rousseau explains.

Wi6labs conquers dead zones

All the start-up’s solutions are built on its product Wiotys, a platform used to control a LPWAN network. These low-power, long-range networks enable communication between connected objects. Wiotys makes it possible to install sensor networks that are independent and isolated. In other words, the sensors used by Saint-Sulpice-la-Forêt only communicate amongst themselves and are controlled locally. This approach is therefore different from those used by telecommunication operators like Orange and Bouygues, which deploy national networks connecting the sensors.

This difference has vast implications. First, there are the advantages. Wiotys networks are not limited by the dead zones in the major operators’ networks. Saint-Sulpice-la-Forêt, for example, does not benefit from any LPWAN networks from national operators. It is therefore impossible to connect their sensors to a national network. Secondly, this allows them to create custom solutions. For example, if a company wants to charge its customers based on data from a sensor, it must send information through the network’s downlink channel, in other words, in the opposite direction from the uplink channel, which sends information from the sensor to the platform. “Operators are not comfortable doing this because it is expensive to reserve part of the network for downlink data transmission to the sensor. For us, it is simply a question of taking this need into account when dimensioning the network,” Ulrich Rousseau explains.

However, they cannot offer some of the features operators can. This is the case with roaming—a sensor’s capacity to switch from one connection terminal to another as it moves.  “For our customers, this is not generally a problem, since water meters and air sensors are stationary,” the founder of Wi6labs explains. The start-up has strategically chosen to eliminate certain complex features to make the installation easier. “What we sell our customers is a quick solution that is easy to deploy. It’s a little like installing a router at home: you plug it in, and it works.”

Today, Ulrich Rousseau assures us that the start-up no longer experiences any technological barriers. Its use cases have involved working 20 meters underground and responding to complex requests from customers. The true limit is that of social acceptability, especially for municipalities. “All of the sudden, we must explain to the civil servant who used to enter meter readings into an Excel spreadsheet that our sensors will be taking over this task,” Ulrich Rousseau explains. “We have to change his tasks and train him to learn how to control the sensors.”

These are no small changes for civil servants who for years have performed tasks unrelated to digital technology. For a municipality, this also requires adjustments to integrate training time and new tasks for civil servants. Social resistance can therefore by significant and the legitimacy of these reactions should not be minimized. According to Ulrich Rousseau, Wi6labs is also responsible for explaining the significant and valuable results of these changes. “We must be educators. For us, this involves showing local citizens and civil servants the savings in euros for the municipality in practical terms, rather than talking about kilowatt hours.” In essence: changing citizens’ perception of energy to increase their awareness of the energy and environmental transition.

 

Opti'waves

Opti’Waves: microwaving ceramics

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The start-up Opti’Waves, a direct spin-off from research conducted at Mines Saint-Étienne laboratories, offers new technology for firing technical ceramics. By using microwaves, this technology considerably reduces high-temperature firing times and the energy used to manufacture ceramics. Its target market? Dental prostheses. The start-up will present its industrial solution at CES 2019 Las Vegas with the delegation from IMT.

 

Having a dental prosthesis fitted is never a pleasant experience. The time required for this procedure makes it even more unpleasant. Whether several teeth need to be covered with a bridge, or a single molar needs replacing, you will have to undergo a series of appointments spanning at least one month. As the dentist assesses the best solution, takes dental impressions, fits a temporary prosthesis, then removes it and fits the final prosthesis, your jaw will repeatedly undergo great strain. The main reason for this little obstacle course your mouth must endure is the time the practitioner needs to produce the prosthesis, and have it fired at a high temperature.

“A type of chalk is condensed by heating it to approximately 1,500°C to create a ceramic prosthesis,” says Sébastien Saunier, a researcher in ceramic materials at Mines Saint-Étienne. The conventional firing process in very energy-intensive kilns —also called densification—lasts between 10 to 15 hours. Prosthetic technicians therefore wait until several parts can be produced in one operating cycle before using the kiln. Since dental practices often have three or four dentists, the volume of parts for patients cannot fill the kilns every day. There is therefore generally a wait time of approximately one week before the prosthesis can be delivered.  “It is because of this time requirement that a temporary prosthesis must be fitted to prevent the gums from closing over again,” the researcher explains.

In light of this situation, Sébastien Saunier decided to use the results of his research to found the start-up Opti’Waves. To reduce the heating time for prosthesis densification, he developed a densification system using microwaves. The firing time was reduced from 10 hours to 40 minutes. “Conventional kilns are resistive, like traditional kitchen ovens: the heat comes from a resistor that heats the material from the outside,” Sébastien Saunier explains. “Firing the ceramic takes at least 10 hours. If the temperature rises too fast, the prosthesis will not be evenly fired, just like when you bake a pie too quickly: the outside is burnt and the inside isn’t cooked.”

The benefits of microwaves

With the microwave kiln, the firing takes place in the core. To ensure the prosthesis is evenly fired, Opti’Waves developed a patented bowl system. The parts are placed in this system and the bowl distributes the heat over the entire material. “This the culmination of the expertise we have been developing for ten years in the laboratories of Mines Saint-Étienne on firing ceramics using microwaves,” the researcher explains. Using bowls of different shapes and sizes, the Opti’Waves kiln can be used to produce crowns, bridges and even entire jawbones. The icing on the cake: the reduced firing time directly affects the kiln’s energy consumption. “The microwave kiln already uses slightly less energy than a conventional kiln, but the savings is directly proportional to reduced operating time.”

The start-up’s product therefore allows prostheses to be produced more quickly, since practitioners no longer need to wait several days before starting a firing cycle that lasts one workday. This benefit will change the organization of the dental prosthesis market. “The manual dental impression process is increasingly being replaced by intraoral scanners. The digital file is generated almost instantly and can immediately be emailed to countries in Eastern Europe or Asia,” says Sébastien Saunier.

In these countries with lower labor costs, the high volume of requests enables them to quickly fire several dozen prostheses at once. They are then sent to practitioners in France, with a total time equivalent to or even shorter than what a small laboratory of prosthetic technicians could accomplish, considering the wait times needed to fill the kiln for a few patients. “Our microwave kiln allows us to directly compete with this production outsourcing and bring prosthesis manufacturing back to France,” observes the researcher and entrepreneur.

Opti’Waves will participate in CES 2019 in Las Vegas from January 8 to 11. The young company will again present its kiln before putting it on the market this spring. “There is already a high demand among prosthetic technicians,” says Sébastien Saunier. This early success is also due to the kiln being so easy to use. In addition to its performance, it comes with a range of software that makes life easier for prosthetic technicians: “All they need to do is enter the number of parts they want to fire and push the button.”

The researcher sees the expertise they have developed in the dental prosthesis market as a springboard. “Our core business is technical ceramics, which is present everywhere: in the aeronautics, automotive, defense and luxury industries…” Opti’Waves makes no secret of its ambitions to apply its microwave technology in other business sectors, in which companies are also facing energy challenges. In conclusion, Sébastien Saunier sums it up quite simply: “our objective is to industrialize technical ceramic production using microwaves.”

Acklio

Acklio: linking connected objects to the internet

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With the phenomenal growth connected objects are experiencing, networks to support them have become a crucial underlying issue. Networks called “LPWAN” provide long-range communication and energy efficiency, making them perfectly suited to the Internet of Things, and are set to become standards. But first, they must be successfully integrated within traditional internet networks. This is precisely the mission of the very promising start-up, Acklio. This start-up developed at IMT Atlantique was a finalist for the Bercy-IMT Innovation Awards and will attend CES 2019 from 8 to 11 January.

 

How many will there be in 2020? 2 billion? 30 billion? Maybe even 80 billion? Although estimates of the number of connected objects that will exist in five years vary by a factor of four depending on which consulting firm or think tank you ask, one thing seems certain: the amount of objects will be a number with nine or more zeros. All these communications must be ensured to connect these objects to the internet in order to exchange data with the cloud, our email accounts or smartphone applications.

But connected objects are not like computers: they do not have fiber optic connections, and few of them use WiFi to communicate. The Internet of Things relies on specific radio networks called LPWAN—the best-known examples of which are LoRa and Sigfox. One of the major challenges in deploying the IoT is therefore to successfully ensure rapid, efficient data transfer between LPWAN networks and the internet. This is precisely the aim of Acklio, a start-up founded by two IMT Atlantique researchers: Laurent Toutain and Alexander Pelov.

Alexander Pelov explains why industrial players are interested in LPWAN networks, “Using just 3 AAA batteries, we can now power a connected gas meter that will transmit one message per day for a period of 20 years. These networks are extremely energy-efficient and make it possible to reduce the cost of communications.” From GPS tracking of objects, animals and people to logistics, alarm systems and more, all industries that wish to make use of connected objects will rely on these networks.

For Alexander Pelov, however, this poses a problem. “Depending on whether we choose the LoRa or Sigfox technology to set up the LPWAN network for the connected objects, a different approach will be used. The developers won’t work in exactly the same way, for example,” he explains. So it would be impossible to scale up in terms of infrastructure or environment to deploy multiple connected objects. It would also be difficult to ensure fluid data transfer between the LPWAN networks and the internet if each network is different. In other words, this represents a major hurdle in the development of IoT.

To overcome this obstacle, Acklio’s team integrates basic LPWAN protocols in standard internet protocols—like IPv6. Alexander Pelov sums up his start-up’s approach as follows, “We define a generic architecture and add it at the server level, which controls the connected objects. Then, we send messages from these objects to the internet and vice versa via this architecture.” Acklio’s technological building block thus acts as an intermediary in the transmission of data from one environment to another.

It is based on the principle of data compression and fragmentation. The role of the technology is first of all to compress the header in a data packet using a mechanism called SCHC —static context header compression. This is a crucial step for providing internet connectivity within the LPWAN network. Since compression is impossible at times, or may produce data packets that are still too large for the LPWAN network, Acklio also makes it possible to fragment the Ipv6 data packets. This two-in-one technology will allow developers to work without worrying about which LPWAN technology is used for the IoT application they are developing.

Acklio, an important player in IoT standardization

The young start-up’s work is so promising that it has been commissioned to coordinate efforts to standardize connectivity between LPWAN networks and the internet. Acklio is leading a working group within the IETF—an organization that is actively involved in developing internet standards—which brings together the IEEE, the 3GPP cooperation for telecommunications standards in Europe, and alliances for the standardization of LoRa and Sigfox technologies (including LoRa Alliance members Bouygues Telecom and Orange for example).

In all, more than 200 industry players are represented in the IETF, not counting academic institutions. “It’s an organization where researchers and engineers can talk about operational needs, technical constraints and scientific challenges without engaging in business lobbying,” says Marianne Laurent, Head of Marketing director for the start-up. In 2018, the IETF recognized Acklio’s technology as a standard. A sign of success and the start-up’s high-quality work, this has also created an opening for the technology and therefore, for competition for the young company.

However, Acklio will be able to count on its head start in developing its compression-fragmentation technique. For now, it is still the only one of its kind, and will enter the market with two products which it will present at the Las Vegas CES 2019 in January. This could be the occasion for the start-up to continue its winning streak for awards, starting with an interest-free loan from Fondation Mines-Télécom in 2016 and continuing with a Best Telecommunication Innovation Award at the 2018 Mobile World Congress in March of last year. Most importantly, the American event will also provide an opportunity to find new customers. Acklio is on track to become a shining example of researchers succeeding in the entrepreneurial world and of the direct commercialization of fundamental research in telecommunications.

 

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LPWAN: networks suited for connected objects

Alexander Pelov illustrates the performance of LPWAN networks through a use case carried out with the city of Rennes to control its electrical grid. “With only two LWPAN base stations, it is possible to cover 95% of the Rennes urban area.” This high level of performance does come with some drawbacks: the networks are slow and only a few messages can be sent per day by the objects connected to these networks. The two base stations support a daily traffic of one hundred 12-byte messages. But the sensors do not usually need to send much information to the server or to do so quickly. That is why these long-range networks have already become the foundation for communications between connected objects.

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CES 2019

Start-ups Energysquare and Opti’Waves receive IMT awards at CES 2019

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On January 8, two start-ups from IMT school incubators received Bercy-IMT Innovation Awards in Las Vegas at CES 2019. Energysquare and Opti’Waves won first and second prize, respectively, for these financial support awards sponsored by IMT, Fondation Mines-Télécom and Carnot Télécom & Société numérique. Fondation Mines-Télécom presented the 5 “Coup de Coeur” awards chosen by 5 sponsors (Bouygues Telecom, Deloitte, Engie, Safran and Wavestone).

 

Two Bercy-IMT Innovation Prizes

 

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First Prize: Energysquare

Energysquare develops new wireless contact charging technology that can be used to charge several devices simultaneously on a high-power surface without any electromagnetic waves or loss of energy.

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Second Prize: Opti’waves

Opti’Waves develops and commercializes technology for sintering ceramics using microwaves. It is ten times faster than the technology currently present on the market and is used to create dental prostheses.

Read our article on I’mTech: Opti’Waves, microwaving ceramics

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The Fondation Mines-Télécom Awards

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Acklio

Acklio develops software aimed at making it easier and more secure to develop, integrate and operate IoT solutions. The start-up, founded in Rennes in 2016, has created technology that enables the use of IP in the emerging networks of the Internet of Things. This technology, currently exclusive to Acklio, will soon be recognized by the IETF as the international standard.

Read our article on I’mTech: Acklio: Linking connected objects to the internet

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Uavia

Uavia is a design, production and service company in the field of civilian drones for professional use. It manufactures high-tech drones that meet the needs of companies with strict requirements.

Find out more about this start-up: www.uavia.eu

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Askhub

AskHub, an artificial intelligence platform aimed at improving chatbots, offers an ecosystem of ready-to-use conversational plugins and cutting-edge artificial intelligence components to improve the user experience.

See the start-up’s website for more information: www.askhub.io

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Learn more about other start-ups from the IMT delegation to Las Vegas on our blog I’MTech.

 

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Wi6labs: customized sensor networks

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Medcam: a high-quality image for laparoscopy

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Botfuel: chatbots to revolutionize human-machine interfaces

Awards, Prix IMT Académie des sciences 2019

The IMT-Académie des Sciences Awards 2019 open for applications

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The third edition of the IMT-Académie des Sciences Awards is now open for applications. Supported by Fondation Mines-Télécom, the awards strive to reward exceptional scientific contributions at the European level in three areas: digital transformation in industry; energy and environmental engineering; and materials and manufacturing (new for 2019). The deadline for applications is April 23, 2019.

 

Two prizes

Awards Ceremony at the Institut de France, 20 November 2018

The IMT-Académie des sciences awards comprise two prizes:

– a Grand Prix awarded to a scientist who has made an exceptional contribution to the fields mentioned above through an outstanding body of work;
– a Young Scientist Prize awarded to a scientist who is under 40 years old on January 1st of the year the prize is awarded, and who has contributed to these same fields with a major innovation.

These prizes will be awarded by IMT, with support from Fondation Mines-Télécom and the Académie des Sciences. They will include the following prize amounts:
– Grand Prix: €30,000
– Young Scientist Prize: €15,000

Each prize will be awarded to a scientist of any nationality working in France, or in Europe in close collaboration with French teams. Applications must be sent to the Académie des Sciences by a laboratory director, an establishment manager or a member of the Académie who supports the application.

Official awards ceremony in the dome of the Institut de France

The formal awards ceremony will be held in the dome of the Institut de France in fall 2019. It will be accompanied by a ceremony at the Académie des Sciences by IMT for the winners to present their works.

Submit an application before April 23, 2019

Discover the 2017 and 2018 winners

Sébastien Bigo (Nokia Bell Labs), Pierre Rouchon (Mines ParisTech), Julien Bras (Université Grenoble Alpes-Grenoble INP), Ange Nzihou (IMT Mines Albi), Pierre Comon (CNRS-Université Grenoble Alpes, Grenoble INP), Ioan-Mihai Miron (CNRS-CEA).

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And the winners of the new IMT-Académie des Sciences Awards are…

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Three new winners of the IMT-Académie des Sciences awards

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computer viruses

Hospitals facing a different kind of infection: computer viruses

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Hervé Debar, Télécom SudParis – Institut Mines-Télécom

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[dropcap]W[/dropcap]annaCry was the first case of a cyberattack that had a major effect on hospitals. The increasing digitization of hospitals (like all areas of society) offers significant opportunities for reducing the cost of health care while making the care provided more effective. However, with digitization comes cybersecurity challenges and these threats must be taken into account in implementing e-health solutions.

The hospital: a highly digitized environment

The medical world — and especially hospitals — is a highly digitized environment. This reality first began with management tasks (human resources, room management, planning, etc.) and over the past few years it has grown to include medical equipment (radiology, imaging). Two significant developments have occurred:

  • An increasing number of objects are used in hospitals to collect data or administer medication. This is what is referred to as the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT). The nature of these often-inexpensive objects represents a break with the professional management of conventional medical platforms.
  • More and more of these objects are used outside the hospital, by individuals who are not properly trained to use them. Some of these uncontrolled devices, such as our smartphones, can enter the hospital and interact with medical processes.

From a technical perspective, we are undeniably becoming increasingly dependent on a high-quality digital infrastructure to provide us with quality medical care. This directly affects not just the care provided but also all the related processes (planning, insurance, reimbursement of fees, logistics, etc.). It is particularly difficult to ensure security in these areas, since the conventional development and management technology in information systems is also vulnerable to these attacks. Furthermore, technological advances are based on the increased ability to share, analyze and disseminate information. The number of vulnerabilities is therefore likely to remain high.

From an economic perspective, the rise in healthcare costs is unavoidable. Increased operational efficiency, made possible by computerization, is one of the measures used to prevent costs from rising too high. It is therefore imperative to keep the impacts of cyberattacks in hospital environments to a minimum.

From a legal perspective, the implementation of European personal data protection regulations (GDPR) and the cybersecurity for operators of critical infrastructures (NIS) are imposing new obligations for everyone.

Hospitals are the perfect example of the use of extremely sensitive data demanding confidentiality, integrity (accuracy) and availability (access) to provide care and ensure medical records are properly managed. A medical record is a summary of sensitive, correlated information with separate subsets with varying levels of interest.

A poorly protected environment

Over the past few years there have been cyberattacks that have affected hospital operations. We should note that in many cases, hospitals are just one of the targets of these attacks, since many other organizations are also impacted.

Wannacry is a computer worm that exploits a breakdown in Windows protocol that allows printers and files to be shared. This protocol is used by medical imaging equipment to transfer an image file from a scanner to computers and is used by doctors who meet with patients to make a diagnosis. When imaging equipment is infected by Wannacry through this network protocol, it becomes inoperable, preventing operations and hence endangering patients’ lives.

More generally, much of the medical equipment relies on aging operating systems and old protocol. It is therefore crucial that manufacturers of this equipment become aware of this issue.

The effectiveness of a medical procedure increasingly relies on the ability to connect various tools used by medical staff for the purpose of transferring data (images, prescriptions, etc.) and interacting. Therefore, it is not possible to consider isolating these pieces of equipment. More rigorous access controls must therefore be implemented (which is generally a challenge for organizations, as demonstrated in the study by Deloitte called “Future of Cyber”).

An attack on pacemakers

In addition to the Wannacry incident, it is also necessary to reflect on the communications between medical objects and information systems. Several examples have recently demonstrated the vulnerability of medical objects.

Implants, such as insulin pumps and pacemakers, are vulnerable to computer attacks. Communications between these objects are neither encrypted nor authenticated, meaning that they could be listened to for the purpose of extracting sensitive data. This also means they can receive commands allowing them to be controlled, creating all types of imaginable consequences through changes in their operations.

Other routine medical equipment, like infusion pumps, are also vulnerable to attacks.

New attacks in sight

So far, the attacks that have been revealed have had two main consequences. The first is a denial of service, or the inability to use medical equipment when it is needed and all the potential consequences this entails. Since it is difficult to prevent denial of service attacks, measures must be taken to limit their effects.

The second result is the leak of potentially sensitive information. This leak of information involves the risk of data being added to other databases, for example as data sources for the validation of creditworthiness, used by banks in their decisions to grant or refuse bank loans. This would represent a major setback in protecting our personal data.

We do not have any clear examples of data being falsified, which could be the next step taken by attackers. Data falsification could lead to erroneous prescriptions and therefore to drug diversion. This diversion would allow the author of the crime to receive an immediate profit, which fits with current trends.

What are the solutions?

The first solutions that come to mind are technological ones. Such new solutions do indeed exist which could improve computer security in medical environments.

  • blockchain. This technology can significantly improve data protection by separating the data according to purpose (medical, clerical, insurance, etc.) and by protecting each piece of data individually. It can also log access to manage emergency situations. Current technology is too energy-intensive and must be changed to become more acceptable.
  • Virtualization and cloudification. Outsourcing computer services professionalizes the management of an organization’s digital activities. The scarcity of human resources trained in cybersecurity makes it necessary to rely on external means. The development of cloud services, particularly the concept of a sovereign cloud, must be done in a way that complies with current regulations, particularly the famous GDPR.
  • By Design. Manufacturers of medical objects, software and platforms must take cybersecurity into account during the design phase for their equipment as well as integrating it into the life cycle. This is a major revolution that cannot be carried out in a day. It is therefore necessary to continue protecting older equipment whose initial cost justifies its continued use for decades to come. This is also a revolution for the IT world, which now counts the life span of its software and services in terms of months. While awareness in the area is growing in the industrial world, it must also increase in the medical world.

All these new forms of technology, and others not mentioned here, will never be effective unless the human factor is first taken into account in the hospital, among caregivers, but also patients and visitors. This remains the key to a successful digital transformation of the hospital.

Medical objects must be adapted to their users, generally patients. Besides gadgets like connected watches, better solutions must be found for all objects to make them simpler and easier to use. Confidence in these objects is fundamental and cybersecurity incidents that could restrict their use must be avoided at all costs.

Finally, the role of medical professionals is absolutely fundamental. They must accept the presence of computer technology and recognize that it can make their work easier on a daily basis rather than representing a hindrance. Medical staff must take an interest in cybersecurity issues, receive training in this area and urge suppliers to develop tools adapted to their needs.

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Hervé Debar, Head of the Telecoms Networks and Services Department at Télécom SudParis – Institut Mines-Télécom, Université Paris-Saclay

The original version of this article (in French) has been published on The Conversation.

See all articles by Hervé Debar on I’MTech