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BeePMN, abeilles, apiculteur

BeePMN: Monitoring bees to take better care of them

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At the crossroads between Industry 4.0 and the Internet of Things, the BeePMN research project aims to help amateur and professional beekeepers. It will feature an intuitive smartphone app that combines business processes with real-time measurements of apiaries. 

When a swarm of bees becomes too crowded for its hive, the queen stops laying eggs and the worker bees leave in search of a place to start a new colony. The hive splits into two groups; those who follow the queen to explore new horizons, and those who stay and choose a new queen to take over the leadership of the colony. As exciting as this new adventure is for the bees, for the beekeeper who maintains the hive, this new beginning brings complications. In particular, the loss of part of the colony also leads to a decrease in honey production. On the other hand, the loss of the bees can be caused by something much worse, like the emergence of a virus or an invasion that threatens the health of the bee colony. 

Beekeepers therefore monitor these events in the life of the bees very closely, but keeping track of the hives on a daily basis is a major problem, and a question of time. The BeePMN project, at the crossroads between the processes of Industry 4.0 and the Internet of Things, wants to give the beekeepers eyes in the back of their heads to be able to monitor the health of their hives in real time. BeePMN combines a non-invasive sensor system, to provide real-time data, with an intuitive and easy-to-use application, to provide decision-making support. 

This project was launched as part of the Hubert Curien Partnerships which support scientific and technological exchanges between countries, offering the installation of sites both in France, near Alès, and in Lebanon, with the beekeeping cooperative Atelier du Miel. It is supported by a collaboration between a team led by Gregory Zacharewicz, Nicolas Daclin and François Trousset at IMT Mines Alès, a team led by Charles Yaacoub and Adib Akl at the Holy Spirit University of Kaslik in Lebanon, and the company ConnectHive. This company, which specializes in engineering as applied to the beekeeping industry, was founded by François Pfister, a retired IMT Mines Alès researcher and beekeeping enthusiast.

BeePMN has several goals: to monitor the health of the hives, to increase honey production, and to facilitate the sharing of knowledge between amateurs and professionals. 

“I actually work on business process problems in industry,” says Grégory Zacharewicz, a researcher at IMT Mines Alès on the project. “But the synergy with these different partners has directed us more towards the craft sector, and specifically beekeeping,” with the aim of providing tools to accelerate their tasks or reminders about certain activities. “I often compare BeePMN to a GPS: it is of course possible to drive without it, but it’s a tool that guides the driver to optimize his choices,” he explains. 

Making better decisions 

The different sites, both in France and Lebanon, are equipped with connected sensors, non-invasive for the bee colonies, which gather real-time data on their health, as well as on humidity, temperature, and weight. For the latter, they have developed ‘nomad’ scales, which are less expensive than the usual fixed equivalent. This data is then recorded in an application to help guide the beekeepers in their daily choices. Though professionals are used to making these kinds of decisions, they may not necessarily have all the information at hand, nor the time to monitor all their apiaries. 

The data observed by the sensors is paired with other environmental information such as the current season, weather conditions, and the flowering period. This allows for precise information on each hive and its environment, and improves the relevance of possible actions and choices. 

“If, for example, we observe a sudden 60% weight loss in a hive, there is no other option than to harvest it,” says Charbel Kady, a PhD student at IMT Mines Alès who is also working on the BeePMN project. On the other hand, if the weight loss happens gradually over the course of the week, that might be the result of lots of other factors, like a virus attacking the colony, or part of the colony moving elsewhere. That is the whole point of combining this essential data, like weight, with environmental variables, to provide more certainty on the cause of an event. “It’s about making sense of the information to identify the cause,” notes Charbel Kady. 

The researchers would also like to add vegetation maps to the environmental information. This is an important aspect, especially with regard to honey plants, but this information is difficult to find for certain regions, and complex to install in an application. The project also aims to progress towards prevention aspects: a PhD student, Marianne El Kassis, joined the BeePMN team to work on simulations and to integrate them into the application, to be able to prevent potential risks. 

Learn through play 

The two researchers stressed that one of the points of the application is for beekeepers to help each other. “Beekeepers can share information with each other, and the interesting model of one colleague can be copied and integrated into the everyday life of another,” says Charbel Kady. The application centralizes the data for a set of apiaries and the beekeepers can share their results with each other, or make them available to beginners. That’s the core of the second part of the project, a ‘serious’ game to offer a simplified and fun version to amateur beekeepers who are less independent. 

Professionals are accustomed to repeating a certain set of actions, so it is possible to formalize them with digital tools in the form of business processes to guide amateurs in their activities. “We organized several meetings with beekeepers to define these business rules and to integrate them into the application, and when the sensors receive the information, it triggers certain actions or alerts, for example taking care of the honey harvest, or needing to add wax to the hive,” explains Grégory Zacharewicz. 

“There is a strong aspect of knowledge and skill transfer. We can imagine it like a sort of companionship to pass on the experience acquired,” says the researcher. The GPS analogy is applicable here too: “It makes available a whole range of past choices from professionals and other users, so that when you encounter a particular situation, it suggests the best response based on what has been decided by other users in the past,” the researcher adds. The concept of the app is very similar, in offering the possibility to capitalize on professionals’ knowledge of business processes to educate yourself and learn, while being guided at the same time. 

The BeePMN project is based on beekeeping activities, but as the researchers point out, the concept itself can be applied to various fields. “We can think of a lot of human and industrial activities where this project could be replicated to support decision-making processes and make them stronger,” explains Grégory Zacharewicz.

Tiphaine Claveau

Planning for the worst with artificial intelligence

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Given that catastrophic events are rare by nature, it is difficult to prepare for them. However, artificial intelligence offers high-performing tools for modeling and simulation, and is therefore an excellent tool to design, test and optimize the response to such events. At IMT Mines Alès, Satya Lancel and Cyril Orengo are both undertaking research on emergency evacuations, in case of events like a dam breaking or a terrorist attack in a supermarket.

“Supermarkets are highly complex environments in which individuals are saturated with information,” explains Satya Lancel, PhD student in Risk Science at Université Montpellier III and IMT Mines Alès. Her thesis, which she started over two years ago, is on the subject of affordance, a psychological concept that states that an object or element in the environment is able to suggest its own use. With this research, she wishes to study the link between the cognitive processes involved in decision-making and the functionality of objects in their environment.

In her thesis, Lancel specifically focuses on affordance in the case of an armed attack within a supermarket. She investigates, for example, how to optimize instructions to encourage customers to head towards emergency evacuation exits. “The results of my research could act as a foundation for future research and be used by supermarket brands to improve signage or staff training, in order to improve evacuation procedures”, she explains.

Lancel and her team obtained funding from the brand U to perform their experiments. This agreement allowed them to study the situational and cognitive factors involved in customer decision-making in several U stores. “One thing we did in the first part of my research plan was to observe customer behavior when we added or removed flashing lights at the emergency exits,” she describes. “We remarked that when there was active signage, customers are more likely to decide to head towards the emergency exits than when there was not,” says the scientist. This result suggests that signage has a certain level of importance in guiding people’s decision-making, even if they do not know the evacuation procedure in advance.

 “Given that it is forbidden to perform simulations of armed attacks with real people, we opted for a multi-agent digital simulation”, explains Lancel. What is unique about this kind of simulation is that each agent involved is conceptualized as an autonomous entity with its own characteristics and behavioral model. In these simulations, the agents interact and influence each other with their behavior. “These models are now used more and more in risk science, as they are proving to be extremely useful for analyzing group behavior,” she declares.

To develop this simulation, Lancel collaborated with Vincent Chapurlat, digital systems modeling researcher at IMT Mines Alès. “The model we designed is a three-dimensional representation of the supermarket we are working on,” she indicates. In the simulation, aisles are represented by parallepipeds, while customers and staff are represented by agents defined by points. By observing how agents gather and how the clusters they form move around, interact and organize themselves, it is possible to determine which group behaviors are most common in the event of an armed attack, no matter the characteristics of the individuals.

Representing the complexity of reality

Outside of supermarkets, Cyril Orengo, PhD student in Crisis Management at the Risk Science Laboratory at IMT Mines Alès, is studying population evacuation in the event of dam failure. The case study chosen by Orengo is the Sainte-Cécile-d’Andorge dam, near the city of Alès. Based on digital modeling of the Alès urban area and individuals, he plans to compare evacuation time for a range of scenarios and perform cartography of various city roads that are likely to be blocked. “One of the aims of this work is to build a knowledge base that could be used in the future by researchers working on preventive evacuations,” indicates the doctoral student.

He, too, has chosen to use a multi-agent system to simulate evacuations, as this method makes it possible to combine individual parameters with agents to produce situations that tend to be close to a credible reality. “Among the variables selected in my model are certain socio-economic characteristics of the simulated population,” he specifies. “In a real-life situation, an elderly person may take longer to go somewhere than a young person: the multi-agent system makes it possible to reproduce this,” explains the researcher.

To generate a credible simulation, “you first need to understand the preventive evacuation process,” underlines Orengo, specifying the need “to identify the actors involved, such as citizens and groups, as well as the infrastructure, such as buildings and traffic routes, in order to produce a model to act as a foundation to develop the digital simulation”. As part of his work, the PhD student analyzed INSEE databases to try and reproduce the socioeconomic characteristics of the Alès population. Orengo used a specialized platform for building agent simulations to create his own. “This platform allows researchers without computer programming training to create models, controlling various parameters that they define themselves,” explains the doctoral student. One of the limitations of this kind of simulation is computing power, which means only a certain number of variables can be taken into account. According to Orengo, his model still needs many improvements. These include “integrating individual vehicles, public transport, decision-making processes relating to risk management and more detailed reproduction of human behaviors”, he specifies. For Lancel, virtual reality could be an important addition, increasing participants’ immersion in the study, “By placing a participant in a virtual crowd, researchers could observe how they react to certain agents and their environment, which would allow them to refine their research,” she concludes.

Rémy Fauvel

Photographie montrant plusieurs blocs de béton

Improve the quality of concrete to optimize construction

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Since the late 20th century, concrete has become the most widely used manufactured material in the world. Its high level of popularity comes alongside recurring problems, affecting its quality and durability. Among these problems is when one of the components in concrete, cement paste, sweats. Mimoune Abadassi, civil engineering PhD student at IMT Mines Alès, aims to resolve this problem.

“When concrete is still fresh, the water inside rises to the surface and forms condensation,” explains Mimoune Abadassi, doctoral student in Civil Engineering at IMT Mines Alès. This phenomenon is called concrete sweating. “When this process takes place, some of the water will not reach the surface and remains trapped inside the concrete, which can weaken the structure,” adds the researcher, before specifying that “sweating does not only have negative effects on the concrete’s quality, as water allows the material to be damp cured, which prevents it from drying out and cracks appearing that would reduce durability”.

In his thesis, Abadassi studies the sweating of cement paste, one of the components of concrete alongside sand and gravel. In analyzing cement paste prepared with varying amounts of water, the young researcher has remarked that the more water incorporated in the cement paste, the more it sweats. He has also looked into the effect of superplasticizers, chemical products that when included in the cement paste, make it more liquid, more malleable when fresh and more resilient when hardened. “When we increase the amount of superplasticizer, we have observed that the cement paste sweats more as well,” indicates Abadassi. “This is explained by the fact that superplasticizers disperse suspended cement particles and encourage the water contained in clusters formed by these particles to be released,” he points out, before adding that “this phenomenon causes the volume of water in the mixture to increase, which increases the sweating of the cement paste”.

Research at the nanometric, microscopic and macroscopic level

By interfering with the sweating, superplasticizers also affect the permeability of cement paste. To study its permeability when fresh, Abadassi used an oedometer, a device mainly used in the field of soil mechanics. Oedometers compress a sample, extract the water contained inside and measure the volume, to determine how permeable it is. The larger the volume of water recovered, the more permeable the sample. In the case of cement paste, if it is too permeable, more water will enter, which reduces cohesion between aggregate particles and weakens the material’s structure.

By varying certain parameters when preparing the cement paste, such as the amount of superplasticizer, Abadassi aims to observe the changes taking place within the paste, invisible to the naked eye. To do so, he uses a Turbiscan. This machine, generally used in the cosmetics industry, makes it possible to analyze particle dispersion and cluster structure in the near-infrared. By observing the sample at scales ranging from the nanometer to the millimeter, it is possible to identify the formation of flocks: groups of particles in suspension which adhere to one another, and that, in the presence of superplasticizers, separate and release water into the cement paste mixture.    

To understand the consequences of phenomena in cement paste at the microscopic and mesoscopic scale, Abadassi uses a scanning electron microscope. This method makes it possible to observe the paste’s microstructure and interfaces between aggregate particles at a nanometric and microscopic scale. “With this technique, I can visualize internal sweating, shown by the presence of water stuck between aggregate particles and not rising to the surface,” he explains. When concrete has hardened, a scanning microscope can be used to identify fissuring phenomena and cavity formation caused by the sweating paste.

Abadassi has also studied the effects of an essential stage in cement paste production: vibration. This process allows cement particles to be rearranged, leaving the smallest possible gaps between them and therefore making the paste more durable and compact. After vibrating the cement paste at various frequencies, Abadassi concluded that sweating is more likely at higher frequencies. “Vibrating cement particles in suspension will cause them to be rearranged, which will lead to the water contained in flocks being released,” he describes, adding that “the greater the vibration, the more the particles will rearrange and the more water will be released”.

Once these trials are finished, the concrete’s mechanical performances will be analyzed. One way this will be done is by exerting mechanical pressure on an object, in this case, a sample of concrete, to measure its resistance to said pressure. The results obtained from this experiment will be connected with microscope observations, Turbiscan tests and trials varying the parameters of the cement paste formula. All of Abadassi’s results will be used to create a range of formulas that can be utilized by concrete production companies. This will provide them with the optimal quantities of components, such as water and superplasticizers, to include when preparing cement for use in concrete. In this way, the quality and durability of the most widely used manufactured material in the world could be improved.

Rémy Fauvel

Graphene, or the expected revolution in electronics: coming soon

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Thibaut Lalire, IMT Mines Alès – Institut Mines-Télécom

“Material of the 21st century,” a “revolutionary material”: these are some of the ways graphene has been described since it was discovered in 2004 by Konstantin Novoselov and Andre Geim. The two scientists’ research on graphene won them the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2010. But how do things stand today – seventeen years after its discovery?

Graphene is known worldwide for its remarkable properties, whether mechanical, thermal or electrical. Its perfect honeycomb structure composed of carbon atoms is the reason why graphene is a high-performance material that can be used in numerous fields. Its morphology, in the form of a sheet just one atom thick, makes it part of the family of 2D materials. Manufacturers have stepped up research on this material since its discovery, and a wide range of applications have been developed, in particular by taking advantage of graphene’s electrical performance. Many sectors are targeted, such as aeronautics, the automotive industry and telecommunications.

Is there graphene in airplanes?

Graphene is used for its status as a champion of electrical conductivity, as well as for its low density and its flexibility. These properties allow it to join the highly exclusive club of materials used in  aeronautics.

Lightning and ice buildup are problems frequently encountered by airplanes at high altitudes. The impact of a lightning strike on a non-conductive surface causes severe damage that can even include the aircraft catching fire. The addition of graphene, with its high electrical conductivity, makes it possible to dissipate this high-energy current. Airplanes are designed in such a way so as to route the current as far as possible from risk areas – fuel tanks and control cables – and therefore prevent loss of control of the aircraft, or even explosion.

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The history of graphene starts here. Umberto/Unsplash, CC BY

A coating composed of a resin reinforced with graphene, which is referred to as a “nanocomposite,” is used as an alternative to metal coating, since its low density makes it possible to obtain lighter materials than the original ones – limiting the aircraft’s mass, and therefore, its fuel consumption. But the electrically conductive materials required to dissipate the energy of the lightening strike have the drawback of reflecting electromagnetic waves, meaning that this kind of material cannot be used for stealth military applications.

To overcome this shortcoming, different forms of graphene have been developed to conserve its electrical conductivity while improving stealth. “Graphene foam” is one of these new structures. The wave penetrates the material, which creates a phenomenon in which the wave is reflected in all directions, trapping it and gradually suppressing its traces. It is not possible for the wave to return to the radar, so the aircraft becomes stealth. This is referred to as electromagnetic shielding.

Graphene for energy storage

Graphene has also become widely used in the field of electrical energy storage.

Graphene is an ideal candidate as an electrode for Li-ion batteries and supercapacitators. Its high electrical conductivity and high specific surface area (corresponding to the available surface on the graphene that can accommodate ions and facilitate the exchange of electrons between the graphene electrode and the lithium) makes it possible to obtain a large “storage capacity.” A large number of ions can easily insert themselves between the graphene sheets, which allows electrons to be exchanged with the current, increasing the battery’s electricity storage capacity, and therefore battery life. The ease with which ions can insert themselves into the graphene electrode and the high electrical conductivity of this material (for rapid electron transfer) result in a battery with a much shorter discharge/charge cycle. Graphene’s high conductivity makes it possible to deliver a great quantity of energy in a very short time, resulting in more powerful supercapacitators. Graphene is also a good thermal conductor, which limits temperature rise in batteries by dissipating the heat.

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Electric batteries are increasingly pervasive in our lives. Graphene could help improve their performance. Markus Spiske/Unsplash, CC BY

At the industry level, Real Graphene has already developed an external battery that can completely recharge a mobile phone in 17 minutes. In an entirely different industry, Mercedes is working on a  prototype for a car with a battery composed of graphene electrodes, proclaimed to have a range of 700 kilometers for a 15-minute recharge  – at present, these values are quite surprising at first glance, especially for electric vehicles which require batteries with high storage capacity.

Making its way into the field of electronics

One area where graphene has struggled to set itself apart compared to semi-conductors is the field of electronics. Its electronic properties – due to its “band structure” – make it impossible to control electrons and graphene therefore behaves like a semi-metal. This means that the use of graphene for binary  – digital – electronics remains challenging, especially for transistors, which are instead composed of semi-conductors.

In order for graphene to be used in transistors, its band structure must be modified, which usually means degrading its honeycomb structure and other electrical properties. If we want to conserve this 2D structure, the chemical nature of the atoms that make up the material must be modified, for example by using boron nitride or transition metal dichalcogenides, which are also part of the family of 2D materials.

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Microscopy of the interface between graphene and boron nitride(h-BN). Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Flickr, CC BY

If, however, we wish to use graphene, we must target applications in which mechanical properties (flexibility) are also sought, such as for sensors, electrodes and certain transistors reserved for analog electronics, like graphene field-effect transistors. The leading mobile phone companies are also working on developing flexible mobile phone screens for better ergonomics.

The manufacturing of the coming quantum computers may well rely on materials known as “topological insulators.” These are materials that are electrical conductors on their surface, but insulators at their core. Research is now focusing on the topological phase of graphene with electric conduction only at the edges.  

The wide variety of applications for graphene demonstrates the material’s vast potential and makes it possible to explore new horizons in a wide range of fields such as optoelectronics and spintronics.

This material has already proved itself in industry, but has not revolutionized it so far. However, ongoing research allows new fields of application to be discovered every year. At the same time, synthesis methods are continually being developed to reduce the price of graphene per kilogram and obtain a higher-quality material.

Thibaut Lalire, PhD student in material science, IMT Mines Alès – Institut -Télécom

This article has been republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article (in French).

IMPETUS: towards improved urban safety and security

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How can traffic and public transport be managed more effectively in a city, while controlling pollution, ensuring the safety of users and at the same time, taking into account ethical issues related to the use of data and mechanisms to ensure its protection? This is the challenge facing IMPETUS, a €9.3 million project receiving funding of €7.9 million from the Horizon 2020 programme of the European Union[1]. The two-year project launched in September 2020 will develop a tool to increase cities’ resilience to security-related events in public areas. An interview with Gilles Dusserre, a researcher at IMT Mines Alès, a partner in the project.

What was the overall context in which the IMPETUS project was developed?

Gilles Dusserre The IMPETUS project was the result of my encounter with Matthieu Branlat, the scientific coordinator of IMPETUS, who is a researcher at SINTEF (Norwegian Foundation for Scientific and Industrial Research) which supports research and development activities. Matthieu and I have been working together for many years. As part of the eNOTICE European project, he came to take part in a use case organized by IMT Mines Alès on health emergencies and the resilience of hospital organizations. Furthermore, IMPETUS is the concrete outcome of efforts made by research teams at Télécom SudParis and IMT Mines Alès for years to promote joint R&D opportunities between IMT schools.

What are the security issues in smart cities?

GD A smart city can be described as an interconnected urban network of sensors, such as cameras and environmental sensors; it offers a multitude of valuable big data. In addition to better managing traffic and public transport and controlling pollution, this data allows for better police surveillance, adequate crowd control. But these smart systems increase the risk of unethical use of personal data, in particular given the growing use of AI (artificial intelligence) combined with video surveillance networks. Moreover, they increase the attack surface for a city since several interconnected IoT (Internet of Things) and cloud systems control critical infrastructure such as transport, energy, water supply and hospitals (which play a central role in current problems). These two types of risks associated with new security technologies are taken very seriously by the project: a significant part of its activities is dedicated to the impact of the use of these technologies on operational, ethical and cybersecurity aspects. We have groups within the project and external actors overseeing ethical and data privacy issues. They work with project management to ensure that the solutions we develop and deploy adhere to ethical principles and data privacy regulations. Guidelines and other decision-making tools will also be developed for cities to help them identify and take into account the ethical and legal aspects related to the use of intelligent systems in security operations.

What is the goal of IMPETUS?

GD In order to respond to these increasing threats for smart cities, the IMPETUS project will develop an integrated toolbox that covers the entire physical and cybersecurity value chain. The tools will advance the state of the art in several key areas such as detection (social media, web-based threats), simulation and analysis (AI-based tests) and intervention (human-machine interface and eye tracking, optimization of the physical and cyber response based on AI). Although the toolbox will be tailored to the needs of smart city operators, many of the technological components and best practices will be transferable to other types of critical infrastructure.

What expertise are researchers from IMT schools contributing to the project?  

GD The work carried out by Hervé Debar‘s team at Télécom SudParis, in connection with researchers at IMT Mines Alès, resulted in the creation of the overall architecture of the IMPETUS platform, which will integrate the various modules of smart city as proposed in the project. Within this framework, the specification of the various system components, and the system as a whole, will be designed to meet the requirements of the final users (cities of Oslo and Padua), but also to be scalable to future needs.

What technological barriers must be overcome?

GD The architecture has to be modular, so that each individual component can be independently upgraded by the provider of the technology involved. The architecture also has to be integrated, which means that the various IMPETUS modules can exchange information, thereby providing significant added value compared to independent smart city and security solutions that work as silos.  

To provide greater flexibility and efficiency in terms of collecting, analyzing, storing and access to data, the IMPETUS platform architecture will combine IoT and cloud computing approaches. Such an approach will reduce the risks associated with an excessive centralization of large amounts of smart city data and is in line with the expected changes in communication infrastructure, which will be explored at a later date.  

This task will also develop a testing plan. The plan will include the prerequisites, the execution of tests, and the expected results. The acceptance criteria will be defined based on the priority and percentage of successful test cases. In close collaboration with the University of Nimes, IMT Mines Alès will work on innovative approach to environmental risks, in particular related to chemical or biological agents, and to hazard assessment processes.

The consortium includes 17 partners and 11 EU member states and associated countries. What are their respective roles?

GD The consortium was formed to bring together a group of 17 organizations that are complementary in terms of basic knowledge, technical skills, ability to create new knowledge, business experience and expertise. The consortium comprises a complementary group of academic institutions (universities) and research organizations, innovative SMEs, industry representatives, NGOs and final users.

The work is divided into a set of interdependent work packages. It involves interdisciplinary innovation activities that require a high level of collaboration. The overall strategy consists of an iterative exploration, an assessment and a validation, involving the final users at every step.

[1] This project receives funding from Horizon 2020, the European Union’s Framework Programme for Research and Innovation (H2020) under grant agreement N° 883286. Learn more about IMPETUS.

MANIFESTS

Decision support tools for maritime accident management

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The European MANIFESTS project, launched in January, is a two-year project bringing together a consortium of nine research institutions and public administrations with complementary expertise in managing maritime accidents. Funded by the European Commission, this project aims to improve responses to emergencies related to these accidents. An interview with Laurent Aprin, a researcher at IMT Mines Alès, a project partner.

Could you describe the broader context of the MANIFESTS project?

Laurent Aprin –The MANIFESTS project (Managing Risks and Impacts From Evaporating and Gaseous Substances to Population Safety) is a follow-up to the European HNS-MS project funded from 2015 to 2017 by the European Commission’s Directorate General for European Civil Protection and Humanitarian Aid (DG-ECHO). The purpose of this project was to study and model the consequences of chemical spills in the ocean and determine the vulnerability of the environment, people and goods depending on the chemicals spilled. We wanted to continue our research by expanding the consortium and addressing questions submitted by the various stakeholders at the end-of-project meeting, in particular the consequences of evaporating substances that are likely to form toxic clouds, which are flammable, or even explosive.

What is the aim of the MANIFESTS project?

LA ­– Responding to maritime accidents can be especially challenging when they involve Hazardous and Noxious Substances (HNS) which act like gases or evaporators. Due to their potential to form toxic or combustible clouds, fact-based decisions are needed to protect the crew, responders, coastal communities and the environment. But when an accident is declared, key information for assessing risks for responders or emergency teams is not always available. Allowing a ship that presents a risk to dock in a place of refuge due to a lack of knowledge and data could have major implications for coastal communities. The aim of MANIFESTS is to respond to these uncertainties and improve response capacity with decision support tools and novel and innovative operational guidelines. How so? By facilitating access to knowledge and databases, all of which are hosted on a dedicated open source web platform accessible to planners and responders.

How will you achieve this goal?

LA – The MANIFESTS project is divided into four activities (workpackages, WP) supported by two cross-project activities, project management (WP1) and project communication (WP6). The technical work includes producing new data and knowledge on gases and evaporating substances that may be released during marine accidents. This information will be obtained by acquiring knowledge from the literature and research data (WP2). WP3 involves developing methods to assess and manage risks and testing response tools through computer-based and field trials. WP4 will focus on developing and improving tools for modeling HNS behavior and developing a MANIFESTS decision support system. This WP includes developing  new tools based on the previously described WPs and upgrading the models developed in the existing HNS-MS and MARINER projects (WP5).

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What scientific expertise are IMT Mines Alès researchers bringing to this project?

LA – IMT Mines Alès[1] researchers are primarily involved in two WPs:

  • WP2: improving knowledge and data on gases and evaporating substances for which IMT Mines Alès is the coordinator. This task aims to characterize and theoretically and experimentally assess the behavior and impacts of HNS when they are released into the ocean, with a particular focus on the release of volatile substances that may lead to the formation of a potentially toxic, flammable and/or explosive gas cloud.
  • WP6: strategy for dissemination, exploitation and visibility, in particular to develop proof of concept (PoC) for a serious games to train emergency responders and planners involved in managing marine pollution events. Using an immersive scenario, this crisis simulation makes it possible to test the implementation of response plans, the response cell’s capacity to fulfill its missions (including adapting during a dynamically evolving scenario) and to make defensible decisions under demanding, realistic conditions.

Who are your partners for this project and how are you working together?

LA – The project consortium is coordinated by Cedre (France)[2], and includes 9 research institutions and public administrations from 6 countries (France, Belgium, UK, Norway, Spain, Portugal) with strong complementary expertise: ARMINES/IMT Mines Alès (France), Royal Belgium Institute of Natural Science (RBINS, Belgium), Instituto Tecnológico para el Control del Medio Marino de Galicia (INTECMAR, Spain), Centro tecnologico del mar/Fundacion CETMAR (Spain), Instituto superior tecnico (Portugal), Department of Health (UK), Meteorologisk Institutt (Norway) and the Federal Public Service for Public Health, Food Chain Safety and Environment (Belgium). They are involved in all the aspects of marine pollution addressed by the project: chemical analysis, pollution modeling, developing decision support tools, risk assessment and management, training and exercises, knowledge transfer. MANIFESTS will also benefit from collaboration with an advisory committee comprising 6 national maritime authorities who will be the primary end-users of the project results, including the French Navy, CEPPOL (Centre of Practical Expertise for Pollution Response) and customs for France.

What are the next big steps for the project?

LA – The MANIFESTS project was launched on 1 January 20201 and is set to run for two years. The first phase will involve an accident study and a literature review of the modeling of the behavior of evaporating substances in the ocean. The next steps will focus on creating experimental designs to characterize the  evaporation rate of substances and the consequences of explosions, programming consequence models (dispersion, fire and explosion) and conducting a large-scale trial in the Atlantic Ocean.


[1] The IMT Mines Alès team includes Laurent Aprin, Aurélia Bony-Dandrieux, Philippe Bouillet, Frédéric Heymes, Christian Lopez and Jérôme Tixier.

[2] Laura Cotte, engineer, and Stéphane Le Floch, Head of the Research Department at the Centre for Documentation, Research and Experimentation on Accidental Water Pollution (Cedre), are the initiators and coordinators of the project.

Interview by Véronique Charlet

detection covid-19 eaux usées

Covid-19: what could subsurface wave detection mean for the pandemic?

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The detection of SARS-CoV-2 viral infections responsible for Covid-19 allows us to monitor the evolution of the pandemic. Most methods are based on individual patient screening, with the disadvantages of cost and time. Other approaches based on the detection of SARS-CoV-2 in urban wastewater have been developed to monitor the trends in infections. Miguel Lopez-Ferber, a researcher at IMT Mines Alès, conducted a study to detect the virus in wastewater on the school’s campus. This precise, small-scale approach allows us to collect information on the probable causes of infection.

How do you detect the presence of Sars-CoV-2 in wastewater?

Miguel-Lopez-Ferber: We use the technique developed by Medema in 2020. After recovering the liquid part of the wastewater samples, we use a centrifugation technique that allows us to isolate a phase that contains the virus-sized particles. From this phase, we proceed with the extraction of the viral genomes present to perform PCR tests. PCR (polymerase chain reaction) is a technique used to amplify a genetic signal. If the PCR amplifies viral genome fragments specific to Sars-CoV-2, then the virus is present in the wastewater sample.

Does this technique tell us the concentration of the virus?

MLF: Yes. Thanks to our partnership with the PHYSE team of the HydroSciences Montpellier laboratory and the IAGE startup, we use the digital PCR technique which is a higher-resolution version of quantitative PCR. This allows us to know how many copies of the viral genome are present in the samples. With weekly sampling, we can know the trend in virus concentrations in the wastewater.

What value is there in quantifying the virus in wastewater?

MLF: This method allows for early detection of viral infections: SARS-CoV-2 is present in feces the day after infection. It is therefore possible to detect infection well before the first potential symptoms appear in individuals. This makes it possible to determine quickly whether the virus is actively circulating or not and whether there is an increase, stagnation or decrease in infections. However, at the scale at which these studies are conducted, it is impossible to know who is infected, or how many people are infected, because the viral load is variable among individuals.

How can your study on the IMT Mines Alès campus contribute to this type of approach?

MLF: To date, studies of this type have been conducted at a city level. We have reduced the cohorts to the scale of the school campus, as well as to different buildings on campus. This has allowed us to trace the sampling information from the entire school to specific points within it. Since mid-August, we have been able to observe the effects of the different events that influence the circulation of the virus, in both directions.

What kind of events are we talking about?

MLF: For example, in October, we quickly saw the effect of a party in a campus building: only 72 hours later, we observed a spike in virus circulation in the wastewater of that building, thus indicating new infections. On the contrary: when restrictive measures were put in place, such as quarantine or a second lockdown, we could see a decrease in virus circulation in the following days. This is faster than waiting to see the impact of a lockdown on infection rates 2 to 3 weeks after its implementation. This not only shows the effectiveness of the measures, but also allows us to know where the infections come from and to link them to probable causes.

What could this type of approach contribute to the management of the crisis?

MLF: This approach is less time-consuming and much less expensive than testing every person to track the epidemic. On the scale of schools or similar organizations, this would allow rapid action to be taken, for example, to quarantine certain areas before infection rates become too great. In general, this would better limit the spread and anticipate future situations, such as peak hospitalizations, up to three weeks before they occur.

By Antonin Counillon

What do we know about the environmental impact of biocomposites?

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Bio-based materials are an alternative to those derived from fossil resources. They have been increasingly promoted in recent years. However, given the recent development of this sector, their real environmental impact is still relatively unknown. Joana Beigbeder, researcher in environmental analysis at IMT Mines Alès, provides an update on the life cycle analysis (LCA) of these emerging materials.

Although bio-based materials are presented as an effective alternative to their petroleum-based predecessors, the details of their environmental impact are still not well known. Plant-based materials are certainly an improvement for some impacts, such as carbon footprint, but it can be trickier when it comes to soil use or soil pollution, for example. To get to the bottom of this, life cycle analysis is an indispensable tool.

Joana Beigbeder, researcher in environmental impacts at IMT Mines Alès, is working on the life cycle analysis of these new bio-based materials, particularly biocomposites. The objective is to compare the environmental impact of different scenarios, either between bio-based and petroleum-based materials, or according to the different stages of the life cycle of the same material. The researcher says, “the focus of life cycle analysis is to study several environmental impacts in parallel and to identify possible transfers of pollution throughout the life cycle of a product”.

Different sources of impact

With regard to environmental impact, some points seem obvious. If we only look at carbon footprint, it seems obvious that bio-based materials are more beneficial than their petroleum-based cousins. But the reality is more complex because there are many variables to consider. “Carbon impact is a well-known indicator, but we must also take into account the different impacts of pollution, human toxicity, soil or water pollution or global warming”, says Joana Beigbeder. Take the automotive sector, for example. If for the same function, a part made of bio-based material has a higher weight, it will require more energy to use and will not necessarily be beneficial. “It may be a better solution from an environmental point of view, but that’s precisely what the LCA will tell us,” she says.

Some points seem more obvious, such as the consumption of fossil resources and the impact on global warming in general. Plant materials absorb CO2 during their growth, which gives them an undeniable advantage. That said, their growth implies an agricultural impact, especially on land use. “Depending on the type of crop, this can lead to soil pollution. Generally, the more fertilizers and additives that are required for growth, the less beneficial some of the impacts will be,” says Joana Beigbeder. This brings up a new issue that does not exist with petroleum-based materials.

“It’s always a case of compromising, and we look for ways to improve the process or the product,” says the researcher. “Plants, such as flax or hemp, require little or no input and are therefore a preferred option. But the material is only one area for improvement when it comes to eco-design”, she notes. To reduce the environmental impact of a product, lightening its weight and extending its lifespan are key points. This can include the reparability of the product, or even new concepts such as prioritizing the use of the product over the purchase of the product.

“There is also a question of ecological common sense, if we study a disposable product, reusable or compostable materials will be favored,” says Joana Beigbeder. One research topic includes the development of compostable diapers and band-aids, a promising step in reducing plastic pollution.

Predicting potential impacts

“Life cycle analysis study is really done on a case-by-case basis depending on the service provided by a product,” says Joana Beigbeder. To estimate the consumption of solvents or the chemical synthesis of materials, the researcher uses previous scientific publications and mathematical models. But in some areas, data is missing. “We sometimes have to use fairly strong approximations on certain impacts, but this still allows us to map trends and areas for improvement,” she maintains. This can be the case for the production of plant fibers, as well as for their disposal at the end of their use.

As these materials do not yet have a major presence on the market, there are currently no channels for processing the resulting waste. In fact, there is no data on the environmental impact of the incineration, landfill, or pollution from these newly emerging materials. “To estimate these impacts, we assimilate them to other, better-known closely-related materials on which we have data, to develop our hypotheses,” she explains. This work also generates new data for LCA such as recycling simulations for end-of-life treatment.

“Some bio-based materials are at the laboratory stage today, and it’s still hard to imagine what will happen at the industrial stage,” says Joana Beigbeder. The researcher then works on predictions: she imagines scenarios for materials that are not yet on the market and analyzes whether this has any impact on an environmental level. Also, given the recent nature of the bio-materials sector, their production will be less optimized than that of traditional petroleum-based materials which have evolved and improved. “This works against the newer materials, as they will need to go through several developmental stages,” she points out.

This research is essential for the development of sustainable alternatives to conventional materials and is part of an overall vision to meet the challenges of plastic pollution. “A lot of research is focused on the development of new materials with a smaller environmental impact. The VOICE project, for example, launched in 2018 in partnership with Innovation Plasturgie Composites, Silvadec, IMT Mines Alès and funded by ADEME, focuses on the recycling of biocomposite decking. Or the Agrobranche project, which brings together 8 French partners[1], and focuses on, among other things, the study of bio-based reinforcements from agroforestry,” she concludes. These two projects reflect the blossoming of new emerging materials and the current development of research to find sustainable alternatives to the plastic problem.

[1] Scop Agroof (coordinator), IMT Mines Alès, CIRAD BiowooEB, LERMAB, FRD, CRA Bretagne, CIRAD AMAP, INRA SPO

Tiphaine Claveau

personnel hospitalier

Do hospital staff feel prepared?

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Marie Bossard, a specialist in the social psychology of health, has been studying the feeling of preparedness among hospital staff in the face of exceptional health situations in her PhD since 2018. She explores the factors that may influence this feeling to better understand the dynamics of preparation in health systems.

The Covid-19 crisis is a case in point: our care system must sometimes confront exceptional health situations. Hospital staff are trained to respond to such situations, but there is little scientific literature on the way in which those concerned perceive their preparation. So how do caregivers, medical doctors, administrative staff and medical center directors feel in the face of these exceptional situations? This is the subject of Marie Bossard’s PhD at IMT Mines Alès and the University of Nîmes.

When she began her work in 2018, the Covid-19 crisis and pandemics were not yet a major concern. Exceptional health situations include anything that goes beyond the usual functioning of healthcare services. “We originally had in mind the emergency services being overwhelmed after an attack”, explains Gilles Dusserre, a researcher in risk sciences at IMT Mines Alès and joint supervisor of Marie Bossard with Karine Weiss at the University of Nîmes. Whatever the cause, this research fits into a global reflection on the current problems in emergency medicine. This is what the researchers want to understand better in order to provide operational responses to special users or hospital staff.

The feeling of “preparedness“

“The idea is to start with the individual and study how each person perceives his or her level of preparedness, and then develop these reflections on a collective scale,” says Marie Bossard. The aim is to measure the feeling of “preparedness” and identify the factors that influence it, as well as to apply psychosocial models to the level of preparedness of hospital staff. The PhD student is exploring the social representations of hospital staff through interviews with medical doctors, paramedics, health executives and administrative employees in different French university hospitals.

“We can differentiate the feeling of preparedness, the perception of our preparation, and the reported preparation”, explains Marie Bossard. If hospital staff consider that exceptional health situations are only linked to an attack, for example, they might never be prepared for a fire,” she continues.

And, although the preparation received has an influence on the feeling of preparedness, she insists that “there are many other aspects to take into account. The feeling of self-efficacy is important, in particular.” This psycho-social concept represents, in a way, the power to act: the individual perception of having sufficient skills to manage a situation and knowing how to apply them. The perception of preparation, whether positive or negative, also affects the feeling of preparedness. The role of the collective is also undeniable. “A common response is that, individually, the person doesn’t feel ready, but they still have confidence in the collective, she adds. There’s a certain resignation”, says the joint PhD supervisor. “Hospital systems are already going through a difficult time and are coping, so collectively they feel capable of facing one more challenge.”

In a second phase, the aim is to propose hypotheses on the structure and content of these social representations. For example, health executives do not give the same type of spontaneous responses as paramedics when asked to list words in connection with exceptional health situations. The former generally talk about the practice of preparation (logistics, influx), while the second generally mention everyday examples or emotion (danger, serious, disaster).

The context of the Covid crisis

Given that the development of an exceptional health situation was completely unforeseeable, it initially seemed impossible to carry out a field study. However, the pandemic caused by the new coronavirus in early 2020 provided a characteristic field of study for the researchers. Marie Bossard and her joint supervisors reorganized their methodology and two new studies were prepared. The first before the arrival of the virus in France, which studied the preparedness of more than 400 participants among personnel and collectives. The second after the first peak of the epidemic and before a potential second wave, which was still an uncertainty at the time. The questionnaires from the study carried out among 534 participants provide a comparison between the feeling of readiness before and after Covid-19.

The post-Covid study confirmed that the feeling of preparedness depends on psycho-social variables and not just the level of preparation. Age and years of professional experience also influence this feeling, as do the profession and any previous experience of managing an exceptional health situation. These are individual variables, but the role of the collective was also confirmed. “The more ready and prepared others are, the higher the perception of personal preparedness, says Marie Bossard. Similarly, perceiving the hospital as ready, with sufficient human and material resources, has a great influence.” The PhD student is currently studying the results of the latest study conducted in September.

The situation, although difficult, provides “a context for the answers given during the first interviews,” says the PhD student. For example, it confirms that all hospital staff are involved, not just those considered on the front line. Indeed, the mobilization affects every hospital department. She admits that “the Covid-19 health crisis has given us a new perspective on this PhD subject, which is now topical and concretely demonstrates the need for a better understanding in this field“. It is also an opportunity to explore the effect of this exceptional health situation on the feeling of preparedness among those first concerned and the factors that influence this feeling with a concrete application of the subject.

“We haven’t found any previous studies that have explored this subject from the same angle, says Marie Bossard. We’re starting from scratch. The aim is to remain as open-minded as possible to identify initial indicators, and then dig deeper into more specific questions,” she concludes. It could lead to new studies, for example to understand why the feeling of auto-efficacy plays such an important role in the feeling of preparedness.

 Tiphaine Claveau

How to better track cyber hate: AI to the rescue

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The widescale use of social media, sometimes under cover of anonymity, has liberated speech and led to a proliferation of ideas, discussions and opinions on the internet. It has also led to a flood of hateful, sexist, racist and abusive speech. Confronted with this phenomenon, more and more platforms today are using automated solutions to combat cyber hate. These solutions are based on algorithms that can also introduce biases, sometimes discriminating against certain communities, and are still largely perfectible. In this context, French researchers are developing ever more efficient new models to detect hate speech and reduce the bias.

On September 16 this year, internet users launched a movement calling for a one-day boycott of Instagram. Supported by many American celebrities, the “Stop Hate for Profit” day aimed to challenge Facebook, the mother company of the photo and video sharing app, on the proliferation of hate, propaganda and misinformation on its platforms. Back in May 2019, during its bi-annual report on the state of moderation on its network, Facebook announced significant progress in the automated detection of hate content. According to the company, between January and April 2019, more than 65% of these messages were detected and moderated before users even reported them, compared with 38% during the same period in 2018.

Strongly encouraged to combat online hate content, in particular by the “Avia law” (named after the member of parliament for Paris, Lætitia Avia), platforms use various techniques such as detection by keywords, reporting by users and solutions based on artificial intelligence (AI). Machine learning allows predictive models to be developed from corpora of data. This is where biases can be damaging. “We realized that the automated tools themselves had biases against gender or the user’s identity and, most importantly, had a disproportionately negative impact on certain minority groups such as Afro-Americans,” explains Marzieh Mozafari, PhD student at Télécom SudParis. On Twitter, for example, it is difficult for AI-based programs to take into account the social context of tweets, the identity and dialect of the speaker and the immediate context of the tweet all at once. Some content is thus removed despite being neither hateful nor offensive.

So how can we minimize these biases and erroneous detections without creating a form of censorship? Researchers at Télécom SudParis have been using a public dataset collected on Twitter, distinguishing between tweets written in Afro-American English (AAE) and Standard American English (SAE), as well as two reference databases that have been annotated (sexist, racist, hateful and offensive) by experts and through crowdsourcing. “In this study, due to the lack of data, we mainly relied on cutting-edge language processing techniques such as transfer learning and the BERT language model, a pre-trained, unsupervised model”, explain the researchers.

Developed by Google, the BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) model uses a vast corpus of textual content, containing, among other things, the entire content of the English version of Wikipedia. “We were able to “customize” BERT [1] to make it do a specific task, to adjust it for our hateful and offensive corpus”, explains Reza Farahbakhsh, a researcher in data science at Télécom SudParis. To begin with, they tried to identify word sequences in their datasets that were strongly correlated with a hateful or offensive category. Their results showed that tweets written in AAE were almost 10 times more likely to be classed as racist, sexist, hateful or offensive compared to tweets written in SAE. “We therefore used a reweighting mechanism to mitigate biases based on data and algorithms,” says Marzieh Mozafari. For example, the number of tweets containing “n*gga” and “b*tch” is 35 times higher among tweeters in AAE than in SAE and these tweets will often be wrongly identified as racist or sexist. However, this type of word is common in AAE dialects and is used in everyday conversation. It is therefore likely that they will be considered hateful or offensive when they are written in SAE by an associated group.

“In fact, these biases are also cultural: certain expressions considered hateful or offensive are not so within a certain community or in a certain context. In French, too, we use certain bird names to address our loved ones! Platforms are faced with a sort of dilemma: if the aim is to perfectly identify all hateful content, too great a number of false detections could have an impact on users’ “natural” ways of expressing themselves,” explains Noël Crespi, a researcher at Télécom SudParis. After reducing the effect of the most frequently used words in the training data through the reweighting mechanism, this probability of false positives was greatly reduced. “Finally, we transmitted these results to the pre-trained BERT model to refine it even further using new datasets,” says the researcher.

Can automatic detection be scaled up?

Despite these promising results, many problems still need to be solved in order to better detect hate speech. These include the possibility of deploying these automated tools for all languages spoken on social networks. This issue is the subject of a data science challenge launched for the second consecutive year: the HASOC (Hate Speech and Offensive Content Identification in Indo-European Languages), in which a team from IMT Mines d’Alès is participating. “The challenge aims to accomplish three tasks: determine whether or not content is hateful or offensive, classify this content into one of three categories: hateful, offensive or obscene, and identify whether the insult is directed towards an individual or a specific group,” explains Sébastien Harispe, a researcher at IMT Mines Alès.

“We are mainly focusing on the first three tasks. Using our expertise in natural language processing, we have proposed a method of analysis based on supervised machine learning techniques that take advantage of examples and counter-examples of classes to be distinguished.” In this case, the researchers’ work focuses on small datasets in English, German and Hindi. In particular, the team is studying the role of emojis, some of which can have direct connotations with hate expressions. The researchers have also studied the adaptation of various standard approaches in automatic language processing in order to obtain classifiers able to efficiently exploit such markers.

They have also measured their classifiers’ ability to capture these markers, in particular through their performance. “In English, for example, our model was able to correctly classify content in 78% of cases, whereas only 77% of human annotators initially agreed on the annotation to be given to the content of the data set used,” explains Sébastien Harispe. Indeed, in 23% of cases, the annotators expressed divergent opinions when confronted with dubious content that probably needed to have been studied with account taken of the contextual elements.

What can we expect from AI? The researcher believes we are faced with a complex question: what are we willing to accept in the use of this type of technology? “Although remarkable progress has been made in almost a decade of data science, we have to admit that we are addressing a young discipline in which much remains to be developed from a theoretical point of view and, especially, for which we must accompany the applications in order to allow ethical and informed uses. Nevertheless, I believe that in terms of the detection of hate speech, there is a sort of glass roof created by the difficulty of the task as it is translated in our current datasets. With regard to this particular aspect, there can be no perfect or flawless system if we ourselves cannot be perfect.”

Besides the multilingual challenge, the researchers are facing other obstacles such as the availability of data for model training and the evaluation of results, or the difficulty in assessing the ambiguity of certain content, due for example to variations in writing style. Finally, the very characterization of hate speech, subjective as it is, is also a challenge. “Our work can provide material for the humanities and social sciences, which are beginning to address these questions: why, when, who, what content? What role does culture play in this phenomenon? The spread of cyber hate is, at the end of the day, less of a technical problem than a societal one” says Reza Farahbakhsh.

[1] M. Mozafari, R. Farahbakhsh, N. Crespi, “Hate Speech Detection and Racial Bias Mitigation in Social Media based on BERT model”, PLoS ONE 15(8): e0237861. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0237861

Anne-Sophie Boutaud

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Algorithmic bias, discrimination and fairness