Year: 2022

PhD Defence: “Resilient IoT-based Monitoring System for the Nigerian Oil and Gas Industry”, Safuriyawu Ahmed, amphi est, bâtiment des humanités, 16th of December 2022 at 10 AM

The defense will take place on Friday 16th December at 10 AM in the est amphi of the Humanities building, Insa-Lyon, Villeurbanne.

 

Title

Resilient IoT-based Monitoring System for the Nigerian Oil and Gas Industry

 

 

Abstract

Pipeline failures in crude oil transportation occur due to ageing infrastructure, third-party interferences, equipment defects and naturally occurring failures. Consequently, hydrocarbons are released into the environment resulting in environmental pollution, ecological degradation, and unprecedented loss of lives and revenue. Hence, multiple leakage detection and monitoring systems (LDMS) are employed to mitigate such failures. More recently, these LDMS include Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) and Internet of Things (IoT)-based systems. While they are proven more efficient than other LDMS, many challenges exist in their adoption for pipeline monitoring. These include fault tolerance, energy consumption, accuracy in leakage detection and localisation, and high false alarms, to cite a few.

Therefore, our work seeks to address some of these challenges in implementing IoT-based systems for crude oil pipelines in a resilient end-to-end manner. Specifically, we consider the aspect of accurate leakage detection and localisation by introducing a unique node placement strategy based on fluid propagation for sensitive and multi-sized leakage detection. We also propose a new distributed leakage detection technique (HyDiLLEch) in the WSN layer. It is based on a fusion of existing leakage detection techniques such as the negative pressure wave method, gradient-based method, and pressure point analysis. With HyDiLLEch, we efficiently eliminate single points of failure.

Furthermore, we implement fault-tolerant data and service management in the fog layer utilising the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) pipeline network as a use case. The problem is modelled as a regionalised data-driven game against nature on the NNPC pipelines. Our proposed regionalised solution (R-MDP) using reinforcement learning optimises accuracy and fault tolerance while minimising energy consumption.

Overall, our system guarantees resiliency to failures and efficiency in terms of detection and localisation accuracy and energy consumption.

 

Jury

  • Stolf, Patricia, Professeur des Universités, Université de Toulouse, Rapporteure
  • Guidec, Frédéric, Professeur des Universités, Université Bretagne Sud, Rapporteur
  • Menaud, Jean-Marc, Professeur des Universités, IMT-Atlantique, Examinateur
  • Caron, Eddy, Maître de Conférences, ENS Lyon, Examinateur
  • Takruri-Rizk, Haifa, Professeur des Universités, University of Salford, Examinatrice
  • Silva, Bhagya Nathali, Senior Lecturer, University of SriJayawardenepura, Examinatrice
  • Le Mouël, Frédéric, Professeur des Universités, INSA Lyon, Directeur de thèse
  • Stouls, Nicolas, Maître de Conférences, INSA Lyon, Co-Directeur de thèse
  • Yusuf, Kabir, Docteur en gestion des ressources environnementales, PTDF/SAPZ, Invité

PhD Defence: “Contributions to the development of passive RFID tag-to-tag communications for the Internet of Things”, Tarik Lassouaoui, amphi ouest, batiment des humanités, 16th of December 2022 at 10 AM

The defense will take place on Friday 16th December at 10 AM in the west amphi of the Humanities building, Insa-Lyon, Villeurbanne.

Title

Contributions to the development of passive RFID tag-to-tag communications for the Internet of Things

Abstract

With the emergence of cognitive sensor networks, and in particular the IoT (Internet of Things), passive RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) UHF (Ultra High Frequency) technology is evolving with new functionalities. New types of applications going beyond the classics such as logistics, security and traceability are being developed. Still benefiting from unitary identification, new types of tags, called augmented tags, are appearing integrating new capacities such as environmental sensitivity, cognitive behaviour, data processing, communication between tags, etc. In this context, the objective of this thesis is to propose strategies and methods to optimize communications between tags, called tag-to-tag “tag-to-tag” (T2T) communications. This new type of radio link, between directly communicating tags, relies on the presence of an external radio frequency (RF) source and is based on the principle of retro-modulation. In particular, the scenarios analyzed are projected within the framework of the Spie ICS – INSA Lyon chair, which focuses on the IoT.

This thesis more specifically targets the application domain of UHF RFID for which the concept of T2T communications has been proposed and demonstrated since 2011, but with relatively little work done so far. In a T2T RFID system, two RFID tags (passive or semi- passive) communicate with each other directly without going through the reader. One of the tags plays the role of “reader tag”: in the presence of an RF source (for example an RFID reader) in its vicinity, it emits binary information by retro-modulation (or backscatter by switching charges), by switching the load seen by its antenna on two distinct impedances, thus reflecting two distinct power levels (modulation here considered in amplitude). The other tag plays the role of “receiver tag”: it receives the information transmitted and demodulates it.

In the traditional case of UHF RFID, the reader emits, in accordance with the standard, a modulated signal with a high modulation depth in order to facilitate the detection of the message transmitted by the tag. The tag responds by retro modulation and the signal it returns is then a signal where the two levels of information (in the case of amplitude modulation) are not very distinct and noisy. However, the player’s demodulator is very efficient, based on quadrature synchronous demodulation, it has very good sensitivity. In the case of T2T communication, a fundamental difference is that the detection is here performed by the second tag which is in the vicinity of the reader tag. Consequently, on the one hand, the performance of the receiver (that of a “simple” RFID tag) is much more limited, while the modulated signal is not necessarily at high modulation depth. And on the other hand, the two tags interact. This inter-tag electromagnetic coupling impacts in particular radiation patterns and impedances, and moreover, it depends on the mutual positions of the two tags, more precisely on their antennas (distance separating them, relative orientation, etc.), which leads to high variability the characteristics of the T2T system (and therefore its performance). In addition, there is the impact of the relative position of the external RF source with the pair of tags, which significantly modifies the characteristics of the retro-modulated signals.

The main challenge of the thesis is to determine a framework that can take into account all the factors (signal, component, circuit and system) impacting T2T communication with the aim of evaluating performance, particularly in terms of communication rate. binary error, a metric conventionally used in the field of telecommunications.

Keywords: Backscattering, passive tags, tag to tag communications, UHF RFID

Jury

  • Bergeret Emmanuel Professor Université Clermont Auvergne Reviewer
  • Breard Arnaud Professor Ecole Centrale de Lyon Examiner
  • Lepage Anne-Claire Associate Professor Telecom Paris Examiner
  • Lienard Martine Professor Université de Lille Examiner
  • Vena Arnaud Associate Professor HDR Université de Montpellier Reviewer
  • Villemaud Guillaume Associate Professor HDR INSA-Lyon Thesis director
  • Hutu Florin-Doru Associate Professor INSA-Lyon Co-director
  • Duroc Yvan Professor Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1 Co-director

CITI seminar – Prasenjit Mitra (Penn State) – 13/12 at 10:00

Speaker: Prasenjit Mitra (Penn State)

Date: 13/12/2022

Time: 10h00

Place: Amphi Chappe/Lamarr

Title: Secure Federated Learning: Lessons Learned, and Future Directions

Abstract: In this talk, I will introduce the topic of federated learning and discuss about its implications to computer security and machine learning. Federated learning has a wide range of applications in several areas where machine learning is gaining prominence but the need to preserve privacy arises. For example, hospitals prevented from sharing patient data can nevertheless collaborate to build a better model that utilizes data from multiple hospitals; next generation cars can share their data to enable dynamic, personalized, just-in-time preventive maintenance that can save customers money as well as make cars reliable, while preserving the privacy of individual drivers. The talk will survey the state-of-the-art for the technology, outline several open issues, and briefly mention our previous work on making federated learning solutions robust when adversaries attack. We will also briefly mention issues related to fairness and federated learning and how we can implement explainable and interpretable federated learning. The objective will be to raise questions that are of interest to the community that we can jointly address to improve the state-of-the-art in federated learning with respect to a wide range of attributes, e.g., computational complexity, security, privacy, fairness and equity, robustness, interpretability, etc.

Bio: Prasenjit Mitra is a Professor at The Pennsylvania State University and a visiting Professor at the L3S Center at the Leibniz University at Hannover, Germany. He obtained his Ph.D. from Stanford University in 2003 in Electrical Engineering and has been at Penn State since. His research interests are in artificial intelligence, applied machine learning, natural language processing, etc. His research has been supported by the NSF CAREER award, the DoE, DoD, Microsoft Research, Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, Dow Chemicals, McDonnell Foundation, etc. His has published over 200 peer-reviewed papers at top conferences and journals, supervised or co-supervised 15-20 Ph.D. dissertations; his work has been widely cited (h-index 60) and over 12,500 citations. Along with his co-authors, he has won the test of time award at the IEEE VIS and a best paper award at ISCRAM, etc.


CITI seminar – Alessandro Renzaglia (CITI) – 13/12 at 12:15

Speaker: Alessandro Renzaglia (CR Inria, Chroma)

Date: 13/12/2022

Time: 12h15

Place: Amphi Chappe/Lamarr

Title: Cooperative Exploration for 3D Reconstruction with Multiple Aerial Robots

Abstract: Autonomous exploration of unknown environments is a fundamental task in many robotics applications, such as map reconstruction, search and rescue operations, and inspection tasks. For this reason, it is a widely studied problem and several efficient approaches, for both single and multi-robot systems, have been proposed over the years. However, most of the existing solutions focus on 2D areas, while complex 3D environments still present several problems to be solved. In this talk, I will present some of the challenges of exploring 3D environments with a fleet of cooperating aerial vehicles and discuss different ways to quantify the expected new information contained in unexplored portions of the map and to take into account potential redundancies in the observations. Finally, I will briefly discuss the case, common in inspection tasks, where not all areas to explore are equally informative, but some regions have a higher priority and introduce a search dimension to the classical exploration task.

Bio: Alessandro Renzaglia is a research faculty member in the Chroma team at Inria Lyon / CITI Lab. He received his M.Sc. degree in Physics from the University of Rome La Sapienza, Italy, and his Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from the University of Grenoble, France. Successively he has been Postdoctoral Researcher with the Computer Science & Engineer Department at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, USA, and later with the Laboratory for Analysis and Architecture of Systems (LAAS), Toulouse, France, in the Robotics and Interactions group, before to join the Chroma team. His main research interests include multi-robot systems, path planning, and optimization.


CITI seminar – Anastasia Volkova (Univ. Nantes) and Florent de Dinechin (CITI) – 08/11 at 12:15

Title: Reconciling LTI filters and their implementations

Date and Place: 12h15 Tuesday 08/11/2022 in Amphi Hedy Lamarr/Chappe

Speaker: Anastasia Volkova (Univ. Nantes) and Florent de Dinechin (CITI)

 

Abstract: 

Linear time-invariant (LTI) filters are widely used in digital signal processing (DSP). Such filters can be designed out of a frequency specification (amplify some frequency bands, attenuate others), and a wide body of techniques exist to transform such a specification into an actual implementation consisting of additions and multiplications. The linearity property (the L of LTI) is essential at all the steps of this design process. However, actual implementations in hardware or software cannot be linear, due to the rounding of intermediate results: rounding is necessary to keep the result of a multiplication on the same number of bits as its inputs. But rounding is not linear, for instance the function that rounds a real to the nearest integer is not linear. So implementations of LTI filters are actually not linear, and this loss of linearity destroys in principle most mathematical foundations on which they are built. The workaround found by the DSP community so far is quite simple: ignore the problem, and hope for the best. Most of the times it works, and indeed your mobile phone is full of such filters. When it doesn’t, strange (and sometimes catastrophic) things will happen, and the community has devised all sorts of tricks and patches to evade them.

This talk will first present a gentle (but incomplete) introduction to LTI filters, their design, and the issue of non-linearity. It will then introduce a simple formalization that reconciles LTI filters and their
implementations. An additional benefit of this unified view is that filter design and implementation becomes a well-formed single global optimisation problem. The talk will conclude with the latest developments towards solving this problem.

Bio:

Anastasia Volkova est maître de conférences à l’Université de Nantes et membre de l’équipe OGRE au LS2N. Avant de commencer à Nantes en 2019, elle a été chercheuse postdoctorale à Intel San Diego, au Max-Plank Institute à Saabrucken, et à l’Inria à Lyon. Dans sa recherche elle se focalise sur des problématiques de précision finie dans des applications numériques, notamment l’analyse d’erreurs, mais aussi sur le compromis entre la précision et la performance. Elle s’intéresse en particulier à la conception et à l’implémentation logicielle ou matérielle des filtres LTI avec garantie de qualité  numérique, et à l’optimisation des ressources matérielles, e.g. sur FPGA.

Florent de Dinechin est professeur à l’INSA-Lyon après un doctorat de l’Université of Rennes-1 en 1997, un post-doctorat à Imperial College à Londres, et un premier poste à l’École Normale Supérieure de Lyon. Il s’intéresse à l’arithmétique des ordinateurs dans ses aspects mathématiques, matériels et logiciels, et particulièrement aux fonctions élémentaires, à la virgule flottante, et à l’arithmétique pour les FPGA.


PhD Defence: “Symmetric semi-discrete optimal transport for mesh interpolation”, Agathe Herrou, C5 room, Nautibus building, 20th of October 2022 at 1.30 PM

 

The defenseIt will take place on Thursday 20th october at 1:30 PM in the C5 room of the Nautibus building, Villeurbanne.

 

Title

Symmetric semi-discrete optimal transport for mesh interpolation

 

 

Abstract

This thesis aims to develop geometric methods to approximate displacement interpolation, derived from optimal transport. Optimal transport is a mathematical theory modeling movements of matter under a cost minimization constraint, with many applications in physics, computer graphics and geometry. The minimum displacement cost between two distributions defines a distance, which itself is at the origin of displacement interpolation. This interpolation may under certain conditions present discontinuities, that the discretized approximations of the optimal transport do not always successfully capture. The work of this thesis aims to develop an approximation that captures these discontinuities well. Our method relies on semi-discrete optimal transport, where only one of the distributions is discretized, thus accurately capturing the discontinuities of the distribution that remains continuous. The transport plans thus obtained partition the continuous distribution into cells associated with the samples of the discretization. A semi-discrete optimal transport plan can thus be assimilated to a power diagram made up of these cells. This variant of optimal transport however has the disadvantage of breaking the symmetry between the two distributions. We start by formalizing our problem as the search for a pair of transport plans coupled through the barycenters of their cells. We then present an algorithm for calculating these coupled transport plans. This first algorithm is based on a classical alternating algorithm scheme, successively computing the transport plans and the barycenters of their cells until convergence. The results obtained from this algorithm allow to interpolate between the initial distributions while maintaining a satisfactory precision, in particular when it comes to discontinuities, including when the discretization of the distributions is done with relatively few points. We then present our exploration of optimization methods for solving the same problem. These methods express the constraints of our problem as a critical point of a functional, and aim to reach these points using algorithms such as Newton’s method. However, this approach did not yield conclusive results, as the functions involved were too noisy to lend themselves well to optimization algorithms.

Keywords: Optimal transport, Interpolation, Optimization, Algorithmic geometry

Jury

    • Julie Delon (reviewer), Université Paris Cité
    • Boris Thibert (reviewer), Université Grenoble Alpes
    • Dominique Attali (examiner), CNRS/Université Grenoble Alpes
    • Filippo Santambrogio (examiner), Université Lyon 1
    • Nicolas Bonneel (advisor), CNRS/Université Lyon 1
    • Julie Digne (co-advisor), CNRS/Université Lyon 1
    • Bruno Lévy (co-advisor), Inria Nancy Grand Est

CITI seminar – Petre-Daniel Matasaru (“Gheorghe Asachi” Technical University Iasi) – 01/09 at 10:00

Title: Research Activities and Interests for Potentially Future Collaborations

Date and Place: 10h Thursday 1/9/2022 in TD-C

Speaker: Petre-Daniel Matasaru (“Gheorghe Asachi” Technical University Iasi)

Hosts: Prof. Oana Iova (AGORA) 

 

Abstract: 

The presentation is composed of 4 major axis: the City of Iasi, an overview of the Research at TUIASI, a detailed look at the Research and PhD Programs at ETTI and the Researcher’s personal research activities and interests with a focus on most relevant work.
A kit that was developed through a collaboration between the private sector (Bitron Electronics Engineering SRL, the Iasi (Romania) branch of Bitron Group, a worldwide Italian company) and the academic staff from ETTI will be presented. The development team included several disciplines such as hardware, software, PCB layout, mechanics and project-management and the resulting IoT kit can be used by researchers and students to develop and test various applications within the Internet of Things framework, highlighting the components of this kit and its capabilities for potential further development in the automotive area. Different sensors acquire information from the physical environment and data is being sent to a remote communication node that centralizes data traffic in a wireless sensor network. Authors developed a C program for an encryption application that runs on the board in order to secure the values obtained from the sensors and sent to the central node by the wireless adapter.

Another relevant paper called “Experimental and theoretical investigations of a plasma fireball dynamics” refers to modelling in the frame of the scale relativity model of the periodic current bursts observed in the dynamic current-voltage characteristic of a probe in the presence of a plasma fireball in dynamic state, based on both the fractal space-time concept and the generalization of Einstein’s principle of relativity to scale transformations. The bursts appear in the probe characteristic when a certain relation exists between the fireball dynamics frequency and the frequency of the probe voltage sweep. The double layer dynamics is described by a set of time-dependent Schrödinger-type equations and the self-structuring is given by means of the negative differential resistance. The obtained experimental and theoretical results are proven to be in very good agreement.”

 

Bio:

Born in Alexandria, Romania, studying electronics and telecommunications engineering at the Technical University of Iasi, graduating BSc in 2002 with a diploma thesis done at the Technische Universitat Darmstadt (TUD), Germany, due to an Erasmus mobility. MSc in 2003 and PhD with the thesis “Probabilistic methods used in the simulation of radio frequency structures” in 2011. Assistant-professor and Lecturer starting since 2003, at the Telecommunications Department of ETTI Iasi. Member of the Mod-Sim-Nano Research Group, Erasmus+ Coordinator at ETTI and member of the University Senate. Didactic mobility at Universita degli Studi Palermo, Italy (UNIPA) in 2019.


CITI seminar – Jérôme Nika (Ircam) – 4/7 at 10:00

Title: Technologies génératives pour la création musicale : composer à l’échelle du comportement ou de la narration.

Date and Place: 10h Monday 4/7/2022 in TD-C

Speaker: Jérôme Nika (Ircam)

Hosts: Romain Michon and Tanguy Risset (Emeraude project-team)

 

Abstract: 

Une machine sera-t-elle bientôt capable de remplacer l’humain dans la création musicale ? Pour toute une partie des artisans de l’intelligence artificielle appliquée à la musique, artistes comme scientifiques, il est difficile de répondre à cette question récurrente car ce n’est pas celle qui se pose. En effet, si on “apprend” la musique à des ordinateurs dotés d’une “mémoire” musicale inspirée de la cognition humaine, l’enjeu réside précisément dans le fait de partir de ces modèles pour explorer la production d’une musique nouvelle plutôt que la reproduction d’une musique crédible.

Les recherches associées au sein de l’équipe Représentations Musicales de l’Ircam s’articulent autour de la notion de « mémoire musicale » : son apprentissage, sa modélisation, et sa mobilisation dans un contexte créatif. Elles ont donné naissance à DYCI2lib, une librairie d’agents génératifs pour la performance et la composition musicale combinant les approches libres, planifiées et spécifiées, et réactives de la génération à partir d’un corpus. Ces travaux ont été mis en oeuvres dans le cadre de nombreuses collaborations artistiques et productions musicales, notamment dans le jazz et les musiques improvisées (Steve Lehman, Bernard Lubat, Benoît Delbecq, Rémi Fox, Orchestre National de Jazz), la musique contemporaine (Pascal Dusapin, Ensemble Modern, Alexandros Markeas, Marta Gentilucci), et l’art contemporain (Le Fresnoy – Studio National des Arts Contemporains, Vir Andres Hera) La présentation des pratiques musicales permises par ces instruments génératifs au service de la créativité humaine sera illustrée par des extraits de ces productions récentes.

 

Bio:

Jérôme Nika est chercheur en technologies génératives pour la création musicale, réalisateur en informatique musicale, et musicien. Diplômé des écoles ENSTA ParisTech et Télécom ParisTech ainsi que du master ATIAM (Acoustique, Traitement du signal, Informatique, Appliqués à la Musique – Sorbonne Université / Ircam / Télécom ParisTech), il a également étudié la composition musicale. Il s’est spécialisé dans l’application de l’informatique et du traitement du signal à la création numérique et à la musique à travers un doctorat (« Prix Jeune Chercheur Science/Musique 2015 », « Prix Jeune Chercheur 2016 », Association Française d’Informatique Musicale) puis en tant que chercheur à l’Ircam (Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique).

En 2019, il entre au Fresnoy – Studio National des Arts Contemporain en tant que chercheur invité. Cette même année, il travaille sur 3 projets : le projet évolutif Lullaby Experience, du compositeur Pascal Dusapin et deux projets de musique improvisée : Silver Lake Studies en duo avec Steve Lehman et C’est pour ça en duo avec Rémi Fox (projet lauréat de l’aide DICRéAM du CNC pour 2020) .

En 2020, il devient chercheur permanent dans l’équipe Représentations Musicales de l’Ircam où il développe des instruments logiciels en interaction avec des musiciens experts. Plus de 60 concerts et performances artistiques ont mis ces outils en jeu depuis 2016 (Onassis Center, Athènes, Grèce; Ars Electronica Festival, Linz, Autriche; Frankfurter Positionen festival, Frankfurt; Annenberg Center, Philadelphia, USA; Centre Pompidou, Collège de France, LeCentquatre, Paris, France; Montreux Jazz festival, etc.). La dernière production en date, pour laquelle il crée l’électronique générative est le concert “Ex Machina”, une collaboration entre Steve Lehman, Frédéric Maurin, et l’Orchestre National de Jazz, créé le 11 février 2022 à la Maison de la Radio et diffusé sur France Musique.

 


PhD Defence: “User Association in Flexible and Agile Mobile Networks”, Romain PUJOL, amphi, Chappe Building, 6th of July 2022 at 2 PM

 

The defense will take place on Wenesday, July 6 at 2 pm, in the amphitheatre of the Telecommunications Department (Claude Chappe building), INSA Lyon, Villeurbanne.

The presentation will be available online: https://insa-lyon-fr.zoom.us/j/91599742042

 

Title

User Association in Flexible and Agile Mobile Networks

 

 

Abstract

The user association process in cellular networks consists in choosing the base station with which the user equipment will negotiate radio resources. The current association is based on measuring the signal strength received by the user equipment from each of the base stations. The association must now deal with the diversification of user application needs and the growing heterogeneity of cellular networks.

 

In this thesis, we show experimentally that the current association process has reached its limits, that it is agnostic of the configurations of the base stations and that it does not allow to control the throughput that the user equipment will obtain following the association. We set up for the realization of our measurements an experimental platform based on the software suite of cellular networks srsRAN and software radios USRP NI-2091.

 

We propose in this thesis a new metric to be used during the association process. This metric, broadcasted by the base station, is a load information which in our case will be represented by the number of user equipment connected to the base station. We also discuss other metrics that can be used as load information. We show, once again experimentally, by modifying the source code of the srsRAN software suite ourselves, that if the user equipment takes this load information into account in the association process, the association decision is improved in 22% of cases.

 

Jury

  • Tara ALI YAHIA, Associate Professor HDR, Université Paris Saclay (Reviewer)
  • Vania CONAN, HDR, Thales (Reviewer)
  • Véronique VEQUE, Professor, Université Paris Saclay (Examiner)
  • Frédéric LAUNAY, Associate Professor, IUT de Poitiers (Examiner)
  • Stéphane FRENOT, Professor, INSA-Lyon (Examiner)
  • André-Luc BEYLOT, Professor, ENSEEIHT (Examiner)
  • Fabrice VALOIS, Professor, INSA-Lyon (Thesis supervisor)
  • Razvan STANICA, Associate Professor HDR, INSA-Lyon (Thesis co-supervisor)