Section: Partnerships and Cooperations

European Initiatives

• Quaero

  CIDRE is involved in the Quaero project. Quaero is a program promoting research and industrial innovation on technologies for automatic analysis and classification of multimedia and multilingual documents. The partners collaborate on research and the realisation of advanced demonstrators and prototypes of innovating applications and services for access and usage of multimedia information, such as spoken language, images, video and music. The Quaero consortium (composed of French and German public and private research organisations) is coordinated by Technicolor.

  Sébastien Gambs is involved in one of the task (leaded by Amedeo Napoli, équipe INRIA Orpailleur) of the Quaero project whose aim is to study the implications in terms of privacy for a user to participate in personalized applications (such as video-on-demand) adapted to the user context, background and preferences as well as proposing solutions that can contribute to enhance this privacy. On one hand using personal data to tailor the content to the user needs may be important for improving the quality of service and its relevance but on the other hand this raises serious privacy issues regarding how this data will be collected, used and disseminated. The main purpose of the solutions developed in this task is to enable an individual to access personalized content/service in a privacy-preserving manner and without having to disclose any unnecessary personal information. Since November 2011, Julien Lolive has also join the project as an engineer.

• EIT ICT Labs

  EIT ICT Labs is one of the first three Knowledge and Innovation Communities (KICs) selected by the European Institute of Innovation & Technology (EIT) to accelerate innovation in Europe.

  Nowadays, Information Technologies have invaded many aspects of the daily lives of individuals, thus creating a lot of new possibilities but also raising privacy concerns to the point that some individuals feel that they no longer have suitable guarantees or any control about their privacy. Indeed, protecting the privacy of individuals is one of the main challenges of the $«$ Information Society $»$ but is difficult to achieve as individuals constantly leave digital traces of their actions and whereabouts, often without even knowing it. If an unauthorized entity gathers these digital traces, he (or she) can use them for malicious purposes ranging from targeted spam to profiling, and even identity theft.

  The goal of the action line “Protection of Privacy in the Information Society” (created by Sébastien Gambs together with Daniel Le Métayer and Claude Castelluccia from INRIA Rhône-Alpes) is to address the new challenges raised by the most recent developments and usages of information technologies (e.g., geo-located applications, social networking sites, profiling, pervasive computing, data mining) by providing solutions to enhance the privacy protection of individuals in the Information Society. Essentially, this action line is transversal to most of the thematic and research action lines of EIT ICT labs and it is envisioned that it should also contribute to their developments. While the action line was originally intended to focus on privacy, its scope was recently extended to include security and trust thus being renamed as “Security, Privacy and Trust in the Information Society”. In 2012, Sébastien Gambs will lead an activity in this action line related to location privacy that involves partners coming from 3 different nodes of EIT ICT labs.