Section: Overall Objectives

Overall Objectives

The DICE team has been created in February 2013 as an "action exploratoire" of Inria to initiate a multidisciplinary research on the economy of data resulting from the digital revolution and its impact on all sectors of our society including its political organization.

With the growth of Web 2.0 systems, social data constitutes a fundamental resource of the economy, much like raw materials. A resource, which is becoming as important as crude oil, and without our societies would stop working. Data are harvested and transformed by industries that grow at an unprecedented pace. Web corporations offer extremely valuable services, which attract users in the hundreds of millions. These corporations generate ecosystems, which become as essential as public utilities and support millions of developers. The new utilities also challenge societies by making obsolete fundamental aspects of their organization, and by generating new (im)balances at global scale.

The objective of DICE is to study the complex dependencies between technological, social and economic systems of the digital age, and to propose technical contributions as well as socio-political analyses. We are ambitious to further investigate the impact of the digital revolution on political systems, anticipated by the French philosopher Michel Serres as expressed in Inria's 2020 Plan.

"if the vast volume of global data [$\cdots$] were to become accessible to as many people as possible [$\cdots$], such an event would be liable to put political institutions and the sciences that study them on a new path, perhaps more quickly than we expect."

Michel Serres also insists on the role of computer scientists to study this revolution and its social impact.

Our contributions target both technical and theoretical aspects of the economy of personal data. Our aim is to

• study from technological as well as social, economic, political, and geopolitical points of view, the new ecosystems emerging from the services of the information society based on mediating social data, which are reshaping the very form of our organizations;

• contribute to improve the knowledge of the information society and its implications among specialists as well as non specialists, in the public opinion as well as at the political level;

• propose technological solutions that answer some of the challenges faced by our societies, such as the concentration of data, the resulting asymmetry of information, and the subsidiarity of computation, that could contribute to better distribute the knowledge among stakeholders.