User-Centered Design, Analysis and Improvement of Information Systems

AxIS is carrying out research in the domain of Information and Knowledge Systems (ISs) with a special interest in evolving large ISs such as Web-based Information Systems. Our ultimate goal is to contribute to user-driven open innovation as a way to foster innovation, to improve the overall quality of ISs, to support designers during the design process and to ensure ease of use to end users.

We are convinced that to reach this goal, according to the constant evolution of actual and future ISs, it is necessary to involve the users in the design process and to empower them, so that they can become co-designers. This is a new way to anticipate the usage and its analysis and also to consider maintenance very early in the design process.

To achieve such a research, we have set up in July 2003 a multidisciplinary team that involves people from different computer sciences domains (Artificial Intelligence, Data Mining & Analysis, Software Engineering) and from Human Sciences (Ergonomics, Cognitive Psychology), all of them focusing on information systems. Our goal is of course to improve efficiency of machine learning and data mining methods but also to improve the quality of results for knowledge discovery in information systems. The originality of AxIS project-team is to adopt an inter-disciplinary approach with a focus on cognitive aspects during the whole KDD(Knowledge Discovery From Database) process and for each step (preprocessing, data mining, interpretation).

To address this challenge, relying on our scientific foundation (see our 2007 activity report, section Scientific Foundation), we had a first 4 years step dedicated to the design of methodological and technical building blocks for IS mining (usage, content and structure). Our research is now organized to support the disruptive process of continuous innovation. In this continuous process, design is never ended and relies on very short test-adapt-test cycles where users are co-designers: they can contribute to design before/after market launch as ideas providers, as participants in test beds or field experimentations or even as solution providers when they are given the convenient tools.

To support this process, a large collection of tools and methods are needed and our team has focused its effort on the technical and methodological environment needed to extract meaning from the huge amount of data issued from large and distributed information systems. Since 2007, our research is organized according to three objectives:

Objective 1 - Mining for Knowledge Discovery in Information Systems:

We study semantic Web mining (ontologies and Web mining), semantics checking of evolving IS and some open problems such as mining massive and evolutive data, knowledge management in KDD, and mining data streams. We mainly developed data stream mining which was an emerging problem and complex data clustering (interval data, heterogeneous data). Most of the effort in data stream mining concerns two problems a) summarizing and mining data streams related to temporal data; b) analysing the evolution of user behaviours.

Objective 2 - Information System Mining based services for supporting Information Retrieval

Since 2007, for developing adaptable and adaptive recommender tools, we oriented our work towards the mining of relational or social network data. The main goal here is to define new methods and develop new tools to support both the usage analysis (by on-line process) and new KDD-tools for supporting information retrieval with a user-centered approach and personalization features. Two most significant contributions on this topic concern "Clustering of Relational Data and Social Network Data" and "Expert finding in Social Networks".

Objective 3 - New methods and tools for supporting user oriented innovation in the context of Living Labs

In short, a Living Lab is a digital ecosystem in which the various stakeholders of innovation projects, including end-users, cooperate at each cycle of a design process (from the very beginning of the co-creation phase up to user experience after market launch). As the Living Lab "philosophy" matches pretty well with Axis 'one we situated our research within this framework, and in 2008, on the occasion of a FP6 ICT call, we reactivated the Living Lab ICT Usage Lab located in Sophia Antipolis.. To address the new requirements of experimentation on large scale and out of lab, we defined two main goals: a) to develop a structured user centered methodology to deal with the co-design, keeping focus on evaluation purpose and evolution analysis; b) to extend and refine research about existing user centered design and evaluation methods. We conduct our research mainly in four application domains: Smart cities, Tourism, Transport and Sustainable Development. We are also setting up a platform (FocusLab Platform - CPER Telius (Contrat Plan Etat Région - DRTT PACA (2007-2013)) funding) to share good practices, tools and methods for fields/lab experiments and usage analysis.

For more info, please contact:

Dr. Brigitte TROUSSE
E-mail:

Tel: +33 4 9238 7745
Fax: +33-4-9238 7755