Post-doc offer

Confidentiality management within virtual communities

to be held at the
University of Saint Etienne, France
LaHC, Laboratoire Hubert Curien, CNRS UMR 5516

The University of Saint-Etienne (France) invites applications for a 1-year Post-doc position at the Hubert-
Curien lab.

*Policies for the management of personal data within virtual communities

*Starting date is January, 1st 2011, duration 1 year.
*Project in cooperation with the University of Tokyo

Description
Communication over on-line communities induces privacy preserving issues, especially when communication is
automated or semi-automated. Personal concerns have to be considered very carefully. Systems must offer trust
mechanisms that people can understand and can rely on. Trust must be provided for the selection of contents that are
going to be transmitted, for the selection of the recipients, relatively to the user's context and the user's preferences.

A typical scenario: Let's assume that Bob is an elderly and has a distant supervisor. A sensor system and mining
algorithms produce the information from Bob's flat: "Bob is in his room since 3 hours. He should be in the swimming
pool". We can assume that this information should be transmitted to Bob's supervisor (assuming Bob's agreement). We
can assume that Bob would not like to have this information transmitted to the neighbours. However, Bob may have
accepted that some derived information such as "Bob may need some visit" would be transmitted to some neighbours.

The issue can be reformulated as: How to built reliable and easy-to-manage automated information sharing system in
order to ensure that personal information is delivered at the right level of details. This point requires expertise on
knowledge engineering, distributed application design, and virtual web-based communities.

The outcome of the post-doc project will consist of a framework (model, methods and tools) for the definition and the
implementation of policies for the management of personal data within virtual communities.

The post-doc is a sub-project of JST (Science and Technology Agency, Japan) CREST project entitled
Development of a physiological and environmental information processing platform and its application to metabolic
syndrome measure conducted in cooperation with the University of Tokyo. The final objective of the project is to
propose a system supporting user-centric social communities in order to improve the daily life of individuals suffering
from metabolic syndrome (physiological aspects -cardiovascular disease and diabetes- and psychological aspects
stress, depression). This system combines sensing technologies, data mining techniques and semantic modeling
techniques for the implementation of user-centric communities.

Team references on the topic

[IJWBC 2009] Int. Journal of Web Based Communities (IJWBC), Special Issue on Dynamic Virtual Communities in
the Information Society, Volume 5 - Issue 2, Guest Editors: Christo El Morr, Pierre Maret and Piet Kommers, ISSN:
1477 8394, (2009).
[Joly 2009] Joly, P. Maret, F. Bataille. Leveraging Semantic Technologies towards Social Ambient Intelligence (Book
chapter), In Context-Aware Mobile and Ubiquitous Computing for Enhanced Usability: Adaptive Technologies and
Applications, IGI Global (2009).
[Maret 2009] Maret Pierre, Calmet Jacques. Agent-Based Knowledge Communities, International Journal of Computer
Science and Applications, vol. 6/2, pp 1-18, (2009).
[Stan 2008] Johann Stan, Elod Egyed-Zsigmond, Adrien Joly, Pierre Maret, A User Profile Ontology For Situation-
Aware Social Networking, 3rd Workshop on Artificial Intelligence Techniques for Ambient Intelligence
(AITAmI2008), Patras, Grce, (2008).
[Subercaze 2009] Julien Subercaze, Christo El Morr, Pierre Maret, Adrien Joly, Matti Koivisto, Panayotis Antoniadis,
Masayuki Ihara, Towards Successful Virtual Communities, Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on
Enterprise Information Systems (ICEIS09), pp.677-688, Milan, Italie, (2009).

Starting date: January 1st 2011

Duration: 1 year
Monthly gross salary: appr. 2 368,13 (Net salary 1 953 ).
Candidate selection: before July 1st 2010

The selected candidate will join the CS group composed of about 20 researchers working at the crossroads of
data mining, machine learning, information retrieval and social networks.

Candidates must have demonstrable interest and expertise in knowledge modelling, agent-oriented systems,
e-health, etc. A good level in English is essential. Applicants should have or be in the process of getting a
PhD in Computer Science.

Applications with a CV and any documents considered as useful by the candidate should be sent to:
pierre.maret@univ-st-etienne.fr
by June, 23th 2010 at the latest.

*Some links:*
-Research team : http://labh-curien.univ-st-etienne.fr/MachineLearning/index.php
- Saint Etienne is a medium size city near Lyon, France. Some facts about Saint-Etienne can be found here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint-tienne
-The University of Saint Etienne is a member of the University of Lyon Consortium.
-The closest airport is Lyon Saint Exupry http://www.lyonaeroports.com/eng
-The city is surrounded by the Pilat Regional Parc in which almost any outdoor activity can be practiced
http://www.parc-naturel-pilat.fr/en.html
-From a cultural point of view, the art museum in Saint-Etienne holds the second national contemporary art
collection, and classical music concerts, dance shows, and operas are performed at the Saint-Etienne
"Massenet Opera"