Created in January 2019 as new research team of the CEDRIC – Computing and Communications Research Department at Cnam, during the last 7 years the team members successfully positioned the team in both the national and international research landscape in networking, IoT systems and cybersecurity.
This happened thanks to various funding for hiring Ph.Ds, engineers, postdocs, interns, support visiting researchers and participation to international conferences and events, by means of healthy academic competition in public calls. Indeed, the team could obtain multiple prestigious research awards, namely 4 European projects (AI@EDGE, Nexasphere, Graphs4Sec, AI4CI), 9 ANR research grants (MAESTRO-5G, CANCAN, COCO5G, PARFAIT, COMMITS, GNADIS, HEIDIS, TREES, NET4AI), 3 France 2030 (ENE5AI, IE6, INFLUENCE) and 1 IPCEI (ME/CT) industrial grants, coordinating 3 of them. These grant competitions were structured with a peer-reviewed anonymous evaluation process, which allowed the team avoiding other funding schemes with other practices. Since 2019, the team also run 17 bilateral research contracts with companies as Orange (9), Ericsson (1), Thales (4), Outscale (1), Nexer (1), Soprasteria (1) which trusted our growing set of skills and expertise, mostly by means of industrial Ph.D. agreements. Overall the team grown thanks to an average funding raise up to 1M€ per year since its creation.
The team distinguished itself with about 55 top-tier Q1 publications, few contributions to ETSI, IETF and AFNOR, 5 patents, and created and maintains multiple softwares and datasets derived from the research activity.
The team supported the community with an important set of international conferences, both intra-muros and extra-moenia, such as IEEE CloudNet and NETSOFT, ACM CoNext and MobiArch, IFIP CNSM and TMA, among others, besides national workshops and events. The team also run monthly seminars, at Cnam but yearly also outside Paris with team workshops, where its members regularly report on ongoing research, with invited expert speakers from the community. We also participated to the launch of the Parisian seminars in networking, to support dissemination in networking at the metropolitan level.
Moreover, coherently with Cnam historical motto Bene Docet Omnes Ubique, to teach to all and everywhere, while ensuring quality, the team launched a diverse set of research-oriented master tracks, diverse both in methodology (international, european, apprenticeship, continuing education) and geography (Paris, Mulhouse, Perpignan, Athens, Cairo), with more than 10 master students who joined the research team as either doctoral students or engineers, and 5 more as doctoral students in other labs. Overall, the team graduated in its first 7 years 27 Ph.D. students and 111 research master students!
Currently, the teams updates its scientific topics and increasingly focuses on network and system algorithms and software/hardware infrastructures forming the cognitive cloud continuum, natively integrating distributed learning and inference AI engines, and plans to contribute to the definition of future 6G systems. For the next years, Stefano Secci, founder of the team, hands overs the team management to Vania Conan, who recently joined Cnam, bringing new ideas in the mobile systems and digital infrastructure sovereignty areas. Stefano will work toward the launch of a research spinoff, called NeuroTel.ai, to perform technology transfer and maturation of 6 inventions (5 patented) from Cnam and Sorbonne University.
Some members (Pierre Paradinas, Eric Gressier Soudan, Jean-Michel Douin) retired after very honorable service to the Cnam and whole community, some members (Françoise Sailhan, Selma Boumerdassi) were promoted to external universities winning public competitions, and many young researchers were trained and are now enjoying nice careers in academia and the industries. We keep updated our Alumnis, archiving the defended Ph.D. thesis. Ad maiora to the current and past ROCkers for the next 7 years!
