The team comprises 7 tenured faculty and about 20 students enrolled in PhD and master programmes. Our research deals with complex, heterogeneous, and evolving data. It tackles two directions: Information retrieval (IR) and Information synthesis (IS).

 

These directions structure our research and are the two sides of a complex process aiming at recognizing, revealing, enriching, adding value to, and combining information to shape an optimum material that meets a specific user need, as illustrated by the figure below.

Information retrieval (IR)

The IRIS team defines IR models to address multiple problems. The team is particularly interested in complex environments of information retrieval, which require to consider different elements depending on the context in which the search is conducted (i.e., Contextual IR).

It also tackles issues of information retrieval in heterogeneous and highly dynamic sources generated by users (UGC), including social media.

The IRIS team also aims to propose models for collaborative IR. Our ambition is to respond to situations that require or would benefit from coordinated cooperation between various actors to address complex information search tasks.

 

Information synthesis (IS)

The IRIS team works on the production of information with high added value.

In particular, it defines models to build information matching a given user need, by aggregating relevant information nuggets from various and heterogeneous sources, such as the Web.

Graphs are data representations, often dynamic, that model various real-world entities as social networks, citation networks, transportation networks, and the Web. In this context, the IRIS team conducts work in mining dynamic graphs to understand or predict the relationships between entities.

The IRIS team also conducts research in bibliometrics and more generally in scientometrics. This is a multidisciplinary research, conducted in collaboration with researchers from disciplines such as sociology and psychology. The computer science issues addressed by the team are enriched with issues from multiple disciplines and open original and compelling research directions.