The SIGMA team addresses research challenges concerning the new kinds of information systems (IS) that have emerged in recent years. Nowadays, these systems involve legacy IS together with web-based IS, social networks, mobile devices, sensors, smart-homes. They must share structured or unstructured data (text, feelings, comments), have to deal with data scarcity or data at a large scale, and data may be raw data or structured knowledge. Moreover, IS have to be flexible and aligned with the continuous evolution and innovation needs that organizations have to face today to stay competitive with regards to new socio-economic challenges. Finally, new forms of IS have emerged due to the increasing importance of participative and collaborative economy: such IS are based on the growing involvement of citizens as sources of innovations or evolutions within complex social ecosystems.

 

The research interests of the Sigma team include design and infrastructure issues. From the design perspective, one of the main goal is to build IS for and from the user, and to extract and reintroduce user feelings in the IS. Another goal is to provide organizations and social ecosystems with new methods allowing them to enrich their capacity to innovate or co-innovate. Natural modellng, text mining, user-centered design, and participative methods are the main keywords from this perspective. From the infrastructure perspective, the work of the SIGMA team integrates sensors and mobile devices as first-class citizens in information systems. Multi-scale, stream data management and private cloud computing are also of particular interest.