Home, Building, City Automation

I work with passion on innovative applications for the Home, the Building and the City in the Orange Labs. It becomes now feasible to connect the relevant objects in these environments and make them communicate together to assist users, cities, firms in their day lives.

I believe it is now going through a transitioning phase. On the one hand, most of electronic devices are isolated, they do not communicate with each other : Audio-Video devices, white goods like the washing-machine, clocks at Home... smoke detectors, surveillance devices in the Building... city lights, bus stops, waste containers in the City... Many actors are acting in vertical or niche markets. On the other hand, many paradigms (Service Oriented Computing, Pervasive Computing, ...) have paved the way towards more open ecosystems. Technologies in embedded design, e.g., OSGi, protocols in the digital Home, e.g., UPnP, emerging ones in home automation, e.g., ZigBee, and probably the ones that we have just launched in the City, e.g., Wavenis, carry on the promise of a standard connection to any object about to become smart.

I manage today a Research Program called Machine-To-Machine – M2M – in three application domains: Energy efficiency at home, the automation of city services, and the adaptation of the classic mobile network to the M2M market. M2M is the promise of mutualized solutions to various control-command applications. These solutions rely upon communication middlewares which still require work. Scalability, reliability and adaptability are some of the main technical challenges – for example, 500 million electricity, gas and water meters are about to become connected in Europe. Our expertise also focuses on ultra low power self-organized radio and powerline protocols. Research, development and standardization efforts will enable the management of devices at a large scale.