PhD Position F/M Decentralized semantic data sharing with access control

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Type de contrat : CDD

Niveau de diplôme exigé : Bac + 5 ou équivalent

Fonction : Doctorant

A propos du centre ou de la direction fonctionnelle

The Inria Saclay-Île-de-France Research Centre was established in 2008. It has developed as part of the Saclay site in partnership with Paris-Saclay University and with the Institut Polytechnique de Paris since 2021.

The centre has 39 project teams , 27 of which operate jointly with Paris-Saclay University and the Institut Polytechnique de Paris. Its activities occupy over 600 scientists and research and innovation support staff, including 54 different nationalities.

Contexte et atouts du poste

Data exchange and sharing is a common need in virtually all modern applications. To achieve interoperability among different, heterogeneous databases, graph databases, and in particular knowledge graphs, are preferred due to their flexibility, which enables them to describe different structures of the underlying databases. Knowledge graphs are also naturally suited to be enriched by ontologies, which describe the known concepts and properties that hold in a given application domain. Ontology-Based Data Access (OBDA) is the name commonly given to data integration systems based on knowledge graphs and ontologies; they have been successfully deployed in a variety of applications. 

Our team is a parter in DXP (Data Exchange Platform), a collaborative project between several Inria teams and Amadeus, technology provided for the travel industry. Within DXP, we will work to develop scalable, decentralized, and secure OBDA mechanisms for exchanging data across the different partners involved in a travel application: providers of services such as transport and lodging, travel operators, individual travelers, etc.

To work on this topic within the DXP project, we are seeking a PhD student with a strong background in computer science, logic, and data management.

Mission confiée

The PhD student will carry original research work, co-supervised by Ioana Manolescu (Senior researcher at Inria Saclay and Ecole Polytechnique) and Maxime Buron (Assistant Professor at Université Clermont Auvergne).

To start the project, the student will get familiar with the core concepts behind data integration, knowledge graphs, ontology-based data access, on one hand, and mechanisms for secure data sharing, on the other hand, such as those based on contracts and on public/private keys. Of particular interest are decentralized protocols, which, by not relying on a single coordinator, eliminate the risks of a single point of failure, as well as the need of relying on a single trusted partner, a potential vulnerability if that partner is breached.

Then, the student will work to propose novel algorithms for secure data sharing in a decentralized, OBDA-style setting, in collaboration with the supervisors. The student will be mainly responsible for implementing the algorithms, establishing their formal properties, validating their performance experimentally, and interacting with the project partners. The Obi-Wan OBDA system previously developed in the team (see below) will be used as a starting point; it allows flexible integration but has no access control mechanisms. The code resulting from the project will be published in open source. 

Depending on the speed of advancement on the above problem, and interest, the PhD may also consider other problems in close scientific areas: heterogeneous data integration, semantic and NLP techniques for data lakes, flexible structured and unstructured graph querying, etc.

For a better knowledge of the proposed research subject :

Obi-Wan (OBDA project previously developed by the team): https://gitlab.inria.fr/cedar/obi-wan (see also publications and demonstration video there).
CEDAR team: https://team.inria.fr/cedar/
Maxime Buron (LIMOS lab at UCA): https://perso.limos.fr/~maburon/

Collaboration :
Claudia-Lavinia Ignat, senior researcher at Inria Nancy, specialized in distributed collaborative systems, and a core partner in DXP, may also be involved to a lesser extent in the supervision.

The CEDAR team is also hiring an engineer on the DXP project. The PhD student will collaborate with the engineer towards delivering solid code as our contributions to the project.

Principales activités

The PhD student position involves

  • collaborative research work: reading and discussing papers, devising algorithms
  • prototyping, developing, and testing algorithm implementation
  • discussing progress within and outside of the team, with the project partners and with the scientific community at large
  • attending scientific conferences to present the work.

Compétences

Technical skills and level required :

Languages :

Relational skills :

Other valued appreciated :

Avantages

  • Subsidized meals
  • Leave: 7 weeks of annual leave + 10 extra days off due to RTT (statutory reduction in working hours) + possibility of exceptional leave (sick children, moving home, etc.)
  • Possibility of teleworking and flexible organization of working hours
  • Professional equipment available (videoconferencing, loan of computer equipment, etc.)
  • Social, cultural and sports events and activities
  • Access to vocational training

Rémunération

1st et 2nd year : 2100€ gross/month

3rd année : 2190€ gross/month