Data Science and Decision Support at ERIC

Abstract

ERIC is the French acronym for Entrepots, Representation et Ingenierie des Connaissances, which literally translates into “Warehouses, Representation and Knowledge Engineering”. The ERIC laboratory was created in 1995 and is a joint research unit of two of the three universities in Lyon, both ranked among top universities in France and Europe in their respective fields: Universite Claude Bernard Lyon 1, a university of science and medicine, and Universite Lumiere Lyon 2, a university of humanities and social sciences. ERIC is also a member of the Institut des Sciences de l’Homme, a federative institute related to the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS). Research at ERIC aims at extracting value from huge, complex databases, especially (but not exclusively) in the fields of humanities. Our expertise lies in the following domains (Figure 1): 1) data warehousing: intelligent integration of complex data, multidimensional modeling of complex objects, personalized on-line analysis processing (OLAP), data warehouse security; 2) data mining and decision: machine learning, graph study and graph mining, complex data analysis, multicriteria aggregation, opinion mining, data mining software. ERIC is constituted of two research teams: Decision support Information Systems (SID in French) and Data Mining and Decision (DMD), which address the two aforementioned domains, respectively. Overall, about 50 people regularly work at ERIC, including 6 full professors, 16 associate professors, 25 Ph.D. students and 1 to 3 postdoctoral fellows, depending on the period. Eventually, the ERIC laboratory is involved in numerous academic and industrial partnerships all around the world, and promotes its research fields by steering and organizing both domestic (e.g., EGC and EDA, both referenced in DBLP) and international events (e.g., the ALT/DS 2012 joint conferences or the VLDB Cloud Intelligence workshop). Figure 1: ERIC’s Research Topics