eNSEMBLE - Future of digital collaboration
News | 04.09.2023 : The inauguration of PEPR eNSEMBLE will take place on 5 October 2023 in Grenoble. Program and registration to attend the event.
Actualité | 04.09.2023 : The results of the doctoral program are available.
The purpose of eNSEMBLE (Future of Digital Collaboration) is to fundamentally redefine digital tools for collaboration. Whether it is to reduce our travel, to better mesh the territory and society, or to face the forthcoming problems and transformations of the next decades, the challenges of the 21st century will require us to collaborate at an unprecedented speed and scale.
To address this challenge, a paradigm shift in the design of collaborative systems is needed, comparable to the one that saw the advent of personal computing. To achieve this goal, we need to invent mixed (i.e. physical and digital) collaboration spaces that do not simply replicate the physical world in virtual environments, enabling co-located and/or geographically distributed teams to work together smoothly and efficiently.
Beyond this technological challenge, the eNSEMBLE project also addresses sovereignty and societal challenges: by creating the conditions for interoperability between communication and sharing services in order to open up the "private walled gardens" that currently require all participants to use the same services, we will enable new players to offer solutions adapted to the needs and contexts of use. Users will thus be able to choose combinations of potentially "intelligent" tools and services for defining mixed collaboration spaces that meet their needs without compromising their ability to exchange with the rest of the world. By making these services more accessible to a wider population, we will also help reduce the digital divide.
These challenges require a major long-term investment in multidisciplinary work (Computer Science, Ergonomics, Cognitive Psychology, Sociology, Design, Law, Economics) of both theoretical and empirical nature. The scientific challenges addressed by eNSEMBLE are:
eNSEMBLE will impact many sectors of society - education, health, industry, science, services, public life, leisure - by improving productivity, learning, care and well-being, as well as participatory democracy.
Scenario for a heterogeneous collaboration space with four participants.
