The purpose of eNSEMBLE (Future of Digital Collaboration) is to fundamentally redefine digital tools for collaboration. The pandemic has demonstrated both the possibilities and limitations of current tools for computer-mediated 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 unp recedented speed and scale.
The PEPR eNSEMBLE launches a transparent and fair call for Ph.D. programmes for the year 2025. The laureates will receive a Ph.D. grant for three years with the same salary as a Ph.D. grant from the Ministry, as well as 10,000 € of support for the purchase of equipment or valorization activities and mission expenses.
Process
- The co-chairs of the targeted projects (PC) define the priority themes for each PC for the current year (see below).
- Future advisors elaborate a Ph.D. project proposal (see the instructions in the form below) for one of the five PCs. The author directly submits the Ph.D. project proposal, with or without an attached candidate already pre-selected.
- The co-chairs of the targeted projects check the relevance of the Ph.D. project proposal with regard to the scientific policy of the corresponding PC. They can exchange with the authors to refine the subject and its objectives / methodologies. Once this pre-review is completed, Ph.D. project proposals without candidates are annouced on the PEPR eNSEMBLE website.
- If not yet selected, the authors of the Ph.D. project proposal select one future Ph.D. candidate (exceptionally two candidates) and submit their choice to the PEPR eNSEMBLE jury by updating the application form.
- The executive board pre-select a set of future Ph.D. candidates for the interview stage. They notify Ph.D. project authors and the future Ph.D. candidates. For those who are selected, the email will contain the date and time of the interview as well as the instructions.
- The interviews will take only by videoconference. The jury will be composed of at least two coordinators of each PC as well as at least two program directors (12 people).
- The jury ranks the candidates and defines a main list and an additional list for each PC. They inform the authors of the Ph.D. project proposals and the future doctoral candidates by email.
Calendar
- 17 February 2025: opening of the application form
- 14 March: soft deadline for subject proposals (with or without attached candidates)
- Late March / early April: Pre-review of subjects by Targeted Projects (PC) co-chairs & publication of available subjects on our website
- 15 May: Deadline for candidate applications (hard deadline). It is still possible (but not recommended) to send an application with a subject that has not been pre-reviewed before this date, until the last minute.
- 30 May: Pre-selection committee & interview decisions sent to applicants
- 16-17 June: Interview of shortlisted candidates (online)
- 18-19 June: Admissions Committee & Letter of Acceptance sent to laureates
Eligibility criteria
- The Ph.D. project proposal should indicate the primary PC of the PEPR eNSEMBLE it contributes to (CATS, PILOT, MATCHING, CONGRATS, TRANSVERSE). A secondary PC can be specified in the application.
- The Ph.D. advisor must have an HDR (or equivalent) and be a member of a laboratory whose one supervisory body is on the list of PEPR eNSEMBLE partners (list of partners in the application form). This partner will fund the thesis.
- The Ph.D. project must start between October and December of the current year.
- In the case of co-supervision, the doctoral student must be assigned to a laboratory whose supervisory body is on the list of PEPR eNSEMBLE partners (and employed by this same partner), under the supervision of an HDR supervisor attached to this laboratory.
- In the case of a half-grant request, the other half-grant must already be acquired.
Specific requirements
In the context of the call for PhD projects of the overall eNSEMBLE programme, the PC co-chairs would like to highlight some additional requirements specific to applications for funding from their respective Targeted Projects.
PC1 CATS – Collaboration Spaces
We prioritize proposals that address synchronous collaboration:
- cross AR and VR
- across devices (HMDs, desktop, mobile…)
- across contexts (outdoors, indoor..)
We also prioritize proposals that address models, methods, indicators, and metrics for evaluating subjective and objective (dimensions of) synchronous collaboration in heterogeneous environments.
PC2 PILOT – Long-term collaboration / Practices and infrastructure for long-term collaboration
3 priority themes:
- Future infrastructure for long-term collaboration
- Interoperability for long-term collaboration
- Long-term collaboration – Practices of the future
Goal: funding of 4-5 PhD thesis
Theme 1: Future infrastructure for long-term collaboration
Distributed and secure infrastructure for long-term collaboration
To handle long-term collaborative practices, new algorithms and infrastructure are needed to manage shared and replicated data. Indeed, several modes of collaboration have to be supported: connected (user modifications are immediately shared and visible to the other users), disconnected (users are not connected to the network; their modifications will be transmitted to the other users at the reconnection), ad-hoc (subgroups of users can work together and synchronize at a later time with other members of the group) and inter-organisational (groups of users from different organizations work and share data during a collaborative activity). A challenging issue is how to balance collaboration with security of shared objects. Interaction is aimed at making shared objects available to all who need them, whereas security seeks to ensure this availability only to users with proper authorisation. We need also to ensure that the infrastructure that supports data sharing and collaboration is resilient and trustworthy. We need an easy to use security mechanism adapted for distributed collaborative systems.
Keywords: distributed infrastructure, distributed algorithms, replication, collaboration modes, synchronous collaboration, asynchronous collaboration, inter-organisational collaboration, security
Theme 2: Interoperability for long-term collaboration
The current approach to digital services, based on information silos and walled gardens, creates unneeded barriers to fluid forms of collaboration. Users need to be able to create their own collaborative environment. They need also to be able to change these environments to adapt them to new requirements, partners, or tools. This requires embracing interoperability at every level of the socio-technical stack. It is also key to enabling accessibility by diverse collectives of users. We launch a call for PhD proposals that aim to develop an interoperability framework that can be used as the basis for collaborative services integration. This includes open and extensible formats and ontological approaches such that different applications could function on the same shared objects as well as software models and infrastructures capable of fostering collaboration among heterogeneous actors and artifacts.
Keywords: interoperability, heterogeneous collaboration, collaborative service integration, ontologies
Theme 3: Long-term collaboration – Practices of the future
Emerging and future forms of long-term collaborative practices
Crises happen, the market and the society change, so as the national or EU legal and regulatory landscape. These evolutions trigger new practices in the most important domains of our society, namely: healthcare, industry, software engineering, and crisis management. These emerging and future forms of long-term collaboration need to be investigated to highlight the forms of collaboration they mobilize, the artifacts they use, their stakes, and their limits. We launch a call for PhD proposals that adopt a socio-technical perspective to discover, describe, analyze, and digitally support emerging and future forms of long-term collaborative practices.
Keywords: practice-centered computing, healthcare, crisis management, industry, software engineering
PC3 MATCHING – Collaboration with intelligent systems
PC3 MATCHING focuses on collaboration between humans in contexts involving intelligent systems. The aim of these intelligent systems may be to support collaboration between humans or to contribute to it in hybrid contexts. MATCHING encourages multi-disciplinary approaches.
For this call, PC3 will prioritise projects falling within theme 3 (impact of intelligent systems on expertise and loss of competence) while not excluding excellent proposals falling within themes 1 and 2.
Theme 1: Modelling and understanding groups of agents with social capabilities in intelligent systems
This theme considers groups of humans and one or more intelligent systems. Human groups are composed of twenty or more people, which implies complex interaction dynamics. An intelligent system, composed of one or more artificial agents, must support the collaboration of such groups (human and/or hybrid) and facilitate their cohesion in the context of achieving common objectives. We are interested both in understanding how collaboration occurs and develops in a hybrid group comprising humans and artificial agents and in developing measures and indicators to evaluate this collaboration. In these contexts, we can address the subjects of agents’ sociability, their adaptation to collective activities, and the management of collaboration control in the various tasks carried out in groups of humans.
Keywords: Intelligent systems, collaborative process, group, conflict, leadership, collaborative interactions, emergence of collective agentivity.
Theme 2: Modelling and understanding collaborative or competitive interactions between two (or more) humans and intelligent systems
Users of increasingly complex intelligent systems may feel a loss of control due to difficulties in understanding the elements that lead to decisions in these systems. The objective is to propose models and frameworks for mutual understanding between humans and intelligent systems in a context of collaboration, in particular through individualised and contextualised adaptations of intelligent systems to humans. This theme could, for example, address (but is not limited to) the fields of affective computing, virtual agents and the modelling of user diversity. These areas could involve collaborative situations comprising several humans and agents, and the models produced could be based on multimodal interactions.
Keywords: Complexity, Control, User state, Trust, Adaptation, Ethics, Diversity
Theme 3: Impact of intelligent systems on expertise and the loss of skills
This theme addresses the effect of prolonged use of intelligent systems by a set of human users. Whether they trust or distrust these systems, their use can modify their critical thinking, their curiosity and their analytical skills, and have a deleterious impact on the decisions or performance of the hybrid complex formed in the short or longer term, including collaboration between humans. For this theme, contributions from the human and social sciences could be complemented by technical contributions to establish the desirable conditions of use of intelligent systems.
Keywords: Long-term interaction, shared authority, deskilling, vulnerability
PC4 CONGRATS – Collectives for knowledge production management that scales / Large-scale collaboration
The PC4 coordinators did not give any specific instructions, beyond proposing a subject that addresses one of the themes developed in the project’s scientific document.
PC5 TRANSVERSE – Transversal aspects of collaboration
For this call, PC5 will prioritize projects falling within one of its 3 main themes:
Theme 1: Methods and tools for measuring impact of collaboration
We must establish a framework for measuring the impact of collaborative technology on human users, including individuals and groups as well as human-algorithm (“intelligent agent”) relationships. Methods must be deployable for diverse user populations, over multiple time scales, and assess different types of impact, including the risk and likelihood of harm to human users. Key measurement dimensions include determining positive, neutral or negative impact with respect to:
- Time scale: immediate, intermediate and long term;
- Population: individual, group or corporate;
- Risk: balance likelihood of harm and size of negative impacts; and
- Measures: qualitative or quantitative, in context or in general.
Keywords: impact, measurement, psychological and sociological factors
Theme 2: Legal, ethical and philosophical aspects of collaboration
Collaboration technologies raise important ethical issues, particularly with respect to technological control, citizen’s liberty and decisional autonomy, digital democracy, governance of and by digital technologies, and the control of work or ordinary activities. This echoes the question of the legal framework organizing privacy, data protection, interoperability, security, and AI responsibilities, but also more classical questions such as the property of the collective intellectual productions especially in light of the EU member States of Directive 2019/790 on copyright and related rights in the Digital Single Market. Finally, philosophical debates and reflections posed by the Humanities explore how far humans can be helped, assisted, facilitated in their tasks and activities, while remaining “human”. In particular, it is important to identify how human’s reflexivity, critical thinking and its own ethical deliberation can be promoted to increase their agency during their interaction with numerical tools.
Key challenges include identifying the ethical responsibilities in human-machine collaboration, and clarifying legal issues related to the impact of both collaborative and intelligent systems on individuals and society. Finally, it is crucial to address regulatory concerns related to privacy, copyrights, agency and interoperability.
Keywords: ethics, digital law, philosophy, epistemology, digital anthropology, anthropology of new technologies
Theme 3: Environmental aspects of collaborative technology development
Echoing in every social and ideological space, environmental issues have become central in the agenda of information and communication technology sciences, as well as in computer science and robotics. The proliferation of technological devices aiming at facilitating collaboration does not only raise questions about the behavior and representation systems of users and usage models: the ecological impact (carbon footprint, exploitation of rare minerals, energy and material pollution, etc.) is also increasingly considered. Research on these dimensions of the current digitalisation of modern societies is urgent and crucial, and must explore the complexity of the configurations and issues that the environmental crisis entails in the field of digital technologies, which moreover maintain an ambivalent relationship with ecology: as sources of pollution on the one hand, digital and collaborative technologies carry and provide IT solutions on the other. The aim of this Ph.D. thesis research is therefore to carry out a reflection, based on solid empirical work and a reliable and robust methodology, on the environmental impacts of digital technologies, considered in a general way (on the background of the movement of digitalisation of human societies) but in a specific approach (with a particular disciplinary or methodological angle) which crosses the problems of the SHS, the STS and the environmental sciences.
Keywords: ecological crisis, collaborative agents, societal impact, socio-cultural approaches
Submission form
Use the following form to submit your application. The application can be made in French or in English. This form has to be filled by PhD advisors / supervisors only. You will be guided through the whole application procedure.
If you have any questions, please send an email to pm@pepr-ensemble.fr (PEPR eNSEMBLE programme managers).
Documents to provide
You’ll be asked to upload several documents in the application form. In particular, we ask you to follow two specific templates for the description of the subject and the candidate profile.
The purpose of those templates is to clarify as much as possible – and before the audition – the scope and expectations of the subject in terms of collaborative themes and candidate profile. It’s not absolutely mandatory to build your documents around these templates, but – in any case – they should contain all the necessary information.
For subject / project proposal (one single file)
Title of the PhD Proposal
- Name(s) of PhD Advisor(s)
- Host Laboratory
- Short abstract
- Short description of hosting research group / lab
Description of the PhD proposal (3 pages max)
- Context (and scenarios if any)
- Problem and Objective
- Brief overview of the state of the art
- Research questions
- Theoretical foundations
- Approach and methods
- Evaluation of the contributions
Nature of digital collaboration (1 page max)
The term « collaboration » should be understood in a wide sense, covering (technology-mediated) human activities that involve a group of at least two humans.
What type of group activities is the PhD targeting/studying in terms of, e.g.:
- Function (communication, sharing, coordination, other),
- Type (synchronous, asynchronous),
- Time scale (second, hours, months, years,..),
- Group size (two, dozen, hundreds, thousands, ..),
- Space (co-located, remote, hybrid),
- Other…
Contribution to digital collaboration: Expected results and Impact (1 page max)
What type of contribution(s) is the PhD expected to make?
- Empirical
- Theoretical
- Methodological (new method, guidelines)
- Technical (system, tool, …)
- Other
Positioning in the eNSEMBLE program (½ page max)
How does the project relate to the themes of the Targeted Project(s) (Projet(s) Ciblé(s)?
For candidate submission (one single file)
1/ Letter of motivation from the candidate explaining the interest for the thesis topic (1 page max)
2/ Support letter of the candidate, by future advisor (1 page max)
How much do you know about the candidate (e.g., ongoing internship, former student, …)?
What is your assessment of his/her strong / weak points with respect to the PhD topic?
How do you plan to provide training for and other support to address the weak points?
3/ Interdisciplinarity (if relevant – ½ page max)
How to overcome the possible difficulties of the interdisciplinary project? Eg. complementarity of the PhD candidate and PhD advisor(s), specific training, specific collaboration, etc.
Submission deadlines summary
- Ph.D. Project proposal (subjects without candidates): 14 March 2025 for quick review (possible later, but there is no guaranteed date for our review)
- Final deadline for subjects + doctoral candidates (or candidates for already-submitted subjects): 15 May 2025
Selection criteria
- For pre-selection step and interview, the main selection criteria include:
- Quality of the research program (objective, approach, originality, methods, feasability)
- Quality and complementarity of the Ph.D. advisors
- Quality of the CV of the future doctoral candidate
- Adequacy of the research program with (1) the PEPR eNSEMBLE objectives and (2) the specific topics of the selected PC (see details & additional requirements for some PCs in the application form)
- Commitment to participate in PEPR eNSEMBLE community
- The secondary criteria also include an equitable sharing of financial resources in space (geographical distribution), in time (from one year to the next), gender, and between partner institutions.
The weight of the different criteria might depend on the selected PCs. We invite you to carefully read the description of the selected PC and – in case of doubts – contact the PC chairs ahead of your application (mail « pcX@pepr-ensemble.fr », with X is the number of your PC).
Attention: it is important to remind laboratories that no recruitment on a PEPR can be done without a referral to the FSD (Fonctionnaire Sécurité Defense).