PhD Position F/M Interconnection of digital twin knowledge

Contexte et atouts du poste

Work Environment

The PhD candidate will be co-supervised by Jérôme David (UGA,LIG,Inria), Cassia Trojahn (UGA,LIG,Inria) within

What You Will Gain from This PhD

This PhD offers the opportunity to:

• Develop highly sought-after skills in knowledge engineering, semantics alignment, and collaborative innovation.
• Collaborate with leading partners (Inria, CEA, CNRS, etc.) and validate your research on real-world industrial use cases.
• Join a network of PhD candidates within the EDT program, fostering collaboration, peer support, and interdisciplinary exchanges.
• Contribute to an open-source platform (Artemis) and publish in international conferences and journals.
• Gain recognition in a rapidly growing field, with career prospects in academic research, industrial R&D, or entrepreneurship.

Upon completion, you will be positioned as a recognized expert in a key domain for industry and research, with diverse professional opportunities in France and internationally.

Mission confiée

Context

Digital twins are virtual representations of real-world products, systems, or processes, enabling simulation, integration, testing, monitoring, and maintenance. They play a pivotal role in optimizing complex systems across a wide range of domains, from industrial manufacturing and energy to environmental monitoring and healthcare.

The Engineering Digital Twin Thesis Objectives

Digital twins rely on the integration of multiple heterogeneous models and data sources, such as sensor observations, simulation models, geographic information systems, and domain knowledge bases. Ontology alignment will therefore play a central role in reconciling these heterogeneous representations and enabling consistent interpretation and integration of the data they produce.

With rapid advances in neural AI, work in the semantic web, historically based on symbolic AI (knowledge representation and reasoning), is moving towards neuro-symbolic AI [2,4]. Neuro-symbolic AI aims to combine the strengths of machine learning (noise robustness, statistical generalisation) with those of symbolic AI (explainability and logical reasoning).

The objective of this thesis is to study the contribution of neuro-symbolic to ontology alignment [5] and data linking [6] in the context of France’s digital twin.

Références

[1]

Breit, A., Waltersdorfer, L., Ekaputra, F. J., Sabou, M., Ekelhart, A., Iana, A., Paulheim, H., Portisch, J., Revenko, A., Teije, A. T., & Harmelen, F. V. . Combining Machine Learning and Semantic Web: A Systematic Mapping Study.

[2]

Benoît Combemale, Pascale Vicat-Blanc, Arnaud Blouin, Hind Bril El Haouzi, Jean-Michel Bruel, Julien Deantoni, Thierry Duval, Sébastien Gérard, & Jean-Marc Jézéquel . Engineering Digital Twins: A Research Roadmap. EDTconf 2025 - 2nd International Conference on Engineering Digital Twins.

[3]

Hitzler, P., Krötzsch, M., & Rudolph, S. . Foundations of Semantic Web Technologies.

[4]

Janowicz, K., Hitzler, P., Bianchi, F., Ebrahimi, M., & Sarker, M. K. . Neural-symbolic integration and the Semantic Web.

[5]

Jradeh, C. K., Raoufi, E., David, J., Larmande, P., Scharffe, F., Todorov, K., & Trojahn, C. . Graph Embeddings Meet Link Keys Discovery for Entity Matching.

[6]

Sousa, G., Lima, R., & Trojahn, C. . Results of CMatch in OAEI 2025.

[7]

Sousa, G., Lima, R., & Trojahn, C. . Survey on embedding methods applied to ontology matching.

Principales activités

The expected work consists of two main parts:

• Improve methods for automatically aligning ontologies and linking data by leveraging the scalability, approximation, and multi-viewpoint capabilities of deep learning methods.
• Study how the semantics of ontology alignment and linking keys can contribute to the validation and explainability of methods based solely on machine learning.

The work developed in this thesis will enable the construction of a semantic bridge allowing interoperability between the different viewpoints of a digital twin. The results of this thesis will directly contribute to the Artemis platform, an open-source framework designed to become a benchmark in the field.

Compétences

Qualification: Master or equivalent in computer science.

Researched skills:

• Curiosity and openness.
• Interaction with other researchers.
• Autonomous researcher.
• Interests in epistemology or the methodology of sciences.
• Innovative.

Avantages

• Subsidized meals
• Partial reimbursement of public transport costs
• 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
• Social security coverage under conditions

Rémunération

2300 euros gross salary /month