This project concerns the study of the use of the Bismuth atom for the realization of antimonide-based devices by Molecular Beam Epitaxy (MBE). The antimonide based semiconductors are the material system comprising GaSb, AlSb, InAs and all their related alloys, such as GaInAsSb or AlGaAsSb for example. They have unique properties in terms of band-gap, band-offsets and carrier effective masses, making them the materials of choice for realizing high-speed low consumption electronic devices and lasers/photodetectors in the infrared range. Bi is a group-V atom that can thus be incorporated within III-V semiconductor crystals. It is also a particular atom in terms of size, making it possible to use it as a surfactant, where while not incorporated, it modifies the way the other atoms arranged within the crystal in a beneficial way. Although quite well studied in the case of the arsenides (GaAs, AlAs, etc…), the use of Bi with antimonides is far less developed. As few as about ten papers can be found on the topic and developments are still needed for its use in actual devices. The potential benefits are however extremely important, from device design capabilities or transport properties enhancement, to pushing the boundaries of the current n-type doping limits encountered within this material system. This project thus proposes to address this promising topic, starting from the study of the MBE of antimonide/Bi materials to the realization of optoelectronic devices using these materials. Both the incorporation of Bi and its use as a surfactant will be studied, and the demonstration of the respective benefits will be ensured by new type-I lasers emitting in the 3.5-5 µm wavelength range, record high doping level GaSb and InAsSb, and a significant improvement of the minority carrier lifetime of InAs/GaSb superlattice photodetectors thanks to a drastic reduction of the native defects density. An original in-situ characterization technique (desorption mass spectroscopy of antimony) will be implemented within the project, to get a real-time analysis of the Bi incorporation. Although this technique was used for other purpose in MBE, its use to monitor and study Bi incorporation has never been reported, even in the more studied arsenides. The novelty of the project is thus strong, as it proposes to address a topic poorly studied and with a strong potential impact. At the national level, no such project exists (although the use of Bi with arsenide is studied), and only one European laboratory (Chalmers University) has published preliminary results on the topic. The project fits the JCJC requirements: the principal investigator who will carry out this project is a young researcher of the NANOMIR group of IES, and although this group has many years of experience in antimonide MBE and realization of devices based on these materials, the use of Bi will be a totally new thematic.

This project addresses the study of the epistemology and the didactics of the relations between mathematics and informatics. The project aims at a better understanding of the relations between mathematics and informatics by studying the foundations, the objects, the methods, the questions and the thinking, shared or specific, and by addressing the questions that each field asks to the other and the place that they occupy one in each other (as tool and as object). The work will be led according to a classical methodology in didactics of sciences that consist in linking together epistemological and didactical studies in order to build and analyse learning situations that allow a suitable appropriation of the targeted concepts. This work of didactical engineering will be set up by developing observations and analysis of students' productions and by experimenting in a laboratory setting and then in classrooms, learning situations in link with the concepts from mathematics and informatics involved. Those works will be experimented and developed in a close collaboration with teachers from secondary school and university who will be involved in the project. The epistemological analysis aims at deeply study how mathematics and informatics interplay, and particularly how the development of the field informatics impacts mathematics and its practice, how mathematics take part in informatics, and how mathematics and informatics interact in the fields at their interface. Indeed, informatics has a great part of its theoretical and practical foundations in mathematics and has been partly built up as a branch of mathematics and logic before getting independent. In return, Informatics asks new questions to mathematics, opens new research fields and enhances some traditional fields of mathematics. Moreover, computer science's tools deeply modify some of the mathematicians' practices. Particularly, informatics questions mathematics about validation (through proofs like the one of the four colours theorem), the value of its results (through the question of the place of constructive mathematics) and their methods (experimental dimension of mathematical activity). The study is organised according to two aspects: (1) Scientific foundations (logic, algorithmics, language, proof), and (2) Concepts and objects (mathematics of computer science, discrete mathematics, representation of objects). For each aspect, we will study how the two disciplines interplay (through the analysis of the knowledge and of the main questions structuring each one) and we will investigate researchers' and experts' practices. This epistemological study will provide elements that permit to analyse and enlighten the didactical choices made in secondary and university teaching and to produce answers to difficulties regarding the introduction of computer science's tools in mathematics, the mathematical issues in informatics, the place of proof, logic and algorithmics in mathematics and informatics, and regarding also the introduction of mathematical contents fitting better with contemporary issues. The main application will be the conception and proposition, on the base of the developed research, of resources and in-service and pre-service training for teachers and trainers. The aim is to take into account informatics in the teaching of mathematics to motivate taught mathematics contents, to better grasp the mathematical issues in the teaching of informatics, and to anticipate the interactions between the teaching of mathematics and a generalised teaching of informatics. It is also about understanding how students from secondary school can be better prepared and how university teaching can be adapted to foster the transition between secondary school and university in mathematics and informatics.

The AXIAUM project focuses on raising innovative interdisciplinary research topics on health and environment related to artificial intelligence (AI) with the scope of developing both new methodologies and finalized research. The ambition of the programme proposed by the consortium University of Montpellier/IMT Mines Alès is to strongly link new research on AI to the existing research and the AI strategy of the consortium, reinforced by the current structuration of data science within the ISDM Montpellier Institute of Data Science. The project is closely tied to the MUSE I –Site certification obtained by the UM in 2017 for its project "Montpellier University of Excellence" (MUSE). The project addresses three major 21st century challenges, namely: to FEED, PROTECT, and CARE. The topics of the AXIAUM project cover 4 main domains: • Health; • Environment; • Foundations of Artificial Intelligence: ontology alignment, constraint • Social Sciences. The selection of the subjects and PhD candidates will follow a two-step process based on rigorous eligibility criteria: excellence, interdisciplinary, intersectoriality, internationality, ethics and coherence with the AI strategy defined by the consortium. Research works on Health will in particular address cancer and HIV. Deep learning methods will be investigated and extended in order to treat IRM images. More generally, mathematical approaches and machine/statistical learning will be developed, (metabolic plasticity and heterogeneity in melanoma, dynamic statistical networks for cancer cells, use of genomics and Immunogenetics,…) One of the goals is to design and develop a novel analysis framework for large scale OMICS and multiscale data analysis in health. Digital Health in Motion will also be investigated to better understand the ethology of human movement (development and clinical validation of "motion data"). Machine learning and deep learning will also be investigated and novel methods will be built in interdisciplinarity for environmental challenges such as costal and marine biodiversity monitoring, flooding risks and karstic, etc. The works will be based on heterogeneous massive data as for instance high-resolution satellite images. Indeed, coastal marine ecosystems shelter a high biodiversity. By measuring, using imagery and deep learning, one topic of the AXIAUM project is to propose novel monitoring methods of underwater biodiversity. The research topics may address several topics, such as the identification of determinants of water transport in plants through pattern recognition, the automatic and high throughput plant organ recognition (root development), the determination of the network of interactions between plants and pollinators by identifying pollen grains transported by captured insects, etc. Foundations of artificial intelligence will be considered by studying research topics like the study of the complexity of constraint acquisition by developing a taxonomy of queries for constraint acquisition, over-fitting to learning data, noise and sparsity robustness, etc.. Within the scope of social sciences, we propose to try and understand how artificial intelligence will have the effect of shaking up the traditional conception of creator and check if the condition of the existence of a creator (physical person) is a condition of application of the intellectual property law. On another view, online marketplaces are evolving with artificial intelligence. We aim at understanding the legal issues of data analysis in the functioning of online marketplaces, and the techniques used to model the contractual relationship between, on the one hand, the operator of the platform and the sellers and, on the other hand, between the sellers and the buyers.