France 2030 - Continuum Project

CONTINUUM enables a paradigm shift in how we perceive, interact and collaborate with complex digital data and digital worlds by placing humans at the center of data processing workflows. The project will provide scientists, engineers and industrial users with a network of high-performance visualization and immersion platforms to observe, manipulate, understand and share digital data, multi-scale simulations and virtual or augmented experiences. All platforms will enable remote collaboration and will be equipped with mobile equipment that can be loaned to users to facilitate access to these technologies.

CONTINUUM is organized along two axes:

• Interdisciplinary research on interaction, in collaboration between computer science and the humanities and social sciences, to increase knowledge and solutions in human-centered computing;
• Deployment of tools and services to meet the needs of many scientific domains for access to big data, simulations and virtual/augmented experiments (mathematics, physics, biology, engineering, computer science, medicine, psychology, didactics, history, archaeology, sociology, etc.). )

CONTINUUM's wide geographical coverage will allow the dissemination of know-how to the economic and social world, in collaboration with innovation transfer players (SATT, Competitiveness Clusters, Carnot Institutes, etc.). Specific economic models will be developed to allow access to equipment and cutting-edge expertise by academics and private users. Thanks to CONTINUUM, French research teams will be able to become leaders in research on digital and immersive environments thanks to interconnected platforms and a multidisciplinary scientific framework focused on humans.

CONTINUUM fills the missing link between the current digital infrastructure of data and computing centers on the one hand, and human intelligence and expertise on the other.

We need collective human intelligence to harness computing power and tame the data deluge. More than just a "human in the loop," we need humans in control, with the appropriate tools to exercise that control. As with the natural sciences, we need scientific instruments to observe the phenomena hidden in large data sets, conduct experiments, and make discoveries. CONTINUUM is an instrument for exploring the digital world: a digital macroscope.

By developing the instrument itself and using it in different application areas, CONTINUUM will foster interdisciplinary research to better understand how to interact with the digital world and enable advances in other fields of science and engineering.