Research Domains

Computer Engineering in the LATECE Lab

LATECE members invest themselves in designing solutions that meet the needs of a variety of audiences and users. Solutions are developed to meet the requirements of the applications designed to meet those needs, including performance, quality, and security requirements. Solutions take the form of algorithms, software, middleware, or any of the hardware needed to support the functionality of the applications as they were designed.  Our work revolves around three key principles:

Research Axes

Solution-building in the field of connected health ­—our specific field of application— requires integrated transdisciplinary expertise, which we deploy across the following thematic axes:

  • Software architecture
  • Telecommunications networks
  • Artificial intelligence
  • User experience management
  • Behavioural medicine

Approaches

Our problem-driven and solution-seeking research works across three major design paradigms:

  • Functional Design (defining how a system should function independently of its technical implementation)
  • User Experience (UX) Design (using data, AI and technology to customize and optimize the user experience).
  • Computer Engineering Design (creating high-performance, optimized ecosystems by analyzing requirements, embedding them in hardware and/or software architectures, and validating them).

CONNECTED HEALTH

Connected health is the use of connected objects to monitor, support, and improve the health of individual users remotely or in real time. Connected health uses digital applications and platforms, telecommunications technologies, IA techniques, and health data to enable telehealth and telemedicine.

LEVERAGING EXISTING AND EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES

The goal of our research is to take on the technical, economic, social, and ethnical issues arising from the design of digital ecosystems in an effort to ensure they are efficient, robust, human-oriented, and socially relevant.

LATECE’s work is focused both on technological breakthroughs and existing technological innovations. The availability of existing infrastructure and technologies largely informs how solutions are designed. These solutions then explore the possibilities offered by emerging technologies.

Emerging technologies are new-generation computer applications that go beyond traditional software running from a server. They include any software or hardware ecosystem relying on a network of connected objects (known as the Internet of Things, or IoT) that capture data about users and their environment.

Working together, existing and emerging technologies largely determine how quality and performance requirements can be achieved to produce smart and connected applications (known as smart process applications) that are ubiquitous, contextual, adaptive, and human-oriented.

DEVELOPING, CO-CONSTRUCTING, AND ADVANCING KNOWLEDGE

Moving knowledge forward to support society’s evolving needs requires solutions engineering. The deployment and operation of the ecosystems that can help make this happen must inevitably be rooted in secure, resilient, adaptative, and efficient infrastructure. The role of functional design is to push boundaries in the right directions. LATECE is driven by a commitment to do just this, all in an effort to develop and advance knowledge to better serve humans and society.

SOCIALLY RELEVANT TECHNOLOGIES

Findability – Where users are able to find products and their content (information architecture and retrieval technology

Useability – Where users are able to perform tasks using secure, resilient, adaptive, efficient, and effective infrastructure and benefit from a pleasant user experience

Usefulness – Where the functionalities offered to the user meet their needs in terms of functionality, performance, quality, and security

Desirability – Where users are offered a design that intuitively resonates with them

Credibility – Where users feel confident about the reliability of the application in terms of security, privacy, precision, and equity

Accessibility – Where all users are offered an accessible experience, including users with different abilities, thanks in part to well allocated resources in terms of infrastructure, cloud capability, security, and resource sharing.

Value – Where both the application provider and the user can extract value from the application

Integration – Where the deployment, operation, and evolution of applications and ecosystems are all together synchronized and ensure their resilience when operating in parallel, from equipment and protocols to user requirements and profiles, data synchronization, and user experience.