Thales Student Innovation Championship 2018

Case Study
Background
Throughout human history, any topic that arose usually triggered a number of diverging opinions.
Those opinions can be argued and defended with the support of evidences brought forward by
their champions. In order to reach a consensus, every opinion has to be taken into account and
every piece of evidence has to be collected and analyzed carefully so as to validate or dismiss it. A
process which can be easily biased as the number of participants grows.
Nowadays, this complexity is amplified with the internet spreading an unprecedented volume of
information at a speed and easiness ever greater reaching an increasing number of people.
Challenge
The challenge, for a given topic provided by the end-user, is twofold:
 Collecting all available opinions and their supporting evidences
 Validating every piece of evidence, weighting its contribution to the topic and explaining
this contribution
Opportunity
Although it will never be possible to crawl all data ever expressed around the world on any topic, it
is possible to design a crawling engine ensuring the completeness of the pool of opinions and
supporting evidences, pertaining to a specific topic, available on the internet. More importantly,
with the recent progresses made in the field of Artificial Intelligence, it should be possible to design
an AI capable of automatically finding the opinion clusters and analyzing a piece of evidence in
order to:
 Classify it with respect to the expressed opinions
 Explain why this piece of evidence is aligned with the opinion(s) it has been assigned to
 Show which pieces of evidence are in contradiction with it
 Explain why those pieces of evidence are in contradiction with it
The winning submission will:
 Provide a clear explanation of the architecture that could be employed to determine all
different pieces of evidence (e.g. articles, images, videos, text, etc.) related to a topic.
 Describe innovative algorithms or applications of algorithms that may be capable of
grouping those pieces of evidence into different opinions.
 Describe innovative algorithms or applications of algorithms that may allow the system to
explain its decision-making process.
 Describe implementation options that could include preconfigured datasets, generated
datasets and/or information gathering on the web.
Nice to have:
 Describe a method to be able to visualize the decision-making process.

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permission of Thales.

©Thales 2017 All rights reserved

 Championnat d'innovation étudiante de Thales 2018
L’Étude de cas
Contexte
Tout au long de l’histoire, tout nouveau sujet avancé sur la place publique a systématiquement
déclenché un nombre d’opinions divergentes. Ces opinions peuvent être confrontées à travers les
preuves et arguments apportés par ceux qui les défendent. Afin d’atteindre un consensus, chaque
opinion doit être prise en compte. Les preuves et arguments s’y rapportant doivent être rassemblés
et analysés avec soin afin de valider ou rejeter chaque opinion. Il s’agit d’un processus facilement
biaisé lorsque le nombre d’intervenants est important.
De nos jours, l’Internet contribue à la propagation d’un volume d’information en croissance
constante, à une vitesse toujours plus importante auprès d’une population toujours plus nombreuse
et diverse. Ce phénomène ne fait que complexifier davantage ce processus de validation.

Défi
Sur un sujet de discussion donné, il y a deux défis à relever :
 Collecter toutes les opinions disponibles et les preuves et arguments s’y rapportant ;
 Valider chaque preuve ou argument, quantifier sa pertinence et expliquer en quoi il
contribue au sujet

Opportunité
Il ne sera jamais possible de prendre connaissance de toutes les informations exprimées à travers le
monde sur quelque sujet que ce soit. Cependant, il est possible de créer un moteur de recherche
assurant la collecte complète, sur un sujet donné, de toutes les opinions ainsi que les preuves et
arguments s’y rapportant disponibles sur l’Internet.
Plus intéressant encore, grâce aux récents progrès réalisés dans le domaine de l’intelligence
artificielle (IA), il devrait être possible de créer une IA capable de segmenter automatiquement les
opinions exprimées et d’analyser chaque preuve et argument afin de :
 Classer par opinion exprimée
 Expliquer pourquoi une preuve ou un argument est attribué à une certaine opinion
 Mettre en évidence les preuves et arguments qui sont en contradiction
 Expliquer pourquoi il y a contradiction

La soumission gagnante sera capable de:

 Fournir une explication claire de l’architecture proposée pour déterminer toutes les preuves
et arguments (par exemple: article, image, video, texte, etc.) relatifs au sujet débattu
 Décrire des algorithmes ou des usages d’algorithmes innovants qui seraient capables de
regrouper ces preuves et arguments selon différentes opinions
 Décrire des algorithmes ou des usages d’algorithmes innovants qui donneraient la capacité
au système d’expliquer son processus de prise de décision
 Décrire des options d’implémentation pouvant inclure des bases de données
préconfigurées, des bases de données générées et/ou de la collecte d’informations
disponibles sur l’Internet

Bon à avoir :
 Décrire une méthode de visualisation du processus de prise de décision du système

This document is not to be reproduced, modified, adapted, published, translated in any material form in whole or in part nor disclosed to any third party without the prior written
permission of Thales.

©Thales 2017 All rights reserved

 Judge’s Scoring Sheet
Thales Student Innovation Championship 2018

Judge ID Team ID

Team Points
Score Available
Solution Process and Content
Solution

 Clear explanation of the architecture that could be employed to 10

determine all different pieces of evidence related to a topic
 Demonstrated that they investigated real potential implementation
options (preconfigured datasets, generated datasets, and/or information 10
gathering on the web)

 Feasibility of the solution (considered costs, challenges, etc.) 10

Innovation
 Provided a creative algorithm or application of algorithms that are
capable of grouping pieces of evidence into different opinions, 40
 Provided a creative algorithm or application of algorithms that allow the
system to explain its decision-making process
Report and Presentation

Overall Style and Impression of Report Slides 5

 Appropriate visualization and structure of data/information

 Deck created to a professional standard (e.g. formatting)
Overall Quality of Team Presentation (verbal delivery, flow, and professionalism) 5

 Team’s verbal delivery and professionalism

 Flow of presentation and consistency of message across the team
Question and Answer

Overall Ability/Knowledge 20

Demonstrated:
 Ability to think on their feet, critical thinking
 Knowledgeable answers to follow-up questions
 An understanding of their idea’s potential value and feasibility
Comments:

This document is not to be reproduced, modified, adapted, published, translated in any material form in whole or in part nor disclosed to any third party without the prior written
permission of Thales.

©Thales 2017 All rights reserved