Latest articles
Making Large Numbers Count: Cognitively Informed Alternatives to Log-Scale Bar Charts
From carbon emissions to national budgets, we’re frequently asked to interpret values that span from thousands to millions and billions. These wide ranges—what we call Orders of Magnitude Values (OMVs)—are cognitively demanding for the general public and hard to represent with common charts. So, how can we make sense of large numbers in order to promote understanding of complex data among the general public? Below, we present the findings from
A Mobile Social Robot as a tool for Nursing Homes
Over the centuries, scientific advances in medicine, pharmacology, and various surgeries have allowed the population to age healthier for longer. Our life expectancy in France has therefore now reached the age of 85.6 for women and 79.7 for men (Papon et al., 2020). This increase in life expectancy suggests an increase in the aging population
What is Robotic Process Automation (RPA)? Our Complete Report.
About Top Illustration: « Built and unveiled for the first time in 1770, the Mechanical Turk or chess-playing automaton is a famous hoax built at the end of the 18th century: it was an alleged automaton with the ability to play chess. It was partially destroyed in a fire. Nowadays a replica has been created: it
Software Traces for Detecting Frauds in BL.Enfance
Fraudulent behaviors can be detected based on the applicative traces. In this work, we used application traces from BL.Enfance, one of our software dedicated to children’s activities billing and management. We specifically focused on detecting the modification of variables such as the family quotient (Q-CAF) and period of billing, which can be modified to change
Public Services’ Principles and Contractual Practice between Software Editors and Public Authorities
To make it simple, in the common sense, the “public service” is the practical way for public authorities (national and local) to implement their public policies. For instance: A university is one of the practical instruments used to implement the education and training policy; A metro company is one of the practical instruments used to
Hey Artificial Intelligence! If you want to Scan Me, please do it in 3D!
What if we could automatically count and detect objects and various pieces of equipment in a building? This would have a tremendous impact on inventory activities, daily inspections, making these tasks easier and faster. This is what we are trying to achieve here. The main idea consists in relying on depth cameras (such ad LiDAR,
The Election Watch Project: Dear candidate, what do you propose in terms of participative democracy?
Traditionally candidates for municipal elections prepare a program including various objectives they undertake to achieve if they are elected. The last French Municipale Election made no difference despite the quite particular context of execution of the 1st round due to the sanitary crisis. Hence, we used this period to gather data that could help Berger-Levrault
AI & Data analysis for predictive maintenance of sewerage pumping system
The International Asset Performance 4.0 Conference will be held from 15 to 17 September 2020 in Belgium. On this occasion, several companies have come together to organize a Hackathon. Among them is Aquafin, a Flemish specialist in wastewater treatment. Their objective is to improve the daily maintenance management of their pumping stations, using data combined with artificial intelligence. The company thus proposes to the participants to find the best possible algorithm to predict the risks of failure of their pumps, and/or
Data visualisation to ease planning in Infosilem Academics
The InfoSilem Academics software (previously TimeTabler) automates and simplifies the creation of academic schedules for faculties. The scheduling is centered on the notion of “deliveries”. A delivery is a combination of professors, academic blocks, and corresponding room requests, repeated at a given frequency. The software provides optimized time slots and room affectations depending on room constraints, the frequency of the delivery,
Multiscale Visualisation: From Territory to BIM View
The technical management of the territory is today a challenge that requires being able to manage objects such as the city or the building and space which contains them at different scales. The following video demonstrates our research prototype integrated into CARL Source for multi-scale management of equipment. You will see that it is possible
The MOTUS Project: Automatic Grouping by Theme of Support Tickets
Dear Project Managers, imagine if you could regroup automatically the thousands of maintenance tickets by topic in just one click. It would be nice no? This would have tremendous implications in priorising the bug fixing, improvement requests, new features, etc. Thus, saving significant amount of time and making better decisions. Well, this is what we
IFIP/SOCOLNET – Hybrid Human-AI Collaborative Networks (Porto – Portugal)
La Mêlée Numérique – Artificial Revolutions (Toulouse – France)
29th International Conference on Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries – TPDL 2025 (Tampere – Finland)
Berger-Levrault strengthens its ties with AI startups!
We are proud to announce that we have joined Hub France IA, the largest association dedicated to artificial intelligence in France. This network now brings together more than 250 members—companies, startups, research laboratories, and institutions—who share the same goal: to accelerate the development and adoption of AI in France and Europe. Getting closer to the
Celebrating New PhDs from the BL.Research Team!
At Berger-Levrault, research is more than a mission—it’s a shared adventure. As the new academic year begins, we are proud to celebrate the success of four of our colleagues from the BL.Research team, who have reached a major milestone in their scientific journeys: the defense of their doctoral theses. These achievements are the result of
Hamza Safri Ph.D. thesis defense: “Federated learning for the IoT : Application for Industry 4.0”
Thuesday 24th June at 3pm Paris time, Hamza Safri, Ph.D. Candidate has defended his thesis named “Federated learning for the IoT: Application for Industry 4.0”. His thesis defense took place at the Inria Minatec Grenoble, Grenoble, France. Take a look at the summary below. Keywords: Model generalization, predictive maintenance, industrial IoT, federated learning, edge network,
ESUG 2025: Six contributions and 2 prizes for the Software Engineering Lab team!
Congratulations to our PhDs Nicolas Hlad, Aless Hosry, Benoit Verhaeghe and Pascal Zaragoza from Berger-Levrault’s BL.Research team for their participation in the 2025 edition of the ESUG (European Smalltalk User Group) conference! This year’s conference took place from July 1-4 in Gdansk, Poland. The theme was innovation in Smalltalk technologies and their use in software
Julien Breton Ph.D. thesis defense: “Extraction and formalization of regulatory industrial maintenance knowledge from semi-structured corpus data”
Friday, 27th June at 1.30 pm Paris time, Julien Breton, Ph.D. Candidate has defended his thesis named “Extraction and formalization of regulatory industrial maintenance knowledge from semi-structured corpus data”. His thesis defense took place at the IRIT research laboratory, Toulouse, France. Take a look at the summary below. Keywords: Legal compliance,Industrial maintenance, Norm extraction,LLM (Large
New White Paper – AI for maintenance! Challenges, Opportunities and Case Studies
How is artificial intelligence transforming maintenance practices today? What are the concrete opportunities for equipment, infrastructure and fleet managers? The new white paper published by CARL Berger-Levrault offers a rich and accessible insight into these strategic questions. Entitled “AI at the service of maintenance: challenges, opportunities and case studies”, this document summarizes experience in the
New White Paper – Agentic AI, a Software and Societal Revolution!
Research at Berger-Levrault is tackling a new frontier in artificial intelligence: that of (partially) autonomous agents capable of reasoning, planning, collaborating, orchestrating and learning in complex business environments. Our new white paper, “Beyond automation – How agentic AI is transforming the software industry”, shares with you an in-depth analysis of this ongoing technological revolution, its
Clément talks at BIM World 2025 on the future of augmented maintenance using BIM models
At BIM World 2025, held in Paris on April 2-3, Clément Colin, our research engineer in BL Research team, spoke at a workshop dedicated to Digital Twins, alongside Laurent Truscello, Product Marketing Manager at Carl Berger-Levrault. The theme of their talk: “GEM & GMAO – Valuing and increasing the use of your BIM models for
