PhD Position F/M Interconnection of digital twin knowledge

Le descriptif de l’offre ci-dessous est en Anglais Type de contrat : CDD

Niveau de diplôme exigé : Bac + 5 ou équivalent

Fonction : Doctorant

Niveau d'expérience souhaité : Jeune diplômé

A propos du centre ou de la direction fonctionnelle

The Centre Inria de l’Université de Grenoble groups together almost 450 people in 26 research teams and 9 research support departments.

Staff is present on three campuses in Grenoble, in close collaboration with other research and higher education institutions (Université Grenoble Alpes, CNRS, CEA, INRAE, …), but also with key economic players in the area.

The Centre Inria de l’Université Grenoble Alpes is active in the fields of high-performance computing, verification and embedded systems, modeling of the environment at multiple levels, and data science and artificial intelligence. The center is a top-level scientific institute with an extensive network of international collaborations in Europe and the rest of the world.

Contexte et atouts du poste

Work Environment

The PhD candidate will be co-supervised by Jérôme David (UGA,LIG,Inria), Cassia Trojahn (UGA,LIG,Inria) within MOEX Team, INRIA/Grenoble and Sophie Ebersold (IRIT, Toulouse) . The candidate will benefit from a stimulating scientific and industrial environment of the highest level, with access to a national network of leading research institutions and industry partners, regular interactions with the broader EDT community through workshops, seminars, and joint demonstrators, and the opportunity to contribute to Artemis, the program’s open software platform.

Doctoral school: MSTII, Université Grenoble Alpes

What You Will Gain from This PhD

This PhD offers the opportunity to:

• Develop highly sought-after skills in knowledge engineering, semantics alignment, and collaborative innovation.
• Collaborate with leading partners (Inria, CEA, CNRS, etc.) and validate your research on real-world industrial use cases.
• Join a network of PhD candidates within the EDT program, fostering collaboration, peer support, and interdisciplinary exchanges.
• Contribute to an open-source platform (Artemis) and publish in international conferences and journals.
• Gain recognition in a rapidly growing field, with career prospects in academic research, industrial R&D, or entrepreneurship.

Upon completion, you will be positioned as a recognized expert in a key domain for industry and research, with diverse professional opportunities in France and internationally.

Mission confiée

Context

Digital twins are virtual representations of real-world products, systems, or processes, enabling simulation, integration, testing, monitoring, and maintenance. They play a pivotal role in optimizing complex systems across a wide range of domains, from industrial manufacturing and energy to environmental monitoring and healthcare.

The Engineering Digital Twin EDT program, funded by the France 2030 investment plan, is a national initiative aimed at advancing the foundations of digital twin engineering in France and Europe [2]. By bringing together leading academic and industrial partners, EDT seeks to strengthen the bases for the design, use, and deployment of digital twins, addressing key open challenges in model hybridization, composability, development methodologies, digital coupling, and human–twin interaction.

A key promise of digital twins is to enable stakeholders to explore what-if scenarios: evaluating alternative configurations, behaviours, or interventions while the system is running, so as to improve performance, reliability, and adaptability. However, enabling such exploratory interactions remains challenging in practice. Digital twins leverage diverse and heterogeneous knowledge about territories and related data. It is therefore not possible to rely solely on a single unifying model, but rather it is necessary to manage the interactions between heterogeneous representations of knowledge and various viewpoints.

The semantic web provides a set of technologies for representing and reasoning about knowledge on a web scale [3]. These technologies include RDF for representing knowledge graphs and OWL for formalising ontologies. In order to manage the heterogeneity of knowledge, alignments between ontologies make it possible to express the relationships between concepts (classes and properties) from different ontologies. At the data level, linking keys define sufficient conditions for identifying resources from different knowledge graphs.

Thesis Objectives

Digital twins rely on the integration of multiple heterogeneous models and data sources, such as sensor observations, simulation models, geographic information systems, and domain knowledge bases. Ontology alignment will therefore play a central role in reconciling these heterogeneous representations and enabling consistent interpretation and integration of the data they produce.

With rapid advances in neural AI, work in the semantic web, historically based on symbolic AI (knowledge representation and reasoning), is moving towards neuro-symbolic AI [2,4]. Neuro-symbolic AI aims to combine the strengths of machine learning (noise robustness, statistical generalisation) with those of symbolic AI (explainability and logical reasoning).

The objective of this thesis is to study the contribution of neuro-symbolic to ontology alignment [5] and data linking [6] in the context of France’s digital twin.

Références

[1] Breit, A., Waltersdorfer, L., Ekaputra, F. J., Sabou, M., Ekelhart, A., Iana, A., Paulheim, H., Portisch, J., Revenko, A., Teije, A. T., & Harmelen, F. V. (2023). Combining Machine Learning and Semantic Web: A Systematic Mapping Study. https://doi.org/10\.1145/3586163

[2] Benoît Combemale, Pascale Vicat-Blanc, Arnaud Blouin, Hind Bril El Haouzi, Jean-Michel Bruel, Julien Deantoni, Thierry Duval, Sébastien Gérard, & Jean-Marc Jézéquel (2025). Engineering Digital Twins: A Research Roadmap. EDTconf 2025 - 2nd International Conference on Engineering Digital Twins. https://inria.hal.science/hal\-05223776

[3] Hitzler, P., Krötzsch, M., & Rudolph, S. (2009). Foundations of Semantic Web Technologies.

[4] Janowicz, K., Hitzler, P., Bianchi, F., Ebrahimi, M., & Sarker, M. K. (2020). Neural-symbolic integration and the Semantic Web. https://doi.org/10\.3233/SW\-190368

[5] Jradeh, C. K., Raoufi, E., David, J., Larmande, P., Scharffe, F., Todorov, K., & Trojahn, C. (2025). Graph Embeddings Meet Link Keys Discovery for Entity Matching. https://doi.org/10\.1145/3696410\.3714581

[6] Sousa, G., Lima, R., & Trojahn, C. (2025). Results of CMatch in OAEI 2025. https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-4144/om2025-oaei-paper3.pdf

[7] Sousa, G., Lima, R., & Trojahn, C. (2026). Survey on embedding methods applied to ontology matching.

Principales activités

The expected work consists of two main parts:

• Improve methods for automatically aligning ontologies and linking data by leveraging the scalability, approximation, and multi-viewpoint capabilities of deep learning methods.
• Study how the semantics of ontology alignment and linking keys can contribute to the validation and explainability of methods based solely on machine learning.

The work developed in this thesis will enable the construction of a semantic bridge allowing interoperability between the different viewpoints of a digital twin. The results of this thesis will directly contribute to the Artemis platform, an open-source framework designed to become a benchmark in the field.

Compétences

Qualification: Master or equivalent in computer science.

Researched skills:

• Curiosity and openness.
• Interaction with other researchers.
• Autonomous researcher.
• Interests in epistemology or the methodology of sciences.
• Innovative. Avantages

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• Subsidized meals
• Partial reimbursement of public transport costs
• Leave: 7 weeks of annual leave + 10 extra days off due to RTT (statutory reduction in working hours) + possibility of exceptional leave (sick children, moving home, etc.)
• Possibility of teleworking and flexible organization of working hours
• Professional equipment available (videoconferencing, loan of computer equipment, etc.)
• Social, cultural and sports events and activities
• Access to vocational training
• Social security coverage under conditions Rémunération

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2300 euros gross salary /month

Informations générales

• Thème/Domaine : Représentation et traitement des données et des connaissances
• Ville : Montbonnot
• Centre Inria : Centre Inria de l'Université Grenoble Alpes
• Date de prise de fonction souhaitée : 2026-11-01
• Durée de contrat : 3 ans
• Date limite pour postuler : 2026-08-24 Attention: Les candidatures doivent être déposées en ligne sur le site Inria. Le traitement des candidatures adressées par d'autres canaux n'est pas garanti.

Consignes pour postuler

Applications must be submitted online via the Inria website. Processing of applications submitted via other channels is not guaranteed.

Sécurité défense :

Ce poste est susceptible d’être affecté dans une zone à régime restrictif (ZRR), telle que définie dans le décret n°2011-1425 relatif à la protection du potentiel scientifique et technique de la nation (PPST). L’autorisation d’accès à une zone est délivrée par le chef d’établissement, après avis ministériel favorable, tel que défini dans l’arrêté du 03 juillet 2012, relatif à la PPST. Un avis ministériel défavorable pour un poste affecté dans une ZRR aurait pour conséquence l’annulation du recrutement.

Politique de recrutement :

Dans le cadre de sa politique diversité, tous les postes Inria sont accessibles aux personnes en situation de handicap.

Contacts

• Équipe Inria : MOEX
• Directeur de thèse :

David Jérôme / jerome.david@inria.fr L'essentiel pour réussir

see below

A propos d'Inria

Inria est l’institut national de recherche dédié aux sciences et technologies du numérique. Il emploie 2600 personnes. Ses 215 équipes-projets agiles, en général communes avec des partenaires académiques, impliquent plus de 3900 scientifiques pour relever les défis du numérique, souvent à l’interface d’autres disciplines. L’institut fait appel à de nombreux talents dans plus d’une quarantaine de métiers différents. 900 personnels d’appui à la recherche et à l’innovation contribuent à faire émerger et grandir des projets scientifiques ou entrepreneuriaux qui impactent le monde. Inria travaille avec de nombreuses entreprises et a accompagné la création de plus de 200 start-up. L'institut s'efforce ainsi de répondre aux enjeux de la transformation numérique de la science, de la société et de l'économie.