Phoenix - INRIA Research Group

Computer scientist

PhD at University of Rennes, 1998; Habilitation thesis (HDR) at University of Bordeaux, 2019.

Computer scientist in programming languages applied to automated software engineering and ubiquitous computing, I am currently on an Advanced Research Position at Inria Bordeaux, member of the Phoenix research group since November 2014.

Fields of expertise: programming languages, domain-specific languages (DSL), automated software engineering, ubiquitous computing, Internet of Things (IoT), smart cities, intelligent transportation systems (ITS), complex event processing (CEP), assistive applications, compilers, programming tools, pattern matching, software checking, software clones, partial evaluation.

• Research interests
• Background
• Research topics
• PhD Students
• Teaching
• Publications

Research interests

I am focusing on various applications of programming language technologies and DSLs resulting in practical and usable tools in various domains, such as software development and ubiquitous computing. For instance, I am actively working on tools and languages for developing context-aware services, and I also worked on DSLs for increasing software reliability or improving productivity. I think that DSL have still a tremendous potential to unleash creativity, by empowering large classes of people, instead of just a few, to advance the state of the art in various fields.

Background

My background is in programming language technologies, including program analyses, program transformations, and the design of DSLs.

During my PhD at the University of Rennes/IRISA, I studied applications of partial evaluation to the optimization of operating system services, both at compile time and at run time.

I gained a solid experience in concrete applications of such technologies in the software industry, by working many years as a research engineer, language expert, and R&D project leader, at Canon Research Centre France and Metaware Technologies. You may find more details on my linkedIn page. In parallel with these full-time jobs, I continued to perform academic research and regularly publish results, in fields such as compilers, software checking, and pattern matching.

Since I joined the Phoenix research group in 2014, I focus on tools and languages for improving the development of IoT / ubiquitous and pervasive computing services, in applications domains such as Ambient Assistive Living (AAL) and Smart Cities, including Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS).

Research topics

My active research topics include:

• DSLs for Ambient Assisted Living (AAL): online state processing.
  AAL has the potential to address a major societal challenge nowadays, by supporting active aging at home. However, a key difficulty is the development of numerous AAL services customized for a variety of configuration, needs, and preferences. This has been shown to be an essential condition for technology acceptance and usefulness. After experimenting with existing technologies for developing AAL services (Java, automata, complex event processing, etc.) on a large-scale deployment in real homes called HomeAssist, we successfully defined two DSLs for programming context detection logic: the Maloya language and the Allen language, which dramatically simplify the development of a wide range of customized AAL services. Further research will address extending the expressiveness of these languages, proving their implementation correct to enable safety-critical assistive services, facilitate developing and debugging, assessing and improving their usability, etc.
• Smart home logs analyses: new methods for data extraction.
  Leveraging (1) the logs accumulated in the HomeAssist large-scale deployment, covering 1year+ in 100+ real homes, and (2) the above DSLs for AAL services development, we are currently investigating for scalable, flexible, and accurate extraction of high-level data from smart home logs. We aim, among other, address insufficiently answered but critical needs, such as detecting weak signals on longitudinal logs. A first research objective is setting up a layered library of programing abstractions for complex operations such as validating and cleaning data, aggregating multi-sensorial timed data series in generic ways, and inferring daily living activities. For example, sleep has been shown to be a major health predictor for seniors. We will thus apply such log extraction techniques to measure metrics on sleep time, regularity, or quality, so as to empower aging experts with new data-driven tools.
• IoT: orchestrating masses of sensors and actuators.
  IoT applications using massing of sensors become common in smart cities or environment monitoring. Masses of actuators are also common in personalized services for smart cities, where different results (e.g. parking recommendations) have to be computed for each individual user. Developing such IoT applications at scale needs efficient parallelization techniques for data crunching, and poses a supplementary challenge on developers. We designed a DSL called DiaSwarm for automating much of the involved infrastructure code, thus letting developers to concentrate on the application logic. The main case studies underlying this research have been parking guidance services and a collaborative ITS mobile application.

PhD students

I advised or co-advised the following PhD students:

• Adrien Carteron, on his thesis “An event-driven approach to developing interdisciplinary services dedicated to aging in place", defended in 2017
• Milan Kabac, on his thesis “A design-driven methodology for the development of large-scale orchestrating applications”, defended in 2016

Teaching

I regularly take teaching activities such as lectures on:

• Imperative programming in C (level: License)
• Object programming in C++ and Java (level: professional License)
• Software engineering for smart spaces (level: Master)
• Advanced topics - technology surveys (level: Master)

Publications

Complete list of publications

You may consult my complete list of publications. Note that between 1998 and 2014 I also worked full time on R&D in the industry.

Recent publications

Following is a list of recent publications within the Phoenix research group.