Section: Highlights of the Year

Highlights of the Year

In 2019, Christophe Gourdin and Philippe Merle have created the XScalibur company. XScalibur is a startup company that sells an innovative software solution to design, deploy and monitor software systems in a multi-cloud environment. The company is the result of a transfert activity initiated by Philippe Merle and Christophe Gourdin around the OCCIware Studio software tool suite. This model-driven based solution for cloud management is the result of several years of research [26], [15] and has especially been developed in the context of the OCCIware collaborative project from 2014 to 2017. XScalibur has been selected in March 2019 by the Alliancy magazine in the top-13 of startup companies in the domain of cloud computing to "follow closely"(https://www.alliancy.fr/a-laffiche/cloud/2019/03/13/13-start-up-du-cloud-a-suivre-de-pres).

In 2019, Laurence Duchien has been general chair of the 13th edition of the European Conference on Software Architecture (ECSA) [49], [48] and program co-chair of the 23rd edition of the International Systems and Software Product Line Conference (SPLC) [47], [46]. These two events have been co-located in Paris from 9 to 13 September 2019. The fact that a member of the Spirals project-team was proposed by the software architecture research community to serve in these two major events is a testimony of the recognition and of the visibility of our research activities in this domain.

Awards

Walter Rudametkin and Pierre Laperdrix were awarded in January 2019 the Prix Inria CNIL protection de la vie privée. The award was announced during the 12th edition of the International Computers, Privacy and Data Protection (CPDP) conference, and rewards research undertaken with a view to creating a trustworthy digital society. The award was granted thanks to the work of Walter Rudametkin, Pierre Laperdrix, and Benoit Baudry [63] on browser fingerprinting.

Thomas Durieux was awarded in June 2019 a honorable mention (accessit) at Prix de thèse GDR GPL for his PhD work on software automated repair that was defended in September 2018 [55]. GDR GPL (Génie de la Programmation et du Logiciel) is the group that gathers the French research community on software engineering and programming languages. This is the third time that a PhD student from the Spirals project-team wins either this prize or an honorable mention (Clément Quinton won the prize in 2014, and Maria Gomez won a honorable mention in 2017).

Lakhdar Meftah and Romain Rouvoy won a Best Paper award at the 19th International Conference on Distributed Applications and Interoperable Systems (DAIS 2019) [37]. This award distinguishes their work on improving user privacy in crowdsourced mobile datasets. They propose a decentralized approach, named Fougere, to convey data samples from user devices to third-party servers. By introducing an a priori data anonymization process, they show that Fougere defeats state-of-the-art location-based privacy attacks with little impact on the quality of crowd-sourced datasets. This work takes place in the context of the Inria Project Lab BetterNet and involves Isabelle Chrisment, who is heading the BetterNet IPL, and who is co-supervising with Romain Rouvoy the PhD thesis of Lakhdar Meftah [13] that was defended in December 2019.

Philippe Merle won a Best Demo Paper award at the 5th IEEE International Conference on Network Softwarization (NetSoft 2019) [39]. This award distinguishes his work on the formal verification of virtualized network and cloud environments. Philippe Merle and his co-authors demonstrate a lightweight toolchain for validating descriptors of network functions compliant with the latest ETSI NFV standards, visualizing these descriptors in the form of various diagrams (i.e. network-oriented, function-oriented, and UML2-based), analyzing these descriptors formally with Alloy Analyzer, and deploying these virtualized network functions on OpenStack. This work takes place in the context of a funded project that ended in 2019 with the Orange telecom operator and that involved, in addition to Philippe Merle, Jean-Bernard Stefani from the Inria Grenoble - Rhône-Alpes research center.

Laurence Duchien was awarded the rank of Chevalière de l'Ordre National du Mérite (JO du 29 mai 2019).

Best Papers Awards:

[37]

[39]