
Assistant Professor – ATER, Computer Science Dpt, INRIA CITI LAB, INSA LYON

Combination of Spatial Modulation and Full-Duplex for future Wireless transceivers
CITI Lab. Centre of Innovation in Telecommunications and Integration of Service (www.citilab.fr)
Guillaume Villemaud
guillaume.villemaud@insa-lyon.fr
Usually in wireless communications, the wireless medium is a shared and limited resource. Current wireless standards always share the medium with Half-Duplex principle: the transmission and reception of signals are done in two separate time slots or two different frequency bands. Besides, the transceiver can only transmit and receive one signal at the same time at the same frequency.
More recent research works [1-3] are focusing on an alternate approach: instead of sharing the medium with Half-Duplex principle, the entire licensed frequency band is shared for simultaneous transmission and reception, what is called Full-Duplex. The major drawback of this kind of Full-Duplex system is therefore that a very high level of interference is created by the transceiver itself while trying to receive a distant signal (known as the self-interference). Besides, the concept of MIMO communications is widely used, but supposes a large increase in the complexity, cost and energy consumption of multi-antenna transceivers. Using Spatial Modulation is a very promising way of developing simpler MIMO transceivers [18], and could be particularly relevant in combination with Full-Duplex.
Our laboratory has already a strong and recognized background on Full-Duplex communications [4-9]. A first thesis was dedicated to this subject, paving the way for more realistic developments and applications. Besides, another thesis has started last year, to study the theoretical bounds of physical layer secrecy by using FD.
Therefore, we have already proposed an architecture enabling FD communications. To approach this goal, we use an active analog radio frequency self-interference cancellation (AARFSIC) method or a combination scheme of the AARFSIC and active digital self-interference cancellation in time domain (ADSICT) to cancel the strong self-interference (SI) induced by the Full-Duplex principle. Based on the Full-Duplex radio, we proposed a flexible Full-Duplex Dual-Band (FDDB) OFDM radio transceiver by combining the Dual-Band RF front-end with Full-Duplex.
These proposed architectures have been studied in theory and in simulations, thus one goal of this thesis will be to develop some practical experimentations of Full-Duplex communications, based on Vector Signal Generators and Vector Signal Analyzers, in connection with simulated parts for digital processing purpose. Furthermore, some experiments in the Cortexlab facility is also an objective of this work (www.cortexlab.fr).
Wireless communications, RF architecture, digital processing, full-duplex, MIMO, Spatial modulation.
In the past years, considerable efforts have been devoted to prove the potential of using in-band full-duplex for future wireless communications, both from the hardware side and the networking side. The major difficulty of IBFD being the large amount of self-interference (SI), this interference is mitigated at three levels in the transceiver: antenna cancellation, analog cancellation, and digital cancellation. However, most of the proposed structures are inherently limited to fixed narrowband operations and almost no system-level demonstrations exist that prove the value of IBFD beyond a straightforward bi-directional link. Moreover, most of existing studies are based on theoretical analyses, simulations, or simple experimental testbeds.
Therefore, the goal of this thesis is threefold:
– To propose and develop some wideband and/or flexible radio architectures dedicated to full-duplex communications, using Spatial Modulation, from the antenna to the digital compensation implementation;
– To develop a complete study and optimization of this kind of architecture, starting from theoretical performance, going to simulation frameworks, and developing a proof of concept;
– To establish some reference scenarios to be tested with this proof of concept, for specific applications in practice beyond the usual toy-example of a straightforward bi-directional. In particular, we plan to explore and demonstrate applications such as secure communications through self-jamming, or the use of primary-user detection in Cognitive Radios.
As stated above, the main problem of Full-Duplex is to mitigate the strong Self-Interference created in the structure. Using Spatial Modulation enable to switch between several antennas to emit the signal of interest. Then, the challenge will be to receive a distant signal on unused antennas during this emission time, cancelling the Self-Interference and reconstructing the distant signal while switching at a high rate between the antennas.
To the best of our knowledge, it exists no actual combination of Spatial modulation and Full-Duplex. Only some theoretical bounds of potential performance of such a combination was proposed in [17] but without taking into account any realistic RF architecture. Thus an actual and functional architecture combining Full-Duplex and Spatial Modulation would be a great breakthrough.
The overall schedule of the thesis is quite simple. The first six months will be dedicated to an exhaustive state-of-the-art not only on Full-Duplex systems and Spatial Modulation, but also on all progress on wideband and flexible radio systems and on interference cancellation algorithms. The remaining of the first year will focus on building the framework of theoretical studies and the associated simulation tools.
The second year will be devoted to extensive theoretical and simulation investigations, as long as choice of the required equipment for experimentations. By the end of this second year, everything should be fixed in order to be able to begin experimentations in the third year.
The third and final year of the thesis will see the production of scientific results via publications of the most significant works, extensive experimentations with feedback on theoretical and simulation studies and global drawing of the potentialities of exploitation of the proposed techniques. A large dissemination to the community is planned in order to encourage the use of these approaches in future communication networks. Finally the thesis manuscript will be written and the thesis will be defended.
Apart from the material part, the proposed tools are the Matlab and the Keysight’s ADS software. The thesis will take place within the Inria Socrate team of the CITI laboratory (http://www.citi-lab.fr/).
Guillaume Villemaud (HDR, 50%), Florin Hutu (50%)
Of course, a large dissemination of the proposed works will be ensured in international conferences, high quality journals and potentially via patents. Our goal is also to collaborate in COST actions, particularly we are strongly involved in the new IRACON action (merge of the NEWCOM# and COST IC1004) and therefore this will offer a good place of interaction with other European partners. We also expect that this project will be a first step to build a larger consortium for future H2020 calls and to participate in the definition of new standards, particularly to encourage the integration of Full-Duplex in the 5G networks.
Moreover, this work could be naturally applied to IoT scenarios, therefore the context of the SPIE IoT Chair hosted at the CITI laboratory could be a rich place of interaction and collaboration.
Master of Sciences or Engineering degree in Telecommunications or Electrical Engineering with a strong background in radiocommunications, RF architectures and signal processing.
[1] A. Sabharwal, P. Schniter, D. Guo, D.W. Bliss, S. Rangarajan, R. Wichman, ‘In-band Full-duplex Wireless: Challenges and Opportunities’, IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications (JSAC), 2014.
[2] B. Debaillie, D. J. van den Broek, C. Lavin, B. van Liempd, E. A. M. Klumperink, C. Palacios, J. Craninckx, B. Nauta, and A. Parssinen, “Analog/RF solutions enabling compact full-duplex radios,” IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications (JSAC), 2014.
[3] H. Alves, C. Lima, P. Nardelli, R. Demo Souza, M. Latva-aho: “On the Average Spectral Efficiency of Interference-Limited Full-Duplex Networks”, CrownCom 2014, Oulu, Finland, June 2014.
[4] Z. Zhan and G. Villemaud, “Combination of Digital Self-Interference Cancellation and AARFSIC for Full-Duplex OFDM Wireless,” IEEE/CIC International Conference on Communications in China (ICCC), Shanghai, China, 13-15 Oct. 2014.
[5] Z. Zhan, G. Villemaud, F. Hutu and J-M. Gorce, “Digital Estimation and compensation of I/Q imbalance in Full-Duplex Dual-Band OFDM Radio,” The 25th IEEE International Symposium on Personal, Indoor and Mobile Radio Communications (PIMRC), Washington, DC, USA, 2-5 Sep. 2014.
[6] Z. Zhan, G. Villemaud, F. Hutu and J-M. Gorce, “Digital I/Q Imbalance Correction for Full-Duplex Dual-Band OFDM Radio Transceivers”, International Journal of Microwave and Wireless Technologies, 2015.
[7] Z. Zhan, G. Villemaud, J-M. Gorce, “Analysis and Reduction of the Impact of Thermal Noise on the Full-Duplex OFDM Radio”, IEEE Radio and Wireless Symposium (RWS) 2014, Newport Beach, Jan. 2014.
[8] Z. Zhan, G. Villemaud, J-M. Gorce, “Design and Evaluation of a Wideband Full-Duplex OFDM System Based on AASIC”, IEEE Personal, Indoor and Mobile Radio Communications Symposium, PIMRC2013, London, September 2013.
[9] Z. Wei, G. Villemaud, T. Risset, “Full Duplex Prototype of OFDM on GNURadio and USRPs”, IEEE Radio and Wireless Symposium (RWS) 2014, Newport Beach, Jan. 2014.
[10] Balatsoukas-Stimming, Alexios, et al. “On self-interference suppression methods for low-complexity full-duplex MIMO.” Signals, Systems and Computers, 2013 Asilomar Conference on. IEEE, 2013.
[11] Belanovic, Pavle, Alexios Balatsoukas-Stimming, and Andreas Burg. “A multipurpose testbed for full-duplex wireless communications.” Electronics, Circuits, and Systems (ICECS), 2013 IEEE 20th International Conference on. IEEE, 2013.
[12] Alexandris, K.; Balatsoukas-Stimming, A.; Burg, A., “Measurement-based characterization of residual self-interference on a full-duplex MIMO testbed,” Sensor Array and Multichannel Signal Processing Workshop (SAM), 2014 IEEE 8th , vol., no., pp.329,332, 22-25 June 2014.
[13] G. Villemaud, “Study of a Full-Duplex Dual-Band OFDM Transceiver”, DUPLO workshop, Crowncom 2014, Oulu, June 2014.
[14] Shanzhi Chen; Jian Zhao, “The requirements, challenges, and technologies for 5G of terrestrial mobile telecommunication,” Communications Magazine, IEEE , vol.52, no.5, pp.36,43, May 2014.
[15] Hossain, E., & Hasan, M. (2015). “5G Cellular: Key Enabling Technologies and Research Challenges”. arXiv preprint arXiv:1503.00674.
[16] G. Zheng, I. Krikidis, J. Li, A. P. Petropulu, and B. Ottersten, “Improving physical layer secrecy using full-duplex jamming receivers,” IEEE Trans. Signal Process., vol. 61, no. 20, pp. 4962–4974, 2013.
[17] B. Jiao, M. Wen, M. Ma and H. V. Poor, “Spatial Modulated Full Duplex,” in IEEE Wireless Communications Letters, vol. 3, no. 6, pp. 641-644, Dec. 2014.
[18] M. Di Renzo and H. Haas, “Performance analysis of Spatial Modulation,” 2010 5th International ICST Conference on Communications and Networking in China, Beijing, 2010
Intitulé du poste
Gestionnaire d’équipes de recherche en laboratoire
Quotité
70%
Mission et contexte
La personne recrutée fera partie d’un service de trois personnes (2.2 équivalent temps plein) en charge de la gestion administrative et financière du laboratoire CITI composé d’environ 90 membres organisés à travers six équipes de recherche. Cette gestion se fait à deux niveaux : d’une part au niveau du laboratoire avec des missions communes, et d’autre part au niveau des équipes de recherche avec des missions spécifiques. La gestion au sein du laboratoire et au sein des équipes, telle qu’entendue ici, comporte des volets RH, financiers, logistiques, organisationnels et de gestions de contrats.
La personne recrutée aura pour mission de s’occuper de deux équipes de recherches pour tous recrutements, événements, mobilités, bons de commandes sur des budgets INSA Lyon et INSAVALOR uniquement.
Activités et tâches principale(s) au niveau du laboratoire
Activités et tâches principale(s) au niveau des équipes de recherche
Compétences et qualités requises
Contact : fabrice.valois@insa-lyon.fr (directeur du CITI)
Le laboratoire CITI (Centre d’Innovations en Télécommunications et Intégration de services, http://www.citi-lab.fr/) de l’INSA Lyon, sous tutelle Inria, recrute une/un professeur(e) des universités en section 27 dans le profil soit Réseaux soit Intergiciels pour intégration dans l’équipe Inria Agora (https://team.inria.fr/agora/) ou dans l’équipe Dynamid (http://dynamid.citi-lab.fr/) respectivement.
Profil complet :
https://www.galaxie.enseignementsup-recherche.gouv.fr/ensup/ListesPostesPublies/ANTEE/2017_1/0690192J/FOPC_0690192J_4197.pdf
Profil recherche
Le CITI souhaite recruter une/un professeur(e) des universités s’insérant dans le projet de recherche du laboratoire et qui aura pour vocation :
Il est important que la/le candidat(e) s’inscrive dans le projet de recherche en cours d’une de ces deux équipes en venant, par exemple, renforcer une problématique déjà installée ou compléter les travaux de l’équipe. La capacité à prendre, à terme, la responsabilité scientifique d’une des deux équipes, en respectant l’existant, est un critère prioritaire dans le recrutement.
Dans le contexte de notre laboratoire, il est important que la/le candidat(e) possède soit un très fort bagage théorique avec la capacité de les appliquer soit une démarche expérimentale rigoureuse. La capacité à devenir un cadre du laboratoire sera un critère important.
Contact recherche : fabrice.valois@insa-lyon.fr (directeur du CITI)
Profil enseignement
La personne recrutée intègrera l’équipe pédagogique d’informatique du Département du Premier Cycle. Elle s’investira dans les enseignements de tronc commun des deux années. Ceux-ci concernent les fondamentaux : éléments d’architecture et systèmes, codage de l’information, algorithmique, paradigmes de programmation (impérative, orientée objet, événementielle, déclarative). Le langage Java est utilisé pour la progression sur l’ensemble du cycle, SQL est introduit en 2e année pour interroger des bases de données. Chaque année (1A et 2A) comporte la réalisation d’un projet pour accroitre l’autonomie des étudiants et leur capacité à développer des logiciels. La personne recrutée pourra aussi intervenir dans les parcours P2I pour un enseignement de l’informatique dans un cadre contextualisé et pluridisciplinaire. Une expérience de l’enseignement des fondamentaux de l’informatique et d’une approche pédagogique par projet sera très appréciée. La personne recrutée devra s’impliquer dans les tâches collectives et prendre part à l’ensemble des activités pédagogiques et administratives. A moyen terme, elle prendra la responsabilité d’une équipe pédagogique et sera force d’animation et de proposition de groupes travaillant sur différentes questions: évaluation par compétences, mise en place de nouvelles pratiques pédagogiques, ajustement des contenus et de la pédagogie tenant compte de l’évolution des programmes de lycée et de celle des compétences nécessaires à un futur ingénieur, gestion de l’hétérogénéité des étudiants de 1e année, montage d’actions transversales avec d’autres disciplines.
Contact enseignement : catherine.verdu@insa-lyon.fr (directrice du Premier Cycle) et sylvie.cazalens@insa-lyon.fr (responsable informatique au PC)
Le laboratoire CITI (Centre d’Innovations en Télécommunications et Intégration de services, http://www.citi-lab.fr/) de l’INSA Lyon, sous tutelle Inria, recrute une/un maître de conférences en section 27 dans le profil “Vie Privée/Informatique” pour intégration dans l’équipe Inria Privatics (https://team.inria.fr/privatics/).
Profil complet :
https://www.galaxie.enseignementsup-recherche.gouv.fr/ensup/ListesPostesPublies/ANTEE/2017_1/0690192J/FOPC_0690192J_4191.pdf
Profil recherche
Le CITI souhaite recruter une/un maître de conférences ciblant principalement l’équipe Inria Privatics (https://team.inria.fr/privatics/) dont le sujet d’étude est la vie privée. Le profil cible les problématiques étudiées par la partie lyonnaise de l’équipe parmi lesquelles : l’anonymisation de données, la transparence des algorithmes, les liens entre méthodes d’apprentissage et vie privée, la vie privée dans l’IoT, la fuite de données dans les réseaux sans fil et les objets connectés, etc.
Cependant, toute excellente candidature pour intégration dans l’une des cinq autres équipes du laboratoire sera également étudiée.
Dans le contexte de notre laboratoire, il est important que la/le candidat(e) possède soit un très fort bagage théorique avec la capacité de l’appliquer soit une démarche expérimentale rigoureuse.
Contact recherche : fabrice.valois@insa-lyon.fr (directeur du CITI)
Profil enseignement
Nous recherchons un(e) candidat(e) pour intervenir dans plusieurs modules typiques d’une formation généraliste en informatique (algorithmique, programmation, réseaux, etc). Ainsi, des compétences pour renforcer certaines de nos équipes pédagogiques comme « Développement Logiciel », « Architectures matérielles, Systèmes et Réseaux » ou encore « Mathématiques et Outils de Modélisation » sont pertinentes et exigent pour nous une formation initiale et un doctorat en informatique. La volonté de s’investir dans des interventions plus pointues sur des domaines comme le « Big Data », la « Transformation Digitale », la « Cybersécurité » ou encore le « Cloud Computing » sera une vraie valeur ajoutée. Outre le travail d’enseignant, nous attendons de ce recrutement qu’il permette au département de mieux préciser son positionnement global sur la formation à la sécurité en informatique (travail de coordination de la part de la personne recrutée sur notre offre dans ce domaine).
Contact enseignement : jean-francois.boulicaut@insa‐lyon.fr (directeur du département Informatique)
Le laboratoire CITI (Centre d’Innovations en Télécommunications et Intégration de services, http://www.citi-lab.fr/) de l’INSA Lyon, sous tutelle Inria, recrute une/un maître de conférences en section 27 ouvert sur l’ensemble des équipes du laboratoire et dont le profil enseignement est orienté “réseaux”.
Profil complet :
https://www.galaxie.enseignementsup-recherche.gouv.fr/ensup/ListesPostesPublies/ANTEE/2017_1/0690192J/FOPC_0690192J_4192.pdf
Profil recherche
Le CITI souhaite recruter une/un maître de conférences capable de s’intégrer dans l’une des six équipes du laboratoire pour venir renforcer les thématiques du CITI ou développer de nouvelles compétences. Un autre poste de maître de conférences étant également ouvert au concours, et orienté vers l’équipe Privatics, cette équipe sera considérée comme la moins prioritaire sur ce concours.
Dans le contexte de notre laboratoire, il est important que la/le candidat(e) possède soit un très fort bagage théorique avec la capacité de l’appliquer soit une démarche expérimentale rigoureuse. Enfin, une attention sera portée sur la cohérence entre le profil enseignement et celui de recherche.
Contact recherche : fabrice.valois@insa-lyon.fr (directeur du CITI)
Profil enseignement
Le poste est à pourvoir au sein du département Télécommunications pour la partie enseignement (voir description ci-dessous). Le/la candidat(e) rejoindra l’équipe pédagogique du département pour renforcer le domaine réseau et avec des interventions possibles dans le domaine informatique.
Le domaine réseau couvre 25% des enseignements du département et développe une pédagogie sur 3 ans intégrant la modélisation des réseaux, les protocoles et les architectures de réseau. La formation intègre des cours théoriques, des travaux pratiques et projets techniques mais également des projets de type appel d’offre.
Le poste a pour but de renforcer l’équipe sur les aspects plateformes techniques, avec une prise de responsabilité sur ces plateformes dans les années à venir. Le ou la candidat(e) devra également contribuer à l’évolution de la formation et s’impliquer dans les parcours de 5ième année où sont développés des cours optionnels autour de 4 parcours: internet des objets, réseaux avancés, web et sécurité ou robotique.
D’autre part il sera demandé au candidat ou à la candidate de s’impliquer en formation sur l’INSA Euro- Méditerranée, avec des déplacements à prévoir à Fès, et une partie de son enseignement à effectuer sur place.
Il ou elle sera spécialiste en réseaux, avec des compétences attendues sur les nouveaux protocoles réseaux, en particulier sur les sujets de la virtualisation, du cloud RAN, des data centers ou des protocoles de type BGP, OSPF. Des compétences dans le domaine de la sécurité (détection d’intrusion, protocoles sécurisés, sécurité et sans fil) pourront être également appréciées.
Le ou la candidat(e) devra démontrer son intérêt pour la pédagogie, en particulier pour les nouvelles formes de pédagogie (mode projets, tutorat, moocs) et sera appelé(e) à s’impliquer sur des missions d’intérêt général pour l’international, les études ou le pilotage de la pédagogie.
La capacité du ou de la candidat(e) à enseigner en anglais sera considérée avec intérêt.
Contact enseignement : jean-marie.gorce@insa-lyon.fr (directeur du département Télécommunications)
The Socrate Team – Cybernetic Communications Project at Inria, Lyon, France, is looking for two self-motivated full-time Ph.D. students in applied mathematics. The current opening revolves around the analysis of fundamental limits of decentralized data transmission systems via an interdisciplinary approach using tools from information theory, game theory, distributed stochastic systems and signal processing.
Both Phd positions are fully funded by Inria and are associated to the doctoral school of Université de Lyon. The selected candidate will enjoy working with a variety of collaborators from Inria and other partner institutions (see http://cybernets.inria.fr). This position is particularly suited to students holding a degree in electrical engineering, computer sciences, physics and/or applied mathematics, seeking for an academic and research career. The start date can be as soon as September 2016. Skills in french language are not required.
Application and More Information
Applicants should submit to samir.perlaza@inria.fr a cover letter indicating the candidate’s research interests; a detailed curriculum vitae; a list of publications (if any); a list of relevant graduate courses taken along with grades; and contact of two or three referees.
About Inria
Established in 1967, Inria is the only French public research body fully dedicated to fundamental and applied research in information and communication sciences and technology (ICST). Inria is a national operator in research in digital sciences and is a primary contact point for the French Government on digital matters. Under its founding decree as a public science and technology institution, jointly supervised by the French ministries for research and industry, Inria’s missions are to produce outstanding research in the computing and mathematical fields of digital sciences and to ensure the impact of this research on the economy and society in particular. Inria covers the entire spectrum of research at the heart of these activity fields and works on digitally-related issues raised by other sciences and by actors in the economy and society at large. Beyond its structures, Inria’s identity and strength are forged by its ability to develop a culture of scientific innovation and to stimulate creativity in digital research. Throughout its 8 research centres and its 180 project teams, Inria has a workforce of 3400 scientists with an annual budget of 265 million euros, 29% of which coming from its own resources.
About CITI-Lab
The Cybernetic Communications Group -Cybernets@Inria- is hosted by the Centre for Innovation and Integration of Services (CITI Lab). The CITI Lab is an INRIA research laboratory affiliated to Université de Lyon and l’INSA de Lyon (National Institute of Applied Sciences).
Anonymization of mobile phone data: algorithm design and impact on applications
CITI Lab, INSA Lyon, Inria – Villeurbanne, France http://www.citi-lab.fr
18-month postdoctoral fellowship
Fall 2016
Marco Fiore marco.fiore@ieiit.cnr.it
More info: http://perso.citi.insa-lyon.fr/mfiore
Razvan Stanica razvan.stanica@inria.fr
More info: http://perso.citi.insa-lyon.fr/rstanica
EUR 2,300 per month (net)
Applications are invited for one postdoctoral position on technical solutions for privacy-preserving publishing of mobile phone data.
The fellow will work on:
(i) the design of algorithms for the anonymization of datasets of mobile network customer trajectories;
(ii) the implementation of such algorithms in big data processing engines;
(iii) the evaluation of the resulting solutions on production databases provided by network operators.
The work will be carried out in cooperation with CNR-IEIIT, Italy, whose early solutions [1,2] will represent the foundations for the work carried out by the fellow, and with Orange, a major mobile network operator in France, who will provide real-world case studies where to apply the privacy solutions at scale.
[1] M. Gramaglia, M. Fiore, On the anonymizability of mobile traffic datasets, NetMob 2015, Boston, MA, USA, May 2015
[2] M. Gramaglia, M. Fiore, Hiding Mobile Traffic Fingerprints with GLOVE, ACM CoNEXT 2015, Heidelberg, Germany, December 2015
– A PhD in Computer Science or related field
– Proven past experience in big data processing, preferably with Spark
– A strong publication record in relevant top-tier conferences and journals
– Fluency in written and spoken English.
– A unique opportunity to work with massive, fine-grained mobility data
– The possibility to advance the state-of-the-art in the mobile data analytics field
– The prospect to publish at major venues in networking and data mining.
– A CV
– A one-page research statement discussing how the candidate’s background fits requirements and topic
– Contact details of two referees shall be sent to marco.fiore@ieiit.cnr.it and razvan.stanica@inria.fr
Applications will be reviewed until the position is filled
Programming language abstractions for the Internet of Things
Programming languages, distributed systems, Internet of Things, middleware
CITI-INRIA Laboratory, Université de Lyon, INSA de Lyon (http://www.citi-lab.fr/)
Dynamid research team (http://dynamid.citi-lab.fr/)
This PhD thesis will be supported by the Spie-ICS – INSA chair on IoT that will start in September 2016.
September 2016
Main supervisor: Dr Julien Ponge julien.ponge@insa-lyon.fr
More info: https://julien.ponge.org
Co-supervisor: Dr Frédéric Le Mouël frederic.le-mouel@insa-lyon.fr
More info: http://perso.citi.insa-lyon.fr/flemouel
The so-called Internet of Things marks the convergence of small connected devices (e.g., personal devices, body devices, wireless sensors) and the larger set of more traditional distributed applications as accessed over standard Internet protocols. The “software is eating the world” mantra (http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424053111903480904576512250915629460) is no lie as more and more of devices communicate with cloud-based services. Still, developing and integrating software remains largely a crafting exercise with mainstream programming languages, while research languages tend to be too impractical.
The architecture of modern applications is converging towards distributed services that expose standard-based interfaces. A service tends to fulfill a single functional purpose (e.g., storing some data / logs, providing authentication, and so on). In this setting an application shifts from a paradigm where it is made by assembling component libraries to a paradigm where many (distributed) processes form the application. Communications between such services are typically made using the general-purpose HTTP protocol, but more specific ones can be used when needed (MQTT for IoT devices, ZigBee in some wireless sensor networks, etc). Given that distributed services rely on the integration with other services through highly inter-operable protocols, it is very wise to take advantage of many programming languages rather than follow a “one size fits it all” approach.
Interestingly, the characteristics of distributed services deployed on cloud infrastructures are quite similar to those of (sensor) network gateways. Among many problems, these applications need to cope with concurrency due to network requests, and they have to bind data from/to network protocols. While middleware can be used to, say, automatically expose a HTTP service interface and perform data binding, or to provide concurrent programming abstractions, this remains orthogonal to programming language operational semantics and type systems.
The history of programming languages is paved with abstractions being moved from library support to first-class citizen language constructs: memory management (e.g., Java, Self), threads (e.g., Java), actor models (e.g., Erlang, Scala), communicating sequential processes over co-routines (e.g., Go), etc. Still, even with a modern programming language the development of distributed services involves lots of boilerplate code (e.g., types for network messages data-binding) and there is little to no static checks beyond types, especially with respect to the correctness of concurrent code. As an example, the Go programming language only provides runtime race condition detection.
In practice, one can observe that the code of a typical application based on distributed services involves a significant share of message processing and network operations. The literature lacks successful languages that were both practical and suitable for these kinds of networked applications. The Scala programming language is a prime example of a language effort that initially tried to address the need for the development of “XML services” with the support of XML semi-structured data elements in the language. Still, Scala does not enforce a concurrency model, it does not provide network programming helpers, and it merely focused its efforts on a sophisticated type system. Funnel (Functional Nets) was a predecessor of Scala with first-class support for concurrency primitives based on join-calculus. Still, it proved impractical to use in real-world applications, just like other attempts of join-calculus in the ML / OCaml families.
An alternative to composing distributed applications using programming languages is to rely on some orchestration language such as BPEL and workflow execution engines. Behavioral protocols can be extracted from BPEL processes, which is useful for checking correctness of distributed systems compositions. Still, the limited expressiveness of workflow languages combined with the complex tooling to develop, test and execute them limit their wider adoption in favor of more traditional programming languages.
The main scientific goal of this PhD thesis is to investigate which abstractions shall be part of the next-generation programming languages in the age of the Internet of Things. We are especially interested, but not limited to, the useful abstractions to cope with: concurrency, asynchronous programming, data processing, software dynamics, message passing, network membership discovery and distributed algorithms (e.g., consensus and transactions). Given the distributed / concurrent nature of the applications that we target, we are also interested in providing compilation-time assistance beyond classical type checking (e.g., deadlock detection, time-bound guarantees, operation sequences consistency, etc). Last but not least: we also want the research outcomes to be practical.
1. Establish an exhaustive state of the art on programming language and middleware abstractions. Consider which ones shall be part of a programming language, and which ones shall be relegated to library support, based on an extensive study of distributed services requirements.
2. Propose a programming language, perhaps as a new or a derivative of an existing one like Eclipse Golo, a language developped at the CITI Lab. Formalize and prove the soundness and correctness of its type system and operational semantics. Classify the ranges of static checks that can be performed at compilation time. Devise which remaining checks shall be done at runtime. Discuss their algorithms.
3. Propose an implementation on top of the Java Virtual Machine or the LLVM code generation infrastructure with state of the art performance. Develop a rigorous micro-benchmarks tests suite, and revisit some suitable larger benchmarks from popular references like http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/.
4. Validate the language usefulness for developing distributed applications, both in cloud and wireless sensor gateway settings. Provide metrics to evaluate programs against other languages. Perform a field study on practitioners to assess the language practicability, suitability and learning curve.
As the work will be conducted in a larger project as part of the Spie-INSA chair on IoT, the candidate will conduct experiments and share progress with other PhD students in systems, networking and radio communications. We will take advantage of a large IoT experimental room that we have, as well as the FIT / CorteXlab testbeds (http://www.cortexlab.fr/).
The candidate should have earned an MSc degree (or equivalent) in computer science and engineering. The candidate must have a strong background in distributed computing, both from theoretical and practical point of views, as well as good notions on programming languages theory and implementation. The nature of this work requires strong software engineering skills. Knowledge of the JVM internals or LLVM is a plus, as well as having been exposed to a wide range of programming language families.
Email a motivation letter
Full CV with project and courses that could be related to the subject
Complete academic records (from Bachelor to MSc)
2 or 3 references
Applications will be reviewed when they arrive until one candidate is selected
Baptiste Maingret, Frédéric Le Mouël, Julien Ponge, Nicolas Stouls, Jian Cao and Yannick Loiseau. Towards a Decoupled Context-Oriented Programming Language for the Internet of Things. In Proceedings of the 7th International Workshop on Context-Oriented Programming (COP’2015) in conjunction with the European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming (ECOOP’2015). Prague, Czech Republic, July 2015.
Julien Ponge, Frédéric Le Mouël, and Nicolas Stouls. 2013. Golo, a dynamic, light and efficient language for post-invokedynamic JVM. In Proceedings of the 2013 International Conference on Principles and Practices of Programming on the Java Platform: Virtual Machines, Languages, and Tools (PPPJ ’13). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 153-158.
Julien Ponge, Computer Science & Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, UNSW. (2009). Model based analysis of time-aware web services interactions. PhD Thesis. University of New South Wales.
Martin Odersky. 2000. Functional Nets. In Proceedings of the 9th European Symposium on Programming Languages and Systems (ESOP ’00). Springer-Verlag, London, UK, UK, 1-25.
Martin Odersky and Matthias Zenger. 2005. Scalable component abstractions. In Proceedings of the 20th annual ACM SIGPLAN conference on Object-oriented programming, systems, languages, and applications (OOPSLA ’05). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 41-57.
Burak Emir, Sebastian Maneth, and Martin Odersky. 2006. Scalable programming abstractions for XML services. In Dependable Systems, Jürg Kohlas, Bertrand Meyer, and Andrü Schiper (Eds.). Springer-Verlag, Berlin, Heidelberg 103-126.
Rob Pike. 2012. Go at Google. In Proceedings of the 3rd annual conference on Systems, programming, and applications: software for humanity (SPLASH’12). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 5-6.
Cédric Fournet and Georges Gonthier. 1996. The reflexive CHAM and the join-calculus. In Proceedings of the 23rd ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT symposium on Principles of programming languages (POPL ’96). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 372-385.
Cédric Fournet, Georges Gonthier, Jean-Jacques Lévy, Luc Maranget, and Didier Rémy. 1996. A Calculus of Mobile Agents. In Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Concurrency Theory (CONCUR ’96). Springer-Verlag, London, UK, UK, 406-421.
Cédric Fournet, Cosimo Laneve, Luc Maranget, and Didier Rémy. 1997. Implicit Typing à la ML for the Join-Calculus. In Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Concurrency Theory (CONCUR ’97). Springer-Verlag, London, UK, UK, 196-212.
Chun Ouyang, Eric Verbeek, Wil M. P. van der Aalst, Stephan Breutel, Marlon Dumas, and Arthur H. M. ter Hofstede. 2007. Formal semantics and analysis of control flow in WS-BPEL. Sci. Comput. Program. 67, 2-3 (July 2007), 162-198.
Chris Lattner and Vikram Adve. LLVM: A Compilation Framework for Lifelong Program Analysis & Transformation. Proceedings of the 2004 International Symposium on Code Generation and Optimization (CGO’04), Palo Alto, California, Mar. 2004.
Dynamic Memory Management For Embedded Non-Volatile Memory
eVaderis (Grenoble Fr) and Verimag laboratory (Grenoble Fr)
You will mostly be located in the CITI Lab in Lyon but you will have to travel to Grenoble several times during the project (expenses covered)
3-years PhD grant «Allocation Doctorale de Recherche» from Région Rhône-Alpes
October 2016
Guillaume Salagnac
guillaume.salagnac@insa-lyon.fr
perso.citi.insa-lyon.fr/gsalagnac/files/phd-nvram.pdf
The general context of this project is smart objects, aka the Internet of Things. Technologically speaking, we are interested in next generation System-on-Chip platforms, based on non-volatile memory technologies. Such technologies make it possible to design very energy-efficient embedded systems, but they also require significant changes in terms of software programming. We aim at designing and studying novel memory management mechanisms, both hardware and software, to improve the performance of such systems. More precisely, we will address the problem of dynamic memory management, i.e. allocating, placing, and moving around the various data structures used by the application program.
Master’s degree or equivalent in the area of computer science / computer engineering
Software: Low-level and/or embedded programming in C and/or assembly
Hardware: system-on-chip architecture: processor, memory hierarchy
Languages: fluent English, both written and spoken ; French is a plus but is not required
Software: discrete event simulation
Work environment: Linux with command-line, scripting language(s)
Personal: autonomy, sense of organization, curiosity, initiative
Relational: good communication skills, intellectual rigour
Send an e-mail with one PDF attachment, containing:
Detailed curriculum vitae
Application letter and/or your last internship report
Academic transcripts (including ranking if available) for the last two years of study
2 to 3 letters of recommendation, or a list of reference persons and their e-mail addresses