professional experience
Jul 2009 - present Research Director & Master Inventor
IBM France R&D Lab, Gentilly
Design, manage and implement collaborative innovation projects involving the France Lab teams,
partners, customers and academics. In this context, I conducted IBM involvement in the
Optimod Lyon project, including evaluating traffic prediction tools and
designing a novel, urban-scale, vehicle round optimization service. Major side activities include:
- Master Inventor, in charge of organizing the protection of intellectual property of France Lab via patenting. Define a strategy and processes, evangelize patenting practice, mentor new inventors, coordinate the evaluation of patents with legal services. The France Lab went from 0 patents per year to about 30 per year in 3 years.
- Crédit Impôt Recherche internal consultant: assist R&D team leaders in assessing the eligibility of research projects and write technical justification documents. Covering 3 product lines, about 10 projects per year and 300 engineers.
- Research and University liaison. co-advise PhD and Master Students, represent the France Lab at University Councils.
- Project Director, Efficacity Institute, Champs-sur-Marne (part-time). Create and conduct a research programme leveraging IBM Smarter Cities product offer to fit the institute's goal of providing public and private urban project owners with tools to address the challenges of energy transition.
Jul 2000 - Jul 2009 Principal Scientist
ILOG (bought by IBM in 2009), Gentilly
Design, manage and implement innovation projects involving the France Lab teams,
partners, customers and academics. Contribution (including design and implementation of advanced
features) to the products: ILOG Discovery,
ILOG JRules,
ILOG Views.
Coordinated participation to public-funded projects: OADymPPaC,
INDIGO,
VisMaster.
Sep 1998 - Jul 2000 Software Developer
ILOG, Gentilly
Contribute to the development of
Views C++ GUI toolkit library. In charge of the development of the
"Business Graphic Objects" module,
took over a 280kloc module, removed 70kloc and added 20kloc for a net productivity of -25kloc per year.
Left 0 open bugs to my successor, with only 1 bug discovered and fixed in 2005.
Mar 1995 - Sep 1998 Researcher & Developer
Alias|Wavefront (now Autodesk), Toronto, Canada then Paris
Contributed to the development of Maya 1.0
(navigation UI design, implementation and design of polygonal modeling UI),
StudioPaint 3.0 (gesture/paint algorithms),
research work (including publications and patents) on misc. interaction techniques:
two-handed input, new input devices, mark-based interaction, 3D interaction...
1990-1994 founder and CEO
le point sur le i, Paris (part-time)
Consulting and business management software development, customers included Garonor customer department,
Hair-dressers and Language schools.
1987-1989 tech support ACI, Paris (part-time)
1982-1983 assistant & internal tech support CIAD, Paris (part-time)
competences
Software design and development: Complex, multi-language, product development & maintenance, with a focus on sophisticated UI programming. Contributed in various capacities to 4 products of over 4Mloc in C++ and Java and a dozen smaller products. Design and development lead of 3 intermediate-sized products (<400kloc) totalling more than 2000 users.
R&D project management & coordination: Plan and fund (internally or with external or public funds) mid-sized (4-8 person.year) innovative projects. Assemble and manage small teams from heterogenous origins (internal developers, customers, academic partners, students...) to carry the project over 6 months to 3 years; integrate the results in existing product lines.
User interface design and programming: Many references of novel user interfaces design, from experimental designs to product implementations involving user participation, including interaction with customers.
System administration & web development: Administrate servers (DNS, SMTP, IMAP, HTTP, LDAP, file server, source code control, databases and application servers...) for small groups on various unices since 1990. Design and continuous administration of 5 (simple) websites since 1993. Amateur proficiency in modern front-end and back-end tools such as JQuery, Angular, J2EE & python/Django.
Research: Over 20 scientific publications, 3300 citations, h-index 15. Participation to various academic & reviewing boards (see below). Involving a strong research component in my work is a mean to ensure the technological consistency and relevance of the products. It's also a great mean to provide for visibility and recruiting abilities.
Patent law, intellectual property: 11 patents granted, 8 patents pending. France Lab Invention Development Team lead (~50 inventors).
Optimization: Basic competences in Operations Research and Constraints Programming (ILOG CPLEX and OPL).
research community responsibilities
- Full publications and patents list.
- Membre du conseil de l'Ecole Doctorale STIC de l'Université Paris-Saclay (ED-STIC) since 2015.
- Member of ANR evaluation committees for grant approvals in 2006, 2011, 2014.
- Vice-president of AFIHM 1998-2003 and 2008-2011.
- Membre de la commission contenu, pôle de competitivité Cap Digital depuis 2007.
- Editor of the IHM 2003 proceedings.
- Co-chair of the conference IHM 2002 (and web site author).
- ASTI, Association Française des Sciences et Technologies de l'Information: founding commitee member (1998-2000).
- Member of the Program Committee for the IHM conference 1997-2008.
- Reviewer for SIGCHI and UISTconferences since 1995.
teaching
- One hour course in the seminar on "urban logistics for local authorities", Formation continue, Ecole des Ponts et Chaussée, 2015.
- Complete course on emerging trends in interactive information technologies. DESS Informatique Paris XI, Université Paris IX, INSEAD, Université de Poitiers (1998-2009).
- Human-computer Interaction at graduate levels: DEA Informatique Paris XI, DEA INSTN, Ecole Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées, Université Paris IX, EPITA, ESIEE. (1992-2005).
- X-Windows and Motif programming, Nouvelle formation d'ingénieurs, IUT Orsay, DESS Informatique Paris XI (1992-1994, then 1998-1999)
- Object oriented databases, Nouvelle formation d'ingénieurs, IUT Orsay (1991-1993)
education
- PhD, Summa cum Laude, Université Paris Sud, 1995.
- Internship at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, 1993.
- Internship at University of Toronto, 1991.
- DEA (Master's equivalent), Université Paris Sud, 1990.
- Maitrise d'Informatique, Ecole Normale Supérieure & Université Paris Sud. 1989.
- Licence de Mathematiques Appliquées, Ecole Normale Supérieure & Université Paris Dauphine. 1988.
misc
Languages: French: native. English: main work language. German, Dutch, Spanish, Ancient Greek: basic conversation & notions.
Married, 2 children