Occupation

I am a permanent research scientist (Chargé de recherche) at Inria (Institut national de recherche en sciences et technologies du numérique) in the STACK team at IMT Atlantique in Nantes, France.

Formerly, I was a staff scientist at the Scientific Computing Institute (SCI) at the University of Utah, USA. I obtained my PhD from ENS de Lyon in France in December 2016.

Research Interests

My research interests are broadly in the areas of next-generation Utility Computing Infrastructures (Cloud, Edge, and beyond) [1].
My current research is focused on leveraging the Edge-Cloud-HPC Continuum for Urgent Science [2], i.e. realizing a fluid ecosystem where distributed computing resources and services (Computing Continuum) are aggregated on-demand to support delay-sensitive and data-driven workflows (Urgent Computing). Applications of this research includes, but is not limited to, sensor networks , stream processing applications, AI/ML models for natural disasters or crisis management [3], and data-centric/middleware systems [4].

Recent Activity

[Tutorial] Sept 2024: Tutorial on Applications patterns for Urgent Science on the Edge-to-Cloud Continuum @eScience2024.
[News]Short article about my research work (english) (french)
[Program Committees]
Information and Communication Technologies for Disaster Management (ICT-DM 2024) - Track chair.
Urgent Analytics for Distributed Computing (QUICK2024) at CCGrid24 - Chair.
Middleware for the Edge (MiddleWedge 2023) at MiddleWare23 - Chair.
PAISE24, Euro-Par 2023, SC23 , ICCS 2023, UCC 2023 - PC Member.
ICPP23 - Publicity Chair.
[Tutorial] Oct 2022: Tutorial on streaming application development on the Edge-to-Cloud Continuum @eScience2022.
[Funding] Sept 2022: I received an NSF grant for managing urgent analytics on advanced cyberinfrastructure.
[PhD Defense] 2021: My first PhD student, Zeina Houmani, has successfully defending her thesis: Data-driven microservices architectures.
[Impact] 2021: Our joint work with Inria on Earthquake Early Warning was cited by Le Monde.
[Award] 2020: Outstanding paper award in Artificial Intelligence for Social Impact, 34th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-20, A* rank)

Bio

Before joining Inria, I was a staff scientist in the Scientific Computing and Imaging (SCI) Institute at the University of Utah (2021-2023). I also worked as a Research Associate at the Rutgers Discovery Informatics Institute (RDi2) led by Manish Parashar, where I investigated programming support and resource management for data-driven analytics and edge computing applications (2017-2021). I received a Ph.D. degree from the Ecole Normale Superieure de Lyon in France (2016) under the supervision of Eddy Caron and Laurent Lefevre as part of the Inria Avalon Team. My PhD research focused on implementing tradeoff mechanisms between performance and energy consumption for large scale cloud applications. I've extented this work as a visiting fellow at Mahindra Ecole Centrale in Hyderabad, India (2015). Before that, I worked as a Junior Engineer at Inria, the French Institute for Research in Computer Science (2011-2013) and interned at the National Institute of Informatics in Tokyo, Japan (2009-2010).

Funding and awards

SmartNet: Defi Inria/Nokia (2024-2027)
PEPR Cloud (2023-2030)
NSF Grant on Exploring intelligent services across the Computing Continuum (Principal Investigator, 2022-2025)
Outstanding paper award in Artificial Intelligence for Social Impact. for A Decentralized Multi-Sensor Machine Learning Approach for Earthquake Early Warning. In AAAI-20 Conference on Artificial Intelligence (A* rank), 2020
Raman Charpak Scholarship for Indo-French collaborations (Research and travel grant, 2015)
Best Paper Award on Nuage: Towards a solidary and responsible cloud computing service. In IEEE CloudTech, 2015

Selected Publications

[1] Balouek-Thomert, D., Renart, E. G., Zamani, A. R., Simonet, A., Parashar, M. (2019). Towards a computing continuum: Enabling edge-to-cloud integration for data-driven workflows. The International Journal of High Performance Computing Applications
[2] Balouek-Thomert, D., Rodero, I., Parashar, M. (2020). Harnessing the computing continuum for urgent science. ACM SIGMETRICS Performance Evaluation Review, 48(2), 41-46.
[3] Fauvel, K., Balouek-Thomert, D., Melgar, D., Silva, P., Simonet, A., Antoniu, G., ... , Termier, A. (2020, April). A distributed multi-sensor machine learning approach to earthquake early warning. In Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence. Outstanding paper award in Artificial Intelligence for Social Impact.
[4] Renart, E. G., Balouek-Thomert, D., Parashar, M. (2019, May). An edge-based framework for enabling data-driven pipelines for iot systems. In 2019 IEEE International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium Workshops (IPDPSW) (pp. 885-894). IEEE.

Current Projects

     

Past projects on my former page.

Supervision

Advisees

Martin Molli. PhD student in joint supervision with IRISA, France (2024-)
Zeina Houmani. PhD student in joint supervision with ENS Lyon, France (2018-2021).
Sangshin Park (B.S., Utah School of Computing, 2023)
Karunakar Gadireddy (B.S., Mahindra Ecole Centrale, 2016)

Mentored

Christian Sicari (Ph.D. Student, University of Messina, 2022-2023)
Eduard Gibert Renard (Ph.D. Student, Rutgers University, 2017-2020)
Ali Reza Zamani (Ph.D. Student, Rutgers University, 2017-2019)
Mengsong Zou (Ph.D. Student, Rutgers University, 2017-2018)
Gianna Shwartz (B.S., Rutgers University, 2018)
Matthew Kurtanick (B.S., Bachelor, Rutgers University, 2018),
Srujana Sure (B.S., Bachelor, Rutgers University, 2017),
Daniel Kim (K-12 Senior, Bergen County Academies, 2019-2020)
Julia Schneidmann (K-12 Senior, Bergen County Academies, 2018-2019)

Teaching

Middleware | Master 2 course (University of Nantes, France, 2024) Cloud Infrastructures | Undergraduate course (IMT Atlantique, France, 2023)
Software development, Data and DevOps Operations | Undergraduate course (University of Nantes, France, 2023)
Programming for Engineers | Graduate course (School of Computing, Univ. of Utah, 2022)
Principles of Data and Information Management (Rutgers University, 2019)
Introduction to Computer Science (Rutgers University, 2018|2019)
Parallel Systems | Graduate course (Lyon 1, France, 2016)
Operating Systems | Undergraduate course (Lyon 1, France, 2014, 2015)
Software Engineering | Graduate course (Lyon 1, France, 2014, 2015)
Databases | Undegraduate course (Lyon 1, France, 2014, 2015)
Project Management and Software Engineering | Graduate course (Lyon 1, France, 2014|2015|2016)
Network and OS Programming | Applied graduate course (IUT Lyon1, France, 2016)
Initiation to Windows | Applied graduate course (IUT Lyon1, France, 2015)

Some talks

Beyond the lab