About me

I am a permanent researcher (chargé de recherche) in Computer Science at Inria, in the STACK team, hosted at IMT Atlantique (Nantes, France). I am also affiliated with the Scientific Computing Institute (SCI) at the University of Utah (Salt Lake City, USA).

Open positions

PhD, postdocs and engineer positions available on edge computing topics in the STACK group at IMT Atlantique (Brittany, France). Reach out for further information.

Research Interests

My research interests are broadly in the areas of next-generation Utility Computing Infrastructures (i.e., Cloud, Fog, 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

[Accepted Papers and talks]
2 papers accepted at UCC 2023 (December 4-7, Messina, Italia)
I'll present recent work on Urgent Analytics at the IEEE Cloud (July 2-8, Chicago, US)
[Programme Committees]
Chair of Workshop on Urgent Analytics for Distributed Computing (QUICK2024) at CCGrid24.
Chair of Middleware for the Edge (MiddleWedge 2023)at MiddleWare23.
PC member for Euro-Par 2023, IEEE/ACM SuperComputing 2023 Reproducibility challenge, ICCS 2023,UCC 2023.
Publicity chair for ICPP23.
[Service] 2022: Panelist for NSF CSSI Elements.
[Tutorial] Oct 2022: Tutorial on streaming application development on the Edge-to-Cloud Continuum in collaboration with WiFire (UC San Diego) @eScience2022.
[Funding] Sept 2022: I received an NSF grant for managing urgent analytics on advanced cyberinfrastructure.
[Programme Committees] 2022: I am serving as a PC member for IEEE/ACM CCGrid 2022 (Artificial intelligence, Machine Learning and Deep Learning Track), IEEE/ACM SuperComputing 2022 Reproducibility challenge and ICCS 2022.
[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

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: The 34th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 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

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, 2017-2020)
Ali Reza Zamani (Ph.D. Student, Rutgers, 2017-2019)
Mengsong Zou (Ph.D. Student, Rutgers, 2017-2018)
Gianna Shwartz (B.S., Rutgers, 2018)
Matthew Kurtanick (B.S., Bachelor, Rutgers, 2018),
Srujana Sure (B.S., Bachelor, Rutgers, 2017),
Daniel Kim (K-12 Senior, Bergen County Academies, 2019-2020)
Julia Schneidmann (K-12 Senior, Bergen County Academies, 2018-2019)

Teaching

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