PhD Day 2016 @ CITI-Lab

prof. Isabelle Guerin-Lassous

L'après-doctorat, constitution de dossiers de qualifications

30 mins

Amphi Chappe

Introduction

Details about the PhD Day and introduction of the invited talks.

10 mins

Amphi Chappe

Dr. Sébastien Simoens

Career as R&D engineer

Based on a personal experience in 3 different companies, my presentation will try to illustrate with concrete examples various topics of interest when considering a career as R&D engineer:

• the variety of activities that an R&D engineer can carry on along his career: specification, testing, publication, standardization, intellectual property, project management
• the differences in day-to-day job from pure research to pure development
• the impact that the company and its economic context may have on the R&D engineers day-to-day job

30 mins

Amphi Chappe

Plenary session I

45 mins

Amphi Chappe

Poster session & demo

30 mins

Hall

Dr. Dan Alistarh

Data, Servers, and Algorithms

From 2014 to 2016, I was a researcher at Microsoft Research Cambridge, in the Systems and Networking Group. In this talk, I will give a brief description of the MSR lab in Cambridge, UK, and talk a bit about my experiences there. In particular, I will describe one project I was involved in, which started from a set of real-world problems encountered by a Microsoft product group, which we solved algorithmically, and then got deployed in a practical setting.

30 mins

Amphi Chappe

Plenary session II

45 mins

Amphi Chappe

Poster session & demo

30 mins

Hall

Dr. Bogdan Pasca

Research in industry

In this talk I will touch on the topic of research in industry: challenges, opportunities and achievements as seen from my perspective at Altera (now Intel PSG).

30 mins

Amphi Chappe

Conclusion & Cocktail

Conclusion on CITI PhD-Day 2016 and a very welcomed cocktail.

60 mins

Hall

Victor Quintero

Approximated Capacity of the Two-User Gaussian Interference Channel with Noisy Channel-Output Feedback.

Wireless communication systems are not only affected by noise but also by interference. A communication system under the influence of interference can be analysed using a model known as interference channel. The two-user interference channel corresponds to two point- to-point links subject to mutual interference. The corresponding capacity region is not known yet, with exception of some specific cases. Under certain conditions, feedback between the intended receiver and the corresponding transmitter, allows each transmitter to observe at least partially the signal transmitted by the other transmitter. This induces a cooperation that improves the achievable rates. This presentation considers the two-user Gaussian interference channel with channel-output feedback. An approximation within a constant gap to the capacity region of this channel is fully described.

15 mins

Amphi Chappe

Team

Socrate team

Célestin Matte

Why MAC Address Randomization is not Enough - An Analysis of Wi-Fi Network Discovery Mechanisms

MAC address randomization of Wi-Fi-enabled devices has recently been adopted to prevent passive tracking of mobile devices. However, Wi-Fi frames still contain fields that can be used to fingerprint devices and potentially allow tracking. Panoptiphone is a tool inspired by the web browser fingerprinting tool Panopticlick, which aims to show the identifying information that can be found in the frames broadcast by a Wi-Fi-enabled device. Information is passively collected from devices that have their Wi-Fi interface enabled, even if they are not connected to an access point. Panoptiphone uses this information to create a fingerprint of the device and empirically evaluate its uniqueness among a database of fingerprints. The user is then shown how much identifying information its device is leaking through Wi-Fi and how unique it is.

15 mins

Amphi Chappe

Team

Privatics team

Matei Istoan

Automatic pipeline generation in FloPoCo 5.0

This presentation introduces the third evolution of a framework for semi-automatic circuit pipelining for FPGAs. The framework is integrated in the FloPoCo generator. Hardware operators are first described using VHDL, encapsulated in C++. Adding simple primitives allows inferring the pipeline, at user specified frequencies and for user specified targets. Sub-component management and sub-cycle pipelining has been improved. The overall performance of the pipelining framework has also been improved. Compared to previous versions of the framework, pipelining is facilitated and requires less effort from the user, while providing more consistent results between designs. The algorithms used are briefly discussed. Several scheduling strategies can be used, the currently preferred one being as-soon-as-possible.

15 mins

Amphi Chappe

Team

Socrate team

Stefan-Gabriel Chitic

SDfR - Service Discovery for Robots

Robotics is evolving towards fleets of robots in order to perform one or multiple tasks together by sharing information between multiple hosts. Fleets should be able to communicate using ad-hoc networks to avoid being dependent on any centralized infrastructure. To this end we propose a robotic middleware, SDfR (Service Discovery for Robots), that is able to provide service discovery for peers to know their reachable neighbors services. The protocol is an adaptation of the Service Discovery Protocol (SSDP) used in Universal Plug and Play(UPnP) for a dynamic network generated by the mobility of the robots. The SDfR protocol is exposed as a REST-style service using JSON content type representations. We propose an extensive study of combinations of different text and binary protocols as alternative implementations of SDfR. We evaluate a series of overhead benchmarking across static and dynamic scenarios in order to compare different versions of the protocol. Our results shows that the gain of bandwidth using binary protocols is less significant compared to the use of a plain-text protocol to keep the retro-compatibility with UPnP.

15 mins

Amphi Chappe

Team

Dynamid, Chroma team

Cherkaoui Soukaina

Random access procedure capacity evaluation in LTE-A

Support of short information packets generated by either M2M applications or smartphones background traffic is identified as on of the key challenges for 4G and beyond wireless networks. LTE-A air-interface is known to suffer from random access procedure overload in case of synchronous connection attempts. This thesis aims to a better understanding of the random access procedure through simulations and analytical modeling from both node and network perspective so as to first identify the key parameters for the enhancement of LTE-A capacity in the current implementation. Further, we plan to suggest a separated signaling lightweight access procedure for M2M users.

15 mins

Amphi Chappe

Team

UrbaNet team

Robert Riemann

Towards a distributed practicial online voting protocol

Paper-based voting protocols offer an unmatched solution to satisfy often contradicting though essential properties, such as secrecy of the ballot, correctness of the tally and verifiability. Moreover, the possibility given to voters to participate to the supervision on-site of both the casting and tallying procedures ensures trust. Paper-based voting owes its robustness to its simple verifiable evidence and its independence from authoritative trust. Traditional *online voting systems* ensure the contradicting properties very differently, as they have to take into account the ease to manipulate and duplicate digitial data, and as such the digitial ballots. The vast majority of todays online voting systems is based on cryptography, which requires a trusted authority that constitutes further a single point of failure. Distributed networks as BitCoin and Bittorrent offer a new approaches and serve as a starting point to introduce *distributed online voting systems*. In this talk, the specific constraints of voting protocols are introduces and illustrated by an example for a traditional online voting protocol. Then, different concepts for distributed voting protocols are presented.

15 mins

Amphi Chappe

Team

DICE team

Ahmed Boubrima

WSN Deployment for Error Bounded Air Pollution Mapping

Monitoring air quality has become a major challenge of modern cities where the majority of population lives. In this word, we focus on using wireless sensor networks for air pollution mapping. We tackle the optimization problem of sensor deployment and propose two placement models allowing to minimize the deployment cost and ensure an error-bounded air pollution mapping. Unlike most of existing deployment models, which assume that sensors have a given detection range, we base on interpolation methods to place sensors in such a way that pollution concentration is estimated with a bounded error at locations where no sensor is deployed. We evaluate our model on a dataset of the Lyon City and give insights on how to establish a good compromise between the deployment budget and the precision of air quality monitoring.

15 mins

Amphi Chappe

Team

Urbanet team

Alexis Duque

Using Visible Light Communication in a Smart City Environment.

With billions of devices expect to connect to each other, enabling the smart city paradigm, RF communication is reaching a major spectrum scarcity problem. With LEDs already in mass production, Visible Light Communication can represent a low-cost solution to the problem. This has been acknowledged by both industry and academia, and current work is ongoing to standardize physical and medium access control protocols for VLC. However some issues still unsolved and VLC hasn't yet been adopted.

In this context, it seems very important to evaluate the performance of VLC in different smart city applicative use cases.

To achieve these goals, we will evaluate the limits of the technology in the context of the Internet Of Things and then propose an efficient communication protocol for VLC networking, taking care on important metrics such as the energy consumption and reliability of  the  technology. Communication range and throughput will be studied in both full-duplex and half-duplex communication scenarios.

15 mins

Amphi Chappe

Team

Urbanet team

David Kibloff

Physical-layer security in full-duplex systems

In this poster, a new model to characterize the fundamental secrecy limits in decentralized full-duplex systems is introduced. Physical-layer secrecy problems are usually studied using the wiretap channel model. On the other hand, action dependent-channels are useful to study decentralized problems in communication. In this model, the choice of an action at the transmitter is considered in the information theoretic framework. In the proposed model, the wiretap channel and the action-dependent channel are combined in a two-way fashion to model physical layer secrecy problems in full-duplex systems. The legitimate terminals have full-duplex capabilities and can take actions. The eavesdropper is assumed to be passive. Therefore, the legitimate parties have a clear advantage against the eavesdropper.

15 mins

Amphi Chappe

Team

Socrate team

Jad Oueis

Autonomous Organization of deployable PMR/LTE Networks

Deployable PMR/LTE networks are usually required in locations where no operating network exists (e.g. following a natural disaster that damages the network infrastructure), or in out of coverage locations where a network infrastructure does not exist at all (e.g. forest fire or underground rescue). In both cases, the installation of isolated eNodeBs without backhaul connection to an Evolved Packet Core (EPC) is required. In this case, eNodeBs connect instead to a local EPC. The eNodeBs in the network must select one local EPC to connect to among the several local EPCs co-located with the eNodeBs in the network. A first problem in this context is to determine which of the local EPCs to select. Our contribution is to determine the location of the local EPC to which all the eNodeBs in the network must connect. In determining the EPC placement, we take into consideration the capacity of the links between the eNodeBs and their quality, in order to ensure that a given amount of signaling and data traffic can circulate in the network from the eNodeBs to the selected local EPC, and vice-versa.

15 mins

Amphi Chappe

Team

Urbanet team

Léo Le Taro

Dense and Automous Urban Pollution Monitoring

Air pollution is becoming even more of an issue as urban density increases. Monitoring stations are set up in major cities: precise appliances, but costly, hence sparsely deployed. Recent progress in nano technologies enabled the rise of small, affordable sensors of reduced precision. We want to compensate this lower precision by a higher density of deployment. The major expectation of high a sensor density is a better spatial definition of pollution levels. Currently, even the best data interpolation tools cannot reliably estimate the exposition of citizens purely from the sparse monitoring stations' data. Additionally, autonomous and connected operation is required in order to minimize operating costs. However, low-cost sensor characteristics are proven to degrade over time, which makes them less than ideal for direct long-term autonomous operation.\\ Design of (distributed) sensor re-calibration algorithms, as well as calibration procedures requirements (like the determination of optimal calibration frequency), are the key challenges of this thesis. Urban experimentations within SenseCity will be carried out in order to validate theoretical contributions and simulation results.

15 mins

Amphi Chappe

Team

UrbaNet team

Yosra Zguira

Study and development of a sensor network architecture tolerant to delays

Wireless sensor networks are designed for sending data from measurement points to a set of sinks through multi-hop radio communications. Roughly, that need that all relay nodes are simultaneously on so that an end-to­end path can be computed, a priori or on demand. This assumption is very strong, can be impossible to fit in several scenarios, and might also lead to sub-optimal routing strategies. Delay Tolerant Networking is the opposite paradigm. Communications are supposed to be prone to delay of availability, errors or failures. DTN protocols store the information in relay nodes and forward it only when the next link is available. The subject of this research proposal is to study protocols and architectures of DTN network and apply them to sensor networks and smart city.

15 mins

Amphi Chappe

Team

Urbanet team

Mihai-Ioan Popescu

Connectivity maintenance in a fleet of robots, while performing - environment exploration for target detection, multi-robot patrolling.

Connectivity maintenance in robot networks has been motivated by applications such as coverage, target detection, reconnaissance or tracking. It assumes maintaining the network connected at all time (100%), or ensuring lower bounds in this sense (connectivity control). Our setting assumes a fleet of robots with wireless communication capabilities and an unlimited (maybe partially delimited) environment containing undiscovered targets (e.g. wireless sensors). The goal is then to maintain connectivity of the fleet while progressively discovering the targets and executing an efficient patrol on them (e.g. with respect to the visiting frequency of the targets, and the robot energy).

15 mins

Amphi Chappe

Team

Chroma team

Yuqi MO

Analysis and Optimization of the performance for Ultra Narrow Band transmission based IoT networks

IoT (Internet of things) networks are gaining more and more interest as they will provide connectivity for countless number of devices. When the goal is to collect information (for example, for temperature monitoring, parking availability monitoring, smart metering, ...), the devices will require to transmit only a few amount of data, during a small proportion of time. In this case, the base station should cover as much devices as possible to reduce the cost of infrastructure deployment, and not waste transmission resources. This is the reason why long range low power transmission technology as UNB (Ultra Narrow Band, known as SigFox) has emerged recently. In a UNB based network, devices access to the medium at will. Transmissions are realized randomly, both in time and frequency (R-FTMA : Random Frequency and Time Multiple Access). This channel access scheme saves the resource for reservation, but it also induces some simultaneous transmission in the same frequency area, leading to interference. The system performance of such network was evaluated by a previous PhD. The work to realize is to study the impacts of different choices in MAC layer to the network performance. The objects, are to amplify the theoretical studies and the downlink usage, as well as different diverse technologies which could be applied in the network : exploitation of the downlink; interference cancellation; joint signal detection by multiple base stations; technologies of channel coding.

15 mins

Amphi Chappe

Team

SOCRATE team

Stefan-Gabriel Chitic

SDfR - Service Discovery for Robots

Robotics is evolving towards fleets of robots in order to perform one or multiple tasks together by sharing information between multiple hosts. Fleets should be able to communicate using ad-hoc networks to avoid being dependent on any centralized infrastructure. To this end we propose a robotic middleware, SDfR (Service Discovery for Robots), that is able to provide service discovery for peers to know their reachable neighbors services. The protocol is an adaptation of the Service Discovery Protocol (SSDP) used in Universal Plug and Play(UPnP) for a dynamic network generated by the mobility of the robots. The SDfR protocol is exposed as a REST-style service using JSON content type representations. We propose an extensive study of combinations of different text and binary protocols as alternative implementations of SDfR. We evaluate a series of overhead benchmarking across static and dynamic scenarios in order to compare different versions of the protocol. Our results shows that the gain of bandwidth using binary protocols is less significant compared to the use of a plain-text protocol to keep the retro-compatibility with UPnP.

15 mins

Amphi Chappe

Team

Dynamid, Chroma team

Robert Riemann

Towards a distributed practicial online voting protocol

Paper-based voting protocols offer an unmatched solution to satisfy often contradicting though essential properties, such as secrecy of the ballot, correctness of the tally and verifiability. Moreover, the possibility given to voters to participate to the supervision on-site of both the casting and tallying procedures ensures trust. Paper-based voting owes its robustness to its simple verifiable evidence and its independence from authoritative trust. Traditional *online voting systems* ensure the contradicting properties very differently, as they have to take into account the ease to manipulate and duplicate digitial data, and as such the digitial ballots. The vast majority of todays online voting systems is based on cryptography, which requires a trusted authority that constitutes further a single point of failure. Distributed networks as BitCoin and Bittorrent offer a new approaches and serve as a starting point to introduce *distributed online voting systems*. In this talk, the specific constraints of voting protocols are introduces and illustrated by an example for a traditional online voting protocol. Then, different concepts for distributed voting protocols are presented.

15 mins

Amphi Chappe

Team

DICE team

Célestin Matte

Why MAC Address Randomization is not Enough - An Analysis of Wi-Fi Network Discovery Mechanisms

MAC address randomization of Wi-Fi-enabled devices has recently been adopted to prevent passive tracking of mobile devices. However, Wi-Fi frames still contain fields that can be used to fingerprint devices and potentially allow tracking. Panoptiphone is a tool inspired by the web browser fingerprinting tool Panopticlick, which aims to show the identifying information that can be found in the frames broadcast by a Wi-Fi-enabled device. Information is passively collected from devices that have their Wi-Fi interface enabled, even if they are not connected to an access point. Panoptiphone uses this information to create a fingerprint of the device and empirically evaluate its uniqueness among a database of fingerprints. The user is then shown how much identifying information its device is leaking through Wi-Fi and how unique it is.

15 mins

Amphi Chappe

Team

Privatics team

Alexis Duque

Using Visible Light Communication in a Smart City Environment.

With billions of devices expect to connect to each other, enabling the smart city paradigm, RF communication is reaching a major spectrum scarcity problem. With LEDs already in mass production, Visible Light Communication can represent a low-cost solution to the problem. This has been acknowledged by both industry and academia, and current work is ongoing to standardize physical and medium access control protocols for VLC. However some issues still unsolved and VLC hasn't yet been adopted.

In this context, it seems very important to evaluate the performance of VLC in different smart city applicative use cases.

To achieve these goals, we will evaluate the limits of the technology in the context of the Internet Of Things and then propose an efficient communication protocol for VLC networking, taking care on important metrics such as the energy consumption and reliability of  the  technology. Communication range and throughput will be studied in both full-duplex and half-duplex communication scenarios.

15 mins

Amphi Chappe

Team

Urbanet team