[JOB][PhD] Infrastructure and Language Kernels for IoT Systems

[JOB][PhD] Infrastructure and Language Kernels for IoT Systems


The RMOD team of INRIA Lille and the CAR theme of IMT Lille Douai have an open position for a PhD student on Infrastructure and language kernels for IoT Systems.

Description
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Over the last years, the RMOD team of INRIA Lille and the CAR theme of IMT Lille Douai have been working together on creating tiny language core. For example, Guillermo Polito demonstrated in his PhD a fully reflective kernel that fits into 80 kb of memory and that it is possible to have hyper specialized kernels down to 11 kb. We have also worked on remote debugging (PhD of N. Papoulias) and dynamic code updates (PhD of P. Tesone) of such kernels. All of these works are prototyped in Pharo. More recently, RMOD have been working on advanced probes mechanisms (M. Denker) and a solid remote debugging infrastructure (D. Kudriashov). The goal of this PhD is to revisit the architecture around such mini-kernels for building IoT applications.

The plan is to:
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• improve the tools to edit, compile, debug, deploy and update such kernels on IoT devices. Learn how to debug remotely and dynamically update such IoT systems using the TelePharo/PharoThings environment. This task will be in cooperation with M. Denker and D. Kudriashov on remote debugging for IoT and G. Polito for the kernel edition and tooling.

• define some language extensions to manage groups of IoT devices to program them at once. Managing hundreds or even thousands of IoT devices is a challenging task. We want to explore different solutions to help deploying and updating groups of IoT devices using some registration mechanism in a cloud server or some groups/roles based approaches for example. Note that ZweiDenker GmbH http://zweidenker.de/en/ is interested in collaboration on the IoT cloud management infrastructure

• expressing the architecture of IoT applications. We would like to explore also how to express IoT architectures and what are the abstractions that should be offered to developers such as expressing event-driven architectures with declarative ECA (Event-Conditions-Actions) rules. But we will study a couple of typical IoT applications.

• dynamically update an IoT application. An IoT application needs to adapt itself because unreachable or faulty devices or the diminution of available bandwith. We would like that the whole application can reconfigure itself in such situations as Guillaume Grondin proposes it in its PhD.

• explore Lightweight Virtual Machines. Virtual machines in the IoT context are very powerful for incremental deployment or dynamic updates. In this task, we would like to investigate what is the minimal memory consumption that we can reach for a VM usable for IoT.

Application
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To apply, please send us :

        • a CV,
        • a copy of your Master diploma
        • a copy of your Master thesis
        • 2 (two) reference letters, with the contact details of the referents
        • links to videos of demos of your experiments and/or simulations

The application materials should be sent by email to Prof. S. Ducasse [hidden email]. Email subject must start with : [PhD-RMoD-CAR-2018].

Bibliography
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        • Guillermo Polito, Stephane Ducasse, N Bouraqadi, L Fabresse, M Mattone. Virtualization Support for Dynamic Core Library Update. Onward !,
          Oct 2015, Pittsburg, USA.
        • Guillermo Polito. Virtualization Support for Application Runtime Virtualization and Extension. Ph.D. Thesis 2015. Co-delivree par l’Universite
           de Lille et l’Ecole des Mines de Douai.
        • Extended results of Tornado : A Run-Fail-Grow approach for Dynamic Application Tayloring. Ecole des mines de Douai, France. 50p, July 2014
        • Nick Papoulias, Noury Bouraqadi, Luc Fabresse, Stephane Ducasse and Marcus Denker, Mercury: Properties and Design of a Remote Debugging
           Solution using Reflection, Journal of Object Technology, 14, 1 :1-36, 2015


Links
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        • Pharo: http://www.pharo.org
        • PharoThings: https://github.com/pharo-iot/PharoThings
        • INRIA RMOD: http://rmod.lille.inria.fr
        • INRIA Lille: http://www.inria.fr/lille
        • INRIA in General: http://www.inria.fr
                • Lille:
                • http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lille
                • http://wikitravel.org/en/Lille

Permanent Link: https://rmod.inria.fr/web/blog/2018-01-25