PhD in IoT and Pharo

Hi

we have a PhD position in France around IoT and Pharo.

Description

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. Krudiaskov).

The goal of this PhD is to revisit the architecture around such
mini-kernels for building IoT applicatons. The following tasks are
foreseen :

— improve the tools to : edit, compile, debug, deploy and update such
kernels on IoT devices. Learning how to debug remotely and dynamically
update such IoT systems using the PharmID Pharo environment. This task
will be in cooperation with M. Denker and D. Krudiakov 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,

— 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 appli- cations.

— 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.

— Lighweight virtual machines. Virtual machines in the IoT context are
very powerful for incremental deployment or dynamic updates. Although
they are tuned for speed,they consume space compared to a non VM-based
program. In this task, we would like to investigate what is the
minimal memory consumption that we can reach for a VM usable for IoT.
To do so we will use a standard VM such as Cog (the open- source
virtual machine of Pharo) and degrade it. We will use it since our
minimal kernels are running on it.

Note that ZweiDenker GmbH is interested in collaboration on the IoT
management cloud infrastructure.

Application

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-2017].

Bibliography

— G Polito, St ́ephane 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-delivr ́ee par
l’Universit ́e de Lille et l’E ́cole des Mines de Douai.

— Extended results of Tornado : A Run-Fail-Grow approach for Dynamic
Application Tayloring. Commanditeur : E ́cole des mines de Douai,
France. 50p, July 2014

— Nick Papoulias, Noury Bouraqadi, Luc Fabresse, St ́ephane Ducasse
and Marcus Denker, Mercury : Properties and Design of a Remote
Debugging Solution using Reflection, Journal of Object Technology, 14,
1 :1-36, 2015

— Madcar:anabstractmodelfordynamicandautomatic(re-)assemblingofcomponent-
based applications G Grondin, N Bouraqadi, L Vercouter. International
Symposium on Component-Based Software Engineering, 360-367.



Stef and Luc