• Animation

• Program Committee and Conference organization

• Director of the LaMI (2004-2006). Cofounder, former deputy director and former director of the IBISC research laboratory (2006-2009).

Spatial computing is an effort to make explicit space in computation because (1) space is used as a resource (e.g. as in parallelism or in hardware) or because (2) space is an input (e.g. sensor network, cyber physical systems) or an output (e.g. CAD systems, cyber physical systems) of the computation.

MGS is an experimental programming language used as a vehicle to study:

• the use of topological notions in programming (e.g. considering a data structure as a space where the computation moves);
• the modeling and the simulation of dynamical systems with a dynamical structure through the use of topological rewriting;
• the representation of spatio-temporal concept in a unified framework (future work);
• spatial representation for musical objects and processes.

Otto e Mezzo (in short 8½) (see also this link). Otto is a declarative (dataflow) programming language for the parallel simulation of dynamical systems. Otto was inspired from multidimensional Lucid. It is a member of the synchronous programming language family. An instantaneous value is a data field: a collection of elements handled as a whole (and in parallel).

UTopoIa relies on topological notions (cellular complex and other notions originated in algebraic topology) for knowledge representation. The underlying idea investigated here is that topological relationships (such as neighborhood, border, dimension, obstruction, deformation, separabitily, connexity, path, etc.) enable the building and the structuration of knowledge representations.

We have developped this framework for analogy solving. This work was further developped in the context of formal ontology by Jean-Paul Sansonnet and Erika Valencia.

Recently, we have started a new investigation on the use of this approach for music (see below).

Antescofo is a score follower and much more: the system embeds a synchronous language that can be used to launch several processes in synchrony with the real-time interpretation of musicians. In this context, José Echeveste extends the available constructs in the direction of a full coordination language dedicated to the writing of time for composer of mixed music (electronics + human performance).

We investigate also in this project and in ANR project INEDIT new forms of interactions and the problematics of GALS/LAGS: how to couple systems that work on several time scales.

Spatial representation for music try to develop the approach initiated in UTopoIa and the use of MGS for developing new tools in musicology. This work has started with a with undergraduate project and now the PhD of Louis Bigo between the LACL and IRCAM.

An example of the current tool developed by Louis is shows here.

INEDIT (Interactivity in the Writing of Time and Interactions) is an ANR funded project launched in 2012. The project aims to provide a scientific view of the interoperability between common tools for music and audio productions, in order to open new creative dimensions coupling authoring of time and authoring of interaction. This coupling allows the development of novel dimensions in interacting with new media.

SynBioTIC is a long term project around the compilation of high-level abstractions towards bioware.

AutoChem aims at investigating and exploring an unconventional approach, based on chemical computing, to program complex computing infrastructures, such as autonomic systems. Chemical computing uses the chemical reaction metaphor to express the coordination of computations. This metaphor describes computation in terms of a chemical solution in which molecules (representing data) interact freely according to reaction rules. Chemical solutions are represented by multisets (data-structure that allows several occurrences of the same element). Computation proceeds by rewritings, which consume and produce new elements according to conditions and transformation rules. In this project, I am interested by : (1) adding more structure in the chemical approach (this can be done à la structured Gamma or à la MGS), and (2) : refining chemical programs into more efficient ones.

• Seminar & Invited talks

Close collaborators (and former PhD students):

• Olivier Michel
• Julien Cohen
• Antoine Spicher

and I have worked / I work with (non exhaustive and unordered list):

• Pascal Fradet (INRIA Grenoble, programmation)
• Annick Lesne (IHES, stochastic simulation)
• Przemek Prusinkiewicz (Calgary, declarative modeling)
• Pierre Barbier de Reuille (meristeme model)
• Denise Pumain (Paris 1, geography)
• Arnaud Banos (GCNRS, Geographie-Cité, complex systems)
• René Doursat (ISC, morphogenetic engineering)
• Moreno Andreatta (IRCAM, formalisation spatiale de la musique)
• Hugues Berry (LRI, stochastic simulation)
• Christophe Godin (CIRAD, biological modeling)
• Jean-Pierre Banâtre (IRISA, programming)
• Frédéric Gruau (U. PXI, language and hardware)
• Grant Malcolm (Liverpool, rewriting)
• Franck Delaplace (IBISC, synthetic biology)
• Pascal Liehnard (Poitier, CAD, Gmap and quasi-manifold)

I like the strange poem by R. Brautigan. I have tried to translate it.