At EURA NOVA, we believe technology is a catalyst for change. To embrace it, we strive to stay at the edge of knowledge. Investing in research allows us to continuously become more proficient, to maintain our know-how at the cutting edge of IT, to share its benefits with our customers, and to incubate the products of tomorrow. As we look back on the year 2019, we are both proud and happy of the work achieved!

Published papers:

We are happy to say that our R&D department has published five peer-reviewed scientific papers last year.

• LEAD: A Formal Specification For Event Processing

In June, our R&D engineer Anas presented his work on complex event processing at the 13Th ACM international Conference on distributed and event-based systems, which was taking place in Germany.

Anas Al Bassit, Skhiri Sabri, LEAD: A Formal Specification For Event Processing, in 13Th ACM international Conference on distributed and event-based systems 2019

• Coherence Regularization for Neural Topic Models

In July, our R&D engineer Kate presented her paper on neural topic models at the 16th International Symposium on Neural Networks taking place in Moscow.

Katsiaryna Krasnashchok, Aymen Cherif, Coherence Regularization for Neural Topic Models. in 16th International Symposium on Neural Networks 2019 (ISNN 2019)

• STRASS: A Light and Effective Method for Extractive Summarization

In August, our PhD student Léo was in Italy to present his paper at the 2019 ACL Student Research Workshop.

Léo Bouscarrat, Antoine Bonnefoy, Thomas Peel, Cécile Pereira, STRASS: A Light and Effective Method for Extractive Summarization Based on Sentence Embeddings, in 2019 ACL Student Research Workshop, Florence, Italy.

• GraphOpt: Framework for Automatic Parameters Tuning of Graph Processing Frameworks

In December, the paper written by our former intern and now full-time colleague Muaz was presented in Los Angeles at the third IEEE International Workshop on Benchmarking, Performance Tuning and Optimization for Big Data Applications.

Muaz Twaty, Amine Ghrab, Skhiri Sabri: GraphOpt: a Framework for Automatic Parameters Tuning of Graph Processing Frameworks. 2019 IEEE International Conference on Big Data (Big Data) Workshops, Los Angeles, CA, USA.

• A Performance Prediction Model for Spark Applications

In June 2020, our paper written as part of the ECCO research project we have been leading at EURA NOVA will be presented at the Big Data congress 2020 taking place in Hawaii.

Florian Demesmaeker, Amine Ghrab, Usama Javaid, Ahmed Amir Kanoun, A Performance Prediction Model for Spark Applications, in the proceedings of Big Data congress 2020.

IEEE Big Data Workshop

Last December, Eura Nova’s research centre held the fourth workshop on real-time and stream analytics in big data at the 2019 IEEE Conference on Big Data in Los Angeles. The workshop brought together leading players including Confluent, Apache Pulsar, the University of Virginia and Télécom Paris Tech as well as 8 renowned speakers from 6 different countries. We received more than 30 applications and we are proud to have hosted such interesting presentations of papers in stream mining, IoT, and industry 4.0. Special thanks to our keynote guests, Matteo Merli (Apache Pulsar) and John Roesler (Confluent), and all the attendees and speakers!

JERICHO, research driving innovations

The mission of the JERICHO research track is to make the latest technologies available to our client, to offer them a competitive edge to play along megacorporations.  After two years of intense work, seven published papers, presentations in international conferences spanning Russia, the United States, Germany, Australia, or Belgium, our Jericho project has come to an end.

And the adventure continues! We are really excited to continue our work on innovative solutions for the next data challenges with our new research track ASGARD.

Our R&D director Sabri Skhiri says: “The costs of data solutions and the lack of data scientists will increase in the next 3 to 5 years and solutions to reduce them will benefit from a large market. In this sense, ASGARD is precisely in the strategy of Eura Nova. ASGARD aims to reduce these costs by automating the most expensive tasks. As the world becomes increasingly digital and reinvents itself, innovation and research are essential in the market.”

Academic collaboration

This year, we welcomed nine interns across our three offices. A big kudo to our intern Muaz who successfully finished his master thesis in collaboration with EURA NOVA! The goal of his thesis was to optimise the configuration of distributed graph frameworks. He now joined EURA NOVA to work as a full-time employee.

Talks & seminars

This year, the research team had the pleasure to be invited at several international conferences:

• In February, our research director Sabri Skhiri gave a seminar on modern Stateful Stream Processing at EPT. Our R&D engineer Syrine Ferjaoui also went to Morocco to give a workshop about data architecture at the Annual International Conference on Arab Women In Computing.
• In March, Sabri was at the World AI Show in Dubaï to talk about successfully deploying AI projects in production. He was also invited to Barcelona Tech to give a Big Data Architecture & Design  seminar.
• In June, our data privacy officer Nazanin Gifani gave a masterclass on Fairness and Transparency in AI at the DI Summit in Brussels.
• In September, our R&D project manager Shivom Aggarwal talked at the Arab Future Cities Summit 2019 about deploying AI at industrial scale for smart cities.
• In October, our software engineer Christophe Philemotte was in San Francisco to talk at the Kafka Summit about crossing the streams thanks to Kafka and Flink.
• In November, Sabri was invited as a keynote speaker at the 17th International Conference on Service-Oriented Computing to share his experience about the convergence between micro-service, stateful stream processing and function as a service.

Summer schools & conferences

This year, Euranovians attended more than 15 prestigious international conferences and summits across the world to remain up to date and grow our network. We investigated the state of the art in streaming, data science, DevOps, computer vision or cloud engineering at conferences such as Flink Forward, Spark AI Summit, Kubecon, IEEE Big Data, DataWorks Summit, Kafka Summit, NeurIPS, RedHat, Elixir LDN or CVPR.

Euranovians brought back what they learned for the rest of the team and the big data community. Find our public summaries, identified trends and review of conferences here:

• Flink Forward (Berlin)
• Spark AI summit (Amsterdam)
• IEEE Big Data (Los Angeles)
• Kafka Summit (San Francisco)
• DEBS 2019 ( Darmstadt)
• ACL 2019 (Florence)
• Dataworks Summit (Barcelona)