This month was a very interesting month for Tech related news. I would have loved to talk about the new Jolla’s phone and the ‘Other Half’, the XBOX ONE, Marissa Mayer’s Yahoo, BBC’s Perceptive Radio or even Google I/O.
But instead I will write about the rise of Instant Messaging Apps.
Common questions heard around IT:
Is IT a science? an engineering domain? Is it a source of profit or a deep endless hole for money? What’s the map of job types in the domain?
“Innovation can be considered as the transformation of dreams into concrete and tangible things”. Thanks to this point of view, Walt Disney developed unconsciously one of the most efficient innovation process that leads the current success of its well-known company. In 1994, a scientist named Robert Dilts formalized Walt Disney’s innovation process. His work is the root of the process used by EURA NOVA today to foster creativity and innovation.
One of the biggest news of the month was the announcement and release of Facebook Home. For those of you who haven’t heard about Facebook Home, it’s an Android Launcher replacement. What does it do? It basically replaces your lock screen and home screen with your Facebook newsfeed. Is it good? Well, apart some privacy concern (your newsfeed appears on your lock screen without the need to unlock the phone), it is as good as your friends are, meaning that if you have a lot of friends who love Hello Kitty, your phone will be an Hello Kitty Phone.
But what Facebook Home shows, is that Android is a very customizable platform that can be tailored to specific needs, even by removing all Google’s services (e.g.: Amazon’s Kindle, Barnes & Noble’s Nook).
For the first time a TEDx event was hosted in Louvain-la-Neuve last 23 march 2013. It was the 4th anniversary of TEDx and plenty of conferences were organized around the world at this occasion. Like all TED conferences, the spirit of this conference was based on the motto “ideas worth spreading”. Sixteen speakers were invited to give twenty minutes talks on various subjects going from artistic cooking, to collective awareness over politics and bad managements practices in companies. The day was divided in four parts of four talks and between the parts we had the opportunity to discuss with the speakers and the audience on an informal way.
In the scope of a Master Thesis collaboration between the Université de Liège (ULg) – Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department and EURA NOVA, we have been working last year on cloud standard of service interoperability. This work has been summarized in a paper [1] accepted in the poster session at 3rd International Conference on Cloud Computing and Services Science, CLOSER 2013. The goal of this project was to contribute on solving the lock-in problem inherent to current cloud offerings. We based our solution on open cloud standards, mainly OCCI.
In total this academical year, five Master Theses and one internship have been conducted in collaboration with 3 different academical institutions in Belgium: Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB), Université de Liège (ULg) and Université Catholique de Louvain (UCL). Let’s here quickly review their goals and contributions.
This year we started a research project, named AROM, in collaboration with the Université Libre de Bruxelles. We wanted to evaluate a Data Flow Graph (DFG) processing framework and compare it to a traditional MapReduce (MR) one. In addition, we analyzed high level data manipulation languages such as PigLatin [1] and investigated whether a MR approach introduces an important overhead in the transformation of data operations to the physical execution plan. Going further, we analyzed a typical class of data analytic, the pipelines jobs and we studied the adequacy of DFG for ease of use and performances. Finally, we used functional programming in order to introduce higher order functions to simplify the expression of jobs and to promote the re-usability of operators.
I am pleased to announce the release of the Okku library.
Okku is a Clojure wrapper around the Akka library. Very briefly, Akka brings the Actor model to the Scala programming language, and hence to the JVM. The Actor model is a model of computation based on small, asynchronous units that communicate only through message passing, without any shared memory.
As we usually do at the end of the year, we will try to summarize the activities led at EURA NOVA R&D during this year. In this post I come back on our scientific publications we had this year. Those publications cover distributed data storage, model management & governance in finance and, finally, elastic architectures for cloud infrastructures. Let me briefly introduce you those papers.