Pierre-Louis Roman

I am a postdoctoral researcher in the Computer Systems Institute of USI Lugano, working with Patrick Eugster since 2019-08. I work on distributed systems with a focus on large-scale systems such as public distributed ledgers and blockchains.

I received a BSc in 2011 and an MSc in 2013 both from Sorbonne Université, and a PhD in 2018 for my work on decentralized systems performed under the supervision of François Taïani and Davide Frey in the WIDE group of Université de Rennes - Inria - IRISA, including a summer at VU Amsterdam with Spyros Voulgaris.

Interests: distributed systems, distributed ledgers/blockchains, operating systems, privacy-enhancing tech.

Good news

Bad news have been elluded for space reasons.

  • 2021-01 – We are still looking for PhD candidates with strong background in systems!
  • 2020-10 – AEON accepted at OOPSLA [C5].
  • 2020-09 – We have an open PhD position in scaling distributed ledgers and blockchains!
  • 2020-08 – Cicero accepted at Middleware 2020 [C6].
  • 2020-03 – PLASMA accepted at EuroSys 2020 [C4].
  • 2020-02 – Received a Distributed Systems research award from Facebook!

Awards & Grants

Publications

Tags: Conference paper, Short paper, Research report, Thesis.

[C6] Consistent and Secure Network Updates Made Practical
James Lembke, Srivatsan Ravi, Pierre-Louis Roman, Patrick Eugster
Middleware 2020 Delft, The Netherlands
DOI PDF code
[C5] Scalable and Serializable Networked Multi-Actor Programming
Bo Sang, Patrick Eugster, Gustavo Petri, Srivatsan Ravi, Pierre-Louis Roman
OOPSLA 2020 Chicago, USA
DOI PDF vod web
[C4] PLASMA: Programmable Elasticity for Stateful Cloud Computing Applications
Bo Sang, Pierre-Louis Roman, Patrick Eugster, Hui Lu, Srivatsan Ravi, Gustavo Petri
EuroSys 2020 Heraklion, Greece
DOI PDF slides vod web
[S2] Dietcoin: Hardening Bitcoin Transaction Verification Process For Mobile Devices
Davide Frey, Marc X. Makkes, Pierre-Louis Roman, François Taïani, Spyros Voulgaris
Short (4p) VLDB 2019 Los Angeles, USA
DOI PDF bibtex code
[T1] Exploring heterogeneity in loosely consistent decentralized data replication
Pierre-Louis Roman
PhD thesis Université de Rennes, France
PDF bibtex slides
[R1] Dietcoin: shortcutting the Bitcoin verification process for your smartphone
Davide Frey, Marc X. Makkes, Pierre-Louis Roman, François Taïani, Spyros Voulgaris
[Research Report] Inria RR-9162
PDF arXiv bibtex
[S1] Bringing secure Bitcoin transactions to your smartphone
Davide Frey, Marc X. Makkes, Pierre-Louis Roman, François Taïani, Spyros Voulgaris
ARM @ Middleware 2016 Trento, Italy
DOI PDF bibtex slides
[C3] Speed for the elite, consistency for the masses: differentiating eventual consistency in large-scale distributed systems
Davide Frey, Achour Mostefaoui, Matthieu Perrin, Pierre-Louis Roman, François Taïani
SRDS 2016 Budapest, Hungary
DOI PDF bibtex slides code
[C2] Similitude: Decentralised Adaptation in Large-Scale P2P Recommenders
Davide Frey, Anne-Marie Kermarrec, Christopher Maddock, Andreas Mauthe, Pierre-Louis Roman, François Taïani
DAIS 2015 Grenoble, France
DOI PDF bibtex slides code
[C1] Towards a Geocentric Mobile Syndication System
Adrien Debrie, Pacôme Eberhart, Pierre-Louis Roman, Cécile Le Pape, Olivier Marin
iThings 2012 Besançon, France
DOI PDF bibtex

Invited talks

MasterKRaft: Dusting off your commodity hardware with several Mops(/s) for SMR
2020-10-28 Facebook Core Systems annual faculty summit Zoom, Cyberspace
Dietcoin: Shortcutting the Bitcoin verification process for your smartphone
2018-11-18 Master Workshop Layer 1 Solutions Amsterdam, Netherlands
Dietcoin: Shortcutting the Bitcoin verification process for your smartphone
2018-11-01 DEDIS group seminar EPFL, Switzerland
Secured light Bitcoin client with Dietcoin
2017-09-26 Distributed Systems group seminar TU Delft, Netherlands
Bringing secure Bitcoin transactions to your smartphone
2016-11-24 The 6th Inria/Technicolor workshop on big data and analytics (WOS6) Rennes, France

Techsplaining

So far, I have only techsplained in French.

[FR] A bit of blockchain, a lot of distributed ledgers
2019-06-11 Club Bretagne Communication 35 Rennes, France
slides
[FR] Blockchains, distributed ledgers, and their notarial use
2018-11-12 E-novation exhibition organized by the notaries of Brittany Rennes, France
slides
[FR] Demystifying the blockchain and its utility for notaries
2017-12-15 Regional council of notaries of Brittany Rennes, France
slides

Reviews

Journal reviewer: TDSC 2020, TMC 2020.

Conference PC member: EuroSys 2021 SPC, SOCA 2018, SC2 2018, DASC 2018, SOCA 2017, SC2 2017, SC2 2016.

External reviewer: ICDCS 2020, WWW 2020, SERIAL@MW 2017, OPODIS 2016, DCC@PODC 2016.

Teaching