Background

I grew up in the wonderful region of Gruyere in Switzerland. I got my B.Sc. degree in Communication Systems from EPFL (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Lausanne). I spent my final year (and one summer) working on multimedia delivery architectures for the H.P. research group at EPFL. I then went to Eurecom Institute to get a M.Sc. degree in Multimedia Communications. While at Eurecom, I spent some time working for France Telecom Research analyzing large-scale web server logs. Concurrently, I passed a couple of exams to get a M.Sc. degree in Network and Distributed Systems from INRIA SOP – U. Sophia-Antipolis.

I then spent six exciting months in N.Y. working for the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center (Multimedia Delivery Architectures group), before coming back to EPFL to start a Ph.D. in the Distributed Information Systems Lab (prof. Karl Aberer). In 2004, I was invited to spend a summer as a visiting researcher at Microsoft Research Asia where I worked on large-scale infrastructures to share annotated photos. In 2004 also, I taught a course for the United Nations in Geneva on XML technologies. In the summer of 2005, I was a visiting scholar at U.C. Berkeley where I worked on sensor networks with prof. Mike Franklin and probabilistic databases with people from Intel Research Berkeley.

My work at EPFL primarily dealt with decentralized (P2P) information systems, with an emphasis on infrastructures for service-oriented architectures, Peer Data Management systems, and Emergent Semantics systems. I was appointed lecturer at EPFL in 2005 and taught classes on relational data management, XML and Web Services. I won the EPFL Doctorate Award and the EPFL Press Mention for my Ph.D. in 2007. In 2007 also, I was appointed Independent Expert by the Seventh E.U. Framework Program and have been reviewing European research projects since then.

I am currently a postdoctoral scholar at MIT working with the Database Group. My current interests are in large-scale infrastructures for unconventional data such as financial, spatiotemporal, scientific, or Semantic Web data. See my projects page for more information.

I also try to keep in touch with non-research institutions. I was invited by P&G to the International IT Management Program in Rome in 2003 and to the Dive Workshop by McKinsey & Company in 2004. Last but not least, I am a co-founder and co-director of Le Bout du Monde, a high-profile public house & concert hall supporting non-profit organizations and cultural events in western Switzerland.