Institute IMDEA Networks Appoints Dr. Pierre François as Staff Researcher

14 November 2011

Dr. François will contribute broad experience in areas such as IP Networking, Routing, Routing Architectures and Routing Economics.

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Institute IMDEA Networks has announced that Dr. Pierre François has joined the team in September 2011 in the role of Staff Researcher, bringing with him extensive experience in IP Networking, Routing, Routing Architectures and Routing Economics. His publication on Disruption free topology reconfiguration in OSPF Networks without protocol modifications, has received the IEEE INFOCOM 2007 Best Paper Award, among more than 1400 papers submitted. At the Institute Dr. François will be focusing on areas such as IP Routing scaling and convergence, Internet Governance, Internet Routing economics, and Network measurements.

Most recently, Dr. François was a postdoctoral researcher at Université Catholique de Louvain – Fonds National de la Recherche Scientique (FNRS), in Belgium, where he conducted research partially funded by the Belgian National Science Fund, the “Trilogy” EU project, (in which Institute IMDEA Networks also collaborated), and Cisco Systems. He focused on routing features, such as BGP Add-Paths, BGP Graceful Shutdown and IP and Multicast Fast ReRoute. His work on these topics includes several papers published between 2007 and 2010 in top conferences, journals and magazines within the networking field, as well as multiple Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) Working Group documents, in various working groups of the Routing and Operations and Management areas, respectively. During the academic year 2009-2010, Dr. François was a lecturer at Université catholique de Louvain and the following year, he travelled to Université d’Abomey-Calavi, Republic of Benin, for the same purpose.

Dr. François received his B.Sc. in Economics and Management Science from the Facultés Notre Dame de la Paix in Namir, Belgium, where he also holds a Masters in Computer Science, awarded with Great Distinction. He received his Ph.D. from Université catholique de Louvain. He has been a member of the technical program committee for the IEEE’s International Workshop on Quality of Service (IWQoS), the International Teletraffic Congress (ITC), and the Future-Networks and Re-Arquitecting the Internet (Re-Arch) Workshops, and is a reviewer for technical journals including Transactions on Networking and Service Management, as well as for conferences including the IEEE International Conference on Computer Communications (INFOCOM) and the IEEE/ICST International Conference on COMmunication System softWAre and middlewaRE (COMSWARE). He is very active on standardization activities and holds an extensive list of IETF contributions. (See a complete list here). Dr. François also maintains an active profile within the international scientific community and has participated in several research visits and collaborations with both academia and industry. He holds a USA patent.