I am pleased to announce my arrival in the For-CoaLa project. I will be reinforcing the team as a postdoctoral researcher.

In the past years, I have done my education in Aix-Marseille Université. After graduating with a major in fundamental computer science, I joined the LIF (Laboratoire d’Informatique Fondamentale, now renamed as LIS - Laboratoire d’Informatique et Systèmes) as a PhD student in the DALGO team (Distributed ALGOrithms). In a word, my doctorate focused on the computability of various consensus problems in distributed systems and the topological methods that can be applied to reason about such problems.

After defending my thesis, I shifted from theoretical research to more practical concerns with a first postdoctoral position in the STACK team at IMT Atlantique. There, I studied configuration description languages and in particular, I formalized the semantics of one of them: CUE. Such languages differ from configuration management languages that are the focus of For-CoaLa. While configuration management deals with the reconciliation of machine states with respect to user intent, configuration description languages focus on giving the right programming constructs to users in order to represent any kind of configuration data, and offer mechanisms for their validation, transformation, reuse, etc. They can be seen as an intermediate programming layer between users editing configuration code and the tools that effectively applies configurations to target systems.

This prior apprehension of configuration languages semantics coupled with a background on distributed systems will certainly be beneficial to the For-CoaLa project. Feel free to contact me by email at eloi.perdereau@univ-orleans.fr for any related discussions.