Jan 04 2017

Christine Morin (Inria) & Deb Agarwal (LBNL): An Inria@SiliconValley success story

Christine Morin & Deborah Agarwal

Christine Morin & Deb Agarwal

Christine Morin is a senior researcher at Inria Rennes – Bretagne Atlantique and scientific leader of the Myriads Inria project-team.

Deb Agarwal is a senior scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory where she is the head of the Data Science and Technology Department.

Over the years, Deb and Christine developed a strong research collaboration supported by Inria@SiliconValley. Since September 2011, Christine  has been an affiliate in the Data Science and Technology department and in 2015 Deb was awarded a five-year Inria International Chair.

They share with us their experience with the Inria@SiliconValley program.

 

  • Deb and Christine, can you tell us about your collaboration and your current work?

– Christine: The Myriads Inria project-team and the Data Science and Technology (DST) department have had an active research collaboration since 2011. I was hosted for my sabbatical visit in the DST (named Advanced Computing for Science – ACS at that time) department from September 2011 to August 2013 and I am still an affiliate at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory (LBNL). Our research activities relate to the design of data management and distributed systems for Science. Our goal is to create a collaborative distributed software ecosystem to manage data lifecycle and enable data analytics on distributed data sets and resources. Specifically, our goal is to build appropriate execution environments that allow users to seamlessly execute their end-to-end dynamic data analysis workflows in various resource environments and scales while meeting energy-efficiency, performance and dependability goals. We engage in deep partnerships with scientific teams such as the climate community through the AmeriFlux and Fluxnet projects and use a mix of user research with system software R&D to address specific challenges that these communities face. Recently we have been developing a mobile application for reliable collection of field data for Fluxnet. Moreover, this year, Anna Giannakou, one of my PhD students, got the opportunity to do a three-month internship in the DST department to work with Sean Peisert on building a workflow for anomaly detection in HPC environments using statistical data.

  • How did Inria@SiliconValley support your collaboration?

– Christine: Our research collaboration has benefited from a strong support of the Inria@SiliconValley program. We have been supported since the beginning, first with my sabbatical stay from 2011 to 2013 at DST (formerly known as ACS), and then with the creation in 2013 of the DALHIS joint research project (Inria@SiliconValley associate team) to sustain our collaboration after I returned to France. The project has been renewed for 3 years in 2016. We also obtained an Inria postdoc grant in the context of the Inria@SiliconValley program: Eugen Feller, one of my former PhD students who was first hosted by ACS department as a summer intern (July-September 2012) spent his 16 months Post-Doc in the ACS department in 2013-2014 to work on data processing for science applications. In 2015 Deb Agarwal was been awarded an Inria International Chair allowing her to stay 12 months at Inria during a period of 5 years starting in 2015. She already visited us twice for 2-3 months in 2015 and 2016.

  • What is next for LBNL- Inria cooperation?

– Deb: During his visit at Inria in 2015 and 2016, David Brown, the director of the computational research division at LBNL met several project-teams in Rennes, Saclay, Lyon and Grenoble. The idea is to strengthen the collaboration between Inria and Berkeley lab on environmental and energy-related challenges with a focus on the interdependence of water-energy systems. The goal of the collaboration will be to increase the number of associated teams working together between Berkeley Lab and Inria.

  • Christine, can you tell us about your 2-year experience at LBNL and as Inria@SiliconValley scientific coordinator?

– Christine: As a researcher at LBNL, I enjoyed working closely with scientific domains to build data and computation capabilities. The DST department has a strong research expertise in HPC, collaborative and workflow tools, machine learning, data management, data processing. I actively engaged in three research collaborations with ACS personnel including data management frameworks for scientific applications in cloud environments (with Lavanya Ramakrishnan), use of data-mining and machine-learning techniques to improve resource and failure management in large-scale infrastructures (with Taghrid Samak), and providing community access to MODIS Satellite Reprojection and Reduction Pipeline and Data Sets (with Valerie Hendrix and Lavanya Ramakrishnan).

When I became Inria@SiliconValley scientific coordinator, this program was still in its infancy, initiated a year before I arrived. The number of associate teams in the program increased from 7 in 2011 to 21 teams in 2013. I actively promoted the Inria@SiliconValley program in the bay area. This led me to meet several researchers at Berkeley, Stanford and other universities and also to network with R&D engineers from several start-ups and big players in the Silicon Valley. I organized seminars targeting especially young researchers to present them the research opportunities in Europe and of course at Inria. Last but not least, with Tania Castro, we created the Inria@SiliconValley website providing in a single place up-to-date information about the program to give more visibility to the program.

  • Deb, you are an active advocate for diversity in computing and a board member of the Computing Research Association?s Committee on the Status of Women in Computing Research (CRA-W). Can you tell us more about it?

– Deb: I joined CRA-W in 2012 to help provide mentoring to early and mid career women researchers. We run workshops that bring together senior women researchers as speakers and mentors for the attendees. We run the workshop approximately every two years. The workshop is targeted at aiding in retention and advancement of women researchers. We also have a workshop called Grad Cohort that brings together women graduate students in their second or third year of graduate school and provides mentoring and career information.In addition, we have student internship programs that give women early exposure to research. It has been a pleasure to work with the rest of the CRA-W board on the diversity issue. It is really exciting to work with so many successful and impressive women on this issue. For our latest early and mid career mentoring workshops, Christine came and served as a senior speaker and mentor during the workshop.

Interview by Tania Castro, Inria European & International Partnerships Department 

Related articles: