I'm a researcher and teaching assistant at the Computer Science and Engineering Department - INGI, part of the ICTEAM and the EPL, at the Université catholique de Louvain - UCLouvain, Belgium. My research focus is self-management of scalable decentralised systems, which basically means that I work a lot with peer-to-peer networks. I'm currently studying how the elasticity of peer-to-peer systems can be used in cloud-computing.

I also develop software to concretely apply and test research ideas. I'm the main developer of Beernet, a peer-to-peer system with strongly-consistent replicated storage, and I was the release manager of Mozart-Oz version 1.3.2. My background also includes object-oriented programming and software engineering.

Why decentralised systems? Because centralised systems presents a single point of failure. That means: no server, no application. And even if the server do not fail, it represents a point of congestion, therefore, they don't scale. Why peer-to-peer systems? Because they can be self-organised, provide efficient routing, and they are more tolerant to failures, so they are self-healing as well. If one peer is down, another peer can carry on with its task.

So, what do we do with the peer-to-peer network once we have it? The idea is to build services on top of this network. To do that, we build a decentralised transaction protocol, that allows us to store the data of the service in a strongly-consistent way.