- 26 May, 2021
- News
In this interview conducted by Pascal Steichen, CEO of SECURITYMADEIN.LU, Yves Le Traon, Full Professor in Computer Science at the University of Luxembourg, Head of the SerVal research group & Co-Director of the Master in Information System Security Management at the University of Luxembourg, tells us about his journey as a researcher.
Yves Le Traon is leading a group of 30 researchers, PhD candidates and post-Doc in software engineering, validation & security, called SerVal at the University of Luxembourg.
SerVal stands for:
- Security: everything that can improve the security of software systems
- Reasoning: research about machine learning systems (systems that embed AI components) to improve their quality and make sure they are robust to attacks
- Validation: software testing
And according to him, supervising PhD and post-Doc students rely on the alchemy between the student and the supervisor. “Just like how a Padawan becomes a Jedi”, he says.
In research, interactions play an important role as he explains that the most difficult aspect is to identify and express the problem correctly. Once this is successfully done, half of the way is already done.
Although his first dream was to become an archaeologist, a career in research has always been in his DNA. And in a way, he finds similarities between these two worlds.
“I’m happy with my job and Luxembourg is a great place for research.”
Papers published in times of Covid-19
Involved in the Covid-19 Task Force at the University of Luxembourg, Yves Le Traon has published in 2020, during the first lockdown, a paper named “Data driven simulation and optimization for covid-19 exit strategies”. This paper has received the Best Paper Award at the KDD Conference, last summer.
The objective of this research was to correlate the available data from the different lockdown strategies in use in different countries in order to analyse and predict the impact of the measures taken. The idea was to train a machine learning based on all this data in order to transform it into predictor, which will allow users to move certain indicators and actually measure their impact:
- What if I close the shops and keep the schools open? etc.
As part of his extensive career, Yves Le Traon has spent some time at the University of Berkeley in the USA, where he worked on Testing Techniques.
“I came back renewed not only in terms of research but also in terms of teaching.”
He made lifelong connections there and now encourages young people to pursue a research career which he describes as more than rewarding, as researchers get to meet a lot of people, experience new cultures and learn on a daily basis.
Yves Le Traon is Co-Director of the Master in Information System Security Management at the University of Luxembourg, which he proudly describes as “a lifelong learning programme that is close to the economy needs in terms of skills”.
Yves Le Traon is organising the next International Conference on Software Maintenance & Evolution (ICSME) that will take place remotely in Autumn, where he will publicise Luxembourg.
Watch the full interview:
