Picture: valduriezwebThe prestigious distinction from the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) was recently awarded to a French national for the third time. This is a major honour for Patrick Valduriez, Senior Researcher at Inria and leader of the Zenith project-team (INRIA /LIRMM).

As one of the most influential computing societies in the scientific and educational world, the ACM awards every year the title of ACM Fellow to a few of its members for her outstanding contributions to computer science, the origin of fundamental knowledge and technological progress. It signifies international recognition at the highest level by one's peers.

Delighted with this distinction, Patrick Valduriez notes that "for the English-speaking world, computing is a major science, which is not yet the case in France." He feels that the award of this distinction also provides recognition of his team's work and, in particular, shows the international community what can be achieved in France.

"I hope there'll be more French nationals recognized in years to come, which will help raise awareness of our research," he said, adding that Inria's recent introduction of awards is contributing to enhancing the discipline's visibility.


Data management at the heart of the achievement

The award celebrates Patrick Valduriez's work on data management. More specifically, his contributions to the parallel management of data—using the parallel computing capabilities of large multiprocessor machines—or data distributed across a network. "This is the subject I've been working on for my entire career, and it has become fashionable in recent years thanks to big data," he observed, pointing out that the topic has been around for some time. Primarily focused on the practical applications of his work, he admits that he likes to push his ideas as far as possible and is therefore naturally inclined towards their applications, based on fundamental advances.

He is currently exploring data management in the field of life sciences and agronomy, in collaboration with INRA (French National Institute for Agricultural Research) and CIRAD (a French research centre working with developing countries to tackle international agricultural and development issues) in Montpellier. He says that his key projects include Numev (an abbreviation of the French for "digital technology for the environment and living organisms") Laboratory of Excellence and the Institute of Computational Biology dedicated to biological big data in health, agronomy and the environment.

"Today there's a whole host of data to manage in connection with multidisciplinary projects, and the major point of interest is to be able to stress techniques to the limit by integrating complexity and heterogeneity at different scales," he explains, concluding that there is a fair balance and, above all, a virtuous circle between fundamental research and applied research.

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