Research interests
Pierre Francois' research focuses on areas such as IP
Routing scaling and convergence, Internet Routing economics, and Network management.
He spends most of his time on a consulting contract with Cisco Systems, focusing
on short and medium term evolution of IP routing features. He also
carries out research on BGP in the context of a Cisco URP grant aimed
at improving internal and external BGP Route Servers, with Juan
Camilo Cardona.
He works with Jaguar Networks, S.A., on operational inter-domain
routing issues. He leads a joint project with a Madrid-based WiFi
Service Provider company, Gowex S.A., developing a WiFi network monitoring
platform aimed at evaluating the QoE for Internet Services provided
over mobile WiFi APs.
Pierre Francois teaches various networking courses at Universidad
Carlos III, Madrid, and gives an Introduction to Networking course
at Universite d'Abomey-Calavi, Cotonou, Benin.
Short biography
Dr. Francois received his B.Sc. in Economics and Management Science from the Facultés Notre Dame de la Paix in Namur, Belgium, where he also holds a Masters in Computer Science, awarded with Great Distinction. He received his Ph.D. from Université catholique de Louvain. He has been a member of the technical program committee for the IEEE's International Workshop on Quality of Service (IWQoS), the International Teletraffic Congress (ITC), and the Future-Networks and Re-Arquitecting the Internet (Re-Arch) Workshops, and is a reviewer for technical journals including Transactions on Networking and Service Management, as well as for conferences including the IEEE International Conference on Computer Communications (INFOCOM) and the IEEE/ICST International Conference on COMmunication System softWAre and middlewaRE (COMSWARE). He is very active on standardization activities and holds an extensive list of IETF contributions. Dr. Francois also maintains an active profile within the international scientific community and has participated in several research visits and collaborations with both academia and industry.
Most recently, Dr. Francois was a postdoctoral researcher at Université catholique de Louvain - Fonds National de la Recherche Scientique (FNRS), in Belgium, where he conducted research partially funded by the Belgian National Science Fund, the "Trilogy" EU project, (in which Institute IMDEA Networks also collaborated), and Cisco Systems. He focused on routing features, such as BGP Add-Paths, BGP Graceful Shutdown and IP and Multicast Fast ReRoute. His work on these topics includes several papers published between 2007 and 2010 in top conferences, journals and magazines within the networking field, as well as multiple Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) Working Group documents, in various working groups of the Routing and Operations and Management areas, respectively. During the academic year 2009-2010, Dr. Francois was a lecturer at Université catholique de Louvain and the following year, he travelled to Université d'Abomey-Calavi, Republic of Benin, for the same purpose.
