Pierre-Louis Roman

Hi, I am a postdoc in the Distributed Computing Lab led by Rachid Guerraoui at EPFL. I try to improve the security and efficiency of large-scale distributed systems such as distributed ledgers and cryptocurrencies.

I was previously a postdoc working on the security and efficiency of datacenter systems in the SWYSTEMS group led by Patrick Eugster at USI Lugano. I completed my PhD on large-scale decentralized systems in 2018 supervised by François Taïani and Davide Frey at the WIDE group of Université de Rennes - Inria - IRISA and partly by Spyros Voulgaris during my summer at VU Amsterdam. Earlier, I received an MSc in 2013 and a BSc in 2011 both in computer science from Sorbonne Université.

Interests: Distributed systems, System security, Distributed ledgers and blockchains, Operating systems.

Publications

Peer-reviewed journal articles

[J3] Differentiated consistency for worldwide gossips
Davide Frey, Achour Mostefaoui, Matthieu Perrin, Pierre-Louis Roman, François Taïani
IEEE TPDS 2023
DOI .pdf .bib code
[J2] Secure and Reliable Network Updates
James Lembke, Srivatsan Ravi, Pierre-Louis Roman, Patrick Eugster
ACM TOPS 2023
DOI .pdf .bib code
[J1] DEFUSE: An Interface for Fast and Correct User-Space File-System Access
James Lembke, Pierre-Louis Roman, Patrick Eugster
ACM TOS 2022
DOI .pdf .bib code

Peer-reviewed conference articles

[C7] Live in the Express Lane
Patrick Jahnke, Vincent Riesop, Pierre-Louis Roman, Pavel Chuprikov, Patrick Eugster
USENIX ATC 2021 Zoom, Cyberspace
.pdf .bib web
[C6] Consistent and Secure Network Updates Made Practical
James Lembke, Srivatsan Ravi, Pierre-Louis Roman, Patrick Eugster
Middleware 2020 Zoom, Cyberspace
DOI .pdf .bib vod code
[C5] Scalable and Serializable Networked Multi-Actor Programming
Bo Sang, Patrick Eugster, Gustavo Petri, Srivatsan Ravi, Pierre-Louis Roman
OOPSLA 2020 Zoom, Cyberspace
DOI .pdf .bib vod web
[C4] PLASMA: Programmable Elasticity for Stateful Cloud Computing Applications
Bo Sang, Pierre-Louis Roman, Patrick Eugster, Hui Lu, Srivatsan Ravi, Gustavo Petri
EuroSys 2020 Zoom, Cyberspace
DOI .pdf .bib slides vod web
[C3] Speed for the elite, consistency for the masses: differentiating eventual consistency in large-scale distributed systems
Davide Frey, Achour Mostefaoui, Matthieu Perrin, Pierre-Louis Roman, François Taïani
SRDS 2016 Budapest, Hungary
DOI .pdf .bib slides code
[C2] Similitude: Decentralised Adaptation in Large-Scale P2P Recommenders
Davide Frey, Anne-Marie Kermarrec, Christopher Maddock, Andreas Mauthe, Pierre-Louis Roman, François Taïani
DAIS 2015 Grenoble, France
DOI .pdf .bib slides code
[C1] Towards a Geocentric Mobile Syndication System
Adrien Debrie, Pacôme Eberhart, Pierre-Louis Roman, Cécile Le Pape, Olivier Marin
iThings 2012 Besançon, France
DOI .pdf .bib

Short articles

[S2] Dietcoin: Hardening Bitcoin Transaction Verification Process For Mobile Devices
Davide Frey, Marc X. Makkes, Pierre-Louis Roman, François Taïani, Spyros Voulgaris
Short (4p) VLDB 2019 Los Angeles, USA
DOI .pdf .bib code
[S1] Bringing secure Bitcoin transactions to your smartphone
Davide Frey, Marc X. Makkes, Pierre-Louis Roman, François Taïani, Spyros Voulgaris
ARM @ Middleware 2016 Trento, Italy
DOI .pdf .bib slides

Research reports

[R2] SurferMonkey: A Decentralized Anonymous Blockchain Intercommunication System via Zero Knowledge Proofs
Miguel Dı́az Montiel, Rachid Guerraoui, Pierre-Louis Roman
arXiv:2210.13242
DOI arXiv
[R1] Dietcoin: shortcutting the Bitcoin verification process for your smartphone
Davide Frey, Marc X. Makkes, Pierre-Louis Roman, François Taïani, Spyros Voulgaris
arXiv:1803.10494, Inria RR-9162
DOI .pdf arXiv

Patents

[P1] Rapidly Verifiable Aggregate Signatures
Martina Camaioni, Rachid Guerraoui, Matteo Monti, Pierre-Louis Roman, Manuel Vidigueira, Gauthier Voron
Patent deposited in 2022-09

Thesis

[T1] Exploring heterogeneity in loosely consistent decentralized data replication
Pierre-Louis Roman
PhD thesis Université de Rennes, France
.pdf .bib slides

Invited talks

MasterKRaft: Dusting off your commodity hardware with several Mops(/s) for SMR
2020-10-28 Facebook Core Systems annual faculty summit Zoom, Cyberspace
Dietcoin: Shortcutting the Bitcoin verification process for your smartphone
2018-11-18 Master Workshop Layer 1 Solutions Amsterdam, Netherlands
Dietcoin: Shortcutting the Bitcoin verification process for your smartphone
2018-11-01 DEDIS group seminar EPFL, Switzerland
Secured light Bitcoin client with Dietcoin
2017-09-26 Distributed Systems group seminar TU Delft, Netherlands
Bringing secure Bitcoin transactions to your smartphone
2016-11-24 The 6th Inria/Technicolor workshop on big data and analytics (WOS6) Rennes, France

Techsplaining / Popularization

So far, I have only techsplained in French.

[FR] A bit of blockchain, a lot of distributed ledgers
2019-06-11 Club Bretagne Communication 35 Rennes, France
slides
[FR] Blockchains, distributed ledgers, and their notarial use
2018-11-12 E-novation exhibition organized by the notaries of Brittany Rennes, France
slides
[FR] Demystifying the blockchain and its utility for notaries
2017-12-15 Regional council of notaries of Brittany Rennes, France
slides

Reviewing

Journal reviewer

Conference PC member

External reviewer

Teaching

  • Fall 2019, 2020 – Two lectures on distributed ledgers, MS Distributed Systems course, USI Lugano.
  • Spring 2020 – Invited lecture on distributed ledgers, MS Information Security course, Mid Sweden Uni.

Awards & Grants