Jean-Luc Dormoy

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Short personal curriculum

 

EDF Group’s site

 

Kalray

VESTA-SYSTEM

 

Moore’s Law Blog




Moore’s Law Blog

 

Scientific &

Technical

Publications

(prior to 2001)

 

I have also a few things which come to my mind here – where you can also find nice photos by my wife Brigitte.

 

Who am I? I am currently building a new company devoted to personal information management, and featuring innovative hardware and software. Mysterious? Yes, please wait for the product to be ready and public. I can give you its code name: Shaman.

 

Previously, I have been working for the EDF group, where I was in charge of Smart Metering & Home Technologies (Smart Grid) strategy for its Customer Branch. I was based in Cologne, at Yello Strom premises, a German energy and service supplier. Yello Strom has a wonderful, very active and creative team, and we have done together nice innovative things for our customers and the future of energy, in particular the Sparzähler.

I was also commuting around Europe, mainly between Germany, the UK and France, to help EDF Group to find its way in the Smart Grid (r-)evolution. EDF Group has 40 million customers throughout Europe, and is one of the leading electric power and energy suppliers in the world, and so has its word to say in this innovative area bound to energy efficiency, renewables, local generation and storage, electromobility, and the like.

In this, Home Technologies and Customer engagement are key. It is the next wave of pervasive, embedded IT technologies, which already is the playground of innovative companies. Why energy? Because it is one of the leading services that will be made possible through Home Technologies: bringing energy savings to everybody; and then carbon-free energy. And because better IT+energy is one of the things current world needs, and something I hope I can help to happen.

 

This is also why I am involved in the VESTA-SYSTEM company as a strategic advisor. VESTA-SYSTEM is a startup selling sophisticated software for energy efficiency and management in buildings. VESTA-SYSTEM is still a small company, but it has recently won contracts with construction companies which will boost its next development step.

 

In a different area, purely related to IT, I also co-founded in 2008 the Kalray company, and I have been since its Scientific Committee Chairman. Kalray is putting on the market in 2012 a chip with 256 processors, called MMPA (Multi Purpose Processor Array) together with its programming environment, AccessCore®. This is what people now call a many-core. People already have multi-core systems in their PC or in their smart phone. However things change when « multi » is turned into « many »: software is required to be parallel from its initial design, and this changes many things. Besides, the continuation of Moore’s law will necessarily push many-cores into mainstream in the coming years. So, we have great expectations for Kalray, please stay tuned and probably part of it!

 

Formerly, I spent 5 years and a half at CEA Technological Research Division. I was in charge of programme strategy and European affairs, covering topics from computing architectures to embedded systems, software, and cognitive systems. CEA-DRT, with its three units LIST, LETI and LITEN, is a major player in France in the area of micro and nano technology, software intensive systems, and new energy technology. It brings together more than 3,000 permanent researchers in Grenoble and Saclay. It is mainly funded through industrial and institutional contracts.

I was until 2007 president of the evaluation of the Software Technology programme (30 M€ funding/year), under the umbrella of the French Agence Nationale de la Recherche.

I helped to build the ARTEMIS Joint Undertaking on Embedded Systems, which is the major European initiative in this field. I was member of its Steering Board, and I had the honor to be elected by European researchers in the field at its Presidium. I also led the Roadmap for Software-Intensive Systems Exercise for the ITEA2 Eureka cluster in 2007 and 2008.

I was also involved in Industry-Research clusters (“pôles de compétitivité”) SYSTEM@TIC and MINALOGIC.

 

Formerly, I worked for 18 years at Electricité de France, where I went back in 2009 in the « Smart Grid » position.

 

I first studied mathematics, at the Ecole Normale Supérieure de Saint-Cloud, (now located in Lyon) where I passed agrégation. Then I got a PhD in Artificial Intelligence with Pr. Jean-Louis Laurière1 at Paris 6 Pierre-et-Marie-Curie University.

 

I have worked and published in various areas: qualitative physics and calculus, rule-based systems, expert systems, with many industrial applications as well as scientific publications.

In particular, in my PhD, I showed how to build an AI (Artificial Intelligence) system able to understand and explain the Three Mile Island nuclear accident, which happened in 1979 in the United States, and which was the first of the 3 major nuclear accidents related to civil energy generation which happened until now, before Chernobyl and Fukushima-Daichi. This was considered as somewhat in advance at this time, probably nuclear industry should spend effort today to apply best-in-class IT and AI technology to plant design and operation.

Then I turned to automatic software generation from mathematical specifications. The main project I worked on within this topic was named Descartes. I was the head of it, and we managed to build a fairly sophisticated program generator prototype - almost 2,000,000 lines of generated C lines. This was in 1997, since then this line of development has expanded in what is called Model-Based Software Engineering, and is now finding applications in parallel programming.

I have also worked on automatic software generation in the area of physical systems simulation (a piece of work related to Scilab and Modelica – Modelica is the major language for modeling and simulating physical systems).

I am also interested in economy, initially focusing on the information technology field. I have started in 2012 a blog on “Moore’s Law” and its potential generalization to other domains. This is an ambitious endeavor, particularly important in this time of crisis in advanced economies: how to put innovation at the heart of economic processes and human advancement.





Brigitte

 

 

I am married with Brigitte, and we have two children: Elen & Mael.




When not working, I like reading, listening to music, theatre, playing the piano and the guitar, riding my bicycle, trakking, traveling, ...

 



 

Last update May 22, 2012
Copyright © 1999-2012 Jean-Luc Dormoy Contact: jl at dormoy d0t org

1Jean-Louis Laurière sadly left us in August 2005. A scientific day was devoted to his work in March 2006, see.