Olivier Mehani, Ph.D.

I am a staff software engineer at Mozilla, in the Engineering Workflow team, working from Hobart (Tas, Australia).

Previously, I have been a member of the Platform Team at Learnosity, and a researcher with the Network Research Group at Nicta, in Sydney (Australia) . My research interests include experimental measurements, transport protocols, seamless device mobility in heterogeneous networks and decentralised systems in general. Before undertaking my PhD, I also worked with Inria's project-team Imara, in Rocquencourt (France), where I was focusing on network mobility applied to vehicular communications.

I obtained my PhD in 2011 in a cotutelle from the Centre for Robotics of Mines ParisTech (École des Mines de Paris, France) and the School of Electrical Engineering and Telecommunications of the University of New South Wales (Australia). My thesis was conducted under the principal supervision of Roksana Boreli from Nicta and Thierry Ernst from Inria. Previously, I also studied at Université de Technologie de Compiègne (France) where I obtained an engineering degree in Computer Science and at Chalmers Tekniska Högskola (Gothenburg, Sweden) where I got an MSc in Complex Adaptive Systems, both in 2007.

I mostly waste my (little) spare time doing geeky stuff on various Unix machines. Some interesting byproducts of this may be a Makefile to compile LaTeX documents in one command (including cross-references, bibliography and index) or home-baked packages for various Linux distributions (ArchLinux, Gentoo, Nylon or Slackware). I also keep track of my experience in what I like to call my knowledge base and parts of a wiki.

I strongly believe openness (for either standards, source code or formats) is a key to successful and perennial systems. As a result, I generally refuse to use or open accounts on closed systems (but I am happily using standard, freely implementable, and decentralised protocols such as SMTP (email), XMPP (Jabber IM), or SIP (VoIP). More complete arguments to this effect can be found in Bradley M. Kuhn's words. For similar reasons, I also have a fondness for OpenBSD.

I also brew beer (some of them are actually quite nice!), pretend I can play the bass guitar, and try to become a better amateur radio operator (callsign: VK7SHM, previously VK2FXAD, VK2SHM). People suffer daily from all these hobbies (:

Links

• Technical blog
• Repositories of personal projects (some of them may even be useful!)
• shtrom@piaille.fr (Mastodon)
• Projects on GitHub
• Projects on GitLab
• Geeky dumpyard
• ORCID record
• Homepage at Nicta (archived); old one (archived)
• Summary of my PhD thesis (on the Mines ParisTech website, archived)
• Homepage at Inria (on the LaRA wiki)
• For completeness, my oldest contribution to appear on the web: a short analysis of the painting Napoleon I on his Imperial Throne by Ingres. This is a high-school work done in 1999 with Renaud Recrosio. This page has had a surprinsing longevity (last seen live in 2021)