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Hugues Mercier's picture
Dr Hugues Mercier
Address: Schools of Computer Science and Mathematics
Université de Neuchâtel
Rue Emile-Argand 11, 2000 Neuchâtel, Switzerland
Office: UniMail - B121
Email: hm@huguesmercier.com
Telephone: +41 32 718 2728

Vita
I am maître-assistant for the Institutes of Computer Science and Mathematics at the Université de Neuchâtel in Switzerland.

Prior to my appointment in Neuchâtel, I was a postdoctoral research fellow in Electrical and Computer Engineering at McGill University with Professor Fabrice Labeau and a postdoctoral research fellow at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences with Professor Vahid Tarokh. I completed my doctoral studies in Electrical Engineering at the University of British Columbia under the supervision of Professor Vijay K. Bhargava. I received the B.Sc. degree in mathematics from Université Laval, and the M.Sc. degree in computer science from the Université de Montréal.

I was born and raised in Québec, Canada. Outside of work, I enjoy running, anything played with a racket, any activity that can be done on snow, playing bridge, and spending time with my daughters.

Research
My current interests are the applications of cryptography, coding theory, information theory, algorithms and data science to the study and design of secure and distributed information, communication and storage systems. With a background in Mathematics, Computer Science and Electrical Engineering, I enjoy solving applied problems supported by theoretical results allowing a better understanding of the behavior, limits, security, management, and governance of these systems. It is a breeding ground touching several important applications, and I consider a wide range of problems.

Recent projects
Angainor: Reproducible Evaluation and Fault Injection of Large-Scale Distributed Systems (FEDER program). The project runs from 2018 to 2020 and its budget is €238.784.

I was the Scientific and Technical Director of the Horizon 2020 SafeCloud project. The objective of SafeCloud was to re-architect cloud infrastructures to ensure that data transmission, storage, and processing can be (1) partitioned in multiple administrative domains that are unlikely to collude, so that sensitive data can be protected by design; (2) entangled with inter-dependencies that make it impossible for any of the domains to tamper with its integrity. The project ran from 2015 to 2018 and its total budget was €3,298,988.

EBSIS: Event-Based Systems in Iaşi (Horizon 2020 - Twinning Action). The main objective of EBSIS was to strengthen the Big Data research output at the Faculty of Computer Science at Alexandru Ioan Cuza University of Iaşi (UAIC), Romania. The project ran from 2016 to 2018 and its total budget was €867,205.

Distributed Storage Security (UniNE Maths-CS Competence Center research grant). The project ran from 2015 to 2016 and its total budget was CHF125,446.

Publications

Most of my publication list is available on my Google Scholar page. Many preprints are available online via open access. Contact me for a copy you cannot find.

Teaching
I currently teach the following courses at UniNE:

R&D Workshop (graduate course, Spring)
Applied coding and information theory (graduate course, Spring)
Probability (graduate course, Fall)
Discrete Mathematics and Applications (undergraduate course, Fall)

Supporting material is available on our Moodle and ILIAS collaborative learning platforms. In general, students must register to a course before being allowed to consult its material.