Aline Carneiro Viana: portrait of a researcher "that you should watch"

Since last year, N2 Women has been publishing a list of leading figures to know and follow. The aim is to put women who progress in the networking community in the spotlight. The members of the community are invited to recommend one or several researchers who have inspired or surprised them,"who has made significant contributions to our field?"...Following the list of the "10 women you should know " published at the end of 2015,Aline is one of the "10 women you should watch " for this year, 2016.

"I was pleasantly surprised by this nomination. My second pregnancy last year greatly slowed down my scientific production at the beginning of 2016." However, thanks to her involvement in her research, Aline has shown that just because a female researcher must occasionally slow down her scientific production in order to take care of her children, it does not mean that this has an impact on the quality of her work and her reputation. 

The N2 Women community was born out of a desire to bring together minorities within the network community. For example, N2 Women organises meetings during conferences that provide the opportunity to talk about the issues encountered by a minority in the field of networking.  These meetings, which were initially created for women, are today open to everybody. 

Aline regularly speaks during these meetings in order to share her experience, not just as a woman but also on other topics: "Gender equality is a very important subject, but as a woman I personally have never had the impression of being treated differently. There are other points that can constitute a barrier. For example, in an international conference, knowing how to express oneself clearly and objectively in just a few sentences is a difficult exercise for a student who is just starting out. American students receive training on this at a very early stage. This is the type of subject we will be discussing during our meetings."

A look back at Aline's background

Aline did her PhD and defended a thesis at LIP6, laboratoire de l’Université Pierre et Marie Curie , before joining Inria in 2006 as a post-doc with the PARIS team and then ASAP, a team located at both Rennes and Saclay. In 2011, following a sabbatical year in Berlin, Aline took her HDR (authorisation to supervise research).

"It was in 2014, with Emmanuel Baccelli and Cedric Adjih, that I began the procedure to create the INFINE team, led by the researcher Laurent Massoulié. The INFINE team (INFormatIon NEtworks) proposes solutions that will extract, process and model different types of information (e.g.: analysis of the mobility of the network's users, detection of communities, ...) that will then be used to "do more" with the network, be it on a communications or infrastructure level."

Aline, who was very active in the field of mobile wireless self-organising networks before her first pregnancy, is today concentrating her efforts on the analysis of human behaviour: "I am trying to understand their "behaviour pattern" in the mobile wireless network: the way they move, generate content, interact with their environment. The idea is to have a profiling of different mobile network user types and to apply this information to "do more" with the network."

In collaboration with Datamining companies in particular, Aline recuperates and studies secure data on mobile wireless network users to extract useful information for her research. "The models of today do not take into account the uncertainties caused by the heterogeneous behaviour of users. The profiling of the mobile network users helps several research fields. In the Device-to-Device (D2D) field it will enable - with the analyses of user interaction and mobility - to better send data to the recipient or better distribute data in the network, without any additional cost. To improve the quality of services provided to its users, a mobile phone operator can optimise the distribution of resources in the network or better adapt its services according to user requirements." A research project that is also one to follow!