We meet Liliana Cucu-Grosjean, leader of the Kopernic team

What does Kopernic mean? What are your main areas of research?

Kopernic comes from the English, ‘Keeping wOrst case reasoning aPpropriatE foR differeNt criICalities’. The notion of Criticalities appeared to provide a formal framework for the compromise that must be made to satisfy the different levels of importance of temporal constraints that must satisfy a real-time embedded system. Because of the increasing complexity of processors and programs, exact solutions rather than estimates are no longer feasible for determining their execution time. Defining the worst cases appropriate to the different levels of criticality of the programs makes it possible to propose solutions in the form of estimations, while remaining the least pessimistic possible, and therefore safe. 

Is it basic or applied research?

Ah, that’s a trick question. There are always research topics that are more theoretical and others that are more applied. Personally, I don’t go in for this kind of separation because the foundations of all research form part of basic research and its uses in other contexts become applied research. So anyone doing research does both.

Do you have academic or industrial partners?

Our academic partners are located both in France (Rennes, Nancy, Poitiers, Grenoble, Toulouse) and abroad (York, Brussels, Vancouver, Singapore or Mälardelan). Our industrial partners belong to the avionics, automobile or rail industry. Current collaborations include major manufacturers such as Airbus, Thales or SNCF, as well as SMEs such as RTaW, Clearsy, Artal or ADCIS.