Bart Theeten

Biography

After obtaining my M.Sc. in Engineering degree in Computer Science in 1996, I joined Alcatel in Belgium as a software engineer building software for a large optical switch. In 1997 I moved to Alcatel USA, Raleigh, NC, where I took the role of software architect and technical lead for various Element and Network Management applications. In 2001 I moved to Alcatel CIT, Marcoussis, France to transfer a generic Element Management Platform I invented, to the central software organisation ALMAP within Alcatel. In 2004 I decided to move back to Belgium, joining the Research & Innovation department, which became part of Bell Labs in 2006.

My research is focused on building massively distributed Big Data management systems:

• In 2004 I invented the Federated Data Manager (FDM) tool capable of unifying both structured and unstructured data into a single logical database. I lead the FDM research team throughout 2007.
• In 2008 I invented the Personal Content Manager (PeCMan) concept for which I received an Alcatel-Lucent Innovation award in 2010. PeCMan is a personal Internet application to organise, tag and search all multimedia content of users distributed over the many social networks and personal devices owned by the user. PeCMan makes this distributed content seamlessly available to any output device such as television sets, mobile devices, etc. through e.g. DLNA. I lead the team throughout 2011.
• In 2012, I invented a Big Data streaming analytics platform called CHive whose goal it is to minimise bandwidth consumption and maximise parallelism in execution of analytics algorithms on densely distributed data streams.
• I then moved on to doing research in the AI domain, resulting in a tool called Code-Compass which allows for visualizing ecosystems of software libraries and a tool code Codebook to help developers become more productive by presenting them code snippets relevant to their tasks right in their IDE (VsCode)
• In 2019, I created The Unix Game (https://www.unixgame.io) in celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Unix Operating system developed at Bell Labs. This game attracted close to 20K players worldwide and is still actively being played.
• Currently, I'm focussing my research on the Web3 domain, where I'm actively researching how to build decentralized systems that are truly trust-less, based on blockchain and zero-knowledge proof technology.