Our research and teaching activities revolve around the design and implementation of adequate programming abstractions for devising dependable distributed systems, with a special focus on the object paradigm. Because we are part of the Business School of the University of Lausanne, a key aspect of our approach is to encompass not only theoretical and practical aspects of distributed technologies, but also enterprise-level concerns, such as deployment and maintainance of distributed architectures, business relevance and adoption of new programming abstractions, etc.

Currently, we are actively investigating how to better support the next generation of distributed systems, which will have to cope with extreme mobility and ubiquity requirements, and with network eccentric communication models (typically based on ad hoc networks). Our motivation lies in the following observation: rapidly evolving network technologies contribute to the advent of a so-called ubiquitous network, which in turn contributes to the emergence of a pervasive distributed computing environment. To better structure this emerging pervasive distributed environment, developers have a crucial need for specialized programming abstractions. There are two reasons for this:

• First, a pervasive distributed environment allows for new types of interactions, such as peer-to-peer, mobile, ad hoc;

• Second, it poses new challenges, e.g. higher probability of transient presence, more exposure to malicious behaviors.

To address these challenges, we are incrementally building a framework structured according to the concerns of both system-level developers and application-level developers. More specifically, this framework aims at proposing distinct programming abstractions to each category of developpers, in order to better suit their needs. We are conducting these activities in the context of two research projects: Pervaho and JInteract. As for teaching, we provide a coherent cursus of distributed objects programming courses, both at the Bachelor level and at the Master level.