Anne-Marie Kermarrec

Former Senior Researcher - ACM Fellow 2016
Anne-Marie Kermarrec
© Inria / Photo G. Scagnelli

The focus of Anne-Marie Kermarrec’s research is on large-scale, dynamic, distributed systems, which are omnipresent in modern computing, particularly in peer to peer (P2P) systems, enabling data to be shared on a large scale while ensuring better privacy. Through the Gossple project, which was launched in 2008, Anne-Marie Kermarrec tackled issues relating to the peer to peer personalisation of the web at a time when neither it nor Google search suggestions existed. However, the personalisation of the internet for users requires the sharing of personal data. Instead of entrusting sensitive data to a web giant, P2P systems enable the implementation of recommendation services, which both upscale and protect privacy given that no single machine possesses all of the information. Kermarrec has made notable contributions to tackling problems surrounding the increase in the volume of both data and users on the web, as well as their variability. This research led to the creation of the start-up Mediego, which she founded in 2015 and ran until 2019. Mediego provides content personalisation services for online media.