Some days ago, I was in Rennes for two days, serving on a PhD committee at Télécom Bretagne. As you may know, Télécom Bretagne is the name of the engineering school that was formerly known as the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Télécommunications (ENST-Bretagne), which can boast a long and prestigious history in telecommunications education in France. We were there to examine the PhD work of Vladimir Fux. In addition to me (acting as a Rapporteur), the committee was formed by Jean-Marie Bonnin (Directeur de thèse), Patrick Maillé (Encadrant de thèse), Burkhard Stiller (Rapporteur), Bruno Tuffin (Examinateur), and Jean-Louis Rougier (Examinateur). Aside from the usual warm hospitality by the friends at Télécom Bretagne and the perfect organization, it's always a pleasure to see the first steps of somebody in the research world, in this case the soutenance de these of Vladimir. Vladimir's work concerns the decisions that a mobile user (or, better, his/her mobile device) has to take when there are multiple available access networks (e.g. a WiFi access point, GSM, UMTS, or LTE): what is the best choice, when the different access networks provide different QoS, different prices, etc? The tool Vladimir used to model the user's decision approach is game theory. Actually, he envisions that operator may use some incentive to orientate users' choices towards the most overall convenient access network. I found the work interesting and wish Vladimir a long and fruitful career.
