Academic Career

I have a PhD from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (Ecole Politechnique Fédérale de Lausanne) in Human-Computer Interaction, something at the intersection of Computer Science, Psychology, Sociology, and Management. A Public Version of my thesis can be consulted below.

Flaviu Roman, PhD.

Interaction Mirrors for Face-to-Face Meetings

  • PhD Title: December 10, 2013
  • City: Lausanne
  • Duration: 4 Years Full Time
  • Supervisor: Prof. Pierre Dillenbourg

Abstract: To be successful, a group requires an appropriate quality of coordination among its members. Even with the advent of remote communication, face-to-face meetings remain the context that offers the best interaction support to an effective collaboration. However, face-to-face meetings seem to suffer from recurring shortcomings which are yet to be alleviated. One of them is the omniscience and persistence of undetected gaps between the actual and the desired (or intended) state of the meeting.

Testimonials

Pierre Dillenbourg

Full Professor, Ecole Politechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL)
Thesis Supervisor during PhD Studies and Thesis

Flaviu is a very good computer scientist who has strong interest from what’s happening outside computer science, namely management and finances. He is a smart, motivated, hard-working team member.

Stefano Mastrogiacomo

Professor and Researcher, Université de Lausanne (UNIL)
Founder of TeamAlignment based on CooPilot

Bertrand Meyer

Full Professor, Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule (ETHZ)
Thesis Supervisor during Diploma/MSc Studies and Thesis

Flaviu Roman was one of our first interns when the ETH Chair of Software Engineering was created; he was highly recommended to us by his professor at Cluj-Napoca (Prof. Iosif Ignat), a recommendation that was fully justified. Flaviu made an excellent contribution to our work; his subsequent career has confirmed his extreme dedication and talent. Flaviu mastered the concepts quickly, he provided an important contribution to the CITADEL tool. He collaborates well in a team, has a good theoretical knowledge and practical skill of object-oriented programming. He is highly motivated and works hard. He is well suited to a career in either academia or industry.

Prof. Octavian Cret

Full Professor, Technical University of Cluj-Napoca
Professor during Diploma/Bachelor Studies

Flaviu was one of the best students of his generation. I really knew him well. I am expecting him to have great achievements in Computer Science.

Paul Istoan

Director, EU Commission IT Management

I worked with Flaviu at Globintech, a software development company that he created and managed. Flaviu is one of the brightest people I know and tends to excel in every activity that he starts. He showed great leadeship and people management skills at Globintech and also thet he can be an excelent project manager.

Publications During PhD

I published several papers in the most exquisite conferences in my field, such as Group, CTS, CSCW, and CHI

Papers as First Author

Papers and Posters in total

Years of PhD Publications

Years Fully Active PhD

Projects During PhD

I built several tools and participated in several projects during my PhD.

Reflect Table

A technology developed by Khaled Bachour, was expanded and enhanced by myself to be used in corporate environments to provide participation awareness to people in a meeting. LEDs light up in corresponding colors to show territories of speech time from each participant. The goal is to measure whether this promotes more balanced interaction in a natural way (by choice of users, rather than by enforcement).

Reflect World

ReflectWorld is an ecology of participation enhancement tools for meetings. Built around an iOS version of the Reflect Table, it is a cloud that enables real-time participation data sharing (Reflect All), real-time questionnaire and feedback collection (Reflect You), real-time meeting analysis (Reflect Meeting Analyzer) and has legacy support for the reflect table.

Swiss Meeting

SwissMeeting is an iPhone / iPad app that manages your time and agenda in meetings. It provides visual notifications when time is up, therefore users can better organize their work.

Collaborative Meeting

A system developed by Himanshu Verma with multiple mice and keyboards, later extended with my module for iPads and time management, is enabling people in meetings to collaborate synchronously over a whiteboard, and to be notified of the progression of time with respect to their agenda.

InstaFeedback

InstaFeedback is, as its name suggests, a solution for teachers, presenters, lecturers, project managers and meeting facilitators to collect feedback from their groups in real-time.

CooPilot

CooPilot is a joint research effort of EPFL and UNIL in Switzerland, aimed at improving meetings by increasing the awareness of mutual knowledge. Teams or task forces in companies or organizations benefit most from the value of CooPilot when using it in their regular meetings (weekly, monthly, etc.). Further research has lead to the creation of TeamAlignment by Stefano Mastrogiacomo.

Publications Before PhD

I Published a number of papers in Conferences such as MTeM, AQTR, ESBME, CSCC, ICCP, MPS, ISPRA, ECMR, TCS, IFBME

Years Active

Publications as Contributing Author

Conferences Attended

Years Old when Publishing First Paper