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Mr Sebastien Marion

Research Student

Tel:     +44 (0)1227 823192 Fax:     +44 (0)1227 762811 Email: sm244@kent.ac.uk

Room S15 School of Computing University of Kent, CT2 7NF

Publications

My publications are available from the Computer Science department publications repository.

PhD Project Summary

Research Interests

I am a member of the following research groups:

• Programming Languages and Systems Group

GC Basics

I am currently researching in the area of Garbage Collection and am under the supervision of Mr. Richard Jones, an expert in the area of Garbage Collection.
Garbage Collection is the term used to refer to Automatic Memory Management.
Basically, Garbage Collection is aimed to free the programmer from having to manage the memory himself.
Garbage Collection brings to the application programmer many advantages:

• It frees the programmer from the fastidious task of managing the memory.
• Many bugs in today's softwares are due to bad memory management. Having a memory managed by a Garbage Collector not only saves a lot of time, but dramatically reduces the chances of making mistakes, hence reducing the amount of bugs.

First year Ph.D project

As part of my first year of PhD, I incorporated a memory visualiser called gcspy, developped by Richard Jones and Tony Printezis into SSCLI (Shared Source Common Language Infrastructure), usually refered as Rotor, its development codename.
Documentation regarding the GCspy4Rotor project is available here.
SSCLI is a shared source implementation of the .NET framework released by Microsoft and available at the moment to Windows, FreeBSD and Mac OS.

Current research

Over the years, Garbage Collection (GC) has been a topic of much interest. Some attempts to improve GC throughput have resulted in making use of heuristics, essentially trying to predict how long an object is likely to live. The main drawback of these approaches however is that they require some prior trace recordings of the program's behavior. We present a novel method allowing the prediction of such lifetime by determining the set of micro-patterns associated with each Java class of the program.

Garbage Collection issues related survey:

I am currently looking for feedback from people who have experienced any kind of Garbage Collection related issues.
We aim to provide a survey on those issues to understand what tools need to be created/improved to facilitate the developer's job. A survey form is accessible here: we would be very grateful for feedback from anyone has who experienced these kinds of problems.

My Links:

• Documentation regarding the GCspy4Rotor project is available here.
• I am currently looking for people who experienced any kind of issues with Garbage Collection.
  The form is available here.
• I developed and manage an estate agent website for my father.
  The website is accessible at Immobilier Rhone-Alpes The forum is available at Forum Immobilier Rhone-Alpes
• I am director of a web-development company called Whizlogic Solutions
• I created a small program for Linux to lock your mouse inside one of your monitors (In a dual monitors configuration).
  It is available here
  If this doesn't work for you, please use the patch provided by Ben Staniford.