Senior researcher (Directeur de recherche) at Inria, I am the director of the Inria center at the university of Bordeaux and the co-director of the eNSEMBLE PEPR.
I also serve on the boards of Aerospace Valley, Enter, and Cap Sciences, and am a member of the Bordeaux Métropole digital advisory committee and the research steering committee of the Foundation for Brain Research.
Before coming to Bordeaux, I did a PhD thesis in Computer Science at LRI, I was a post-doctoral researcher at GMD Sankt Augustin and the University of Fribourg, I was an Associate Professor (Maître de conférences) at Paris-Sud University for eight years, and then a Senior researcher at Inria Lille - Nord Europe for another eight years.
My research lies in the field of Human-Computer Interaction, with specific interests in computer-mediated communication and groupware, engineering of interactive systems, graphical interaction, tactile and gestural interaction, and human interactions with AI systems. I have published and served as organizing or program committee member in conferences such as ACM CHI, ACM UIST, IHM, ACM CSCW, ECSCW or ACM Multimedia. I have also co-organized four editions of the Forum on Tactile and Gestural Interaction, an Inria - Industry Meeting on "Interaction with digital objects and services" and the 2021 edition of the AFIA Artificial Intelligence Platform.
In early 2014, I wrote two short texts (two pages each) summarizing the evolution of HCI as a research field and the directions I intended to pursue at that time. The essence of these two texts is still relevant today, I think.
In recent years, I have become interested in many other aspects of digital technology. I am no longer interested solely in the interaction between a person and a specific system, but rather in the broader relationships we collectively have with digital technology as a whole.
My french web page lists some future, recent or more ancient news that might also be of interest to you.
I might not be the Nicolas Roussel you're looking for: I know nothing or very little about rheology, hydraulic fracturing, planar graphs, spatial geodesy or photonics...