Research

SPELLS² · Software Performance Evaluation of Low-Level, Safe, Secure and Scalable Systems

Research Identity

I lead SPELLS², the research group on Software Performance Evaluation of Low-Level, Safe, Secure and Scalable Systems within the Software Languages Lab (SOFT) at VUB. We build tools and methods that help understand and reason about system behavior, not just measure it, across operating systems, compilers, and real-time software.

The work is organised around four research lines that reinforce each other: the same PhD students move between them, and they share infrastructure such as eBPF, Pythainer, and benchkit.

Research Lines

01
Structured Performance Reasoning
Tools and methods that not only measure systems but help understand and reason about their behavior. Anchored by benchkit (ICPE'26) and by the Speedup Stacks work on time-proportional bottleneck analysis.
benchkit speedup stacks
02
Reproducible Evaluation Infrastructure
Open-source, reusable and reproducible research artifacts. Anchored by Pythainer (JOSS'26), used by benchkit and by most group projects, and by newer components for build interception and snapshot-based testing.
Pythainer artifact evaluation
03
Safe Systems Migration
Practical migration of legacy C/C++ codebases to safer languages such as Rust. Anchored by the DEFRA/FORCES project and the Oxidize C-to-Rust transpilation research.
C-to-Rust DEFRA/FORCES Oxidize
04
Real-Time, Robotics & Embedded Systems
Real-time methods (scheduling theory, real-time operating systems, evaluation of new languages and platforms for time-sensitive workloads) applied both to core research and to cross-disciplinary robotics collaborations with the Royal Military Academy and BruBotics.
scheduling real-time Linux GPU robotics

Active Projects

DEFRA / FORCES

Coordinator · 2024–2028

Belgian Defence (RHID) project on transpiling legacy C/C++ to Rust for safety and security, with the Robotics and Autonomous Systems (RAS) lab of the Royal Military Academy and Thales Belgium.

Time-Proportional Speedup Stacks

FWO Senior Research Project · VUB Supervisor · 2025–2028

Joint project with UGent and NTNU on time-proportional bottleneck analysis for multicore systems.

Cybersecurity Research Program Flanders

CIF / CRPF · Co-PI · 2024–2029

Flanders-wide programme (Cybersecurity Initiative Flanders) involving several universities and research groups. Co-PI for the low-level secure software systems track.

imec Industrial PhD

Supervisor · from 2024

Software framework for safe collaborative robots, joint with KU Leuven.

Open-Source Tools

benchkit

Declarative performance evaluation framework. Published at ICPE 2026 with all three artifact badges; recognised tool in the SPEC Research Group tools repository since July 2026.

Website: benchkit.dev · GitHub: open-s4c/benchkit · Paper: ICPE'26

Pythainer

Composable Docker builders and runners for reproducible research. Published in the Journal of Open Source Software (2026); used by benchkit and by most group projects.

GitHub: apaolillo/pythainer · Paper: JOSS'26 · DOI

Service & Visibility

  • Chair, OSPERT 2027 workshop (ECRTS satellite, Prague); Co-Chair, OSPERT 2026 (Lund)
  • General Chair, ECRTS 2025 (hosted at VUB, ~100 attendees)
  • Technical Program Committees: RTNS 2026, DSD 2026
  • ERC remote referee (2025)
  • Shadow Program Committee, EuroSys 2025
  • Reviewer, IEEE Transactions on Computers (2024–2025)
  • Session chair, RTNS 2024; chair of the Real-Time Pitches session, ECRTS 2024
  • Co-organiser, BOSON workshop (Brussels, 2024, with ULB)

Earlier Work

Projects and research before VUB (HIPPEROS and the ULB PARTS spin-off, the Tulipp and CRAFTERS EU projects, Huawei Dresden, my Ph.D. thesis) are kept on the Earlier Work page.