Dr. Steven Costiou
Research scientist
Research
Students
Publications
Software
Talks
Teaching
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CV
Office: Inria B, room 302
+33 (0)3 59 35 87 38
Centre Inria de l'Université de Lille, 40, avenue Halley, Parc Scientifique de la Haute Borne, France.
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Research
I am a research scientist at Inria in the EVREF team (INRIA EPC), member of the CRIStAL laboratory (UMR CNRS 9189).
Keywords: Debugging, Live Debugging, Object-Centric Debugging, Time-travel Debugging, Scriptable Debuggers, Dynamic Langages, Reflection, Software Adaptation, Object-Oriented Systems, Software Engineering.

I research, design, and build new debugging tools to help developers understanding their software. To this end, I study how developers interact with their development environments, how they use their tools, the difficulties they encounter and how they approach these difficulties. I use this knowledge to inform and drive the design and implementation of new techniques and tools aimed at improving the effectiveness of debugging.

My academic position "chargé de recherche" is equivalent to an associate professor position with very limited teaching duties.

Projects
  • ANR-21-CE25-0004: Object-Centric Debugging Reloaded (2022 - 2026).
    Lowering the cost of debugging with the first generation of object-centric debuggers.
    Funding: 173 000 euros.
Awards
  • Innovation technology award (3d place). The Pharo Debugger and Debugging Tools, Steven Costiou, Adrien Vanègue, Valentin Bourcier. 29th European Smalltalk User Group International Conference, 2023.
  • Innovation technology award (1st place). Time-Traveling Queries for Faster Debugging, Maximilian Willembrinck, Steven Costiou, Anne Etien, Stéphane Ducasse. 28th European Smalltalk User Group International Conference, 2022.
  • Best poster award. Time-Traveling Queries for Faster Debuggign and Program Comprehension, Maximilian Willembrinck, Steven Costiou, Anne Etien, Stéphane Ducasse. Journées nationales du Génie de la Programmation et du Logiciel et AFADL, 2022.
  • Best paper award finalist. 15 years of reuse experience in evolutionary prototyping for the defense industry, Pierre Laborde, Steven Costiou, Alain Plantec, Éric Le Pors. 19th International Conference on Software and Systems Reuse, 2020.
Working groups
  • Leader of the DevX working group of the CNRS GDR GPL. (2025 - ...). gt-devx.github.io.
  • Leader of the GT Debugging working group of the CNRS GDR GPL. (2020 - 2025). debugging.inria.fr.
  • Co-leader of the Inria Northern Europe Associated Team : Advanced debugging (2020 - 2022). Inria funding for associated team in northern Europe.
Collaborations
  • RelationalAI (2024 - ...). Collaboration with Dr. Alexandre Bergel on the study of tools and visualizations for understanding the debugging activity of software developers.
  • CIRAD (2024 - ...). Collaboration with Dr. Oleksandr Zaitsev on the study of how modelers for social sciences using the CORMAS platform use their IDE tools and what limits they face as non-developers.
  • Inria Rennes and University of Nantes (2021 - ...). Collaboration with Pr. Benoit Combemale (Inria Rennes) and Pr. Erwan Bousse (University of Nantes) from the GEMOC project, on the automatic generation of queries on program traces to support new back-in-time debugging features.
  • École de Technologie Supérieure - ÉTS (Canada) (2020 - ...). Collaboration with Pr. Fabio Petrillo (ÉTS) on the empirical evaluation of debuggers.
  • University of Zurich, Suisse (2020 - ...). Collaboration with Pooja Rani (Oberassistant/Senior Researcher) on the empirical evaluation of object-centric breakpoints.
  • University of Zurich, Suisse (2020 - ...). Collaboration with Pr. Alberto Bacchelli on the empirical evaluation of object-centric debugging operators.
  • Thales DMS, Brest (2017 - 2024). Industrial R&D collaboration with Dr. Éric Le Pors, lead prototyping artitect at Thales DMS (Brest). We work on unanticipated object-centric debugging of HMI prototypes.
  • SOFT laboratory, Vrije Universitat Brussels, Belgique (2017 - 2019). Collaboration with Matteo Marra (PhD candidate) : remote debugging for cyber-physical systems.
  • Inria, Lille (2017 - 2018). Collaboration with Dr. Marcus Denker (CRIStAL): object-centric reflection for Pharo..
  • Diazol/Libre-Informatique, Brest (2016 - 2018). Industrial collaboration with two French companies, Diazol and Libre-Informatique, on dynamic prototyping of industrial applications.