Sylvain Malacria
Loki group
Inria Centre at the University of Lille
Batiment B, bureau B102
40, avenue Halley - Park Plaza
59650 Villeneuve d'Ascq, France
Phone: +33 (0)3 59 35 8785
sylvain dot malacria at inria dot fr
Latest news:
Very happy for Raphael Perraud who successfully defended his PhD on Investigating How Users Perceive Interface Differences and Similarities Across Analogous Graphical User Interfaces, also signing the end of the ANR JCJC Discovery project. Congratulations Dr. Perraud! It was a real pleasure working with you!
Very happy for Vincent Lambert who successfully defended his PhD on Representation of interactions based on hand microgestures. Congratulations Dr. Lambert!
Raphaël Perraud's work on metrics for estimating perceptual distances between interfaces and collaboration with Gilles Bailly on the the role of social interactions in the discovery of keyboard shortcuts have respectively received best Work-in-progress and best paper awards at the 36th IHM conference. Great job guys!
I am a research scientist (Chargé de Recherche, HDR) at Inria, in the Loki group, currently visiting Prof. Koji Yatani 's' Interactive Intelligent Systems Laboratory at the University of Tokyo as a JSPS Invited fellow . Prior to that, I was a post-doctoral researcher at the University College London and at the University of Canterbury (New-Zealand). I did my Ph.D. at Télécom ParisTech, and passed my Master Degree at UPMC in Artificial Intelligence with a speciality in HCI. I am also an adjunct assistant professor at the University of Waterloo, Canada (2021-2028).
My research interests are in the areas of human-computer interaction (HCI), with additional focus on designing interactive systems and interaction techniques that can be easily discovered and learned by novice users, while still yielding high performance to more practiced users. More generally, I am highly interested in how interaction can be communicated to the user to foster its discovery. If you are curious about my research, giving a look at the selected recent publications below should provide a decent overview.
I was the Principal Investigator of the ANR JCJC Discovery project (2020-2025) that investigates the design of Graphical User Interfaces that would better support the discovery of their interactive principles.
Selected recent Publications
Ongoing student supervisions
- Suliac Lavenant (PhD Student funded by the ANR MIC project, co-supervised with Laurence Nigay, Alix Goguey and Thomas Pietrzak)
- Antoine Nollet (PhD Student funded by the University of Lille, co-supervised with Bruno Fruchard and Carla Griggio)
- Maëva Calmettes (PhD Student at University of Lyon, co-supervised with Aurélien Tabard and Mathieu Nancel, funded by the PEPR Ensemble )
Previous student supervisions
- Raphaël Perraud (Defended Dec. 10th 2025)
- Vincent Lambert (Defended Nov. 13th 2025, co-supervised with Laurence Nigay and Alix Goguey)
- Constant Yuan Chen (Defended Sep. 20th 2024, co-supervised with Géry Casiez, Daniel Vogel and Edward Lank)
- Eva Mackamul (Defended Dec. 21st 2023, co-supervised with Géry Casiez) -- Now Post Doc at Simon Fraser University
- Damien Masson (Defended Aug. 2nd 2023, co-supervised with Géry Casiez, Daniel Vogel and Edward Lank) -- Now Assistant Professor at the Université de Montréal
- Axel Antoine (Defended Jan. 29th 2021, co-supervised with Géry Casiez) -- Now lead software engineer at Stereograph
- Nicole Pong (Defended Oct. 21st 2020, co-supervised with Stéphane Huot and Nicolas Roussel)