Senior researcher (Directeur de recherche) at Inria, I am the director of the Inria center at the university of Bordeaux (22 research teams, >450 people).
I also currently serve on the administrative board of Aerospace Valley, Digital Aquitaine, Unitec, CATIE and Cap Sciences, on the scientific board of GIS Albatros and LyRE, and was the first coordinator the Regional Research Network in Artificial Intelligence.
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 and an Inria - Industry Meeting on "Interaction with digital objects and services". 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.
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...