Philippe Lalanda conducts research in the field of pervasive computing. He is involved in numerous conferences and serves as an expert for several institutions in France and in Europe. He has authored some 100 papers in international journals and conferences and supervised more than 20 PhD thesis.

He obtained his PhD at the University of Nancy under the supervision of Jean-Paul Haton and worked at Stanford University as a post-doctoral fellow in Barbara Hayes-Roth's team.

He received an IBM Faculty Award in 2015 for his work in autonomic computing.