Who am I ?

I obtained a Master's degree in Computer Science at the "Université Libre de Bruxelles" (ULB) in September 2003. During my studies, I went on a traineeship at the Xerox Research Center Europe (XRCE). I was supervised by Jean-Michel Renders and developed an efficient implementation of the Support Vector Machines (SVM) for classification. I'm currently a researcher funded by the FRIA at the "Département d'Ingénierie Informatique" (INGI) of the "Université Catholique de Louvain" (UCL). In this context, I'm working on a PhD thesis in the field of Machine Learning. The expected date of graduation is end of June 2007.

Research

I'm working with my advisor Pr. Pierre Dupont on the problem of modeling of a sequential process from a data sample. This kind of modeling has applications in a variety of domains such as speech recognition, text mining and biological sequence analysis to name a few. We mainly concentrate our attention on modeling dynamic features in the sequences called the First Passage Times (FPT). The FPT are fundamental characteristics of a sequential process and are closely related to the long-term dependencies possibly present in the process. We propose three novel approaches relying on the FPT to solve the following problems: (i) Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) induction (ii) sequence classification and (iii) graph mining. This work includes a tool (PHit, available soon) for fitting the FPT dynamics with discrete Phase-type distributions, a tool (K-walk) for extracting relevant subgraphs in large networks and for mining business processes, and new kernels based on the FPT and Phase-type distributions.

Publications

Some Presentations

Teaching

I'm assistant to Pr. Pierre Dupont for the INGI2262 course (Machine Learning). The reference book for the course is Tom M. Mitchell "Machine Learning" McGraw-Hill International Editions, 1997, ISBN: 0071154671.

I'm also assistant to Pr. Philippe Delsarte and Pr. Vincent Blondel for the discrete mathematics part of the FSAB1103 course.

Interests

As a computer scientist, here are my points of interest :

• Kernel methods
• Statistical learning theory
• Stochastic processes
• Convex optimization

• Hidden Markov Models (HMMs)
• Spectral graph theory
• Learning and mining with structured data
• Business process modeling

Hobbies

I'm a guitarist in a jazz band called The Yellows. Our music ranges from jazz standards to funk. This young band performed a few times in jazz clubs and at a festival. We sometimes play a composition of mine called Persian Night. As a guitarist, my main influence and favourite guitar player is Philip Catherine. Other influences are Brad Mehldau (piano), John Scofield (guitar), Chet Baker (trumpet), John Coltrane (sax), Eric Clapton (vocal, guitar), Madeleine Peyroux (vocal, guitar) and Elliott Smith (vocal, guitar) to name a few.

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