ENSAI’s 2021 PhD Day 

On November 18th, ENSAI’s doctoral students presented their work to their peers as well as ENSAI’s faculty and staff. Their theses in Statistics or Computer Science, are oriented towards methodology or applications, in a wide variety of subjects. 

The ten PhD students supervised or co-supervised at ENSAI are, for the most part, attached to the CREST laboratory (UMR 9194). Some of them are CIFRE fellows, working both in a company and a laboratory. CIFRE stands for Industrial Agreement of Training through Research.

After a presentation by Cécile Terrien, coordinator of the PhD program at ENSAI, Valentin Patilea, director of research, introduced the presentations of the PhD students.

“Our growing number of PhD students are a definite asset for ENSAI. Climate, energy, ecology, sports, finance, cybersecurity… I am delighted with the diversity among the fields of application of their work.”

The “senior” PhD students were given 15 minutes to present the progress of their work. The students who began their theses in the Fall spoke more concisely about their research projects.

Theses in progress at ENSAI

Edouard Genetay, in a CIFRE thesis at LumenAI is co-supervised by Adrien Saumard. His thesis, “K-bMOM: a robust K-means-type procedure” is about classification, robust algorithms using the median-of-means approach.

Camille-Sovanneary Gauthier, co-supervised by Romaric Gaudel, is doing a CIFRE thesis at Louis Vuitton. The Data Science engineer graduated from ENSAI in 2018 and is working on multi-proposition recommender systems and behavioral bandits.

Under the supervision of Lionel Truquet, Zinsou Max Debaly’s thesis focuses on multivariate time series. Zinsou Max took part in the PhD track program offered by the school. He studied at Université de Rennes 1, in parallel with the third year of his engineering degree at ENSAI.

Elie Chedemail is a PhD student at Orange and works in the fields of cybersecurity and machine learning. His thesis “Adaptive filtering of large graph signal” is co-supervised by Basile de Loynes.

Guillaume Flament, ENSAI Class of 2020 and PhD track student, started his CIFRE thesis in May 2021. Under the supervision of Valentin Patilea and at AdWay Conseil, he is working on the modeling of credit risks due to climate change.

Previously a Data Scientist at the European Central Bank, Daphné Aurouet joined ENSAI for a thesis in statistics, supervised by Valentin Patilea. Her work focuses on functional data analysis with application to banknote quality using machine-readable data.

Guillaume Franchi, a recent graduate of ENSAI’s Master for Smart Data Science, began a thesis in October, alongside Lionel Truquet, with co-financing from the Brittany Region. With his thesis “Dynamic modeling of abundance data in ecology“, he aims to create predictive models of abundance in ecology by including external variables such as climate change or increased pollution.

Supervised by Eftychia Solea and Valentin Patilea, Sunny Wang is interested in the analysis of complex functional data in the field of sports. His thesis is co-financed by the Digisport university research school.

Hassan Maissoro has just completed his studies at ENSAI and the PhD track during his third year. He joined DataStorm for a thesis on functional data analysis in the field of meteorology: “Robust approaches to functional data modeling with application to hydrometric station monitoring and electric load curves forecasting“. It will be co-supervised by Myriam Vimond and Valentin Patilea.

Finally, Camille Méneur closed the presentation session by talking about her future CIFRE thesis at Lim, co-supervised by Gilles Stupfler and Matthieu Marbac-Lourdelle: “Arrythmia: Development of a statistical model for the detection and classification of cardiac anomalies in sport horses“.

Becoming a doctoral student at ENSAI

ENSAI is authorized to co-deliver doctoral degrees within the framework of the Mathematics and Information and Communication Sciences and Technologies (MathSTIC) graduate school, in the “Mathematics and Interactions” field.

In their third year, ENSAI engineering students interested in a research career can integrate, in parallel with their studies, a Master’s degree as part of the PhD track, notably at the Université de Rennes 1. Pursuing a thesis is also possible with the ENSAI engineering diploma, however, integrating a research-oriented Master’s during the third year at ENSAI allows students to better prepare for a PhD. The Master for Smart Data Science also allows the most motivated students to pursue a PhD.