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Professor for Computer Science |
I am a full professor at École Polytechnique (France). My main research areas are algorithms (randomized algorithms) and artificial intelligence (heuristic search). I am regularly teaching algorithms courses at École Polytechnique and in the MPRI Master program. I like both a lot and thus do not spend much time on this homepage. You find some basic information below. My teaching can be found on the Polytechnique Moodle. If you need more information, don't be shy to contact me (email works usually best).
I have worked in algebra (group theory) for my diploma, in discrete mathematics (discrepancy theory, combinatorial games, probabilistic combinatorics) for my PhD, in algorithmic mathematics (randomized rounding) for my habilitation, then on randomized algorithms (in particular, epidemic algorithms), and most recently on heuristics search. I still like all these topics and work on several of them, but the center my work now are randomized search heuristics such as evolutionary algorithms, ant colony optimizers, and estimation-of-distribution algorithms.
You can find my publications on Google Scholar or DLBP (some maths publications are missing here, though). For most publications, you can find a free preprint version on the arXiv.
I like doing top research with students on all levels.
Tobias Friedrich (2007, now full professor at U Potsdam), Edda Happ (2009, now at Deutsche Bahn), Daniel Johannsen (2010, then postdoc at Tel Aviv U, now at SAP), Anna Huber (2010, now at Teesside U), Markus Wagner (jointly supervised with Frank Neumann, continued his PhD at U Adelaide, now associate professor there), Carola Winzen (2011, now permanent researcher at CNRS, Paris 6), Mahmoud Fouz (2012, jointly supervised with Markus Bläser, now doing start-ups), Christian Klein (2014, now in industries), Marvin Künnemann (2016, now senior research at MPI for Informatics), Anatolii Kostrygin (2017, now in industries), Jing Yang (2018, now in industries), Denis Antipov (2020, joint PhD with ITMO St. Petersburg, now postdoctoral researcher at ITMO), Quentin Renau (expected 2022, CIFRE with Thales) did (or do) their PhD with me. Some also received a nice award for it (two Otto-Hahn medals, a Dr. Eduard Martin prize, a Digiteo-Digicosme prize, a dissertation award from the IDIA department of IP Paris, and three nominations for the GI dissertation award).
I enjoyed working with PhD students where I was not the official supervisor, for example, Johannes Lengler, Karl Bringmann, Sebastian Mayer, Martin Krejca, Weijie Zheng, and numerous others.
I supervised a couple of M1 and M2 internships.
I supervise in average two M1 research projects for Polytechnique students (projet de recherche en laboratoire). With good students, this has often led to a paper at an international conference, once even to a best paper award (at GECCO 2017). If you are interested (and have excellent marks in the algorithms course), please contact me towards the end of the second year.
I occasionally do research together with students that just like to do research besides their regular studies. This has just led to a paper at IJCAI.
If you are interested in doing such an adventure with me, please contact me a good while ahead (some administrative processes need a lot of time). I usually do not advertise PhD projects or internships since I first want to talk to the student and then find a suitable topic together with him/her. As a general rule, however, there is always funding for an excellent student (when the administrative processes are started early).