[Décidément je suis un ignorant ! Je ne sais reconnaître la source de ces senteurs, la nature de ces arbres, pas plus que le sens des traces laissées dans la neige par toute la vie secrète de la forêt. Je ne fais à la nature que de si courtes visites ! Je ne la traverse que comme un évadé furtif et égaré, bientôt repris et captif à nouveau. Imbéciles qui nous terrons dans nos maisons à fouiller les vieux textes laissés par des gens aussi insensés que nous, qui ne sentaient pas mieux le monde ou ne lui donnaient pas le même sens, pour l’illusion de les comprendre. Et nous poussons la porte sur la vivante profusion qui nous assiège. (Paul Cèze, fév. 1951)]
· Research interests[Nous n’accepterons pas éternellement que le respect accordé au masque
des philosophes* ne soit finalement profitable qu’au pouvoir des
banquiers (Paul Nizan, « Les chiens de garde », 1932)]
Research
activities
· System identification: links between sequential design of
experiments and dual (active) control.
· Experimental design and nonlinear regression: parameter estimation for singular experiments (collaboration with
Andrej Pazman, Comenius University, Bratislava).
· Semi-parametric estimation: parameter estimation in regression
models (possibly nonlinear) in the presence of errors with unknown distribution
by minimisation of the entropy of the residuals.
· Estimation of entropy (Shannon, Rényi...) by
nearest-neighbour methods (collaboration with Nikolai Leonenko, Cardiff University).
· Analysis of convergence of optimisation algorithms considered as
dynamical systems, in particular gradient-type
algorithms (collaboration with Henry P. Wynn, LSE, and Anatoli A Zhigljavsky, Cardiff University).
· Non-parametric estimation, kriging
(board member of the GdR MASCOT-NUM): design of computer experiments
A fractal in the steepest descent
algorithm
Ph.D. supervisions
Applications,
projects and grants
My activity has found applications
in biomedical engineering (identification problems in pharmacokinetics),
chemical engineering (identification problems in electrochemistry and
heterogeneous catalysis), telecommunications (blind equalisation), image
processing (comparison of dissimilar images, estimation of movement in
sequences of video images), mechanical and electrical engineering (quality
improvement, modelling and multiobjective optimisation).
I participated to the european
project (CE)2 of the BRITE-EURAM program, concerning the development
of a general purpose tool for multiobjective optimisation through the use of
numerical simulation codes (1996-1999) and to the projects TITOSIM and ONE,
also related to simulation and optimisation (2001-2004). I have been member of
the Network of Excellence PASCAL (Pattern Analysis, Statistical Modelling and
Computational Learning). I supervised a Ph.D. (Régis Bettinger) with Pascal
Duchêne from IFP (Institut Français du Pétrole) on an
application of kriging to the construction of catalysts.
I co-supervised with João Rendas (I3S) the Ph.D. of Youssed Bennani (defended in Dec. 2015) on the identification of a biophysical model dedicated to the prevention of decompression accidents, supported by a DGA project (SAFE-DIVE).
I co-supervised with João Rendas
(I3S)
the post-doc intertship of Asya Metelkina (2017-2018) on the
individualised modeling of athletic performances in competition,
supported by a contrat with IAAF (International Association of Athletic Federations).
I coordinated the ANR project DESIRE (DESIgns for Spatial Random FiElds), joint with the Statistics Departement of JKU Universität, Linz (Au), 2012-2015.
I coordinate the ANR project INDEX (INcremental Design of EXperiments), joint with EdF R&D (Chatou) and the Statistics Departement of JKU
Universität, Linz (Au), 2019-2022.