Section: Overall Objectives

Statement

Machine learning is a recent scientific domain, positioned between applied mathematics, statistics and computer science. Its goals are the optimization, control, and modelisation of complex systems from examples. It applies to data from numerous engineering and scientific fields (e.g., vision, bioinformatics, neuroscience, audio processing, text processing, economy, finance, etc.), the ultimate goal being to derive general theories and algorithms allowing advances in each of these domains. Machine learning is characterized by the high quality and quantity of the exchanges between theory, algorithms and applications: interesting theoretical problems almost always emerge from applications, while theoretical analysis allows the understanding of why and when popular or successful algorithms do or do not work, and leads to proposing significant improvements.

Our academic positioning is exactly at the intersection between these three aspects—algorithms, theory and applications—and our main research goal is to make the link between theory and algorithms, and between algorithms and high-impact applications in various engineering and scientific fields, in particular computer vision, bioinformatics, audio processing, text processing and neuro-imaging.

Machine learning is now a vast field of research and the team focuses on the following aspects: supervised learning (kernel methods, calibration), unsupervised learning (matrix factorization, statistical tests), parsimony (structured sparsity, theory and algorithms), and optimization (convex optimization, bandit learning). These four research axes are strongly interdependent, and the interplay between them is key to successful practical applications.