Team Leader

Professor

Prof. Benoît Frénay obtained his PhD in Machine Learning in 2013, for which he received the Scientific prize IBM Belgium for Informatics 2014. In 2014, he became Assistant Professor at the University of Namur (UNamur) where he is currently (co)supervising a total of 10 PhD students, 3 postdocs and 5 to 10 Master’s theses/year. In 2022, he was promoted to Professor at UNamur. According to Google Scholar, he has 2398 citations and an h-index of 16, with more than 15 peer-reviewed articles in journals and more than 30 peer-reviewed articles in conferences. In the past five years, he co-organised three workshops on interpretability and explicability at ECML-PKDD and CIKM and two special sessions on Information Visualization and Machine Learning at ESANN.

Team Members

PhD Student

Abiola P. Chokki has a Master’s degree in Science, Technology and Health with a specialization in Computer Science. After an experience in project management in Laos, he started a PhD at the University of Namur. His research focuses on open data, data storytelling, data visualization, semantic web and citizen participation.

Postdoctoral Researcher

Armielle Noulapeu Ngaffo received a PhD from the Higher School of Communications of Tunis (SUP’COM) in 2021. She also received a Master’s degree in Telecommunication Services Engineering from the National Advanced School of Posts, Telecommunications, and ICT (SUP’PTIC), Yaoundé, Cameroon, in 2016. She is currently a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Namur in Constraint Learning to generate relevant tests to guide learning models. She is interested in constraint learning, constraint acquisition, Bayes methods, collaborative filtering, recommender systems and version space.

PhD Student

After completing a Master’s degree in Information and Communication Technologies at the Polytechnic University of Valenciennes (France), Arnaud obtained a Master’s degree in Electronics and Telecommunications at the Polytechnic University of Barcelona (Spain). He joined Aisin-Europe (ex-AW Europe) in Mons (Belgium) in 2008, as a test engineer specialized in electronic manufacturing, for the automotive industry. In 2019, he became a digital transformation actor of the production center, taking on responsibilities as an engineer in operational technologies (Factory of the Future Award 2019). In this context, he started a Ph.D. thesis in 2020, in collaboration with the University of Namur (Belgium), under the supervision of Benoît Frénay and Isabelle Linden.

PhD Student

Géraldin Nanfack is a PhD student at the University of Namur (Belgium) since December 2018. He obtained a Master’s degree in Data Science from École Nationale Supérieure d’Informatique et d’Analyse des Systèmes (Morocco) in 2018, and a Bachelor’s in Computer Engineering from École Nationale Supérieure Polytechnique de Yaoundé (Cameroon) in 2016. His research interests lie in constraint enforcement for explainability and trustworthiness, as well as statistical guarantees in Machine Learning.

PhD Student

After a first career as a librarian, Julien start a reconversion process and obtained in 2020 a Master’s degree in Computer Science at the University of Namur. In September of 2021, he started a PhD in Computer Science at the University of Namur under the supervision of Professors Benoît Frénay and Bruno Dumas. His research area is explainability in Artificial Intelligence applied to recommender systems.

PhD Student

Jérôme is a PhD student working on the translation of continuous sign language videos to French. In 2019, he completed a Master’s degree in Computer Science at the University of Namur, with a major in Data Science.

PhD Student

Michael Lognoul is a Teaching Assistant and legal researcher at the Law Faculty of the University of Namur since 2017. He is a member of the Research Center on Information, Law and Society (CRIDS), and of the Namur Digital Institute (NADI). He has particular expertise in EU Law and in ICT Law, notably regarding competition law and intellectual property law in the information society. His research mainly focuses on Artificial Intelligence, mainly from the legal side, as he is currently involved in PhD research on AI decision-making explainability. He also studies the interactions of AI with several fields of law, notably in terms of consumer protection and data economy.

Postdoctoral Researcher

Mohammed is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Faculty of Computer Science of the University of Namur. His research objective is to predict gas concentration using Machine Learning applied to data acquired from low-cost sensors. He received a PhD in March 2021 at the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Mons in Belgium. He received a Master’s degree in Computer Science (Computer Graphics and Image Processing) from the University of Fez, in 2015, and a Bachelor’s degree in Mathematics and Computer Science from the Faculty of Science in Oujda in 2013. In 2015 he started his PhD, where his research focused on applying image processing and deep learning to predict the response of breast cancer patients to chemotherapy using 3D MR images.

Postdoctoral Researcher

Paul is a Postdoctoral Researcher working mainly with Gilles Perrouin on software variability with a focus on systems that embed an ML component. Because of this component, traditional software testing techniques need to be adapted to validate the behavior of such components. Before this, he obtained a PhD in France (Université de Rennes 1), in the DiverSE team at IRISA lab under the supervision of Mathieu Acher and Jean-Marc Jézéquel. The goal was to reduce the complexity of testing configurable systems by limiting the number of configurations to consider and/or limiting the number of tests to pass. His Master’s (from the Université de Rennes 1, France) was focused on data and image processing. He did an internship in the LinkMedia team under the supervision of Ewa Kijak and Laurent Amsaleg on adversarial Machine Learning for the security of ML models.

Postdoctoral Researcher

Rebecca (Becca) is a Postdoctoral Researcher developing methods for improving the stability of feature selection and dimensionality reduction techniques. She completed a PhD in Statistics at UCLouvain (Belgium) in 2021, and her thesis covered the subjects of clustering, dimensionality reduction and feature selection for data with grouped features.

PhD Student

Sacha received a Master’s degree in 2021 in Computer Science (Data Science) at the University of Namur. He then began a PhD at the University of Namur, researching methods for explaining and constraining nonlinear dimensionality reduction methods.

PhD Student

Valentin received a Master’s degree in Physics in 2020, and he is currently a PhD student in Machine Learning. He is working on introducing rotation invariance, as well as other types of invariance, to Convolutional Neural Networks. This project is a multidisciplinary project, as the main objective is to exploit mathematical developments that are well-used in physics but not yet in Machine Learning.

Alumni

Adrien Bibal

Viet Minh Vu