About me

I am a graduate student and research assistant at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Laboratory under the supervision of Prof. Alex (Sandy) Pentland in the Human Dynamics group. I develop stochastic tools to harness the power of rich behavioral datasets, such as human movement data and communication patterns in networks.

These data, which are side effects of our use of technologies such as mobile phones or Internet services, offer an astonishing prism to better understand and quantify human behavior at a scale never dreamed of before. While for obvious privacy reasons, these data should be used with extreme caution, I am confident they will offer considerable insights to improve people's lives. Research questions range from modeling the dynamics of urbanization and human dynamics to catastrophe modeling or user profiling.

My contributions include work done with Nathan Eagle and Luís M.A. Bettencourt on modeling the dynamics of urbanization, which has been published and is featured in the AAAI on Artificial Intelligence for Development. On the data-analysis part, we analyzed (with Aaron Clauset and Ben Good) the performance of modularity-based module detection algorithms in practical context (Phys. review E.). I am organizing the organizing the Conference on the Analysis of Mobile Phone Datasets and Networks (NetMob2011) and I am serving on the Program Committee of the International Conference on Social Informatics (SocInfo2011), the International Workshop on the Social Mobile Web (ICWSM2011) and the workshop Security and Privacy in Social Networks (SPSN2011).

I was a visiting researcher during 6 months at the Santa Fe Institute under the supervision of Nathan Eagle as well as a researcher Université catholique de Louvain under the supervision of Profs. Vincent D. Blondel and Michel Verleysen. Within the last 6 years, I obtained M.Sc.s from the Université catholique de Louvain in Applied Mathematics with majors in Discrete Mathematics and Computer Science, from Ecole Centrale Paris (Centralien) in Engineering and Industrial Management as part of the T.I.M.E. program (Top Industrial Managers for Europe), and from Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in Mathematical Engineering as part of the Erasmus Belgica program as well as my bachelor in general engineering at the Université catholique de Louvain.