Academic research work

My academic research work focuses on exploring ways to delegate conception and design of objects or mechanisms to computers, by using optimization algorithms. The objects to conceive can be robots, planes, turbines, neural networks...

An other angle of my research work is swarm : large communities of agents without centralized control. Those agents, by interacting with their close neighboring environment, will eventually perform a task all together.

So my research combines those two aspects: optimization of objects, where what is optimized is not an object, but the capacity of a swarm to build objects fit to a task. The interesting thing in such an approach, is that the optimization task does not depends on the scale of the objects we want to design, nor the size of the swarm we are going to use to generate an object. Potentially, this would allow the design of very large designs with reasonable computational resources. Also, decentralized construction fits nicely with emerging technologies like 3d printing and meta-materials.

I tinker with neural networks, evolution strategies, physicals simulations and computational geometry to do all that. My work have strong connections spatial computing and self organization. I tend to be very empiric, mostly in-silico experiments.

The mandatory publications list