machine learning posts

2024 highlights: of computer science and society

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For me, 2024 was full of back and forth between research, software, and connecting these to society. Here, I lay out some highlights on AI and society, as well as research and software, around tabular AI and language models.

As 2025 starts, I’m looking back on 2024. It …

CARTE: toward table foundation models

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Foundation models, pretrained and readily usable for many downstream tasks, have changed the way we process text, images, and sound. Can we achieve similar breakthroughs for tables? Here I explain why with “CARTE”, we’ve made significant headway.

Contents

  • Pre-training for data tables: hopes and challenges
    • Pre-training is a …

Skrub 0.2.0: tabular learning made easy

We just released skrub 0.2.0. This release markedly simplifies learning on complex dataframes.

model = tabular_learner(‘classifier’)

Simple, yet solid default baseline

The highlight of the release is the tabular_learner function, which facilitates creating pipelines that readily perform machine learning on dataframes, adding preprocessing to a scikit-learn compatible learner …

People underestimate how impactful Scikit-learn continues to be

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François Chollet rightfully said that people often underestimate the impact of scikit-learn. I give here a few illustrations to back his claim.

A few days ago, François Chollet (the creator of Keras, the library that that democratized deep learning) posted:

Tweet from François Chollet: "People underestimate how impactful scikit-learn continues to be"

Indeed, scikit-learn continues to be the most popular machine …

2022, a new scientific adventure: machine learning for health and social sciences

A retrospective on last year (2022): I embarked on a new scientific adventure, assembling a team focused on developing machine learning for health and social science. The team has existed for almost a year, and the vision is nice shaping up. Let me share with you illustrations of where we …

2021 highlight: Decoding brain activity to new cognitive paradigms

Broad decoding models that can specialize to discriminate closely-related mental process with limited data

TL;DR

Decoding models can help isolating which mental processes are implied by the activation of given brain structures. But to support a broad conclusion, they must be trained on many studies, a difficult problem given …

Hiring an engineer and post-doc to simplify data science on dirty data

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Join us to work on reinventing data-science practices and tools to produce robust analysis with less data curation.

It is well known that data cleaning and preparation are a heavy burden to the data scientist.

Dirty data research

In the dirty data project, we have been conducting machine-learning research …

2020: my scientific year in review

The year 2020 has undoubtedly been interesting: the covid19 pandemic stroke while I was on a work sabbatical in Montréal, at the MNI and the MILA, and it pushed further my interest in machine learning for health-care. My highlights this year revolve around basic and applied data-science for health.

Highlights …

Survey of machine-learning experimental methods at NeurIPS2019 and ICLR2020

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A simple survey asking authors of two leading machine-learning conferences a few quantitative questions on their experimental procedures.

How do machine-learning researchers run their empirical validation? In the context of a push for improved reproducibility and benchmarking, this question is important to develop new tools for model comparison. We …

2019: my scientific year in review

My current research spans wide: from brain sciences to core data science. My overall interest is to build methodology drawing insights from data for questions that have often been addressed qualitatively. If I can highlight a few publications from 2019 [1], the common thread would be computational statistics, from dirty …

Comparing distributions: Kernels estimate good representations, l1 distances give good tests

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Given two set of observations, are they drawn from the same distribution? Our paper Comparing distributions: l1 geometry improves kernel two-sample testing at the NeurIPS 2019 conference revisits this classic statistical problem known as “two-sample testing”.

This post explains the context and the paper with a bit of hand …

2018: my scientific year in review

From a scientific perspective, 2018 [1] was once again extremely exciting thank to awesome collaborators (at Inria, with DirtyData, and our local scikit-learn team). Rather than going over everything that we did in 2018, I would like to give a few highlights: We published major work using machine learning to …

Our research in 2017: personal scientific highlights

In my opinion the scientific highlights of 2017 for my team were on multivariate predictive analysis for brain imaging: a brain decoder more efficient and faster than alternatives, improvement clinical predictions by predicting jointly multiple traits of subjects, decoding based on the raw time-series of brain activity, and a personnal …

Scikit-learn Paris sprint 2017

Two week ago, we held in Paris a large international sprint on scikit-learn. It was incredibly productive and fun, as always. We are still busy merging in the work, but I think that know is a good time to try to summarize the sprint.

A massive workforce

We had a …

Our research in 2016: personal scientific highlights

Year 2016 has been productive for science in my team. Here are some personal highlights: bridging artificial intelligence tools to human cognition, markers of neuropsychiatric conditions from brain activity at rest, algorithmic speedups for matrix factorization on huge datasets…


Artificial-intelligence convolutional networks map well the human visual system

Eickenberg et …

Data science instrumenting social media for advertising is responsible for todays politics

To my friends developing data science for the social media, marketing, and advertising industries,

It is time to accept that we have our share of responsibility in the outcome of the US elections and the vote on Brexit. We are not creating the society that we would like. Facebook, Twitter …

Of software and Science. Reproducible science: what, why, and how

At MLOSS 15 we brainstormed on reproducible science, discussing why we care about software in computer science. Here is a summary blending notes from the discussions with my opinion.

“Without engineering, science is not more than philosophy”     —     the community

How do we enable better Science? Why do we do software …

MLOSS 2015: wising up to building open-source machine learning

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The 2015 edition of the machine learning open source software (MLOSS) workshop was full of very mature discussions that I strive to report here.

I give links to the videos. Some machine-learning researchers have great thoughts about growing communities of coders, about code as a process and a deliverable …

MLOSS: machine learning open source software workshop @ ICML 2015

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This year again we will have an exciting workshop on the leading-edge machine-learning open-source software. This subject is central to many, because software is how we propagate, reuse, and apply progress in machine learning.

Want to present a project? The deadline for the call for papers is Apr 28th …

Job offer: working on open source data processing in Python

We, Parietal team at INRIA, are recruiting software developers to work on open source machine learning and neuroimaging software in Python.

In general, we are looking for people who:

  • have a mathematical mindset,
  • are curious about data (ie like looking at data and understanding it)
  • have an affinity for problem-solving …