Pages (EN)

A few words about me

Greetings! I am Lilian Besson, a student in Mathematics and Computer Science at ENS de Cachan :gray:`(a French "Grande École" specialized in training researchers and professors for superior studies, located near Paris, in Cachan)`.

This year (2015-16):

I am currently a research intern in the BIG/LIB team at EPFL (Lausanne, Switzerland), from April to August 2016, under the supervision of Julien Fageot and Michael Unser. Check out the git repository for my internship (my Master thesis is almost done) !
I am finishing the MVA master program (at ENS de Cachan), in applied Maths, mainly in machine learning and numerical optimization. Cf. my documents written for the MVA, and 6 projects: PCS, PGM, RL / GML, Kernel, Brain Imaging, Neuro-Sciences.
I was also teaching in Maths. and in Computer Science in a prep' school for national competitive exams for French Engineering Schools ("Grandes Écoles"), at "Lycée Lakanal" in Sceaux (near Paris).

Contact information

Feel free to contact me by, the solution you prefer:

by email at this adress Lilian.Besson＠ens-cachan.fr, or besson at crans.org:
you can call me or send me a SMS:

Studies and past jobs

I presented this poster at MLSS'2016 in Cadiz (Spain) in May 2016!
My Master 2 research mini-projects are finished: "Recognizing hand-written Digits with SVM" (Kernel Methods course), "The Space-Net classifier to decode Haxby2001 brain images" (Neuro-Imaging (MEEG, fMRI) course), "SOM and Dynamic SOM, from unsupervised clustering to models of cortical plasticity" (Modeling in neuro-science course).
And the ones from the first semester: "Probabilistic Algorithms for Approximate Matrix Decompositions" (Sparsity and Compressed Sensing course), "Multi-Task Inference and Planning in Board Games using Multiple Imperfect Oracles" (for both Graphs in ML and Reinforcement Learning courses); and "Hidden semi-Markovian Models (HsMM)" (for the Probabilistic Graphical Models course). All these are open-sourced under the MIT License.
Almost all the documents I wrote during my 2nd M.Sc. (master MVA) in 2015-16 are also publicly distributed.
Complete solutions for the practical sessions in Computer Science that I am in charge of in 2015-16 (in a prep' school, +2, at Lycée Lakanal in Sceaux, near Paris).
All the ressources for my Computer Science (CS101) course at MEC (given in 2015) are now publicly available!
I worked on the solutions for two programming projects (for CS101 @ MEC): one is about matrices and linear algebra, and the other one is about numerical integration.
All the ressources for my maths courses (MA101 and MA102) at MEC (given in 2014-15) are now publicly available: ma101 and ma102!

From mid-July 2014 to mid-May 2015, I lived and worked in India, on the campus of the new Mahindra École Centrale (a new Engineering College born from a partnership between the (Indian) Mahindra group and (French) École Centrale de Paris). I was the first French faculty to work there full-time, and I have been involved as a teaching assistant, in charge of mathematics (MA101 and MA102) tutorials, and in charge of the Computer Science CS101 course for the second semester!
In 2013/2014, I prepared the (French) agregation of Mathematics exam (national competitive exam for "Prep Schools" teacher recruitment, with a major in Maths and a minor in Computer Science). I have been ranked 23rd, for 275 available positions, for 795 candidates allowed to pass the oral exam (second step) in June and July 2014, and almost 1200 persons registered in October 2013. I also did the second year of my Master of Science in Fondamental Mathematics (major) and Computer Science (minor), with a speciality on teaching. A list of useful references (and other ressources) for this exam is here.
In 2012/2013, I did the first year of the MPRI (Master of Science specialized in theoretical research in Computer Science, in Paris) and also the first year of the Master of Science in fondamental mathematics of ÉNS Cachan (again both magna cum laude).
From 2011/2012, I studied at ÉNS Cachan, and in July 2012, I completed two Bachelors of Science, one in Mathematics and one in Computer Science, both magna cum laude.
During two years, 2009/2010 and 2010/2011, I studied in Marseille, at Lycée Thiers, first in MPSI 2 and after in MP*1.
Before that, I lived in Briançon (Hautes-Alpes, France), and I got my scientific baccalauréat, with a major in maths and a minor in theater, in 2009.

A few words about me:

I like to walk, travel, go camping around France and Europe, mainly by using hitch-hiking. I also like using new technologies, and enjoy design small games, or tiny pieces of software or web content (for instance some nice javascript hacks), geeky tutorials (e.g. about ga-beacon, GNU/Nano, Firefox, Sublime Text 3 or git), or Linux command line tools (see this page for example).

A few words about this site:

I am working on this little website (currently, http://perso.crans.org/besson/) when I have the time, hoping it can be useful to someone. :gray:`All the content of the website is (C) Lilian BESSON, and it is open source with the` GPLv3 License. What means Open Source, explained with LEGO?. This site's Google Analytics data suggest that some pages are indeed visited on a daily basis, so if you are here for something in particular, I hope you will not be disapointed (you can use this bug tracker to report any bug, or even to ask me anything).

Note

Contact me?

Feel free to contact me by the solution you prefer.

Some projects on-line

Some of my profile pages on some great websites:

either with my bitbucket account bitbucket.org/lbesson;

or my Github account GitHub.com/Naereen;

or with my personal Wikipedia page User:Naereen;

or on Transifex profile/Naereen (almost not used anymore).

2nd year of MSc : Master MVA

You can find here all the documents written for the MVA (2015-2016). I also worked on 6 small research projects, all published on my bitbucket, open-source under the MIT license.

For the 1st trimester (Fall 2015):

Parcimonie and Compressed Sensing : « Random factorization for low-rank matrices » ("finding structure with randomness"), graded :blue:`19/20`;

Probabilistic Graphical Models : « Hidden semi-Markov Models » (comparison to Hidden Markov Models and Gaussian Mixture Models), graded :blue:`16/20`;

Reinforcement Learning / Graphs in Machine Learning : « Multi-Expert board-game Inference », graded :blue:`18/20`;

For the 2nd trimester (Spring 2016):

Kernel Methods for Machine Learning : « Recognizing hand-written digits with a SVM classifier » :orange:`new!`;

Brain Imaging : « Decoding of fMRI images with the SpaceNet classifier » :orange:`new!`;

Modelisation in Neuro-Sciences : « Self-Organizing Maps and Dynamical SOM » :orange:`new!`.

MSc research internship in 2016

"A theoretical study of steerable convolution operators, and possible applications to stochastic processes for images".

I will be a research intern in the BIG/LIB team at EPFL (Lausanne, Switzerland) (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne), from April to August 2016, under the supervision of Julien Fageot and Michael Unser. Check out the git repository for my internship (my Master thesis is almost done) !

MSc research internship in 2013

"Towards modularity for planning and robot programs verification".

I did a research internship for the third semester of my Maths MSc and CS MSc from 03 June to 09 August 2013.

I worked at UCL (University College of London), under the direction of Jules Villard (who quotes me on his new page, and Peter O'Hearn, about separation logic, planning in AI, and the study of modularity in those two domains.

My report (in English): rapportM1Info13.pdf, and my slides (in French): slidesM1Info13.pdf.

Mark:	Jules gave me 19/20. I got the mark 17.7/20 from the Computer Science jury at ENS Cachan, and 18.50/20 from the Maths jury at ENS Cachan (september 2013).

All pages in English

For more details, see sitemap.en.html.