[Portrait] Fabrice Lefèvre, Director of the LIA, Scientific Integrity Referent and Head of the AI Master's programme
What is your research about?
After taking one of the very first DEA (formerly M2) courses in Artificial Intelligence at UPMC, I turned to the automatic language processing. First I worked on speech recognition for my thesis at LIP6, then on speech understanding after joining LIMSI (now CNRS-LISN). When I arrived in Avignon, I extended my research to all the components of the human-machine voice interaction systems. Since then, I have continued to study the problems of dialogue policy (for example, with reinforcement learning, or large agentic language models), text generation (with deep neural networks), multimodality, personalisation, pro-activity, human-robot interaction, robot-robot interaction, etc.
What are your current scientific activities?
For a few years now we have been working on a project that really motivates me. the integration of pro-activity capabilities for human-robot interaction. So, after analysing the audiovisual scene in which it finds itself, a robot can autonomously decide to engage in a dialogue with a human present. In order to carry out a particular task, for example toinform or entertain patients waiting in hospital, as we are currently validating experimentally at Broca Hospital in Paris. We're really looking forward to the results!
In addition, with a colleague from AMU, we are preparing the flagship international conference in the field, SIGDIAL, in Avignon at the end of August 2025.
Why did you choose to work in academic research?
To be honest... I don't really know. Things just clicked when I finished my engineering studies. And this path that I had taken timidly at the beginning, almost by chance when I came back from my military service, never let me go again in the end. So I'm not sure that I 'chose' to become a university researcher, but I've been happy to be one ever since.
What advice would you give to students who want to do research?
To be honest, with themselves, with others and above all with their science. Research is a very demanding profession. It requires a high level of awareness and a great deal of self-sacrifice. You have to accept that you are about to embark on a long and difficult process that will not necessarily be crowned with success. At least not in the way we generally think. For our part, we researchers know the satisfaction of having made a contribution to the edifice of knowledge, however modest it may seem!
What object or image from your business best illustrates you?
At this point, I think I can sit next to my babies, the Pepper robots that have been helping us a lot with our research activities recently. And even though they can be very temperamental at times, they make excellent companions once they've been properly educated, er... programmed!
The Avignon Computer Laboratory (LIA)
The LIA (Laboratoire Informatique d'Avignon) is a Proprietary Research Unit (UPR 4128) that brings together Avignon Université's lecturers and researchers in computer science, as well as administrative and technical staff, engineers, doctoral students and masters students on research placements. The laboratory is part of the Centre d'Enseignement et de Recherche en Informatique (CERI) at Avignon Université.
Research portraits
Mis à jour le 10 June 2025