Thursday 26 March - Exceptional Midiscience: MT180’s local final!

This year, you can vote live for your favourite candidate thanks to the People's Choice Award!

The jury's top prize will qualify for the regional final in Marseille on 28 April.

Come and support them and enjoy a chat with the whole team after their performance.
A convivial moment awaits you after the event.

valentina citterio - UPR Cultural Identity Texts and Theatricality (ICTT)

Title of her thesis: «Words and gestures: a choreographic approach to the poetry of Dominique Fourcade».»

What made you want to work on this subject?

My desire to work on Dominique Fourcade grew out of an encounter with language in motion. His poems breathe, fall, rise like bodies. Coming from a contemporary dance background, I saw in them a call to gesture. My research-creation thesis is based on this intuition: what if this poetry wasn't just to be read, but also to be danced? 

If your thesis were the title of a film, what would it be and why?

Save the Last Dance. Because it's all about choice. Keeping the last dance means deciding to fully inhabit a moment. With Dominique Fourcade, I'm exploring this precise space where writing and dancing become the same act of presence, concrete and situated. 

Juan guzman Landa - UPR Avignon Computing Laboratory (LIA)

Title of his thesis: «Abstraction et synthèse de documents textuels en nahuatl (langue mexicaine autochtone) avec des algorithmes d'Intelligence Artificielle» (Abstraction and synthesis of textual documents in Nahuatl (an indigenous Mexican language) using Artificial Intelligence algorithms).»

What made you want to work on this subject?

Nahuatl is the indigenous language of my country. It's a language that's still spoken by a lot of people, but it's not very present in the digital world. That's why I wanted to work on this subject: I want to develop as many tools as possible during my thesis.

If your thesis were the title of a film, what would it be and why?

I would choose the film Arrival (2016) because, as in the film, the aim is to gain a better understanding of a language through the development of IT tools. For the digital world, Nahuatl is almost unknown, and each tool developed enables this language to be integrated little by little into this great digital world. 

Hibat Allah Kabbaj - UPR Avignon Computing Laboratory (LIA)

Title of his thesis: «Designing incentives for effective federated learning in a distributed system».»

What made you want to work on this subject?

At the start, I didn't know my subject perfectly well. Like many PhD students, you discover it as you work on it. But I was already attracted to distributed systems and non-centralised architectures. With my background in data science and AI, the issues of trust, privacy and cybersecurity have had a particular impact on me. Federated learning, at the heart of my thesis, appealed to me because it makes it possible to use AI without centralising data, in a context where trust is becoming essential.

If your thesis were the title of a film, what would it be and why?

If I had to sum up my thesis in a film, it would be The Platform. In this closed environment, strangers share a common resource, revealing cooperation, selfishness and unpredictable behaviour. It's a metaphor for federated learning: a network of phones or computers building an AI model together without sharing data. Some participate honestly, others seek to save resources or disrupt the process, and many are simply imperfect. I design mechanisms capable of ensuring robustness and performance despite this diversity of profiles. 

My thesis in 180 seconds

Ma thèse en 180 secondes is an opportunity for doctoral students to present their research topic, in French and in simple terms, to a diverse audience. Each student must give a clear, concise yet convincing presentation of his or her research project in three minutes.

This competition is inspired by Three minute thesis (3MT®), developed at the University of Queensland in Australia.

The concept was taken up in Quebec in 2012 by the Association francophone pour le savoir (Acfas), which wanted to extend the project to all French-speaking countries.

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Winning candidates from Avignon Université