Research team in LaBRI, Bordeaux

Presentation
The Synthesis team is one of the five teams in the Formal Models and Methods (M2F) department at LaBRI (Bordeaux). It gathers researchers around the Synthesis problem, which in very general term is a family of techniques aiming at automatically constructing programs (models) from their specifications.

You can sign up to the dedicated mailing list for team announcements: send an email to labri.synth-ext[@]diff.u-bordeaux.fr with subject subscribe synth-ext FIRST_NAME LAST_NAME where you substitute FIRST_NAME and LAST_NAME as appropriate. Or just click here.

Events
Regular events include (receive announcements on Discord or internal mailing lists):
  • Weekly catch-up (Wednesdays 13.30--14.00)
  • Mercodedi (Wednesdays 14.00--15.30)
  • Internal seminars (Thursdays 12.30 -- 14.00)
  • External seminars (Tuesdays 14.00 -- 15.00)
Exceptional events include:

Seminars
Date Time Room Speaker Title
Nov 21, 2024 12.30 -- 14.00 room 74 Loïc Paulevé Introduction to Boolean networks
Nov 19, 2024 14.00 -- 15.00 room 178 Romain Robbes INSPECT: Intrinsic and Systematic Probing Evaluation for Code Transformers

Keywords
  • Program synthesis / code generation / inductive programming
  • Controller synthesis / reactive synthesis
  • Machine learning
  • Network dynamics
  • Model synthesis for biology and ecology
  • Strategy synthesis / algorithmic game theory
  • Decision making
  • Theory of social choice

News

October 2024

  • Projects:
    • MonProjetSup has been available in 300 high schools since November 4, and will be presented at the “Salon européen de l'éducation” (https://salon-education.com/).
  • Publications:
    • The four papers submitted to AAAI in the Synthesis team made it to Phase 2 (which is about 25% of all submissions).
  • Events:
    • Loïc Paulevé gave an inaugural seminar for POSTECH's Center for Algorithm and Optimization (Pohang, South Korea).
    • The seminar series is starting with talks by Romain Robbes and Loïc Paulevé.
    • The Program Synthesis days on Tuesday, November 26th and Wednesday, November 27th, 2024 at LaBRI, co-financed by the GDR IFM (Fundamental Computer Science and Mathematics) and RADIA (Reasoning, Learning, and Decision in Artificial Intelligence), co-organized by Nathanaël Fijalkow, Loïc Paulevé, and François Schwarzentruber.

August and September 2024

  • Team: The team has a GitHub organisation: SynthesisLab
  • New Members:
    • Arka Ghosh joined as a postdoc starting October 1st to work on automata learning on the PEPR IA SAIF project.
    • Arthur Gall joined as an intern starting October 1st to work on probabilistic automata learning on the PEPR IA SAIF project.
    • Baptiste Mouillon joined as a research engineer on September 2nd to work on parallel algorithms for an LTL theorem prover on the PEPR IA SAIF project.
    • Roman Kniazev joined as a postdoc starting September 2nd to work on programmatic reinforcement learning on the PEPR IA SAIF project.
    • Célia Biane joined as a postdoc to work on boolean networks synthesis to model blood cancer development on the ANR project BNediction.
  • Projects:
    • MonProjetSup: Guillaume Lagarde has been appointed by the Ministry of Higher Education, Research and Innovation (MESRI) to work alongside Hugo Gimbert on developing the recommendation engine for MPS (MonProjetSup), based on current evaluations conducted by 120 career guidance experts.
  • Publications:
    • Journal article accepted in SIAM Journal on Discrete Mathematics: "Computational complexity of minimal trap spaces in Boolean networks" with Loïc Paulevé, Kyungduk Moon, and Kangbok Lee, as part of a PHC LaBRI-POSTECH (South Korea) project.

July 2024

  • Projects: ANR SxC "From Shannon to Cray Charles" led by Charles Paperman, with LaBRI as a partner (local coordinator: Nathanaël Fijalkow).
  • Awards:
    • The "Sciences et technologies" Prize was awarded to Antonio Casares-Santos from the doctoral school Mathématiques et Informatique for his research work on "Structural properties of automata on infinite words and memory for games", a thesis supervised by Igor Walukiewicz and Nathanaël Fijalkow (LaBRI).
    • Gabriel Bathie: Best Paper Award at the CPM (Combinatorial Pattern Matching) conference with Panagiotis Charalampopoulos and Tatiana Starikovskaya.
  • Publications:
    • Journal article accepted in PLOS Computational Biology: scBoolSeq: Linking scRNA-Seq Statistics and Boolean Dynamics (Gustavo and Loïc).
    • Pierre Vandenhove: Paper accepted at CONCUR 2024 ("The Power of Counting Steps in Quantitative Games", with S. Bose, R. Ibsen-Jensen, D. Purser, P. Totzke).
    • Corto Mascle: Paper accepted at MFCS 2024, "The Complexity of Simplifying ω-Automata through the Alternating Cycle Decomposition" with Antonio Casares.
    • Gabriel Bathie had 2 papers accepted at ESA 2024 (same co-authors as the CPM paper).

June 2024

  • Internship: Matéo Torrents (L3, ENS Paris) did an internship supervised by Pierre Vandenhove on the complexity of strategies in stochastic games.
  • Visits:
    • Roman Kniazev visited LaBRI.
    • Researchers in combinatorial optimization from POSTECH (South Korea) visited (June 16-21) as part of a PHC 2024-2025 LaBRI/POSTECH project on the synthesis and reprogramming of Boolean networks.
  • Presentations/Workshops:
    • Nathanaël Fijalkow gave a seminar at Nokia Bell Labs.
    • Workshop on the evaluation of methods for inferring dynamic models in biology, organized by Loïc on May 28th in Paris (50 participants) (link)
    • Théo Matricon presented his work at the AI Seminar in LaBRI on EcoSearch.
  • Publications:
    • Article on the "BoNesis" tool developed at LaBRI on Boolean network synthesis accepted at the CMSB 2024 conference (link)
  • Other:
    • Nathanaël Fijalkow was invited to the PC of AAAI 2025.
    • Chaimaa Radiousse (L3, ENSEIRB) did an internship supervised by Théo Matricon on the estimation of mixtures of stable distributions.

May 2024

  • Events: Nathanaël Fijalkow organized the Dagstuhl Stochastic Games seminar from June 2nd to 7th, 2024.
  • Visits:
    • Igor Walukiewicz was at MIMUW Warsaw, as part of the Trójkąt project.
    • Théo Matricon returned from a 1.5 month visit to Rennes in the Diverse team with Mathieu Acher to work on program synthesis.
    • Akshay visited and gave a talk on Boolean synthesis.
    • Guillaume Lagarde visited INRIA Lille and IRIF/IMJ-PRG.
  • Internship: Maxence Doucet started his internship with Guillaume Lagarde on multi-agent RL.

Projects
  • ANR JCJC Games4Synthesis
  • PEPR IA SAIF
  • LabCom Parcoursup
  • PEPR Santé Numérique
  • ANR BNeDiction and RD2Bool
  • UB RI3 HeMaMox

Coordinators

Permanent members

Important members