A bit more than a year ago, I travelled to Grenoble for a first faculty informal meeting / retreat with the Polaris group I was joining as an Inria Associate Researcher (Chargé de Recherche). PICTURE I wrote about this move in another post with two explicited goals: settling in this new life and building a research network and group of people working with me. In January this year, I officially joined and started this new phase. Looking back, I would say both parts got progress to a level where I am happy.

The future of Polaris

A project-team at Inria is by design a temporary organization: a set of faculty members joining forces to push research on a given set of scientific challenges. The core expertise of people may not change but the set of questions evolves as some of them are answered. Topics of interest and people also invariably change throughout the years, for instance with new hires and departures. The Polaris project which I joined will be coming to an end soon with people choosing different directions. I will not go into the specifics for everyone since it is not (only) my story to tell, but one of these directions, which I am part of, will be about building a team around fundamentals of game theory, optimization, and stochastic systems.

Building up on more activities

As predicted, I continued working on mixed-integer and convex constrained optimization methods and applications. The search for motivated students was very successful, with four Master’s theses and an internship completed in 2024, both at the Technische and Freie Universitäten Berlin with the Zuse Institute and at the Université Grenoble Alpes. Hubert Villuendas and Rim Alhajal also officially started their Ph.D. in co-supervision between Jérôme Malick and myself. Hubert is funded by a scholarship from the Persyval label and Rim is supported by the PEPR IA program.