Meet Rémi Flamary and Michalis Vazirgiannis, program directors

Rémi Flamary is a Professor at Ecole Polytechnique in the Centre de Mathématiques Appliquées (CMAP) and holder of a Hi! PARIS Chair. He was previously Associate Professor at Université Côte d’Azur (UCA) and a member of the Lagrange Laboratory, Observatoire de la Côte d’Azur, as well as holder of a Chair in Artificial Intelligence from 3IA Côte d'Azur.He received a Dipl.-Ing. in Electrical Engineering and an M.S. degree in Image Processing from the Institut National des Sciences Appliquées de Lyon in 2008, a Ph.D. degree from the University of Rouen in 2011, and a habilitation to direct research (HDR) from Université Côte d'Azur in 2019.His current research interests include signal and image processing, and machine learning, with a recent focus on applications of Optimal Transport theory to machine learning problems such as graph processing and domain adaptation.

Michalis Vazirgiannis is a Distinguished Professor at École Polytechnique in France. He has been deeply involved in data science and AI-related research. His broad research areas include methods for data science and machine/deep learning applied to diverse data types and domains such as graphs, text, and time series. Recently, he has focused on multimodal large language models (LLMs) with applications in protein analysis and LLMs for Arabic dialects. In the same context, he has led efforts in developing pretrained language models and resources for multilingual NLP and biomedical applications. Another major branch of his research concerns graph machine and deep learning, as well as graph generative AI—studying Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) with respect to expressiveness, efficiency, and generation. His research and industrial impact spans multiple sectors, including web advertising, social networks, online gaming, insurance, legal text processing, aviation, maritime industries, and biomedical domains. He has taught machine learning, deep learning, and AI courses for both academic and executive programs in France, China, the UAE, Morocco, Spain, and Greece. Professor Vazirgiannis has published more than 250 papers in international journals and conferences, including NeurIPS, AAAI/IJCAI, AISTATS, ICLR, EMNLP/ACL, JMLR, JAIR, KDD, Nature Digital Medicine, and Scientific Reports. He has supervised 35 completed PhD theses. Over the years, he has attracted significant research funding from national and international agencies, as well as industrial partners such as Google, Airbus, Huawei, Deezer, BNP, and LVMH. He has led several academic research chairs (DIGITEO 2013–15, ANR/HELAS 2020–26, WASP/KTH 2020–25) and one industrial chair (AXA, 2015–2018). Professor Vazirgiannis has received numerous awards and distinctions, including the Marie Curie Intra-European Fellowship (2006–08), the Rhino-Bird International Academic Expert Award from Tencent (2017), and multiple best paper awards at international conferences such as IJCAI 2018, CIKM 2013, and COLING. He has been invited to media interviews in France, the United States, and China, and has published popular articles on Artificial Intelligence in French and Greek magazines and newspapers.