Person in charge: Philippe Schnoebelen
The “Initiation to Research” course (3 ECTS) embeds you in a working group (called “workshop”) tackling some research problem under the guidance of a senior superviser. The group meets once a week in order to assess progress, fix/update its short and long-term goals, assign tasks to participants. Research work is done between these meetings, working either alone or in some subgroup. Between the weekly meetings, communication with the group is often necessary and use ad-hoc means from email to impromtu discussions.
The pedagogical objectives of these workshops is to develop some specific skills by practicing them in a resarch-oriented setting. These skills are (list not exhaustive):
- Assessing the state of the art on some question/problem: specifying the scope of the question, assessing what are the main questions and why they are important or difficult or .., round up the relevant litterature, organize the existing contributions historically.
- Formulating a problem formally: choosing definitions, stating hypotheses to be proven/disproven, identifying subproblems or special cases, finalize proven results by either expanding/generalizing them or proving impossibility of extensions, find connections with problems in other contexts.
- Presenting/explaining a research result to your colleagues: highlighting what is easy and what is tricky, what is original and what is standard. Also, explaining what remains unclear and why.
- Understanding why a research problem is important: Identifying the underlying stakes, the implicit motivations, the potential applications, the future perspectives.
- Understanding the rules of research as a profession/career: how to write a curriculum vitae, how to find a position, where to publish a research paper and how to write it, what is plagiarism really, where and how to get funding for one's research, etc.
Description: Students will be enrolled in either one long workshop spanning the whole semester, or two short workshops over the two halves of the semester. Joining a long workshop allows investigating a research topic in more depth. Joining two short workshops allows for more diversity in research topics, style of supervision, sets of colleagues with whom to collaborate.
Planning: Each workshop has a scheduled group meeting on Tuesday afternoons during the semester (half semester for short workshops). Other interactions outside this time slot can be organized on a call-by-need basis, as the superviser deems necessary.
Language: Workshops will be in English (unless everyone prefers French or another language).
Evaluation: Each workshop has its own guidelines/rules/.. for evaluation (see details below).
In this first class we describe the objectives and of the course, present the list of workshops on offer for the academic year 2025-26, and explain how students will be assigned to workshops based (partly) on their preferences.
The workshops start on Sept. 23rd, 14h00.
See the slides used on Sept. 16th. TODO: Send me (phs꩜lmf.cnrs.fr) an email before 09 AM Fri Sep 19th indicating your preferences so that I can take them into account when assigning students to workshops.
Supervisor: Vladimir Zamdzhiev.
Room: 1-K-82
Participants (9): BELANGER Félix, CHEVAILLIER Evelyne, GUILLONNET Brewen, MERCIER DES ROCHETTES Alexis, MULARD Andreas, RUELLAN Yann, SEMEZIES Igor, STERBAC Raphaël, WATTELLE Quentin.
Keywords: Programming Languages, Type Systems, Logic.
Description: The goal of this workshop is to study and identify interesting features in programming languages and related type systems. Modern research in programming languages and type systems has produced some interesting new programming features and abstractions that have not yet been introduced into mainstream languages. Students will have the opportunity to dive into modern programming language research and identify specific topics that are of interest to them. Examples can include studying programming abstractions (e.g., monads, dependent types, higher-order polymorphism), more specialised programming languages (e.g., probabilistic programming languages, quantum programming languages), static analysis tools/frameworks, etc. Students are expected to learn about a specific topic and do a presentation during the class during which they introduce the concept. They should also be able to answer questions about it. During the class we can also discuss other aspects of programming language/logic/type system research and/or discuss a possibility of a group project.
Expected Workload: About 5 hours per week.
Planning:
Grading: Details to be discussed, but it will be determined by class participation, contribution and presentation.
Supervisor: Philippe Schnoebelen.
Room: 2-X-47
Participants: (7) CATHERINOT Margot, COMBAUD Adam, HLOVA Bohdan, LIVNÉ Esther, MAGNIER Lucile, MILLERAT—GALLOT Rémi, VINCENT Thibaud.
Keywords: Algorithms on words and text.
Description: Compression of data is an important technique for reducing storage space and transmission time. Beyond questions of how to compress and decompress data, a new class of algorithmic problems arose : how to work with compressed data without decompressing it?
The goal of this workshop is to survey this rapidly growing area and understand what are the current challenges and research directions. A motivation for us is to understand some of the non-trivial algorithms like for fully-compressed matching.
The workshop activities will include bibliographical research, evaluation of papers, redaction of synthetic summaries, etc. We might test some algorithms by developing a prototype/barebone software library.
The workshop will be the occasion to experience the benefits of collective work (brain-power, motivation, work-sharing, ..) and face its challenges (communication, work-sharing, ..).
The group will meet weekly and rely on the usual tools (emails, git, discord, ..) for exchanges between two meetings.
Expectations: It is expected that each participant will contribute his/her ideas, time & energy, ensuring group success.
Workload: Approximately 5 hours per week (including the weekly meetings).
Grading: Each participant will receive a mark made of (50%) the superviser's assessment of their contributions to the common project, and (50%) the superviser's assessment of the quality of their oral presentations and written material.
References: See Lohrey's survey paper.
Supervisor. Sam van Gool
Room: 2-Z-41
Participants (8): BLANCAL-SIMON Aurélien, BOERI Aurélien, DE MASURE Axel, DUCROCQ Diane, GALLOIS François, HUBER Paul, JAZERON Corentin, LOUBIÈRE Antonin.
Keywords: Interpolation, modal logic, intuitionistic logic, first order logic, proof theory, algebra, automata.
Skills to be developed: Reading current research, writing reviews, surveying the state-of-the-art of a topic, giving presentations, identifying research problems, giving feedback.
Description. This workshop is about recent research on the theory and applications of interpolation in logic and computer science. We will study chapters of the forthcoming volume
Theory and Applications of Craig Interpolation
which is scheduled to appear in 2026. For the purposes of this workshop, we have obtained special permission from the volume's editors and authors to use certain chapters ahead of publication.
Interpolation is a fundamental method in logic, with applications in computer science. Given a logical entailment “A entails B”, an interpolant for this entailment is a formula C in the intersection of the languages of A and B that “causes” the entailment to hold, in the sense that A entails C and C entails B. Depending on the logical system, interpolants may or may not always exist, and in some cases interpolants may be difficult to compute. Some of these questions have recently been shown to be closely connected to questions in algebra and automata theory, leading to a number of interesting new, often still open, research problems.
The students in this workshop will read, summarize, write critical reviews, and give presentations on a number of chapters from the volume. Ideally, these activities will lead us to identify open problems in this field of research that may form the basis for a research internship proposal.
Tasks: Each week will focus on one chapter, and each student will perform a different task for the chapter, among the ones below:
The workload, in addition to the two-hour meetings, will be a few hours per week on average. It may vary somewhat, according to your task of the week.
Grades will reflect each student's participation and effort in performing the above tasks.
Supervisor: Luc Lapointe.
Room: 2-X-42
Participants (8): BOEUF Leonard, CORDE—DROUET Yoann, DIEDLER Baptiste, GRET Paul, LECLERE Theotime, RALEIGH Léonard, VALLÉE Brigitte, ZEITOUN Antoine.
Keywords: Automata, Distributed systems.
Description: Many systems used in our everyday lives can be modeled by distributed systems. The goal of this workshop is to discover the different existing models, what they have in common and how different they are, what interesting questions have already been solved, and what open problems remain to be solved.
Students are expected to learn how to collaborate, what tools to use, how to communicate and share the workload.
Grades: will be determined by class participation, contribution and presentations.
Supervisors: Matthias Függer and Thomas Nowak.
Room: TBA
Keywords: Research methods; Scientific writing; Artificial intelligence; Critical thinking
Description This short workshop is organized as a six-week research sprint. Each student will be assigned one of the following topics and will work individually towards producing a research-style paper:
AI tools may be used at all stages—for literature exploration, drafting text, and coding—but the essential task is to rework and refine these outputs. The final paper must reflect the student’s own understanding, critical judgment, and ability to craft a coherent scientific narrative.
Pedagogical Objectives
Expected Workload Approximately 5h/week (2h/week in class + ~3h/week individual work)
Supervisor: Uli Fahrenberg.
Keywords:
Description: Concurrent computing systems are those in which several events may happen in parallel; in fact that includes most modern systems. The verification of such systems is difficult: if one considers all possible interleavings of concurrent events, thus reducing concurrent systems to sequential systems which are well-understood, then the state space explodes; in addition it is not clear a priori which interleavings are possible (think out-of-order executions).
Perhaps surprisingly, geometry and topology may provide plenty of intuition for analysing concurrent systems in their own right, i.e. without reducing them to sequential systems. We will use this as a guiding principle for introducing several models for concurrent systems, exploring the relations between them, and using them for verification.
The course will cover Petri nets, concurrent step transition systems, higher-dimensional automata, and directed topological spaces. We will see how to translate these formalisms into each other, how to analyse them, and how to use them to model concurrent systems. If time permits, we will also look at extensions such as Petri nets with inhibitor arcs or higher-dimensional timed automata.
Note: Some of what we will do is related to the course GEOMCOMP at M2 MPRI which will cover that material much more in detail. .
Supervisor: Philippe Schnoebelen.
Keywords: Scientific writing.
Description: This workshop is aimed at students who plan to submit for publication some work based on their L3 internship report, or “mémoire de stage”. The task will be to transform an L3 internship report into a scientific publication that meets the requirements of academic writing and can be meaningfully submitted to a scientific conference or a journal. The distance between the internship report and a professional-level submission may be small (that depends on the actual report) but the workshop will be a good opportunity to learn about some fundamental principles of scientific writing, and to practice them in a real-life situation. We expect that collective feedback from peers (and from superviser) will help improve the quality of the submissions.
Other aspects that will be explored or discovered are the issues of authorship, the purposes of citations and bibliography, the business of publishers, the ranking of journals and other publication venues, etc.
Important Note: Before they can be enrolled in this workshop, it is essential that applicants have clarified the intellectual property issues with their internsip superviser(s) and obtained permission to prepare and submit a text as sole author.
Workload: The workload will depend in part on how far your internship report is from a submission. It is expected that you provide feedback to your peers.
Grading: Each participant will receive a mark made of the superviser's assessment of their contributions to the group efforts and of the quality of his/her oral presentations and written material.
Supervisor: Luc Lapointe.
Room: TBA
Keywords: Popular science.
Description: When you speak to someone picked at random in the street, they might have heard about Higgs boson, RNA vaccines, or studies by economists about taxing the rich. But they probably cannot explain the basics of what computer scientists do, what are their use, or name a huge achievement from the last decade, or even century.
This workshop is aimed at students who, during their career, would like to make computer science less obscure for non-computer scientists. We will try to identify why computer science is so poorly known outside of universities, and the best ways to communicate about this topic to different categories of the population.
Grades: Involvement during the workshop will be evaluated, as well as a small production on a medium to be decided.