In my website you will find information about my research interests in computer science such as artificial inteligence, eye-tracking, virtual reality, computer vision, machine learning, affective computing, etc.
You can also find some resources to the teachings I gave for undergraduate and master students (C#, data mining, ...) and the scientific papers I published.
Some of my hobbies are composing and playing music and traveling.
About me
I am currently associate professor in computer science at Ecole Centrale de Nantes and LS2N laboratory, where I am working on HCI, Cognition and AI.
I am also an invited researcher at Osaka Metropolitan University and a senior researcher at Keio Media Design.
From 2019 to 2025 I was an associate professor at Lab-STICC research laboratory and ENIB where I was the director of the European Center for Virtual Reality (CERV) since 2021.
From 2014 to 2019, I was a research assistant professor at Osaka Prefecture University in the intelligent media processing group which is supervised by Professor Koichi Kise.
I was involved in a national CREST project and working with researchers from Tohoku, Kyushu and KEIO Universities until 2016.
We use devices such as cameras, eye-trackers, EoGs and smart glasses in order to get information from the reading activity. From 2017 we started a new national CREST project with Tokyo University and Kobe University about "experiential supplements" which aims to create new tools for sharing experiences, and especially for improving learning and education.
From 2012 to 2014, I was at the head of Research & Development at Gestform, a digitizing company of 340 people. I worked on many projects such as handwriting recognition, image classification, segmentation and recognition.
During my PhD.,I worked 3 years at LaBRI, the computer science laboratory of Bordeaux with Jean-Philippe Domenger and Nicholas Journet.
In 2009, I worked 6 months at INRIA about designing multitouch interfaces for 3D interactions in Pascal Guitton team.
In 2008, I worked 4 months at Kumamoto University about chaos theory and its application for random number generation. My advisor was Akio Tsuneda.
You will find in my resume more information about my education, my experiences, my skills...
Previous responsabilities
Director of the European Center of Virtual Reality (ENIB)
Member of the Scientific and Technological Council (ENIB)
Member of the Ethics Committee for Non-Interventional Research (AUB)
Member of the scientific committee of CONTINUUM project (13.6M€ coordinated by CNRS)
Member of the scientific committee GIS CORMORANT (Thales)
Member of the scientific committee of Noz Breizh project (UBO)
Member of the steering committee of the CERV-CERVVAL agreement (ENIB)
Member of the scientific council of the Nouvelle Aquitaine regional network on comics
The list of my publications is available on Google Scholar or the dblp website.
I am doing research about artificial intelligence, affective computing, human-computer interaction, virtual reality, cognitive science and computer vision.
Learning and training in virtual reality
Since 2021 I started to investigate the use of physiological and behavioral sensors for analysing how people learn in virtual reality. The use of eye-tracking technology is very useful to analyse where people are looking at, how long and to guess if they are understanding or not what they are doing. My goal is to build interactive systems that can automatically adapt to the user in order to help learning in a better way.
Reading analysis and mental state analysis with physiological sensors
Since the end of 2014, I am using different kinds of eye trackers for analysing the reading behavior at Osaka Prefecture University. The main idea is to create a reading-life log to quantify and qualify the daily life reading habits. I extended the research of a tool for counting the number of read words named the Wordometer.
We also proposed several educational applications such as estimating the English skill (TOEIC score), the Japanese skill or the confidence while answering multiple choice questions.
Mangas analysis
My research group in Osaka Prefecture University is also working on mangas analysis. Analyzing drawings is a very challenging task due to their variety. We proposed a new method to analyze the story telling based on genre classification with a deep learning approach.
I also proposed a method to generate dynamic image visualization based on eye tracking, automatic animation of characters based on deep learning, and preliminary research about physiological signal analysis (heartbeat, sweating, skin temperature, etc.) while reading mangas.
Image analysis and machine learning
During my PhD at In Bordeaux university and Gestform digitizing company, I explored new techniques for image processing, analysis and comparison. I also studied machine learning, data mining and information retrieval. I used both image and text information for document image classification and indexation.
I worked on many subjects such as: handwriting recognition based on Artificial Neural Network,
document image classification based on bags of visual words, detection of check-box location and state, identity card robust and real-time retrieval, incremental learning with user interaction... I developed this techniques in C#, C++, R and applied them in industrial context.
Awards and grants
I was honored to win one best paper award at CIFED 2012.
In 2012, I got a young researcher grant to stay 3 weeks in the laboratory of my choice from LaBRI.
In 2013 I won the best student paper award at DRR 2013 for my works about semi-structured document image matching and recognition .
In 2015 I got Kakenhi young researcher grant (~4 millions JPY / ~30,000 EUR) to support my research about reading analysis and smart documents.
In 2017 I got the outstanding quality paper reviews award as reviewer of ICDAR 2017. I also got the outstanding service award for serving as local arrangement chair at ICDAR 2017.
Research supervised
PhD students
Charles Lima Sanches (2016-2019): Reading behavior analysis via non-professional eye trackers to enhance knowledge acquisition.
Anais Raison (2021-2024): Automatic identification by artificial intelligence of procedural learning stages in a virtual environment
Corentin Boidot (2021-2024): Explanable artificial intelligence for finance application
Hugo Le Tarnec (2021-2024): Enhencing collaboration in virtual reality
Master students
Philippe (2011): Document image retrieval based on keypoint extraction
Anas (2012): Automatic analysis of checkbox in forms
Emma (2012): Text, logo and hanwritting segmentation in document images
Romain (2012): Document image classification based on Bag of Visual Words
Étienne (2012): Handwritten digit recognition based on neural networks
Yann (2012): Document image analysis for predicting of OCR errors
Pauline and Léa (2013): Automatic processing of receipt and expense reports
Nicholas (2013): Computer vision analysis for document duplicate retrieval
Ellina (2013): Combining text and image information for document image classification
Rémy (2013): Improvement of handwritten digit recognition
Thomas (2013): Analysing check marks on forms (OMR)
Fabien (2014): Interactive and incremental learning for improving image classification
Benedikt (2014-2015): Reading behavior analysis with an eye-tracker
Tobias (2014-2015): Using medical EOG for Activity Recognition
Johannes (2015): Comparing the reading behavior of Japanese and non-Japanese students while reading English texts
Manuel (Undergraduate, 2015-2016): Estimating reading skill of non-native readers with eye-tracker
Hitinui (2017): Counting the number of read word with an EOG system
Clément (2017 & 2018): Creating a webplatform for logging the reading activity
Anne-Gaelle (2018): Classifying reading behavior based on eye movement analysis
Marc (2018): Detecting manga character faces with deep learning
Anastasia (2018): Estimating the facial emotion of manga character with deep learning
Dominick (2018): Analysing the Japanese text difficulty for creating a recommender system to learn Japanese
David (2018): Space-Repetition system fro memorizing vocabulary
Kilian (2017-2018): Generating animation of manga character based on deep learning
Hamza and Nabil (2018): Automatic text simplification system based on deep learning
Kevin (2018): Analysing the student understanding while reading a text
Mathilde (2018-2019): Estimating the user interest in museums
Pierre and Fabien (Undergraduate, 2018): Creating a system for logging and sharing the web browsing experience
Ildut and Gwendal (2020)- Développement d’une plateforme d’analyse de signaux physiologiques pour un simulateur de voiture autonome
Valentin (2020): Attention detection in Virtual Reality with Eye Tracking
Legendre (2020-2021) Vers une analyse de l’activité physiologique, lors de l’expérience de la conduite autonome, à bord d’un simulateur.
Erwan (2021) Social skills training using virtual reality in an agents populated environment
Axel and Victor (2021): Reading aloud analysis with eyetracking and microphone
Mohamed (2021): Imporovement of reading aloud analysis with eyetracking and microphone
Sofiya (2021): Analyse de la langue parlée pour l'apprentissage d'une langue seconde dans un système réactif utilisant des stratégies de nudge
Pedro and Gabriel (2021): Cognitive load and emotion adaptative Virtual Reality applications
Faustin and Arthur (2022): Caractérisation affective automatique d’une expérience immersive
Raphael (2022): IHM pour l'exploration de données temporelles
Ignacio and Simon (2022): Simulation d'éclairage publique RV
Gabriel, Letícia and Ziad (2022): Public lighting & feeling of security in VR
Gwenael (2023): Simulation d'éclairage publique en RV
David (2023): Electromyography and virtual reality for affective computing
Mohamed (2024): Predicting mental workload and learning phases through physiological and beahavioral analysis
Teachings
I am curently teaching at ENIB: artificial inteligence, deep learning, affective computing and Object Oriented Programming.
In Japan I was teaching data mining at Osaka Prefecture University, more specifically about the following topics:
Link analysis and PageRank (Google) algorithm.
TrustRank and combating web spam.
Frequent itemset mining and association rules.
Clustering.
Recommender systems: content-based and collaborative filtering.
Recommender systems: Latent Factor Models, and the Netflix Challenge.
I also taught computer science at Bordeaux University. You can find here some of courses, but they are all in French.
lesson 1 : Introduction, Histograms and binary operation, exercises and images used for the exercise
lesson 2 : Contour detection, image transformation, exercises and images used for the exercises. Another exercise about geometrical transformation and morpho-math
lesson 3 : Pattern recognition and segmentation and image analysis. Exercises
lesson 4 : Image synthesis. OpenGL introduction
C2i : 6 lessons - linux, internet, word, excel, open office and powerpoint.
I like to play guitar (acoustic and electric) and piano. I enjoy jazz, blues and rock music. I use essentialy a Guibson SG with a Marshall amplifier. I also have a Wah-Wah and a Big Muff footswitches.
You can find my first compositions on Soundcloud and the music I like on my itunes profile.
