Biography

After doing both a Bachelor and Master in Communication Systems at EPFL, I had the opportunity of working as an intern in the AI research lab of Technicolor in Los Altos, CA. The lab focuses on developing new analytics solutions in the areas of Human Behavior Modeling, Internet-Of-Things and wearable devices. I worked there for 9 months in 2014-2015 and developed a new generative mixture model to characterize the behavior of viewers on video-on-demand systems. Our approach enabled the predicting of future user actions (such as number of views and stopping time). This work lead to the publication "Just One More: Modeling Binge Watching Behavior" published in the 22nd ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD) in August 2016.

Working in such a stimulating environment motivated me to continue my academic research. Therefore, I started my PhD at EPFL in September 2015. I received the EDIC Fellowship for my first year, and I am advised by Pr. Patrick Thiran and Pr. Matthias Grossglauser. My research revolves around the statistical and algorithmic aspects of learning causality structure from high-dimensional time series; with applications on epidemiology, public health, and information diffusion.

Current work

My research focuses on modeling infectious disease epidemics and the use of complex networks to effectively and timely mitigate them. In particular, I am interested in understanding the spatial distribution and spreads of epidemics. I believe that advances in Machine learning can help develop better models to predict and control epidemic outbreaks.

Research interests

• Machine Learning
• Data Mining
• Computational Epidemiology
• Global Heatlh

Supervised semester projects

• Hedi Driss, Modeling the spatiotemporal spread of 2014 Ebola outbreak. Co-supervised with Brunella Spinelli
• Antoine Mougeot, How do tweets relate to polls? Tweets sentiment analysis as polling system. Co-supervised with Victor Kristof
• Julie Djeffal, How do fake-new go viral? Or why Bernie Sanders could replace President Trump with little-known loophole. Co-supervised with Victor Kristof
• Ahmad Ajalloeian, Curing epidemics under budget constraint. Co-supervised with Brunella Spinelli