Hi there, here is my very first event blog, just a few days before I start my PhD life (for which I am waiting almost unpatiently but also with a lot of anxious). From now on, I will be continually writing about different (in particular scientific and technological) events during this exciting coming journey. Scientific events like international conferences will play a crucial role in the early career of a young researcher. I hope, with these diary-like blog posts, to record some unforgettable parts of my life (and to improve my English writing lol).

The France-Japan Machine Learning Workshop was held on September 21-22 at Ecole Normale Supérieure (special thanks should be dedicated to my former internship mentor Marco Cuturi in Japan, with whom I worked a bit on optimal transport, who has joined ENSAE and Google Brain since then). This is the first workshop that gathers leading researchers from both countries working in machine learning and affiliated fields such as statistics, applied maths and optimization. This is the first formal event that I’ve ever participated, at my own cost. The full programme can be found on this site.

I don’t have much to say in a scientific point of view, since I still haven’t started my PhD yet. The scope of the workshop is such broad that I didn’t seize the core idea of the majority of the presentations. I was mostly interested by two topics: optimal transport and bandits since it will be the main topic of my PhD. I talked a bit with Junya Honda about his work on dueling bandits. That’s all of it. The only thing I want to complain is the food: I didn’t get the point of catering Japanese researchers traveling to France with fake Japanese food…