Person in charge: Stéphane Le Roux
General presentation
The module Initiation to Research (3 ECTS) embeds you in three successive working groups (called “workshops”) tackling some research problem under the guidance of a senior superviser. Each 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 impromptu discussions.
The pedagogical objectives of these workshops is to develop some specific skills by practicing them in a research-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 literature, 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: The students will be enrolled in either one long workshop spanning the two first periods, or on two short workshops over the two first periods. 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. The last period is dedicated to preparing the bibliography of your internship, under the supervision of a researcher specialist of the domain.
Planning: Each workshop has a scheduled group meeting on Tuesday afternoons during the first two periods (one period for short workshops). Other interactions outside this time slot can be organized on a call-by-need basis, as the superviser deems necessary.
Finally, a seminar Prepare for your M1 internship will conclude the course on January 2027.
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).
Présentation: Each period will start by a session presenting the eligible workshops:
- first period: presentation meeting on Tuesday, September 8th, at 14:00, on room 1O07.
- second period: presentation meeting on Tuesday, November 3rd, at 14:00, on room 1O07.
- third period: presentation meeting on Tuesday, January 19th, at 14:00, on room 1O07.
First period
Workshop 1
| Credits : | 1 ECTS |
| Room: | 1X55 (but 1Z31 on 29/09) |
| Number of hours: | 12 (+personal work) |
| Evaluation: | participation, contribution and quality of the presentation |
| Chair: | Vladimir Zamdzhiev |
Objectives : The goal of this workshop is to study and identify interesting features in programming languages and related type systems. 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.
Participants : Le Hir Mazé Sacha, Pustetto Mathis, Coquerel Eva, Rometti Valentin
Workshop 2
| Credits: | 1 ECTS |
| Room: | 1X59 (but 1Z56 on 29/09) |
| Number of hours: | 12 (+personal work) |
| Evaluation: | Presentation, Participation, Reviews |
| Chair: | Sam van Gool |
Keywords: Automata, modal logic, first- and second-order logic, graphs, theory of computation.
Objectives: This workshop is about recent research on the theory and applications of automata and logic in computer science. We will read five articles that appeared this summer in one of the top conferences in the field, Logic in Computer Science (LICS), on topics that fit with the above keywords.
The students in this workshop will read, summarize, write critical reviews, and give presentations on the articles. Ideally, these activities will lead us to identify open research problems, which may form the basis for a research internship proposal.
A main learning objective of the workshop is to learn how to read an article in limited time, and how to extract the main contributions and ideas from it, without getting blocked by details. In addition, the workshop will increase participants’ understanding of current research in the field, and of how theoretical computer science conferences work in practice.
For more details, please see the webpage: https://www.samvangool.net/wire2026.html
Participants : Signoret Achile, Idiri Badis, Gupta, Anusha, Ojeda Martin, Boubker Youssef
Workshop 3
| Credits: | 1 ECTS |
| Room: | 1X70 (but 1Z76 on 29/09) |
| Number of hours: | 12 (+personal work) |
| Evaluation: | Presentation, Report |
| Chair: | Matthias Fuegger |
Objectives : AI is significantly changing the way we do research. The main objective of this course is to learn, experiment, and develop an understanding of working with AI in research.
In the class we will discuss AI methods that are used by scientists for research. An emphasis is on aspects in theoretical computer science, however, we will also cover aspects relevant to coding, data science, and experimental work.
Course modalities: at the example of a research question that you choose, you apply techniques that we discuss in class.
Each class is partitioned into 3 parts: lecture, work on your research question, discussion.
Deliverable at the end of the course: 3-4-page computer science article
Participants : Vigneron Matthieu, Encrevé Hermin, Moisy Raphaël, Depres Adrien
Workshop 4
| Credits: | 1 ECTS |
| Room: | 1X74 (but 1Z77 on 29/09) |
| Number of hours: | 12 (+personal work) |
| Evaluation: | Presentation, Report, Participation |
| Chair: | Philippe Schoebelen |
Objectives : Natural Computing lies at the intersection of computer science, biology, and physics. It sees Nature
as a source of algorithmic inspiration, and as a computational mechanism itself. Main goals are:
- computing inspired by nature* (neural networks, evolutionary algorithms, swarm intelligence);
- simulating nature on computers* (cellular automata, morphogenesis models);
- computing with nature* (harnessing DNA, quantum states, etc. to process information). All this redefines information processing as an intrinsic feature of the physical universe.
Natural Computing has deep roots tracing back to the origins of computer science and it is a mature discipline that has repeatedly expanded our understanding of computation. Today, as traditional silicon architectures hit physical limits, the field is all the more important. Emerging paradigms like synthetic biology, wetware computing, and quantum processing raise vital technical and
philosophical questions:
- What constitutes agency or intelligence in non-silicon media?*
- How do we build a rigorous theory of computation for biological, chaotic systems?*
The workshop will explore these questions as a group. It is meant for students who are curious about this whole area and want to learn more. The main tasks will be finding and reading scientific papers, and sharing them with the rest of the group during presentations.
Participants : Gilbert-Reiche Anaïs, Passelande Ewen, Guirardel Thimotée, Cuingnet Lucie-Hélène
Workshop 5
| Credits: | 1 ECTS |
| Room: | 1X77 (but 1S69 on 29/09) |
| Number of hours: | 12 (+personal work) |
| Evaluation: | Presentation, Report |
| Chair: | Uli Fahrenberg |
Objectives : Modeling and analysis of concurrent systems
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 some 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, branching automata, 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.
2025-2026's webpage
Participants : Vigeolas-Choury Paul, Mungiu Andrei Vladimir, Kress Nicolas, Rooy Lucas
