Chedy Raissy
Chedy Raissi received his PhD in Computer Science from the University of Montpellier and the Ecole des Mines d’Alès in July 2008. He was part of the Knowledge Discovery in Databases Team (TaToo) in the Laboratory of Informatics, Robotics and Microelectonics of Montpellier (LIRMM) where he worked on topics such as data streams and sequential pattern mining. Chedy also worked at the National University of Singapore as a post-doctoral researcher with Dr. Panos Kalnis and Pr. Kian-Lee Tan on privacy-preserving data mining. He joined the Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique (Inria) in fall 2009 and is currently a research scientist (Chargé de recherche 1) within the Orpailleur team.
Chedy has been selected to participate to the 2016 Frontier Development Lab at NASA Ames and SETI Institute. We asked him to share his experience!
- Chedy, what is your field of research?
I am a scientific researcher at the Nancy-Grand Est research center of Inria ( French national research Institute for Computer Sciences and Applied Mathematics). My research focuses on pattern mining and preference representation in data mining. Recently, I started working on deep learning algorithms with application to astronomy data (deep space object detection).
- After a tough competition you have been selected to participate to the 2016 Frontier Development Lab at NASA Ames and the SETI Institute: congratulations! Can you tell us about the program and what you will be doing? What will this experience bring you?
In 2013, NASA embarked on the “Asteroid Grand Challenge” (AGC), a White House supported initiative to supplement the NEO Program, with the mission of finding and understanding all asteroids threats to human populations.
NASA Frontier Development Lab (www.frontierdevelopmentlab.org) aims to bring new approaches in Computer Science – such as deep learning and machine vision and new skills to tackle specific parts of the problem.
As such, NASA Frontier Development Lab brings researchers, with significant backing from industry and bolstered by feedback loops with experts from Planetary Science and data science, to focus their talents on tightly defined questions surrounding asteroid detection, characterization and mitigation issues. The ambition is to also to provide participants with a meaningful research opportunity, as well as support the work of the planetary defense community in this focused research activity.
I am currently assigned to work in the “New Tools Team”. Our goal is to provide new tools for asteroid shape computation from radar images. To do so, we currently are investigating the use of novel bayesian optimization and deep learning generative models.
- You are having a busy California summer full of exciting opportunities! Did you establish cooperations with institutions/researchers in California?
It is indeed a busy California summer and Silicon Valley is full of opportunities! I met a lot of interesting people, researchers, investors and industrialists. I have already started discussing possible cooperations and future possible research axes with different researchers from either the SETI Institute or NASA Ames.
- What’s next for you?
Back to France of course! I will definitely continue the project that we started @FDL and I hope that this experience will help me focus more on astronomy data!
