Past topics

Coq

Before my PhD, I worked with Hugo Herbelin on the automatic and transparent transfer of theorems along isomorphisms. On this subject, I have written a blog post [in French] and a working paper.

Computational biology

During my year in Texas, I discovered the field of bio-informatics and computational biology. I have worked with Professor Tandy Warnow for one semester (after having followed her class during the first semester) and I have co-authored two conference papers:
- Zimmermann T., Mirarab S. and Warnow T. BBCA: Improving the scalability of *BEAST using random binning. BMC Genomics 15, Suppl 6 (2014), S11.
- Mirarab S., Reaz R., Bayzid M. S., Zimmermann T., Swenson M. S. and Warnow T. ASTRAL: genome-scale coalescent-based species tree estimation. Bioinformatics 30, 17 (2014), i541–i548.
Some works done for Prof. Warnow’s class:
- “Boosting BAli-Phy with UPP”, C. Rottner, T. Zimmermann, with help of N. Nguyen and T. Warnow, class project paper.
- Presentation of CABOG, a genome assembler.

Linguistic

I did an internship with Professor Paul Sabatier at LIF (Laboratoire d’Informatique Fondamentale) in Marseille in the area of Natural Language Processing. I developed an algorithm to infer syntactic transformation of a sentence from examples and implemented it in Prolog [report, in French].
When in primary and middle school, I invented a language called Enfantin. This paper I wrote [in French] explains everything you need to know about it. On a side note, I’ve never spoken this language fluently and I would have had no one to talk to anyways.

Physics

In second year of college studies (maths spé at Lycée Thiers, Marseille), I worked on my first research project. The subject was how to adapt a vehicle to the road surface (in the context of Shell Eco-Marathon). I defended this report [in French] for the competitive exams leading to my admission to the ENS (École Normale Supérieure), Paris. I have studied, both theoretically and experimentally, the variation in running resistance with respect to the type of road surface, but also to the tire pressure.

Biology

When in high school, I did a report [in French] on the adaption of plants to a new environment with two classmates.
My first internship in a research unit was in middle school when I visited a biology/cancer research lab for one week [report, in French].

Other computer science works

During an internship at Microsoft Research Cambridge (England), I worked on non-termination proofs, under the supervision of Byron Cook [report, in English].
I have read and commented many computer science research papers. I’m including here a link to one of the first comment I did, on a paper in the area of robotics [in French].

Past software projects

My first programming project (winner of the Concours Innovez des Jeunes Inventeurs, March 2008): Test-Pedago [in French]. This is an educative software which was used by a school teacher with her students. Some of them directly contributed to it by creating a database for French verbs conjugation.
A modern version of the Snake game that you can play in your web browser on mobile phone, tablet, laptop or desktop. It still works perfectly!
A mass-collaboration novel writing project: unkilodeplumes [in French].

Kinea

As an editor, I contributed to the creation of Kinea, a new plurilingual online magazine which provides alternative political and economical analyses as well as science popularization.