Nicolas Fouqué

I am a French computer science Engineer.

I love Data Science, and being the guy who gives meaning to the numbers.
Currently employed at IRISA team LinkMedia.


Work Experience

Research Engineer

CNRS

Research Engineer working in LINKMEDIA team at IRISA on a Data Visualization project in collaboration with ILDA.

Working to improve scalability of HyperStorylines to handle bigger datasets.

Representative of temp employees in INRIA’s center committee.
Part-time teaching duties at INSA Rennes in the preparatory cycle.

#Data Visualization #Knowledge Engineering #JavaScript #D3.js #Python

March 2024 - Present

Research Engineer

CNRS

Research Engineer working in LINKMEDIA team at IRISA on a computational Journalism project with Le Télégramme.

Conception of predictive models for online news articles audience metrics, integration into new tools for the redaction of news articles based on Explainable AI.

Representative of temp employees in INRIA’s center committee.
Part-time teaching duties at INSA Rennes in the preparatory cycle.

#Natural Language Processing #Machine Learning #PyTorch #HuggingFace Transformers #Amazon Web Services #Gradio

May 2022 - November 2023

Semantic Web Engineer

Viasema

Engineer in the Semantic Web team, in charge of development on projects destined to clients as well as internal R&D projects. Back-end development of knowledge engineering applications, ontologies, and services.
Managing the lifecycle of resources and integration of Natural Language Processing tools.

#Semantic Web #Knowledge Engineering #TopQuadrant #SPARQL Web Pages

November 2021 - May 2022

Summer Intern

SIB

Development of prototypes in several Data Visualization tools for a dashboard to help decision-making in Hospitals’ Emergency Services.

The prototypes were realized with success and an evaluation report was created that enabled the team to take a decision on the tool to use.

#Data Visualization #Proof of Concept #Superset #ElasticSearch #Logstash #Kibana #PowerBI

June 2020 - August 2020

Research Intern

IRISA

Project Repository

Implement an algorithm for Similarity Search in RDF Graphs
Work based on an ESWC Publication, working with the author to bring the algorithm as a Java library, using Apache Jena for RDF Manipulation.

Demonstration publication presented at EGC2020 in Brussels

#Semantic Web #Java #JavaFX

June 2019 - August 2019

Production Intern

Digby

I wasn’t always in the IT Field, but as I try to make the most out of everything, I’m sure this experience will have given me a non-negligeable number of transferable skills

First internship required by my formation as an intership in the industrial world.
To-the-glass Wine distributor company.
Assembly of the summer production.

#Industry #Assembly

July 2017 - August 2017

School Projects Experience

Identifying risk-prone behaviors by seafarers using Explainable AI

Master's Thesis

The goal of this thesis is to produce a predictive deep learning model to study navigational data and use attention mechanisms to identify seafarer behaviors which could lead to accidents during the ship’s navigational operations.

#Machine Learning #Explainable AI #Maritime Navigation #Pytorch #Tensorflow #Phased-LSTM

October 2020 - June 2021

TALIESIN

4th-Year Group Project

Project Repository

Rework in microservices of an application to build training databases for Handwritten Text Recognition

#Microservices #Agile Development #Docker #Kubernetes #Gitlab CI/CD #Go #Grafana

September 2019 - May 2020

Spoken Language Understanding : slot tagging project

4th-Year NLP Project

Project Repository

We had to submit two systems for slot tagging.
Our first system was a Bidirectional Gated Recurrent Unit (BiGRU) and the second one was an original turn on the CRF approach wrapped in a genetic algorithm.

#NLP #Machine Learning #Python #Google Cloud Computing #Tensorflow #CRF #LSTM

February 2020 - May 2020

GoPiGo Robotics Challenge

4th-Year Robotics Project

Introduction to robotics using GoPiGo robots and ROS framework.
The Goal was to use Infrared line detectors, an Ultrasound ditance detector and a Camera to navigate along a given path

#Robotics #GoPiGo #ROS #C++

January 2020 - April 2020

Geolocalized Air-Quality sensor

4th-Year IOT Option

Project Repository

Used an M5Stack and several sensors to collect data about the air quality, store it in a database and analyze it with Grafana.

#IOT #M5Stack #Arduino #Grafana

October 2019 - December 2019

MODL : A Discretization algorithm

3rd-Year Group Project

Implement the discretization algorithm MODL using python to be used with temporal series.

#Discretization #Python

October 2018 - May 2019

Pacman AI

3rd-Year AI Option

Project Repository

Implement Min-Max Algorithm for a Java Pacman game.

#AI #Java

March 2019 - May 2019


Education

Former Engineering student at

Engineering Degree in Computer Science

In France, engineering schools are a 3-year cursus you join after 2 years of preparatory cycle. Some schools like INSA Rennes, have their own internal preparatory cycle that you can enroll directly out of highschool to get better prepared for the specific things you do in that school; that's what I did.

Notable courses

General curriculum : Software Engineering Machine Learning Data Mining
Data Science Option : Natural Language Processing Cloud Computing Statistics
Other options : Artificial Intelligence Internet Of Things Robotics

Misc. Info

"FIRe" International Cursus : Usual courses taught in small groups with 50% foreign students, attended during the preparatory cycle.

September 2016 - present

Double degree student at

Master's degree in Information Technology

What's a double degree ?

A double degree is an agreement that lets you pursue two diplomas at the same time with each school acknowledging the other's classes as equivalent to some of theirs and by completing the right modules you qualify for both diplomas.
Having undertaken a university's double degree as an Engineering student, I learned about the world of research without compromising on a heavy technical background.

Summary of courses

Data Science Software Engineering Formation for Research

September 2020 - June 2021

High School François 1er, Le Havre, France

Baccalauréat Scientifique

Physics & Chemistry Specialization
Optional additional Physics & Chemistry courses in english

September 2013 - June 2016

Skills

Technical Skills

Main Programming Languages
Other Programming Languages
Cloud Computing & Databases
Most used Tools

Other Skills

Adobe Creative Suite
Languages

Associative Life

Insakura

Japanese Culture Association
2018-2020 - Co-President
Co-Founder in 2018

While talking with a friend of mine, we realized that a lot of people around us were big fans of the Japanese culture, and that these people tended to flock to the same clubs. But it was only by chance, and there might be even more people sharing the same interests that we might not have met because there was no club that was really made for them.
We made it our mission to create such a place, one that any person interested in Japan culture could turn to at first sight.
We founded Insakura with that in mind, and started organising “Manga Café” and Anime projection nights, to bring people interested in Japan’s pop-culture and test out a potential public for more traditional activities.

We are very proud of the platform we grew and we happily passed our responsibilities to the next generation as we moved forward in our studies.

Le Mégaphone

School Webradio
2018 - Hardware Manager
Field Reporter & Sound Engineer 2016-2019

When I joined the webradio association of my school, I was only interested in the technical side of things at first, I was the only person joining with the goal of becoming a technician, and that motivation got me appointed as the next Hardware Manager.
Eventually the other sides of what that club had to offer interested me too and I got to lead some interviews and even write my own podcast.
But I was still a technician at heart and my best achievements were made as a Sound Engineer and Audio Editor for several big interviews and a podcast written and presented by a friend of mine.

This experience taught me that I could find hapiness in making the work of others shine.

Festival de l'Œil Glauque

Tabletop Games & RPG Festival
2018 & 2019 Editions Pizza partnership manager
2017 Edition - Communication vice-manager
Volunteer for every Edition since 2016

FOG is a student festival that spans 48 hours where anyone can come and play board games from the club’s massive collection.
It also has an extensive Pen & Paper RPG listing which Game Masters can join on the fly to find players.
After I joined as a volunteer during my freshman year I knew I wanted to help this club reach out to more people, so I took the duty of Communication vice-manager after my first festival, as the responsibilities were passed on annualy.
My reponsibilities included communicating about the events that the club was organising all year long, as well as make the communication for the Festival.
When it became my turn to pass my responsibilities down to the next person,

I stayed with the club managing the partnership for pizzas on the Festival, a role that I gave my everything to during the festival, but allowed me to spend more time on other clubs during the rest of the year.

Hobbies

I always have several creative projects under way ; audio and video content creation, coding side projects and creative writing. My main media consumption comes from Japanese pop-culture in the form of anime, mangas and light novels.

Still very much an indoors type even when I want to stay active, I've been doing archery since I was in High School and came back to it recently. I have also been learning yosakoi and have been on stage several times as part of my troop.


Achievements

  • 2022 - Mental Health First Aid Formation
  • 2020 - TOEIC (Top Score)
  • 2018 - NPU-INSA Spring School
  • 2016 - Période Militaire de Découverte
  • 2016 - Selection for Regional Archery Tournament
  • 2014 - Cambridge English FCE (Top Level)
  • 2014 - Deutsches Sprachdiplom 1 (Top Level)