“Ma thèse en 180 secondes” is a popular science contest allowing PhD students from all over the French-speaking worldto present their research topic in three minutes in simple and understandable terms. The French final of this 2021 edition was organized by the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) and the Conférence des Présidents d’Université (CPU) and was sponsored by Frédéric Courant. Paul Dequidt won the first prize of the jury and the internet users’ prize for his thesis related to artificial intelligence and will represent France at the international final.
The national final of “My thesis in 180 seconds
During this national final, sixteen doctoral students presented their research topics by popularizing their words so that they could be understood by everyone. 3 minutes and not one more, that’s how long they had to achieve this feat. The Internet users and a specialized jury then gave their verdict. For the French final of the 2021 edition, the jury was composed of :
- Laurence Beauvillard, journalist at France television, “Sciences” specialist at Télématin (France 2).
- Manon Bril, video artist, science popularizer and creator of the channel “C’est une autre histoire”.
- Valérie Castellani, CNRS research director at the NeuroMyoGene Institute (Claude Bernard Lyon 1 University/Inserm/CNRS), 2018 CNRS innovation medal.
- Tom Mébarki, 1st prize of the jury and public prize of the 2019 competition “Ma thèse en 180 secondes”.
- Eddy Moniot, comedian, winner of the Eloquentia competition in 2015.
Among the prizes awarded, e third jury prize for Peter Stephen Assaghle of Aix-Marseille Provence Méditerranée at the Centre for Litigation Studies and Research (University of Toulon). His thesis work is on the “Vulnerability of women and violence in the African Great Lakes region: the case of women in Grand Kivu”.
The winner of the jury’s second prize is Louise Fliedel from the Sorbonne Paris Cité Alliance at the Chemical and Biological Technologies for Health Unit (University of Paris/CNRS/Inserm) who presented her thesis on “Design, characterization of nanovectors and evaluation of their interaction with the placental barrier”.
An award-winning thesis on artificial intelligence
Paul Dequidt, a doctoral student at the Confederation University Léonard de Vinci in the XLIM laboratory (University of Poitiers/CNRS/University of Limoges) received the Internet users’ prize as well as the jury’s first prize. He immediately commented after receiving these awards:
“I am very honored to have received these awards. Popularizing research is a way to bring research to the public. It’s important to me.”
He will have the chance to present his research topic at the international final of “My thesis in 180 seconds”. The topic? “Analysis of multimodal NMR (Nuclear Magnetic Resonance) data by artificial intelligence for binary discrimination of glioma grade.” Thanks to his study, Paul Dequidt wants to use artificial intelligence to improve the diagnosis of brain tumours.
He wants to exploit AI to perform an alternative image analysis to help the radiologist make his diagnosis. The PhD student proposes to implement automatic classification tools from the analysis of these images and for this, he deploys tools to analyze the behavior of automatic classifiers.
Thus, he points out the inconsistencies within the most used database on the task of binary classification of the tumor. Then, from acquisition to classification, an optimal processing chain is designed. Finally, he also investigates how multimodal data can improve the performance of automatic classification.
Translated from Ma thèse en 180 secondes : Paul Dequidt, doctorant en IA, vainqueur de la finale nationale
