Jules Brochard

Position

I started PhD with Dr. Jean Daunizeau in September of 2016 in the Motivational Brain Behavior team at the Brain and Spine Institute in Paris, France. Funded by   "École Normale Supérieure Rennes" (ENS Rennes)  I'm a student of the "Université Pierre et Marie Curie" at the doctoral school "École Doctoral Cerveau Cognition Comportement".

Current work

My PhD research is focused  on computational approaches for brain-behavior relationship (that's actually my thesis title :D). I'm developing mathematical framework and tools to evaluate how the brain transforms external signals in overt behavior.

To this end, I started with simple models and I evaluated the realm of application of (massively-univariate) mediation analysis on fMRI data. When can we say something from the data, what we cannot say, and more importantly when we cannot conclude.

Still in the same spirit, I'm working right now on a finner modelisation (non-linear) of the brain computation, from a multivariate perspective.

Academic background

I first studied Mathematics and Physics during 3 years of french preparatory classes. Then I have been acepted at the ENS Rennes. where I received a bachelor in Mathematics,  and both a bachelor and a master in Computer Sciences. Before my PhD I extended my scope of interest by spending one year studying cognitive science in the cogMaster at the ENS Ulm.

Lab experience

After my bachelors I spent 3 month working with Pierre-Yves OUDEYER in the FLOWERS team (developmental robotics) at the INRIA Bordeaux, France. I worked on a stochastic optimization algorithm applied to a realistic model of human vocal-tract. We published an article about my internship: "Emergent Jaw Predominance in Vocal Development through Stochastic Optimization". 

During my 1st and 2nd year of master I spent 3 and 6 month working with Thomas SERRE in the SERRE Lab (computational vision) at BROWN University, Rhodes Island, USA. There I investigate bimodal representation of visual cue (mixing stereoscopic and motion information) and the impact of color cues on face recognition machin learning algorithms.

email: "brochard.julesATgmail.com" change the AT by @ to contact me, I'll be happy to chat with you :)