I am a third year PhD student in applied mathematics at Laboratoire J.A. Dieudonné, Université Côte d'Azur located in Nice. I am working under the supervision of Patricia Reynaud-Bouret and Samuel Vaiter .

In October, I will start working at the Center for Systems Biology Dresden as an ELBE postdoctoral researcher.

Research interests

My research focuses on the mathematical modeling of neural learning, at the interface between mathematics, machine learning and biology. During the two first years of my PhD, I focused on demonstrating rigorously that biologically-inspired neural networks can indeed learn, in order to further our understanding of the local mechanisms underlying global learning.

I am currently working on two projects. The first focuses on studying reaction times in cognitive experiments using spiking neural networks. The second aims to reconstruct the functional connectivity of a neural network, where the neurons' activity is only partially observed, by employing optimization techniques.

Keywords

Spiking neural networks, Hawkes process, online learning, optimization

Publications:

S. Jaffard, S. Vaiter, A. Muzy, and P. Reynaud-Bouret, “Provable local learning rule by expert aggregation for a Hawkes network” , AISTATS 2024
M. Villet, P. Reynaud-Bouret, J. Poitreau, J. Baldi, S. Jaffard, A. James, A. Muzy, F. Sargolini, I. Bethus, "Coding dynamics of the striatal networks during learning", eNeuro, 2024

Preprints:

S. Jaffard, S. Vaiter, P. Reynaud-Bouret, “CHANI: Correlation-based Hawkes Aggregation of Neurons with bio-Inspiration”, preprint, May 2024.
S. Jaffard, G. Mezzadri, P. Reynaud-Bouret, E. Tanré, "Spiking Neural Models for Decision-Making tasks with Learning" , preprint, February 2025.

Teaching:

2023: Teaching assistant, XXVI Brazilian School of Probability , São Paulo, Brazil (Jul 30 - Aug 5)
2022-2025: Teaching assistant, Université Côte d'Azur
2021-2022: Colleuse, Lycée Henri IV

Tutorials XXVI Brazilian School of Probability:

CV:

CV.pdf

Contact: sophie.jaffard@univ-cotedazur.fr

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