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2026's Seminars

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[LINGI2399] 2026-05-07 (10:45) : Successful development of a Marketplace

At BARB94

Speaker : Sébastien Deletaille (Rosa) , and Antoine Pairet (Rosa)
Abstract : A marketplace is an online platform that allows sellers to offer their products or services to a large audience, thus facilitating the meeting between supply and demand. In our daily life, several marketplaces have become essential: Amazon, Booking.com, Doctolib, Uber, Airbnb,...What does it take to launch a marketplace? Through the analysis of the launch of Rosa.be, one of the largest medical platforms in Belgium, we will understand the means, resources and time required to succeed.
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[INMA] 2026-05-05 (14:00) : Designing Provably Safe Autonomous Systems Under Uncertainty

At Euler building (room A.002)

Speaker : Sofie Haesaert (Eindhoven University of Technology)
Abstract : The deployment of autonomous aerial and ground vehicles in real-world environments presents fundamental challenges in ensuring safety and resilience under uncertainty. As autonomy increases and human oversight diminishes, we must develop formal methods that provide mathematical guarantees on system behavior in the face of stochastic disturbances and environmental variability. This talk presents recent advances in data-driven verification and control synthesis for both linear and nonlinear stochastic models. We differentiate between abstraction-based and abstraction-free approaches and show how approximate stochastic simulation relations can be used to quantify abstractions, enabling scalable formal verification of systems with uncertainty. Building on this foundation, we address control synthesis for autonomy via a tight integration of symbolic logic, stochastic formal methods, and uncertainty quantification — paving the way toward interacting autonomous systems that are not only capable, but also provably safe.
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[LINGI2399] 2026-04-16 (10:45) : Quantum Computing

At BARB94

Speaker : Eric Michiels (IBM)
Abstract : Quantum Computing is rapidly moving onto the strategic agenda of organizations worldwide. It is designed to tackle complex problems and serves as a complement, not a replacement, to Classical Computing. What truly sets Quantum Computing apart? What are the key characteristics of its hardware, software, and applications? Which hardware architectures exist, and how are Quantum Algorithms developed? And what skills will professionals need in the new "Quantum Era"? The speaker will explore short-, mid-, and long-term use cases, look at early adopters, and examine the synergy between Quantum Computing and AI. You will also discover how both junior and senior professionals can begin their Quantum Journey.
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[INGI] 2026-04-16 (13:00) : No evaluation without fair representation: Impact of label and selection bias on the evaluation, performance and mitigation of classification models

At BARB 94 (Hall Sainte-Barbe)

Speaker : Magali Legast (ICTEAM)
Abstract : Bias can be introduced in diverse ways in machine learning datasets, for example via selection or label bias. Although these bias types in themselves have an influence on important aspects of fair machine learning, their different impact has been understudied. In our work, we empirically analyze the effect of label bias and several subtypes of selection bias on the evaluation of classification models, on their performance, and on the effectiveness of bias mitigation methods. We also introduce a biasing and evaluation framework that allows to model fair worlds and their biased counterparts through the introduction of controlled bias in real-life datasets with low discrimination. Using our framework, we empirically analyze the impact of each bias type independently, while obtaining a more representative evaluation of models and mitigation methods than with the traditional use of a subset of biased data as test set. Our results highlight different factors that influence how impactful bias is on model performance. They also show an absence of trade-off between fairness and accuracy, and between individual and group fairness, when models are evaluated on a test set that does not exhibit unwanted bias. They furthermore indicate that the performance of bias mitigation methods is influenced by the type of bias present in the data. Our findings call for future work to develop more accurate evaluations of prediction models and fairness interventions, but also to better understand other types of bias, more complex scenarios involving the combination of different bias types, and other factors that impact the efficiency of the mitigation methods, such as dataset characteristics.
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[INMA] 2026-04-14 (14:00) : High order deterministic and stochastic optimization without evaluating the objective function

At Euler building (room A.002)

Speaker : Philippe Toint (Université de Namur)
Abstract : We first motivate OFFO methods, that is methods for optimization without computing the objective function's value. We then show that such methods are applicable for unconstrained minimization of nonconvex functions (both in the deterministic and stochastic frameworks) and give a few examples from deep learning applications. We then move on to the case where the problem has general equality and inequality constraints, propose an OFFO algorithm for this case and analyze its global convergence rate in the deterministic case.  We conclude by presenting some numerical illustration of the proposed method. This is a Joint work with S. Gratton, S. Bellavia and B. Morini.
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