Idiap is accompanying university students thanks to research activities

During this semester, Maxime Délitroz, Lena Loye and Côme Jaubert will carry out practical work at our institute as part of their university curriculum. «These students will contribute to our research activities while gaining experience for their thesis in a research institute. » Raphaëlle Luisier—the researcher who welcomes the students in her group—explains.

Can you briefly describe your background?

Maxime: I’m currently doing a master's degree at EPFL in life sciences where I’m working on my thesis in the field of computer vision.

Lena: I’m doing a bachelor at EPFL and my thesis is in the machine learning field. My goal is to proceed further with a master.

Côme: I’m a medical student at the University of Paris where I’m doing a master. For the moment I’m particularly interested in data science and machine learning.

What will you be working on in the next few months?

Maxime: Following Raphaëlle Luisier and Colombine Verzat’s research [editor's note, Verzat is a development engineer at Idiap] on amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, I want to understand how it works, how the model discriminates affected from healthy neurons. To this end I should find a way to automatically annotate this database of neurons.

Lena: I aim to design machine learning models from this same database of neurons set up by Raphaëlle and Colombine.

Come: I'm interested in the physical and genetic characteristics of the neurons from this database so that we can then sort them into specific groups, which can be useful.

Why did you decide to do an internship at Idiap in Valais?

Maxime: My main interest is the "engineering" side of life sciences. When I saw the opening on the internship portal, I didn't hesitate, because it fitted exactly to what I want to do.

Lena: I know a friend who used to work at Idiap and she spoke well of the institute. So, since Raphaëlle was looking for students, I sent an application for an internship.

Côme: I already know Valais because part of my family is from here and I used to spend my vacations in the Châble region. So I was happy to take the opportunity to work in the area.

More information

- Genomics & Health Informatics group
- Classifying neurons for a better understanding of Stephen Hawking’s disease