My current
research is about exploration of Big Data and extraction of useful
information from large databases. In particular, my thesis has mostly
been about exploring mobile phone databases. This field of research has
a wide variety of applications, ranging from community detection on
large graphs, to mobiliy modeling or monitoring epidemics. During my
thesis, I've focused mainly on the modeling of spreading processes on
large networks of contacts, and more recently I've been very interested
in the use of mobile phone data to help countries towards development.
In this context, I've helped in the organization of the
Orange
D4D challenge in 2013, and this year I spent the spring of 2014 in
New York, working in partnership with the
United Nations Global Pulse
and
Real Impact Analytics,
on a project to use mobile phone data to monitor food security in
Africa.
My research interests more generally include all dynamical aspects
of network theory, spreading processes and temporal networks as well as
applications of big data towards development.
My Ph.D. advisors are
Vincent
Blondel and
Jean-Charles
Delvenne.
My Ph.D. committee also includes
Paul Van Dooren
and
Michel
Verleysen.
I work at
UCLouvain in the
applied
mathematics department (INMA), in the research group on
Large Graphs and Networks.
I am currently an
F.R.S.-FNRS research fellow for my
Ph.D. thesis (2011-2015), and I'm currently writing my thesis, to be
presented in September 2015.
I did my master's degree in mathematical engineering (
ingénieur
civil en mathématiques appliquées) at the
Ecole
polytechnique de Louvain (2009-2011). I spent my first year of
master's as an exchange student at the
Royal Institute of Technology in
Stockholm, Sweden, under the program of
Cluster Dual Degree. I
did my master's thesis under the supervision of
Vincent
Blondel and
Paul
Van Dooren
on the statistical analysis of the Belgian mobile phone network. In the
context of my master's thesis, I had the opportunity to spend a few
weeks as a visiting student at
MIT.
During my thesis, I helped organize
NetMob
2013, the third international conference on the analysis of mobile
phone datasets, along with the
Orange
D4D challenge on data from Côte d'Ivoire.
I also had the opportunity to spend a few months in New York in 2014,
working with
UN Global Pulse
on a project of data for development. I very much enjoyed exploring the
uses of data for good, and I am convinced that in the future, more and
more of these Big Data will be harnessed to serve for development
purposes, or crisis prevention.
Review Paper:
V. D. Blondel, A. Decuyper, G. Krings,
A survey of results on mobile phone
datasets analysis, arXiv
preprint arXiv:1502.03406 (2015). [
arXiv]
Research Papers:
A. Decuyper, A. Rutherford, A. Wadhwa, J.-M.
Bauer, G. Krings, T. Gutierrez, V. D. Blondel, M. A.
Luengo-Oroz,
Estimating
Food Consumption and Poverty indices with Mobile Phone Data,
arXiv preprint
arXiv:1412.2595 (2014). [
arXiv]
This project was also featured in
MIT
Tech Review and on
Global
Pulse's website.
M. Tizzoni, P. Bajardi, A. Decuyper, G. Kon
Kam King, C. M.
Schneider, V. D. Blondel, Z. Smoreda, M.C. Gonzàlez,
V. Colizza,
On the use of human
mobility proxies for modeling epidemics,
PLoS
computational biology 10(7), 1003716 (2014). [
PDF]
Book Chapter:
L. E. C. Rocha, A. Decuyper, and V. D. Blondel.
Epidemics on a stochastic model of
temporal network. In Animesh Mukherjee,
Monojit Choudhury, Fernando Peruani, Niloy Ganguly, and Bivas Mitra,
editors,
Dynamics
On and Of Complex Networks, Volume 2,
Modeling and Simulation in Science,
Engineering and Technology, pages 301–314. Springer
New York,
2013. [
PDF]
Press:
A. Decuyper, V.D. Blondel,
Une vie privée est-elle encore possible?,
La Recherche 482 (Dec 2013)
[
Article on Big
Data (French)]
Talks:
Monitoring food security with mobile phone data, Ignite Talk
Big Data Innovation Summit - Made in Belgium, Brussels, March 2015
Exploring mobile
phone data and its uses towards development,
ICTEAM tutorial seminar, Louvain-La-Neuve, Belgium,
November 2014.
Estimating food
consumption and poverty indices with mobile phone data,
seminar Big Data ARC research group,
Louvain-La-Neuve, Belgium, October 2014.
Time independent
degree distributions in mobile phone networks,
Benelux Meeting, Houffalize, Belgium, March 2013.
Latest progress
on a mysterious distribution in large networks,
UCL-INMA Largre Graphs and Networks seminar,
Louvain-La-Neuve, Belgium, November 2012.
Epidemics on a
stochastic model of temporal network,
Benelux Meeting, Heijen, The Netherlands, March
2012, and
Symposium on Mathematical Theory of Networks and
Systems, Melbourne, Australia, July
2012.
A Statistical
Analysis of the Belgian Mobile Phone Network,
UCL-INMA Large Graphs and Networks seminar,
Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium, March 2011.
