MIMOSA is a currently ongoing research project funded by Agence Nationale de la Recherche from 2017 to 2021 (young researchers / JCJC program, no. ANR-16-CE33-0005-01). MIMOSA lies at the frontier between signal processing and operations research. It aims to propose new optimization strategies, based on mixed integer programming methods, in order to solve exactly some difficult L0-norm-based sparse approximation problems encountered in various signal processing applications.

People involved in the MIMOSA project

 

 

 

 

  • The MIMOSA project is coordinated by Sébastien Bourguignon, who is an assistant professor at Ecole Centrale de Nantes and a member of the SIMS (Signal, Image and Sound) research team at the Laboratoire des Sciences du Numérique de Nantes (LS2N) in Nantes, France. His research interests include inverse problems in signal and image processing, statistical inference, sparse approximation, optimization algorithms. His favorite application fields range from planetary and astrophysical science to nondestructive testing and evaluation.S. Bourguignon was still considered as a young researcher when the project started, therefore the funding through the “young researchers” ANR program is mostly dedicated to his research team. However, in order to yield the best possible achievements, the MIMOSA project also includes several researchers with acknowledged expertise in their respective fields.
  • Jérôme Idier works in the same team SIMS at LS2N as a CNRS senior researcher. His major scientific interests are in probabilistic approaches to inverse problems for signal and image processing
  • Jordan Ninin is an assistant professor at ENSTA Bretagne and a member of the IHSEV team of Lab-STICC in Brest, France. He is also an associate member of the research group GERAD in Canada. His research deals with exact global optimization algorithms with applications to a wide variety of problems in robotics, synthesis of robust control laws, optimal design of polygons and signal processing.
  • Hervé Carfantan is an assistant professor at Université Toulouse 3 Paul Sabatier and a member of the SISU (Signal, Image en Sciences de l’Univers) team of the Institut de Recherche en Astrophysique et Planétologie (IRAP) in Toulouse, France. His main interests are in inverse problems, estimation, spectral analysis (in particular, the case of irregularly sampled data), sparse approximation and optimization. His application fields essentially concern astronomical and remote sensing data analysis.
  • Marcel Mongeau is a professor in Operations Research at Ecole Nationale de l’Aviation Civile (ENAC) in Toulouse, France. His research interests include Global Optimization, Numerical Optimization, and Operations Research with applications to aeronautics.

Post-doc

  • Ngoc Nguyên Tran started a two-year postdoctoral fellowship in November 2018 at LS2N. Nguyên received his PhD degree in Applied Mathematics from the University of Limoges (under the supervision of Paul Armand) in October 2018. 

Student members

  • Ramzi Ben Mhenni started a PhD thesis in October 2016 at Ecole Centrale de Nantes and LS2N. He received the Master degree in Computer Science from the University of Monastir in 2016. He is involved in the different aspects covered by the MIMOSA project. His thesis is supervised by S. Bourguignon and J. Ninin.
  • Ghandy Ajib performed his Master internship (Master ACSYON, Limoges, France) at Ecole Centrale de Nantes and LS2N, from February to July 2018. He mostly worked on trying specific cutting plane methods for MIP formulations of sparse approximation problems, and on Lagrangian relaxation as an alternative to continuous relaxation within a branch-and-bound algorithm.