Centre d'Ecologie Fonctionnelle et Evolutive

nicolas dibot

The role of facial resemblance in kin selection in mandrills:

contribution of artificial intelligence

Contact

Please feel free to contact me if you have any questions about my work

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Places: CNRS-CEFE, Office 210 B / LIRMM, Bldg 5, Office 03/061

Supervisors: Julien Renoult (CEFE-E3CO), William Puech (LIRMM-ICAR) Marie Charpentier (ISEM-Evolutionary Anthropology)

Research topics

Keywords: Behavioural ecology, Artificial intelligence, Mandrills (Mandrillus sphinx), Kin selection, Generative adversarial networks (GANs), Facial similarity.

Coming from a background in bioinformatics, my doctoral work focuses on the use of artificial intelligence (AI) , and in particular image generative techniques, to study the behavior of Mandrills (Mandrillus sphinx) via the Mandrillus Project (http://www.projetmandrillus.com/).

The idea is to understand and experimentally verify the role of facial similarity in mate selection. In order to control the confounding factors inherent to correlative studies, I will set up experimental studies presenting several artificially generated images (with GANs - Generative Adversarial Networks) varying according to a same variable to a population of Mandrills in Gabon, to test several hypotheses.

In addition to that, I am working on more fundamental aspects of cognitive science concerning the links between neural fluency and beauty perception in the brain.

Generally speaking, I am as much interested in the applications of AI to solve scientific problems as in the more fundamental and innovative aspects of its functioning.

This PhD is half of the time spent in the ICAR team of LIRMM, a computer science team specialized in image processing (http://www.lirmm.fr/icar/)

More informations on theses.fr: https://www.theses.fr/s311973

Background