Tribute to Pierre Saurel
Message from Nicolas Vayatis, Director of the Borelli Center
I met Pierre in 1996 while he was doing his thesis in the Complex Systems team of CREA in Palaiseau. I have a very vivid memory of this meeting with his lively, curious, mischievous, passionate mind. At the time, he was interested in modeling the democratization process in East Germany with reinforcement learning models. I found him again in 2008 as a member of the statistics team at Ecole Centrale Paris. Since his thesis defended in 1998 under the title: "Necessity of models in cognitive sciences: from modeling to parangon" (speciality: Psychology!), he had obtained a position as a lecturer at the Institut Universitaire de Formation des Maîtres. He then became passionate about mathematics didactics, but also about law, since he had also become a brilliant lawyer specialized in computer law.
Pierre never ceased to amaze with the strings he added to his bow. Indeed, I mention in passing that after his engineering studies, he passed the agrégation in mathematics, while attending the Ecole du Louvre during his science thesis, and he also has a diploma from the Institut des hautes études de défense nationale. He has been involved at CMLA since 2012 on a number of projects involving legal and scientific aspects around health data in particular.
In 2014, he presented a habilitation to direct research on the theme "Knowledge engineering to deal with the heterogeneity of data from social systems - AI and radical otherness". His trajectory is surprising, but knowing his determination and pragmatism, we can guess that he is progressively building an intellectual edifice between mathematical sciences, computer science and humanities, freeing himself from the barriers between disciplines and communities, fed by a deep taste for the strength and dynamics of ideas. In recent years, he has worked to gain acceptance for research in the field of educational sciences within French academic institutions. He became a full member of the Borelli Center in January 2020 with the objective of developing a research program around the applications of artificial intelligence in the educational sciences.
My thoughts are with his family, his wife Ghislaine and his three children.