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Artificial intelligence represents a revolution comparable to agriculture and settlement, to the invention of writing or even of the printing press. These turning points transformed how we interact with the world. Today, AI touches every human activity.

To be honest, I'm still not sure what intelligence really is. In practice, I think we can say that artificial intelligence is a scientific discipline that lets machines accomplish tasks from examples rather than from instructions.

✍️ Writings & Media

The Sign Before the Meaning

deraison.ai, 2026 — Warith Harchaoui

Why the deraison.ai logo begins in a 1659 algebra treatise, from Johann Heinrich Rahn's ÷ sign to AI's vector representations.

✒️ ➗ Logo origins

Programming in AI

harchaoui.org — Warith Harchaoui, Mohamed Chelali, Matias Tassano and Pierre-Louis Antonsanti

A basic cheat sheet for programming in machine learning (statistical learning, pattern recognition, AI or data science), covering applications from computer vision to audio and language processing.

✒️ 💻 Technical Tips ↗

Dear Professor

Stanislas, 2021 — Warith Harchaoui

On March 2, 2021, my friend Quentin and I visited your preparatory class at Stanislas in Paris to thank you, on behalf of many alumni, for teaching us the “satisfaction mark”. […]

✒️ ❤️ Inspirational Teacher

Value in Data

Think Tank 4ᵉ Révolution, 2021 — Warith Harchaoui

Each industrial revolution is driven by a key force — raw material, energy source or creative technology — that redefines the economy. This fourth revolution is unique because its “commodity” is abstract: data. […]

✒️ 🧐 White Paper ↗

AI for Business

Rennes School of Business, 2021–2025 — Warith Harchaoui

Bridging the gap between AI technologists and team leaders: this course helps business leaders understand AI's strategic aspects and how to implement it, reconciling science and business for corporate success.

✒️ 👨‍🏫 Executive MBA ↗

On Refait le Mac with Luc Julia, Siri's Co-creator 🇫🇷

Electric Dreams, 2020 — Olivier Frigara, Luc Julia and Warith Harchaoui

Luc Julia, co-creator of Siri, revisits his creation and discusses why Apple's voice assistant still struggles to mature. A world AI expert questioning its real impact on our future — should we trust the tech giants' grand promises? Let's debate!

✒️ 📺 ORLM ↗

An Introduction to Neural Networks for Statisticians 🇫🇷

Université Paris Descartes, École 42, 2020 — Warith Harchaoui

Starting from a single neuron, to one-layer networks, then multi-layer — including convolutional architectures and adversarial networks — we explore aspects of intelligence emerging through a technology revolutionizing nearly every domain of our world.

✒️ 🧑‍🏫 Conference ↗

Favorite AI Books

Annotated library — Warith Harchaoui

In a fast-evolving field flooded with publications, a curated list of books I find remarkable, with brief comments, for readers eager to embark on the exciting AI journey.

✒️ 📚 Books

🗞️ Peer-Reviewed Publications

Publications reviewed by scientific peers.

Optimal-Transport-Based Machine Learning to Match Specific Patterns: Application to Detection of Regulatory Motifs in Omics Data

Journal of the Royal Statistical Society (RSS), 2024 — Thi Thanh Yen Nguyen, Warith Harchaoui, Lucile Mégret, Cloe Mendoza, Olivier Bouaziz, Christian Neri and Antoine Chambaz

We developed methods to geometrically link two point sets when those points should correspond. Our case study focuses on mRNA in genetics to understand Huntington's disease.

🗞️ 🧬 Article ↗

Generalized Mutual Information for Discriminative Clustering

Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2023 — Louis Ohl, Pierre-Alexandre Mattei, Charles Bouveyron, Warith Harchaoui, Mickaël Leclercq, Arnaud Droit and Frederic Precioso

Clustering groups similar objects together — customers, genes, fruits or animals. GEMINI leverages artificial neural networks in novel ways for large-scale clustering tasks. NeurIPS is the top (or second-top) conference in AI according to Google Scholar.

🗞️ ♊️ Article ↗

Learning Representations Using Neural Networks and Optimal Transport 🇫🇷🇬🇧

Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics, 2020 — Warith Harchaoui (supervised by Prof. Charles Bouveyron and Dr. Stéphane Raux)

From 2016 to 2020, this doctoral work focused on three key areas: large-scale clustering, feature importance without manual labels and confidence estimation for automated decisions. Its originality lies in combining optimal transport, neural networks and emerging generative AI.

🗞️ 🎓 Ph.D. Defense ↗