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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.

Warith Harchaoui on a cafe terrace, facing a camera on a tripod

✍️ Writings & Media

The Model Does Not Write the Number

deraison.ai · September 2026 · Warith Harchaoui

Four plain-language questions put to a company database: a number, a prediction, a forecast, a chart. The language model writes the query, the database answers and the error becomes visible again. txt2sql, txt2sql2ml with TabICL, txt2sql2viz with sprezzature.ai.

✒️ ⚖️ Read the article

While Not Good Yet

deraison.ai · September 2026 · Warith Harchaoui

The Ralph loop extends the while loop to conditions no machine can test: a readable chart, prose that flows, an honest forecast. Four guards make it hold and the third one has a number attached.

✒️ 👁️ Read the article

An Elbow or Nothing

deraison.ai · September 2026 · Warith Harchaoui

elbow-helper detects the elbows of diminishing-returns curves, with quantified uncertainty. When the evidence is missing, it abstains. Bootstrap, BIC, null-model test: the full mathematics.

✒️ 📐 Read the article

From a Table to a Map

deraison.ai · September 2026 · Warith Harchaoui

Standpoint reads a comparison table (options as rows, criteria as columns) and draws a positioning map, axes named in the table's own language. One command does it, everything runs on your machine.

✒️ 🗺️ Read the article

The Last Slide

deraison.ai · September 2026 · Warith Harchaoui

A QR code on the last slide, the contact card lands in the audience's phones and a private page counts the scans. Why and how I built qr4prez.

✒️ 📱 Read the article

Good Colors

deraison.ai · Warith Harchaoui and Laurent Pantanacce

A small palette settled once and for all, every shade copied with one click. Three tables map a color to an emotion, to a concept and to what psychology says about it, all downloadable as CSV. Two variants: the corporate one, and the academic one built on the Okabe-Ito palette, readable by people whose color vision differs.

✒️ 🎨 Palette ↗

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 ↗

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 ↗

Past Talks

A few recordings