Amaury Hayat from Ecole des Ponts

For the 18th – or maybe 17th, it’s starting to get hard to count – episode, I was fortunate to have Professor Amaury Hayat as my guest. A researcher in mathematics at Ecole de Pont, I’m sure he could help me keep track of my episode numbers – that, and a little bit more. His academic career began in Classe Preparatoire at Lycée Sainte-Geneviève, before he continued on to obtain his PHD from Sorbonne University and his Masters from Cambridge. His first work in AI began with a collaboration with Meta, where he created a neural network that could prove math theorems without any built in knowledge. Next, in a project that took him here to New Jersey, he joined Rutgers University in a multi-university study into “phantom jams.” CIRCLES, the project was called, studied control algorithms that could mimic the stop and go oscillations of unstable traffic jams. The conclusion of this work was an experiment that placed three autonomous cars on a highway in Tennessee during peak hours that were programmed to drive with particular behaviors to mitigate these oscillations. The result: a success, the cars were able to reduce traffic! His current work focuses on the stabilization of partial differential equations. A little beyond my ability to explain, implications of his work could include more accurate provision of vaccines to epidemic hotspots, and variable locations for dams.