The French Computer Science Society (Société Informatique de France – SIF) has announced the 2025 winners of the Gilles Kahn PhD Thesis Award, a leading distinction recognizing outstanding doctoral research in computer science. Awarded under the patronage of the French Academy of Sciences, the prize highlights PhD work with strong scientific, technological, and societal impact.
2025 Laureate: Margot Hérin
The Gilles Kahn PhD Thesis Award 2025 was awarded to Margot Hérin for her dissertation entitled:
Learning Preference Models: A Marriage between Decision Theory and Machine Learning, conducted at LIP6 (Sorbonne University).
In her work, Margot Hérin proposes an original and rigorous connection between decision theory and machine learning to better model preferences. Her contributions open up important perspectives for the design of more expressive, robust, and interpretable recommendation systems, at the intersection of artificial intelligence and decision sciences.
This PhD research was funded by SCAI (Sorbonne Cluster for Artificial Intelligence), highlighting SCAI’s commitment to supporting excellence in AI research.
The PhD defense took place on June 25, 2025, at Sorbonne University.
The dissertation is available online, to read it, click here.