Erwan Le Merrer

Erwan Le Merrer

Senior Researcher (Доктар навук)

Hello, since Nov. 2018, I am on an “advanced research position” at Inria, in the WIDE team.

“Maybe, not content to be alienated by observation, maybe does the object deceive us? Maybe it invented original answers, and not only the ones we ask for? May not be does it not want to be analyzed and observed at all and taking this for a challenge (which is true), does it respond with another challenge? […] the object analyzed today triumphs everywhere, by its object position, over the subject of analysis.” (Jean Baudrillard, Fatal Strategies.)

My main current research activity is trying to disprove that quote, by studying black-box algorithms in the context of recommender systems, neural-network models, or decision-making algorithms in general. I co-organized with Gilles and Antoine the workshop “Algorithmes en Boite-Noire”, in a continuous attempt to link several research domains on this societal question.

Background

I was a senior research scientist at Technicolor R&I (2009-2018), where I worked on scalable storage, processing and machine learning for data analytics and monitoring of home devices. I own a PhD on distributed systems from University of Rennes 1, and a background on peer-to-peer systems, and graph mining/algorithms. My Ph.D. thesis was financed by Orange Labs (where I stayed btw 2004-2007). I obtained my habilitation (HDR) on November 2016 from University of Rennes 1. I am the president and sysadmin of the gozdata association, that provides the gozmail service, built from free software. I am a board member of the Société Informatique de France.

News

Under submission

  • RoBIC: A benchmark suite for assessing classifiers robustness, Thibault Maho, Benoît Bonnet, Teddy Furon, Erwan Le Merrer. Preprint [Arxiv 2021], [code].

Recent publications

  • SurFree: a fast surrogate-free black-box attack, Thibault Maho, Teddy Furon, Erwan Le Merrer. In CVPR (2021). Preprint [Arxiv 2020], [code].

  • Setting the Record Straighter on Shadow Banning, Erwan Le Merrer, Benoît Morgan, Gilles Trédan. In INFOCOM (2021). Preprint [ArXiv preprint 2020].

  • Remote Explainability faces the bouncer problem, Erwan Le Merrer, Gilles Trédan. In Nature Machine Intelligence (2020). [Nature article full access] doi [citation]. Preprint [ArXiv preprint 2019].

  • FeGAN: Scaling Distributed GANs, Rachid Guerraoui, Arsany Guirguis, Anne-Marie Kermarrec, Erwan Le Merrer. In Middleware, 2020. [Preprint], [Presentation video].

  • The Imitation Game: Algorithm Selection by Exploiting Black-Box Recommenders, Georgios Damaskinos, Rachid Guerraoui, Erwan Le Merrer and Christoph Neumann. In NETYS, 2020. [Preprint].

  • zoNNscan : a boundary-entropy index for zone inspection of neural models, Adel Jaouen, Erwan Le Merrer. In Monte Carlo Search workshop (MCS) @ IJCAI 2020 [ArXiv preprint 2018].

  • Adversarial Frontier Stitching for Remote Neural Network Watermarking, Erwan Le Merrer, Patrick Perez, Gilles Trédan. In Neural Comput & Applic 32, 9233–9244 (2020). [editor] [preprint] [citation]

  • TamperNN: Efficient Tampering Detection of Deployed Neural Nets, Erwan Le Merrer, Gilles Trédan. In ISSRE, 2019. [preprint] [editor]

  • Unified and Scalable Incremental Recommenders with Consumed Item Packs, Rachid Guerraoui, Erwan Le Merrer, Rhicheek Patra, Jean-Ronan Vigouroux. In Euro-par 2019. [preprint] [editor]

  • Application-aware adaptive partitioning for graph processing systems, Erwan Le Merrer, Gilles Trédan. (6p short) In MASCOTS 2019. [preprint] [editor]

  • MD-GAN: Multi-Discriminator Generative Adversarial Networks for Distributed Datasets, Corentin Hardy, Erwan Le Merrer, Bruno Sericola. In IPDPS, 2019. [preprint] [editor]

  • Gossiping GANs, Corentin Hardy, Erwan Le Merrer, Bruno Sericola. In Middleware’s Workshop on Distributed Infrastructures for Deep Learning, 2018. [preprint] [ACM ref]

  • Distributed deep learning on edge-devices: feasibility via adaptive compression, Corentin Hardy, Erwan Le Merrer, Bruno Sericola. In IEEE NCA, 2017. Best paper award [preprint] [editor]

  • The topological face of recommendation, Erwan Le Merrer, Gilles Trédan. In Complex Networks 2017. [preprint] [editor]

  • Uncovering Influence Cookbooks : Reverse Engineering the Topological Impact in Peer Ranking Services, Erwan Le Merrer, Gilles Trédan. In ACM CSCW, 2017. [preprint] [editor]

Selected publications

  • Remote Explainability faces the bouncer problem, Erwan Le Merrer, Gilles Trédan. Nature Machine Intelligence, 2020. [citation]

  • Adversarial Frontier Stitching for Remote Neural Network Watermarking, Erwan Le Merrer, Patrick Perez, Gilles Trédan. Neural Computing and Applications, 2020.

  • Frugal topology construction for stream aggregation in the cloud, Rachid Guerraoui, Erwan Le Merrer, Rhicheek Patra, Bao-Duy Tran. Infocom, 2016.

  • Archiving cold data in warehouses with clustered network coding, Fabien André, Anne-Marie Kermarrec, Erwan Le Merrer, Nicolas Le Scouarnec, Gilles Straub, Alexandre van Kempen. Eurosys, 2014.

  • Second order centrality: Distributed assessment of nodes criticity in complex networks, Anne-Marie Kermarrec, Erwan Le Merrer, Bruno Sericola, Gilles Trédan. Computer Communications, 2011.

Code

Awards

  • IEEE NCA 2017 best paper award, for paper “Distributed deep learning on edge-devices: feasibility via adaptive compression”, with Corentin Hardy and Bruno Sericola.
  • Paper co-authors are awarded prize “La recherche 2015”, for work on cold storage, from Eurosys 2014.
  • Prix “Bretagne jeune chercheur” 2011, mention spéciale.

Communication

Service

As my main participation to scientific events, I was co-chair of Middleware 2018 industry track, in Rennes, and AlgoTel 2019 program co-chair. Co-organizing WOS with INRIA and Interdigital (ex Technicolor), a workshop on storage, cloud processing and data analytics, in every year Rennes: WOS archive.

I have co-authored 8 granted patents, and around 39 pending demands.

I have contributed to produce a document on “Transparency and audit of algorithms” regarding the GAFAM, for the French DGE. In general, I am broadly interested in the impact of technology on society.

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