Welcome to my little corner on the Internet! I'm a French student, currently living in Kobe, Japan.
You can reach me at: mathieu !AT! mblondel *DOT* org
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Research interest
My main research interest is in Machine Learning. Machine Learning is a subfield of Artificial Intelligence (AI) concerned with the design and development of programs that can learn to perform their task from data. This is inductive learning ("learning from example"). Machine Learning is a highly interdisciplinary field built on concepts from cognitive science, probability and statistics, information theory, philosophy, psychology, neurobiology, and others. It has found widespread use in many real-world applications including pattern recognition, computer vision, natural language processing, information retrieval, data mining, etc... With the masses of information that are more and more available to us, Machine Learning will be (if it isn't already), in my opinion, a major field in the future.
Software
I sometimes create or maintain software in my free time.
Tegaki is a handwriting recognition project for Chinese and Japanese characters. Tegaki is multi-plaform and supports several recognition engines.
I also host some smaller projects or experiments in my git repository.
Interests
Programming and Open-Source
I like computer programming very much. It's for me an easy way to create. I like the way programming languages let me express solutions to problems. Like for everything, however, the path to mastery is long and difficult. It takes a lot of knowledge and experience to write elegant, concise, abstract, readable, robust, performant programs. Therefore, I constantly aspire to improve my skills.
In programming, I like free software and open-source. These are two related, yet distinct philosophies. In free software, access to the source code is considered an essential freedom while in open-source, it is part of a methodology to improve the quality of software. I adhere to both but, as an individual, I'm particularly sensitive to the free software philosophy, since I see software as knowledge. That being said, I also happen to sometimes use proprietary software and while I think the free software / open-source model can have many advantages for businesses, I also think it's not always applicable.
Japanese and Chinese
Another great passion of mine is learning languages (the natural ones!). I've been learning Japanese and Chinese since around 2004. I lived in China, near Shanghai, for 6 months in 2006 and I've been living in Japan since December 2007, first near Tokyo and now in Kobe. This probably explains why my Japanese is far better than my Chinese.
The study of these languages is fascinating and very rewarding. Every day, learning new words or characters is like a new discovery! My philosophy for learning languages is to multiply the learning sources: speaking with people, reading texbooks and books, watching TV and DVDs (if possible with subtitles), learnings the lyrics of songs, writing a blog, etc...
Music, Cinema and Sport
My favorite style of music is rock / pop rock, though I listen to pretty much anything. Listen to Radio Paradise, and you'll get a good summarize of my tastes. When working, I also often listen to trance. For some reasons, it keeps me very focused and productive...
I love Cinema. Sometimes I dream of becoming a movie director. Some of my favorite movies include: "Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind", "Gattaca", "Twelve monkeys", "Le Grand Bleu", "American Beauty", to name just a few... Essential to a great movie, in my opinion, is a great original soundtrack. Some composers I like include: John Williams, James Horner, Thomas Newman, John Barry, Michael Nyman, Danny Elfman, Yann Tiersen, Bruno Coulais, Eric Serra, ...
My favorite sport and the one I'm best at is badminton. It requires very violent, intensive efforts, yet it requires stamina to be able to go on a whole match. It also requires good technique, precision and strategy.