I am a postdoc at Unidistance in the Team of David Belius. Before that, I was a PhD student at Universitat Pompeu Fabra and Université Paris Saclay. My advisors were Gabor Lugosi and Christophe Giraud.

I work on probaility and statistics problems. Most of my research is in combinatorial statistics, where I am interested in inferring the past of growing random graphs from a snapshot of their present state. I also study random graph models introduced to describe real life phenomena. Finally, I am interested in theoretical machine learning and high dimensional statistics.

In other exciting news, in the spring of 2025 I will be visiting the Simons Laufer Mathematical Science Institute for the Probability and Statistics of Discrete Structures program.

If you are interested in collaborating on some exciting projects, please do not hesitate to contact me!

I am also organizing a bi-weekly seminar for young researchers. You can find more informations on this page PSYR seminar. The goal is to share and discover the work of young colleagues in an informal setting. We meet online and I encourage speakers to present accessible talks, followed by discussions and exchange. Most of our meetings are online. If you are interested in participating and/or giving a talk send me an email.

Simon Briend

Contact me

simon dot briend @ unidistance.ch
Department of Mathematics
Unidistance Suisse

Publications and preprints

  • Simon Briend, Francisco Calvillo, and Gábor Lugosi. "Archaeology of random recursive dags and Cooper-Frieze random networks." Combinatorics, Probability and Computing, 2023, to appear. (pdf)
  • Simon Briend, Luc Devroye and Gábor Lugosi. "Broadcasting in random recursive dags." 2023, ArXiv preprint. (pdf)
  • Simon Briend, Gábor Lugosi, Roberto Imbuzeiro Oliveira. "On the quality of randomized approximations of Tukey's depth." 2023, ArXiv preprint. (pdf)
  • Simon Briend, Christophe Giraud, Gábor Lugosi, Déborah Sulem. "Estimating the history of a random recursive tree." 2024, ArXiv preprint. (pdf)
  • Louigi Addario Berry, Simon Briend, Luc Devroye, Serte Donderwinkel, Céline Kerriou, Gábor Lugosi. "Random friend trees." 2024, ArXiv preprint. (pdf)
  • Louigi Addario Berry, Anna Brandenberger, Simon Briend, Nicolas Broutin, Gábor Lugosi. "Leaf Stripping on Uniform Attachment Trees." 2024, ArXiv preprint. (pdf)

Seminars, talks and visits

  • February 2024: Invited talk at the ASCAI workshop, Potsdam.
  • January 2024: Invited talk at Bienal RSME, Pamplona.
  • November 2023: SfS PhD presentations at ETHZ.
  • October 2023: Month long visit to McGill, funded by CRM.
  • June 2023: Invited talk at the APS conference, Nancy.
  • May 2023: Month long visit to IMPA, working with Roberto Imbuzeiro Oliveira.
  • November 2022: LIMDA seminar, UPC, Barcelona.
  • Ocotber 2023: Month long visit to McGill, working with Louigi Addario-Berry and Luc Devroye.
  • October 2022: Statistics seminar, UPF, Barcelona.
  • August 2022: Randnet workshop, Eindhoven.
  • April 2023: Month long visit to IMPA, working with Roberto Imbuzeiro Oliveira.

Education

  • 2021-2024: PhD student in probability and statistics in Laboratoire de Mathématiques d'Orsay and Universitat Pompeu Fabra, under the supervision of Christophe Giraud and Gabor Lugosi.
  • 2021: Research internship under the supervision of Gabor Lugosi, working on network archaeology.
  • 2019-2021: Master Mathématiques de l'intelligence artificielle at Université Paris-Saclay.
  • 2018-2019: Bachelor degree in Mathematics at Université Paris-Saclay.
  • 2016-2018: Classes prépa in Lycée Thiers, Marseille.

Cool Stuff

A sample of what I do in my spare time.

Plain Academic