Laurent is currently on leave from his position of full Professor of Physics at the Université Paris Diderot, Paris. He is a graduate from Ecole Normale Supérieure and holds a PhD in Applied Mathematics from Marseille University. He is a former fellow of the Institut Universitaire de France, which recognizes the top 2% of French university professors for their research excellence. In parallel, he held various academic positions : Visiting Scholar at Stanford University, USA, Visiting Senior Lecturer at Queen Mary University of London, UK, Visiting Professor at the National Institute for Informatics in Tokyo, Japan. Laurent has been a consultant to various small and large companies, and is a co-inventor in several patents. Laurent is also a Senior Member of the IEEE and an elected member of the IEEE AASP Technical Committee as well as a former Associate Editor of IEEE TSALP. He has co-authored more than 50 peer-reviewed journal articles, and over 120 conference proceedings.

Florent is a full professor at Sorbonne University and a group leader at Laboratoire de Physique at Ecole Normale Supérieure (ENS, Paris). He holds a PhD in Physics from Paris XI University (Orsay, France). He held different positions at ESPCI in Paris, University of Roma La Sapienza and visiting positions at the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing, UC Berkeley, Duke University, Tokyo Institute of Technology, and Los Alamos National Labs. Nowadays, his research interests range from Statistical Physics, Optimization problems, Quantum Computing and Machine Learning. He is a fellow of the Institut Universitaire de France and a recipient of an EU « ERC Starting Grant ». He is an associate editor for the Journal of Statistical Mechanics. He is in the executive committee for the Data Science chair at ENS. Florent has co-authored more than 100 articles in peer reviewed journals and conferences proceedings and has been invited to over 40 conferences.