I’am Regis Konan Marcel DJAHA
Research Technician at BCAM
Regis Djaha is a full-time Research Technician from Ivory Coast at the Basque Center for Applied Mathematics (BCAM). He is a member of the Machine Learning group, working closely with Iñigo Urteaga, since September 2023.
His research is focused on the development and evaluation of deep latent variable models in general, and in particular, variational autoencoders for unsupervised and supervised learning problems. The overarching goal is to apply these techniques across diverse fields, with his research at BCAM representing a significant contribution in the intersection of mathematics and machine learning. Regis has academic training on the foundations of partial differential equations, time-series, machine learning, reinforcement learning, fluid mechanics and climate science, with practical experience on the implementation and evaluation of such techniques in Matlab, R, Python and PyTorch.
In July 2023, right before joining BCAM, he was awarded the opportunity to engage in an international collaborative project between Mfano Africa and the University of Oxford, participating in a virtual mentoring program. This initiative involved close collaborations between promising pre-doctoral students from sub-Saharan Africa, who aspire to pursue postgraduate studies in the mathematical sciences, and faculty at Oxford University. The work resulting from this project, entitled “Visibility Network Structure of Time Series from Real-World Systems,” involved comparing multivariate time-series correlations to a Wiener process with uncorrelated variables. The research examined data from the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to analyze their fluctuation patterns and correlations. By studying differences in the average edge overlap metric, they concluded that the time-series of returns in finance exhibited higher correlation between its layers, establishing it as a valuable resource for financial analysis and prediction.
Regis Djaha completed his Master’s degree in Mathematical Sciences on June 2022 at the African Institute for Mathematics Science (AIMS) —renowned as the most prestigious Mathematics center in Africa— in Kigali, Rwanda. His Master Thesis, executed under the supervision of Yoshifumi Kimura from Nagoya University in Japan, focused on the application of partial differential equations to physical problems. Specifically, he investigated how to apply Darcy’s Law, the fundamental partial differential equation governing flows in porous media, to assess the water passage through a porous embankment for conservation and flood risk mitigation.
Prior to that, Regis Djaha had obtained his Bachelor’s degree in Mathematics in 2018, and a Master’s degree in Mechanics and Energetics in 2020, both at the University Félix Houphouët-Boigny in Abidjan, Ivory Coast.
In January 2023, he was selected as a student within the African Master’s in Machine Intelligence (AMMI) program at the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences in Mbour, Senegal. This is an internationally recognized program as the most important center for Artificial Intelligence studies in Africa. He is expected to graduate from a Master’s in Machine Intelligence by July 2024, with a Master Thesis supervised by Dr. Urteaga, PI of this proposal.