Laurent Najman

Timeline

1. 1991–1995

   Thomson-CSF and a Dauphine PhD

   He earns an engineering degree from the École des Mines de Paris in 1991 and works as a research engineer at Thomson-CSF's Central Research Laboratory, studying infrared image segmentation with mathematical morphology. In 1994, he completes a PhD in applied mathematics at Paris-Dauphine University.

2. 1995–2002

   Animation Science and Océ

   In 1995, he joins the start-up ArSciMed, now Animation Science, as director of research and development; the company's particle-system technology, developed under his technical leadership, wins the European Information Technology Prize in 1997. In 1998, he becomes a senior scientist at Océ Print Logic Technologies, working on image analysis for scanning and printing.

3. 2002–2007

   Associate professor at ESIEE Paris

   He joins the Informatics Department of ESIEE Paris in 2002 as an associate professor and becomes a member of the Laboratoire d'Informatique Gaspard Monge at Université Paris-Est Marne-la-Vallée. In 2006, he receives the Habilitation à Diriger les Recherches from the University of Marne-la-Vallée, and in 2007 he becomes a professor at ESIEE Paris.

4. 2009–2011

   Power Watersheds and a morphology book

   With Jean Cousty, Gilles Bertrand and Michel Couprie, he coauthors "Watershed Cuts: Minimum Spanning Forests and the Drop of Water Principle" in 2009. He and Hugues Talbot publish the book Mathematical Morphology: from theory to applications with ISTE-Wiley in 2010. In 2011, he coauthors "Power Watersheds" with Camille Couprie, Leo Grady and Hugues Talbot, a framework that places graph cuts, random walker and shortest-path optimization in one energy function.

5. 2012

   Scene parsing with convolutional nets

   In 2012, he coauthors "Scene Parsing with Multiscale Feature Learning, Purity Trees, and Optimal Covers" with Clément Farabet, Camille Couprie and Yann LeCun; a multiscale convolutional network trained from raw pixels extracts the features. He supervises the doctoral theses of Couprie and Farabet.

6. 2019

   The Higra library paper

   In 2019, he coauthors the SoftwareX paper "Higra: Hierarchical Graph Analysis" with Benjamin Perret, Giovanni Chierchia, Jean Cousty, Silvio Jamil F. Guimarães and Yukiko Kenmochi, on Higra, a library for hierarchical graph analysis.

7. 2023

   ICLR 2023 honorable mention

   He coauthors "On the duality between contrastive and non-contrastive self-supervised learning" with Quentin Garrido, Yubei Chen, Adrien Bardes and Yann LeCun, and the paper receives an Honorable Mention at ICLR 2023. It relates contrastive and covariance-based non-contrastive criteria algebraically and shows them equivalent under limited assumptions.

8. Since 2025

   President of AFRIF

   He is a professor at ESIEE Paris, Université Gustave Eiffel, and leads the A3SI team at the Laboratoire d'Informatique Gaspard Monge. Elected in late December 2024, he serves from 2025 as president of AFRIF, the French branch of the International Association for Pattern Recognition, and oversees its events, including the ORASIS conference and the RFIAP congress.