Portrait of Issam Falih

Issam Falih

Associate Professor in Computer Science
ENSEA — ETIS (UMR 8051), DATA & AI team

My research is in statistical machine learning, with a focus on multimodal representation learning under data scarcity: incomplete or unpaired modalities, few labels, small samples and limited compute. I work on three connected problems:

  • Multimodal representation learning from incomplete and unpaired data: multi-view and collaborative clustering, non-negative matrix factorization, multilayer graphs, and shared latent representations across sensors.
  • Cross-modal transfer and generation with optimal transport: hierarchical optimal transport for transfer under distribution shift, with generalization guarantees, and transport-based generative models (flow matching) for cross-sensor generation from few paired samples.
  • Reliability under scarce supervision: credal uncertainty based on belief functions, and partial identification to certify transfers and synthetic data, i.e. how many paired or labeled observations are needed to reach a decision.

Applications include health (patient phenotyping in chronic pain, multimodal clinical cohorts), human activity recognition from video and inertial sensors, and multi-sensor perception (RGB, infrared) with industrial partners (Safran, Emo’Lis). I contributed to the European project NeuroDeRisk (H2020 IMI2).

Previously Associate Professor at Université Clermont Auvergne (LIMOS, 2019–2026). PhD in Computer Science, LIPN, Université Sorbonne Paris Nord (2018). MSc in Computer Science (MIDO, Intelligent Systems — Machine Learning track), Université Paris Dauphine – PSL (2014).

Research interests optimal transport · domain adaptation · generative models (flow matching) · multi-view learning · partial identification · uncertainty quantification · frugal learning

News

Dec. 2026
Upcoming PhD defense of Hélène Tran on 4 December 2026 — Ambiguity in Multimodal Emotion Recognition: A Coarse-to-Fine Strategy using Functional Bilevel Optimization.
Nov. 2026
Upcoming PhD defense of Rim El Cheikh on 26 November 2026 — Ad-Hoc Concept-Based Explainability for Deep Neural Networks.
Sept. 2026
Paper accepted at the OWAD Workshop at ICDM 2026 — Unsupervised Online Anomaly Detection in Data Streams via Optimal Transport, with H. Tcheneghon Motcheyo and E. Mephu Nguifo.
Sept. 2026
I joined ENSEA as Associate Professor and the DATA & AI team of the ETIS laboratory (UMR 8051, CY Cergy Paris Université, ENSEA, CNRS).
June 2026
Paper accepted at CAp 2026 — Online domain adaptation for data stream anomaly detection, with H. Tcheneghon Motcheyo and E. Mephu Nguifo.
June 2026
Paper accepted at ISMIS 2026 — Accelerating Gradual Pattern Discovery through Dimensionality Reduction, with H. Tcheneghon Motcheyo, L. Tiogning-Djiogue and E. Mephu Nguifo.
Apr. 2026
Thematic school on generative AI co-organized at the University of Yaoundé I (Cameroon), as part of the FDMI-AMG project supported by the CNRS DSCA program.
Dec. 2025
PhD defense of Jingyao Wang — Edge AI for e-health: application to mobility monitoring.
Dec. 2025
Presentation at the NeurIPS 2025 Workshop on Evaluating the Evolving LLM Lifecycle with C. M. Tran on the evaluation of LLM agents.