Facing energy future is one of the large challenges of the world, with numerous implications for R&D strategy of energy companies. One of the Total R&D missions is the development of competences on advanced technologies, such as Advanced Computing (HPC), Material sciences, Biotechnologies, Nanotechnologies, New analytical techniques, IT Technologies. HPC allows also tackling the challenge in code coupling: both a horizontal direction -multi-physics-, (chemistry and transport, or structural mechanics, acoustics, fluid dynamics, and thermal heat transfer, ...) and in the vertical direction -multi-scale models- (i.e. from continuum to mesoscale to molecular dynamics to quantum chemistry) which requires bridging space and time scales that span many orders of magnitude. This leads to improve at the same time more accurate physical model and numerical methods and algorithms and these improvements of numerical simulations will be illustrated by their application, use and impact in Total strategic activities such as: seismic, depth imaging by solving waves equation; oil reservoir modeling by solving transport, thermal and chemical equations; multi scale process modeling and control, such as slurry loop process; mechanical structures and geomecanics.[-]

Cancer patients often respond differently to the same treatment. Precision oncology aims at predicting which treatments will be effective on a given patient. Such predictive biomarkers of drug response typically take the form of a particular somatic mutation. However, lessons from the past indicate that these single gene-drug response associations are rare and/or often fail to achieve a significant impact in clinic. In this context, Machine Learning (ML) is emerging as a particularly promising complementary approach to precision oncology. Our results show that combining multiple gene alterations of the tumours via ML often results in better discrimination than that provided by the corresponding single-gene marker. This approach also permits assessing which type of molecular profile is most predictive of tumour response depending on treatment and cancer type. Moreover, ML multi-gene predictors generally retrieve a much higher proportion of treatment-sensitive tumours (i.e. they have a higher recall) than the corresponding single-gene marker. The latter suggest that a higher proportion of patients could benefit from precision oncology by applying this ML methodology to existing clinical pharmacogenomics data sets.[-]

In this talk I will discuss recent joint work with Mike McCourt (SigOpt, San Francisco) that has led to progress on the numerically stable computation of certain quantities of interest when working with positive definite kernels to solve scattered data interpolation (or kriging) problems.
In particular, I will draw upon insights from both numerical analysis and modeling with Gaussian processes which will allow us to connect quantities such as, e.g., (deterministic) error estimates in terms of the power function with the kriging variance. This provides new kernel parametrization criteria as well as new ways to compute known criteria such as MLE. Some numerical examples will illustrate the effectiveness of this approach.[-]

Start the video and click on the track button in the timeline to move to talk 1, 2 and to the discussion.

- Talk 1: Paul Apicella - Striatal dopamine and acetylcholine mechanisms involved in reward-related learning

The midbrain dopamine system has been identified as a major component of motivation and reward processing. One of its main targets is the striatum which plays an important role in motor control and learning functions. Other subcortical neurons work in parallel with dopamine neurons. In particular, striatal cholinergic interneurons participate in signaling the reward-related significance of stimuli and they may act in concert with dopamine to encode prediction error signals and control the learning of stimulus–response associations. Recent studies have revealed functional cooperativity between these two neuromodulatory systems of a complexity far greater than previously appreciated. In this talk I will review the difference and similarities between dopamine and acetylcholine reward-signaling systems, the possible nature of reward representation in each system, and discuss the involvement of striatal dopamine-acetylcholine interactions during leaning and behavior.

- Talk 2: Yonatan Loewenstein - Modeling operant learning: from synaptic plasticity to behavior

- Discussion with Paul Apicella and Yonatan Loewenstein[-]