Akram BENSALEM - PhD Candidate in Computer Science

About Me

Currently in the final year of my PhD in Computer Science, I specialize in Explainable AI (XAI), Fuzzy Logic, and Data Analysis. I design interpretable, human-centered methods to transform complex data into decision support tools. My thesis defense is scheduled for late October 2026.

Education

PhD in Computer Science Brest, France | 2023 — Present

IMT Atlantique • Lab-STICC / MOTEL team • SPIN Doctoral School

Thesis: Understanding and explaining digital educational inequalities using data mining and machine learning methods.

Advised by Prof. Grégory SMITS and co-supervised by Fahima DJELIL.

Master in Computer Science Sidi Bel Abbes, Algeria | 2023

Higher School of Computer Science (ESI SBA)

Focus on scientific research, innovation, and R&D methodology.

Engineer's Degree in Computer Science Sidi Bel Abbes, Algeria | 2023

Higher School of Computer Science (ESI SBA) • ISI Specialization

Professional Experience

Doctoral Research Stay Paris, France | Jan. 2026 — Feb. 2026

Sorbonne University — LIP6 / LFI team

Study of counterfactual explanations aligned with domain expertise.
Research project on the perceptibility of counterfactuals for experts.

Graduation Internship — Monitoring Algorithms Lannion, France | Apr. 2023 — Sept. 2023

Nokia Bell Labs

Designed an intelligent Edge Cloud caching system for connected vehicles.
Developed time-series prediction models to anticipate data needs.
Paper accepted for publication at the SSDBM 2024 conference.

Backend Developer (Java/Spring Boot) Remote | Dec. 2022 — Mar. 2023

STRABL (Part-time)

Designed and developed APIs for payment flows.
Integrated "Try Before You Buy" solutions and contributed to backend architecture.

Research & Publications

Fields: Human-Centred AI, Fuzzy Logic, Explainable AI (XAI), AI in Education.

Research Topics

Fuzzy Vocabularies: Measuring disagreements between experts and their impact on data modeling.
XAI: DiCE_GI algorithm for generating diversified counterfactual explanations for groups of instances.
Decision Support: Visualisation tools for the French educational system (GTNum GoData project).

Scientific Publications

Bensalem, A., Djelil, F., Lesot, M. J., & Smits, G. (2026). Diversified and Perceptible Counterfactual Examples Leveraging Expert Knowledge. SUM 2026. (Submitted)
Bensalem, A., Djelil, F., & Smits, G. (2026). DiCE_GI: Diversified Counterfactual Explanations for a Group of Instances. XAI-2026, Fortaleza, Brazil.
Bensalem, A., Smits, G., Djelil, F., & Lesot, M. J. (2025). Measuring Disagreements between Fuzzy Linguistic Vocabularies in Expert-Driven Data Analysis. FUZZ-IEEE 2025.
Bensalem, A., Djelil, F., Lesot, M. J., & Smits, G. (2025). Measuring the disagreement between expert vocabularies and its impact on data analysis (In French). LFA 2025.
Bensalem, A., d'Orazio, L., Lallet, J., & Enrici, A. (2024). VG-Prefetcher Cache: Towards Edge-Based Time Series Data Management Using Visibility Graph Prefetching. SSDBM 2024.

Teaching

Since 2023, I have been teaching at IMT Atlantique (~91 hours):

Python & Object-Oriented Programming (Course/Lab)
Web Application Architecture (Java/Spring Boot Projects)
Semantic Web & Web of Data (Project supervision)
Educational Data Analysis (PRONTO Project)

Skills

AI & Data

XAI, Fuzzy Logic, Statistical Learning, Graph Theory

Development

Python, Java/Kotlin, R, JavaScript, Bash

Frameworks

Spring Boot, Vue.js, TensorFlow, PyTorch, Docker

Languages

English (Advanced), French (Fluent), Arabic (Native)