Team MIDAS' missions

The research of Team MIDAS revolves around Modelling, Interdisciplinary research, Data science, Applied mathematics and Statistics.

We aim to develop innovative statistical and machine learning procedures based on new mathematical and computational tools to tackle the challenges posed by modern days' increasingly complex and large data sets.

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Research projects

Below is a list of the current research projects where Christophe Ley and team MIDAS are involved:

• NextStep-EI - Make counts matter : Next level step monitoring in health, sports and medicine by augmenting gait with meaningful environmental information” with Luxembourg Institute of Health
• New models and inferential procedures to analyse data on multidimensional tori, with applications in the fundamental protein structure prediction problem, within the PRIDE MATHCODA project, with Sophia Loizidou
• The fundamentals of Statistically Enhanced Learning with Florian Felice
• The use of AI in medicine with the ESSKA Artificial Intelligence in Sports Medicine group

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Midas turns research into gold

According to the legend, King MIDAS died because everything he touched turned into gold, and consequently he could no more eat nor drink. With data, the same can happen: having tons of data may look great at first sight (like King Midas' capacity), but if you don't know what to do with the data, then they will induce you into serious mistakes or you simply won't be able to do anything with it. Team MIDAS precisely wants to provide and explain methods that prevent a King Midas like ending with data.

The meaning of team MIDAS' logo

This logo represents the infinity symbol (the limits of the possible for MIDAS). It contains all the letters (in Greek) of the name MIDAS:

• $M$ for Modelling
• $I$ for Interdisciplinary research
• $\Delta$ for Data science
• $\alpha$ for Applied mathematics
• $\Sigma$ for Statistics

The colors used in the logo (blue and red) are the colors of the Luxembourgish flag (and the University). The circle in the center of the logo represents spherical data and directional statistics, an important research topic for the team. It also represents a node from a neural network, symbol of machine learning, another important research topic.

An AI generated mascot

The image was generated by a generative model, an OpenAI technology called DALL-E 2.
The prompt used to generate the original picture was: "A 3D render of a king of statistics that turns computers and blackboards into gold".
DALL-E offers the possibility to provide an image as an input and make some edits based on a prompt. Then, after the first image was generated, few iterations were made to improve Midas' face and hand to be more human-like using DALL-E edit functionality.
Finally, some formulae were written manually on the blackboard behind Midas given that text generated by OpenAI on the original image did not look like any kind of text.