I have just started as an Assistant Professor at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, which seems like a good moment to look back on the last three years, from Rennes to Martigny and now Barcelona.

Rennes and the WIDE team at Inria

I arrived in Rennes in May 2023, after my PhD defense and a research internship at Idiap. I had spent a semester of high school in Montpellier thirteen years earlier, so my French needed some work.

The WIDE team made room for me from the first week, and several colleagues became good friends. Working on privacy in decentralized machine learning for the SOTERIA project was a shift from my thesis work on face recognition, and it meant learning about distributed systems and what privacy means for machine learning applications. Outside the lab, Brittany and its people turned out to be more fun and open than I expected, and by the end of the year I felt settled there.

Martigny and the Biometrics Security & Privacy Group at Idiap

The hardest part of moving to Idiap in June 2024 was leaving Rennes just after I had settled in. Knowing people from my 2022 internship helped, but I still had to adjust to a much smaller town, a different variety of French, and a new group with its own way of working.

The research had its challenges too. Face generation in the StyleGAN latent space was new to me and took a while to get right, and my own ideas about where the work should go did not always match the direction of the project. More generally, the postdoc stage is hard: at some point you need a more permanent position and a clearer path forward.

Still, some of the work I am proudest of came out of those two years. Presenting the aging and de-aging work at IJCB 2025 in Osaka was one of the highlights of that time, and presenting the GaitFace and DriveFace datasets and the low-resolution face recognition paper at IJCB 2026 in Rome was great as well.

Martigny also had more going on than I expected for its size, from the Festival des 5 Continents to jazz, rock and metal concerts around the Valais (and other parts of Switzerland), plus a good crowd at the local bars and karaoke nights. Leaving was hard for the same reason as Rennes: the friends I had made and lifestyle choices that suited me. Starting over twice is part of an academic career (and life) at this stage. It is not always easy, but change is inevitable, and good changes are always welcome.

Barcelona

Now I am in Barcelona. With this position I can follow research questions that did not always fit within a project’s scope or timeline, and teach exciting Computer Science, Computer Vision & AI courses and work with students while I do research.

I am especially grateful to the supervisors and collaborators in Mexico, Rennes, and Martigny who gave me these opportunities and learning experiences, and to the friends who made those years what they were: very special :)