Laurent Simon

Full Professor @ Bordeaux-INP
Invited Researcher @ Google Research

Most recent news

(list of all news)

Interview for Curieux.live!

(24 December 2025)

I had the chance to answer questions from Florence Heimburger for the magazine curieux.live!, a site aimed at science-curious teenagers. The starting point was to understand why we should—or should...


Seminar on Competitions at Dagstuhl

(29 October 2025)

It had been quite a while since I last had the pleasure of returning to Dagstuhl Castle. This week is also a return to an old topic: competitions and empirical...


Interview in the Science et Vie Special Issue on AI

(20 October 2025)

I’ve had the privilege for some time of occasionally answering journalists’ questions about the impacts of AI on society, thanks to the Trustworthy AI Chair which has increased the visibility...


AI Act Afternoon by the Trustworthy AI Chair

(06 October 2025)

October 13th: afternoon of presentation and exchanges on the AI Act! Listen, question and understand the AI Act An afternoon of explanations, theoretical insights and applied experience feedback to develop...


Science & Vie Roundtable — Fête de la Science

(01 October 2025)

On the eve of the official launch of Fête de la Science 2025, and at the offices of the Ministry of Higher Education, I took part in a roundtable organized...

Explanations during a presentation

Short Presentation

I am a University Professor at the engineering school ENSEIRB-MATMECA of Bordeaux INP, and I conduct my research in the Formal Methods and Models, M2F department at the Bordeaux Computer Science Research Laboratory (laBRI) at the University of Bordeaux, since 2013. Since 2024, I am also one of the 180 regional councilors at the CESER of Nouvelle-Aquitaine, the second regional chamber (qualified member, economic commission, 2024-2030 term).

Since October 2025, I am a part-time Visiting Researcher at Google (Paris) for one year.

From 2021 to 2025, I was in charge of the Computer Science department of the ENSEIRB-MATMECA Engineering School, with more than 300 students in the department and more than thousands students for the whole school. The ENSEIRB-MATMECA is the largest engineering school member of the Bordeaux INP group.

⊆ Computer Science Dep. ⊆ ENSEIRB-MATMECA ⊆ Bordeaux-INP ⊆ INP ⊆

I’ve had the privilege for some time of occasionally answering journalists’ questions about the impacts of AI on society, thanks...

Last Wednesday, I had the opportunity to answer questions from Stéphanie Lacazze, from Sud Ouest, as part of Hebdo Éco...

For more than two years now, with the Trustworthy AI Chair, I have been invited to give talks about the...

Drones during the celebration of the 100 years of ENSEIRB-MATMECA

I am pleased to teach at the National Polytechnical Institute of Bordeaux, member of the national engineering school network INP). Of course, I’m teaching in the ENSEIRB-MATMECA engineering school, member of Bordeaux-INP, and in the computer Science department.

Picture of the Bordeaux INP Engineering School

Amongst the important tasks I am involved in, I spend a lot of time with the following activities:

(Previously, I was member of the LRI laboratory in the University of Orsay Paris 11, in the Artificial Intelligence and Inference System group (IASI))

Research Topics

Picture of the LaBRI Computer Science Laboratory

My main research activities are conducted at the LaBRI laboratory (see picture above). My interests are on propositional-based reasoning, SAT solving and
efficient Prime Implicates generation / Knowledge Base Compilation with a strong appetite on experimental study of AI tools (SAT Solvers essentially). I used to work
on decentralized approaches of some of these topics (reasoning on top of P2P and social networks, and ensuring diagnosability of designed systems). Since a few years, I am working on trustworthy AI, especially in the context of critical decisions or when an explanation is needed. To tackle these problems, logic / formal methods will be essentials.

About the Glucose SAT solver

Medals of our Glucose SAT Solver in the 2017 competition

Glucose is a SAT solver based on a particular scoring scheme for the clause learning mechanism, based on the paper Gilles Audemard and I wrote at IJCAI’09. Solver’s name is a contraction of the concept of “glue clauses”, a particular kind of clauses that glucose detects and preserves during search. Glucose is heavily based on Minisat, so please do cite Minisat also if you want to cite Glucose.

There is a dedicated page for the solver. In 2022, we decided to reboot it with the glucose 5.0 version.

What is SAT?

SAT is a fundamental problem of computer science that, intuitively, captures all the easiest of the hard problems. Hard problems mean problem that cannot be solved efficiently (you'll need more time than the universe had on large problems!). If you want to read more about it, why not taking your with the Wikipedia page about SAT ?