Alexis Juven's PhD Thesis

One of the ways to realize how AI permeates all areas of society is to measure the extent of its applications. I was happy to be the reviewer of Alexis Juven’s thesis (a former student of ENSEIRB-MATMECA) on, believe it or not, “Simulation-assisted machine learning for infrared measurement in a tokamak.”

This is a thesis using AI to monitor thermonuclear fusion at the heart of future reactors. Without going into details, the proposed work studies the possibility of deploying non-intrusive monitoring systems, based on machine learning for the interpretation of infrared images. These systems should allow measuring the internal temperature of the components of nuclear fusion reactors of the tokamak type (these are toroidal chambers with magnetic coils), which can reach thousands of degrees Celsius, based solely on fixed images from infrared cameras.

In addition to the pleasure of attending Alexis’s thesis, I was able to visit, on the Cadarache site, what a tokamak is and measure the engineering feat deployed to master this formidable energy.

Congratulations again Alexis for this work!