David is a senior particle physicist at LAL-Orsay (CNRS/IN2P3 and Univ. Paris-Sud/Université Paris Saclay). After many years at the forefront of software developments for the ATLAS experiment on the Large Hadron Collider at CERN until the Higgs boson discovery in 2012, he was looking for something different: a chance encounter at the cafeteria with a Machine Learning scientist decided it.

With Higgs physics always on his mind, David organized the Higgs ML challenge in 2014, and  the tracking ML challenge in 2018-2019. He has co-coordinated the ATLAS ML forum and now the LHC Interexperiment Machine Learning forum. He's keen on both riding and promoting the ML/AI wave in particle physics and science  in general.