Research Interests
- Machine Learning
- Data Science
- Natural Language Processing
Education
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M.Sc. in Computer Science - Artificial Intelligence
Université Laval, Québec, 2018 to 2019.
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Ph.D. in Computer Science
Université Laval, Québec, 2016 -
Advised by Pr. François Laviolette.
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M.Sc. in Microbiology-Immunology
Université Laval, Québec, 2013 to 2018
Advised by Pr. Jacques Corbeil, co-advised by Pr. François Laviolette.
Thesis: Improvement of Quality Insurance of Blood Products with High-Throughput Mass Spectrometry and Machine Learning
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B.Sc. in Computational Biology
Université Laval, Québec, 2010 to 2012
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B.Sc. in Biochemistry
Université Laval, Québec, 2008 -
Experience
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Research Scientist, Co-operator’s General Insurance Company
June 2021 - ongoing. R&D research in Data Science and applied Machine Learning. Includes Computer Vision, NLP and optimisation projects, along with software engineering and best practises seminars.
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Associate Research Scientist, Co-operator’s General Insurance Company
January 2020 - June 2021. R&D research in Data Science and applied Machine Learning. Includes Computer Vision, NLP and optimisation projects, along with software engineering and best practises seminars.
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Artificial Intelligence MITACS Internship, Can-Explore
May 2019 - November 2019. Research internship within the company.
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Teaching Assistant, Université Laval
January 2017 - April 2019. Grading of undergraduate tests for GLO-2100 Algorithms and Data Structures (2017-2019) and for GLO-4027 Big Data Treatment.
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Practical Tutorial Instructor, Machine Learning applied to Metabolomics Data, Microbiome Summer School - Big Data Analytics for Omics Science.
June 2017, Université Laval. Link
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Participant in the Hacking Health Québec Hackathon 2016.
October 2016, Université Laval.
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Research Assistant / Intern, IBIS, Université Laval
January 2011 - May 2013, Pr. Nicolas Derome Laboratory.
Publications and Communications
Publications
- Francis Brochu. Increasing Shape Bias in ImageNet-Trained Networks Using Transfer Learning and Domain-Adversarial Methods. arXiv preprint.
- Francis Brochu, Pier-Luc Plante, Alexandre Drouin, Dominic Gagnon, Dave Richard, Francine Durocher, Caroline Diorio, Mario Marchand, Jacques Corbeil, and François Laviolette. Mass spectra alignment using virtual lock-masses. Scientific Reports, 9(1):8469, 2019.
- Jean-Guillaume Emond-Rheault, Antony T Vincent, Mélanie V Trudel, Francis Brochu, Brian Boyle, Katherine H Tanaka, Sabrina A Attéré, Éric Jubinville, Thomas P Loch, Andrew D Winters, et al. Variants of a genomic island in aeromonas salmonicida subsp. salmonicida link isolates with their geographical origins. Veterinary microbiology, 175(1):68–76, 2015.
- Steve J Charette, Francis Brochu, Brian Boyle, Geneviève Filion, Katherine H Tanaka, and Nicolas Derome. Draft genome sequence of the virulent strain 01-b526 of the fish pathogen aeromonas salmonicida. Journal of bacteriology, 194(3):722, 2012.
Communications
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Oral Presentation at the Great Lakes Bioinformatics Conference (GLBIO) 2017, Chicago, Il. in May 2017. Virtual Lock Masses: an algorithmic method to enable mass spectra comparison in untargeted studies. Brochu F, Plante PL, Drouin A, Laviolette F, Marchand M, Corbeil J.
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Poster at 64th ASMS Conference on Mass Spectrometry and Allied Topics, San Antonio, Tx in June 2016. Virtual Lock Masses: an algorithmic method to enable mass spectra comparison in untargeted studies. Brochu F, Plante PL, Drouin A, Laviolette F, Marchand M, Corbeil J.