Maurice Clerc is a French

mathematician A mathematician is someone who uses an extensive knowledge of mathematics in their work, typically to solve mathematical problems. Mathematicians are concerned with numbers, data, quantity, structure, space, models, and change. History On ...

Early life and education

Maurice Marcel Clerc was born on April 24, 1949, in

Besançon Besançon (, , , ; archaic german: Bisanz; la, Vesontio) is the prefecture of the department of Doubs in the region of Bourgogne-Franche-Comté. The city is located in Eastern France, close to the Jura Mountains and the border with Switzerl ...

. He finished his graduate studies and obtained his engineering degree in 1972 from the

Institut industriel du Nord The Institut industriel du Nord (IDN) was the engineering school and research institute at École Centrale de Lille from 1872 to 1991, within the campus of the Lille University of Science and Technology (France). History École des arts indus ...

(renamed Centrale Lille in 1991).

Professional career

Maurice Clerc worked in the Research and Development department of

France Télécom Orange S.A. (), formerly France Télécom S.A. (stylized as france telecom) is a French multinational corporation, multinational telecommunications corporation. It has 266 million customers worldwide and employs 89,000 people in France, and 5 ...

. His early work focused on fuzzy representations. He was later recognized as a world specialist in particle swarm optimization (PSO) jointly with James Kennedy. He is, together with the latter, the lead co-author of the first detailed theoretical analysis of this method, rewarded by

IEEE The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) is a 501(c)(3) professional association for electronic engineering and electrical engineering (and associated disciplines) with its corporate office in New York City and its operation ...

in 2005. He outlined and demonstrated convergence theorems in a five-dimensional space and, in particular, defined the constriction concept that has since been largely used in the context of PSO. The analysis defines value intervals for the coefficients, which makes it possible to generalize the algorithm to many types of problems. enabling a researcher or an application developer to use the same model, with the same coefficients, without arbitrary limitation of speeds. One can use the same basic code by just defining the objective function of the problem under consideration. This approach is more versatile than previous ones, and is now used in virtually all PSO variants. By the end of 2020 it got more than a thousand citations. Clerc introduced other innovations in the swarm intelligence paradigm, for example the «Swarm and Queen» approach. His work on the use of PSO for combinatorial problems, such as the Travelling Salesman Problem (TSP), is particularly innovative in that he completely redefines the concepts of “speed” and “distance” to address these types of problems. Its definition of the concept of stagnation and the analysis have also led to improvements in the algorithm. He works with many people around the world, some notable ones being James Kennedy (see above),

Riccardo Poli Riccardo Poli (born 1961) is a Professor in the Department of Computing and Electronic Systems of the University of Essex. His work has centered on genetic programming. Education Poli started his academic career with a Laurea in electronic engin ...

on the XPS (eXtended Particle ''Swarms'') project of the University of Essex, Patrick Siarry (professor at Paris-East Créteil University), Mahamed G. H. Omran, professor at the

Gulf University for Science and Technology Gulf University for Science & Technology (GUST) is the first private university established in Kuwait. It has a dual-enrollment agreement with the University of Missouri–St. Louis. History The university was to be a supplement to Kuwait Un ...

(Adaptive Population-based ''Simplex''), and several teacher-researchers in India, including the

Indian Institute of Technology The Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) are central government owned public technical institutes located across India. They are under the ownership of the Ministry of Education of the Government of India. They are governed by the Institu ...

(IIT) in

Roorkee Roorkee (Rūṛkī) is a city and a municipal corporation in the Haridwar district of the state of Uttarakhand, India. It is from Haridwar city, the district headquarter. It is spread over a flat terrain under Sivalik Hills of Himalayas. The c ...

. He is involved in updating the Particle Swarm Central site. Retired since 2004, he remains active in various fields of research, both in PSO related fields and other areas. He regularly publishes articles and books, gives keynote speeches in conferences, and serves as a director and thesis jury. He also occasionally works as an optimization consultant.

Publications

Books

Maurice Clerc is the author of three books: * ''Particle Swarm Optimization'' *''Guided Randomness in Optimization'' *''Iterative Optimizers''

Articles and conference texts

* (2001) "Think locally, act locally: The Way of Life of A2PSO, and Adaptive Particle Swarm Optimizer", France Télécom R&D. *"Stagnation Analysis in Particle Swarm Optimisation or What Happens When Nothing Happens", Technical report, University of Essex, 2006. *"Why does it work?", International Journal of Computational Intelligence Research 4, n° 2, 2008, p. 79-91. *"Beyond Standard Particle Swarm Optimisation", International Journal of Swarm Intelligence Research 4, 2010, p. 46-66. *Handbook of Swarm Intelligence, vol. 8, Heidelberg, Springer, 2011 , "From Theory to Practice in Particle Swarm Optimization", p. 3-36. *"Cooperation Mechanisms in Particle Swarm Optimisation", Nature Inspired Computing : Theory and Industrial Application, 2013. *"List Based Optimisers - Experiments and Open Questions", International Journal of Swarm Intelligence Research, vol. 4(4), 2014. *"Total memory optimiser: proof of concept and compromises", International Journal of Swarm Intelligence, vol. 3, 2017.

Notes and references

External links

Personal technical site
{{DEFAULTSORT:Clerc, Maurice 21st-century French mathematicians 1949 births Living people University of Lille Nord de France alumni