Mathilde Fichen

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Mathilde Fichen

(Elle/She/They)

About

As of November 2023, I am a Ph.D. candidate at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers (CNAM), affiliated with the laboratory History of Techno-Sciences in Society (HT2S). My Ph.D is under the supervision of Loïc Petitgirard and Camille Paloque-Berges. I received my engineering training at Mines Paristech and Corps des Mines and hold a master’s degree in the History and Philosophy of Science from the University of Lorraine. I previously worked at Inria, the French National Institute for Research in Digital Science and Technology, with the Software Heritage team, contributing to the team’s efforts in building a universal software archive. I am still actively involved with Software Heritage, contributing to the preservation of historical software source code under UNESCO funding.

See my full resume here.

Research interests

My research interests intersect the domains of Computer Science History, Software History, and the preservation of Computer Science heritage.

My Ph.D. research delves into the history of Prolog, a programming language conceived in 1972 at the University of Marseille. Prolog introduced a groundbreaking programming paradigm known as ‘logic programming,’ particularly well-suited for symbolic artificial intelligence applications and knowledge systems manipulation. Through an exploration of Prolog’s history, my aim is to illuminate the underlying mechanisms contributing to the ‘AI effect’ and encourage a critical examination of the current excitement surrounding generative AI.

Furthermore, studying Prolog provides insight into the often-overlooked history of the European AI scene from the 1970s to the 1990s, offering an alternative narrative to the predominantly American perspective. In my Ph.D., I will employ approaches rooted in internalist history, externalist history and science and technology studies (STS).

See my Ph.D proposal here (in French).

Organization of conferences, workshops, and seminars

Science mediation and popularization

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