Cyril Furtlehner is an Inria Research Associate with a PhD in theoretical physics and an Hdr. After completing his thesis at the IPN Orsay, followed by successive post-docs at the Max Planck Institute Heidelberg and the University of Oslo, he first joined the PREVAL team at Inria-Rocquencourt, then the TAU team at Inria Saclay, to work on theoretical and applied topics related to stochastic processes and probabilistic inference. Since then, his research has focused on interdisciplinary topics, mainly statistical physics problems related to optimization and machine learning.