Yannick Estève

Senior research scientist and laboratories director with more than 20 years of experience in AI, machine learning, and speech and language processing. My career has been defined primarily by scientific leadership, through the direction of major French public research laboratories (LIA and LIUM), and the creation and management of the Claude Chappe Computer Science Institute (Le Mans Université).

I currently hold the LIAvignon partnership chair in Artificial Intelligence, coordinating research programmes with Airbus, Orange, ChapsVision, ValidSoft, LNE, Orkis, INRIA Défense et Sécurité, and Avignon Université. My research spans speech recognition, speech translation, self-supervised learning, privacy-preserving speech technologies, and multimodal language models.

I have authored around 200 peer-reviewed publications, received more than 5000 citations (h-index > 35), supervised 19 defended PhD theses (with 6 in progress), and contributed to more than 45 PhD committees (France, Switzerland, Tunisia, Finland).

While my identity is firmly scientific, I also have secondary entrepreneurial experience through the co-founding of Stenomedia and Voxolab, which provided complementary insight into real-world constraints of speech technologies.

I bring the profile of a research director anchored in scientific excellence, long-term vision, research group governance, and the ability to structure and drive large collaborative AI programmes.