About Work Projects

Théo Fabien

Research engineer / System administrator

My work as an engineer at UMR IGEPP (INRAE) mainly involves building machine learning algorithms and modelling methods, as long as leverage inferential statistical approaches, to solve complex biological questions. But it also includes server administration, AI deployment, intern supervision and a bit of teaching !

About me

Hello ! My name is Théo Fabien and I am a young engineer in the fields of ecology and data science, as well as system administrator. Currently working at INRAE (Le Rheu), I am developing computer vision methods to track insects in 3D scenes. My tasks mainly involve working with deep learning and modeling algorithms. Additionally, I manage a local server on which I deploy and maintain algorithms used by the team for automatic detection and annotation of objects in image datasets. Here are some of the tools I use the most at work:

I am passionate about building some side-projects, such as my homelab that I use to learn more about networking, virtualization, cybersecurity and the automation of IT infrastructures.

I also love climbing and hiking, and I have a very cute cat named Harold.

Work

Machine Learning Engineer - INRAE, UMR IGEPP

Since February 2025

  • Automation of insects tracking through image sequences
  • Custom triplet neural networks, constraint programming
  • CVAT server administration, deployment of fine-tuned models (using the Nuclio platform) for semi-automated annotations

Engineer - INRAE, UMR IGEPP

May to July 2024

  • Modelling the spatio-temporal diffusion of spores using public geographic databases
  • Data exploration using visualization tools and statistics
  • Streamlit web interface

Doctoral student - INRAE, UMR LISAH

September to December 2023

  • Stopped for medical reasons
  • Pl@ntNet project

MSc Internship - INRAE, UMR IGEPP

January to July 2023

  • Spatio-temporal Fisher-KPP growth model
  • Image segmentation neural networks
  • Work on computing servers and cloud platforms

Some projects I worked on (more on Github)

Homelab

I started this project in late 2024. The initial goal was to get better experience with system and network administration, but it quickly escalated into a fascinating pool of experimentation. Here are some of the services that are running in my homelab:

When I started this homelab, I wanted it to be as energy-efficient as possible, for both economical and ecological reasons. This was a primary criterion when picking hardware for building my servers. On the software side, I almost exclusively use containerized services through Docker or LXC, and limit my use of virtual machines (which I still occasionally use for testing new things) to save even more power.

Msc Internship project : late blight growth model

This project was supervised by Melen Leclerc (IGEPP, INRAE). The goal was to develop a model capable of describing the growth of late blight on potatoe leaves. To do that, I had to implement efficient image registration techniques, as well as deep image segmentation algorithms, before building the reaction-diffusion model itself.

This website

One of the goals of building this website was for me to understand a bit more about front-end development. This is quite far from my field, but it only made me more curious. I stuck to the basics (HTML, CSS, Javascript), in order to perhaps later learn a bit more about the modern frameworks.
I hope you enjoyed it !