Chimiométrie 2019 was held in Montpellier, January 30 to February 1. Now in its 20th year the conference attracted over 150 participants. The conference is mostly in French, (which I have been trying to learn for many years now), but also with talks in English. The Scientific and Organizing Committee Presidents were Ludovic Duponchel and J.M. Roger, respectively.
Eigenvector was proud to sponsor this event, and it was fun to have a display table and a chance to talk with some of our software users in France. As usual, I was on the lookout for talks and posters using PLS_Toolbox. I especially enjoyed the talk presented by Alice Croguennoc, Some aspects of SVM Regression: an example for spectroscopic quantitative predictions. The talk provided a nice intro to Support Vectors and good examples of what the various parameters in the method do. Alice used our implementation of SVMs, which adds our preprocessing, cross-validation and point-and-click graphics to the publicly available LIBSVM package. Ms. Croguennoc demonstrated some very nice calibrations on a non-linear spectroscopic problem.
I also found three very nice posters which utilized PLS_Toolbox:
Chemometric methods applied to FT-ICR/MS data: comprehensive study of aromatic sulfur compounds in gas oils by J. Guillemant, M. Lacoue-Nègre, F. Albrieux, L. Duponchel, L.P de Oliveira and J.F Joly.
Chemometric tools associated to FTIR and GC-MS for the discrimination and the classification of diesel fuels by suppliers by I. Barra, M. Kharbach, Y. Cherrah and A. Bouklouze.
Preliminary appreciation biodegradation of formate and fluorinated ethers by means of Raman spectroscopy coupled with chemometrics by M. Marchetti, M. Offroy, P. Bourson, C. Jobard, P. Branchu, J.F. Durmont, G. Casteran and B. Saintot.
By all accounts the conference was a great success, with many good talks and posters covering a wide range of chemometric topics, a great history of the field by Professor Steven D. Brown, and a delicious and fun Gala dinner at the fabulous Chez Parguel, shown at left. The evening included dancing, and also a song, La Place De la Conférence Chimiométrie, (sung to the tune of Patrick Bruel’s Place des Grands Hommes), written by Sylvie Roussel in celebration of the conference’s 20th year and sung with great gusto by the conferees. Also, the lecture hall on the SupAgro campus was very comfortable!
Congratulations to the conference committees for a great edition of this French tradition, with special thanks to Cécile Fontange and Sylvie Roussel of Ondalys for their organizational efforts. À l’année prochaine!
BMW