Mohameth François Sy


Data and Knowledge Engineering

Mohameth François Sy is the Section Manager for Data and Knowledge Engineering in the Simulation Neuroscience Division.

A knowledge graph engineer and software developer, he leads a team building systems, applications and processes to support large-scale data, knowledge management and governance throughout their life cycle. His team’s focus is to build data and knowledge products and use graph analytics and state of the art methods for machine learning on graphs to support various downstreaming tasks at BBP.

Some of those tasks include:

  1. Search, recommender and inference systems to generalize sparse neuroscience data;
  2. NLP language model augmentation with knowledge background;
  3. Spatial and FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) data integration and access through 3D brain atlases;
  4. Knowledge organization and mapping in neuroscience ontologies (including brain modeling, cell types, brain regions ontologies) in coordination with the broader neuroscience community.

Mohameth François Sy contributed to various projects at Blue Brain including Blue Brain Nexus  and BlueGraph.

Before joining Blue Brain, Mohameth was a postdoctoral researcher at the Grenoble Informatics Laboratory (LIG) of the Université Grenoble Alpes, France where he led the development of a knowledge graph to support Adaptive Learning use cases. Specifically he developed generic semantic graph based representations for entities involved in teaching and learning maths and French language competencies in French elementary schools reusing and implementing a theoretical framework named Anthropological Theory of the Didactic.

Mohameth obtained his PhD from the LGI2P Lab, Ecole des Mines d’Ales, University of Montpellier, France and a Masters degree in Computer Science from Gaston Berger University, Saint-Louis, Senegal.

In his free time, he enjoys hiking and reading.

Selected Publications

Sy, Mohameth François, et al. “Blue Brain Nexus: An open, secure, scalable system for knowledge graph management and data-driven science.” Semantic Web Preprint: 1-31, 2022. https://doi.org/10.3233/SW-222974

Logette, E.; Lorin, C.; Favreau, C.; Oshurko, E.; Coggan, J.S.; Casalegno, F.; Sy, M.F.; Monney, C.; Bertschy, M.; Delattre, E.; et al. A Machine-Generated View of the Role of Blood Glucose Levels in the Severity of COVID-19. Front. Public Health 2021, 9, 695139. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpubh.2021.695139

Gillespie, T.H., Tripathy, S.J., Sy, M.F. et al. The Neuron Phenotype Ontology: A FAIR Approach to Proposing and Classifying Neuronal Types. Neuroinform (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12021-022-09566-7

Mohameth-François Sy, Sylvie Ranwez, Jacky Montmain, Armelle Regnault, Michel Crampes, Vincent Ranwez: User centered and ontology based information retrieval system for life sciences. BMC Bioinformatics 13(S-1): S4 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1186/1471-2105-13-S1-S4

Reconstruction and simulation of thalamoreticular microcircuitry
Elisabetta Iavarone, Jane Simko, Ying Shi, Marine Bertschy, María García-Amado, Polina Litvak, Anna-Kristin Kaufmann, Christian O’Reilly, Oren Amsalem, Marwan Abdellah, Grigori Chevtchenko, Benoît Coste, Jean-Denis Courcol, András Ecker, Cyrille Favreau, Adrien Christian Fleury, Werner Van Geit, Michael Gevaert, Nadir Román Guerrero, Joni Herttuainen, Genrich Ivaska, Samuel Kerrien, James G. King, Pramod Kumbhar, Patrycja Lurie, Ioannis Magkanaris, Vignayanandam Ravindernath Muddapu, Jayakrishnan Nair, Fernando L. Pereira, Rodrigo Perin, Fabien Petitjean, Rajnish Ranjan, Michael Reimann, Liviu Soltuzu, Mohameth François Sy, M. Anıl Tuncel, Alexander Ulbrich, Matthias Wolf, Francisco Clascá, Henry Markram, Sean L. Hill bioRxiv 2022.02.28.482273; https://doi.org/10.1101/2022.02.28.482273