Playing with AI, Cities, and Whatever Futures We Can Dream Up ✨

Hi, I’m Hugo 👋 Basically a full-time nerd for AI, cities, and sustainability. Right now I’m a postdoc at the Chaire UNESCO en Paysage Urbain, where I explore how AI, public spaces, and democracy can actually vibe together instead of awkwardly ignoring each other.

Before that, I did my PhD at Mila (aka Montréal’s AI playground), where I explored how teaching AIs to compete — like in image generation and adversarial games — can push the boundaries of what they create.

My thesis was titled “Adversarial games in machine learning: challenges and applications.” Translation: imagine two AIs locked in an endless video game — one fakes images, the other tries to spot the fakes. Fun to watch, a nightmare to train. My work tried to make that chaos slightly less chaotic: bringing in mathy optimization tricks, poking at why GANs love to spin in circles instead of settling down, and even inventing new adversarial games to generate sneaky attacks across different models.

In short: I research how to turn messy AI battles into something useful (and maybe even a little elegant).