DC Board

Our Founding Members

Make.org, project leader of Democratic Commons, brings a dual expertise to the table. With eight years of experience in the field and numerous participatory projects launched across Europe in partnership with public authorities, the Make team possesses an in-depth understanding of participatory democracy. Additionally, Make.org contributes a second area of expertise: proficiency in technologies and AI challenges for participatory platforms. This stems from their commitment to leveraging technology and data science to streamline and accelerate results analysis.

Axel Dauchez

Founder & President

Alumnus of École Polytechnique, Axel initiated his professional trajectory in marketing at Procter and Gamble before transitioning to the media sector, where he led high-growth enterprises for nearly three decades. His career encompasses leadership roles in various domains, including marketing direction for a global leader in PC edutainment software and games, presidency of a premier French digital agency, and general management of a worldwide leader in animated audiovisual production. Subsequently, he assumed the role of CEO at Deezer in 2010, followed by the presidency of Publicis France in 2014, where he spearheaded the inaugural edition of Viva Technology, a global event focused on collaboration between startups and large corporations.

Alicia Combaz

Founder & CEO

NEOMA Business School graduate, Alicia commenced her career in media and emerging technologies, collaborating with major conglomerates and startups where she managed teams of developers, data scientists, and product managers. In 2012, she joined Deezer, where she established France's first Growth Hacking Team to accelerate the company's expansion. There, she met Axel Dauchez, then CEO, with whom she partnered in 2016 to establish Make.org.

David Mas

Chief AI Officer

CentraleSupélec alumni, David pursued research at LIMSI (Laboratory for Mechanics and Engineering Sciences) at CNRS, now merged with LRI (Computer Science Research Laboratory) within LISN (Interdisciplinary Laboratory of Digital Sciences). David's research included a project for the French Defense Procurement Agency, focusing on enhancing language models used in automatic speech recognition through neural networks, discriminative learning, and automatic classification. David subsequently completed a doctorate in economics at Panthéon-Assas University Paris II, concentrating on the analysis and modeling of venture capital investments. Post-doctorate, he transitioned to data science, working as a Data Scientist at Valbray Development on projects involving image analysis, web scraping, and statistical modeling, and later at Rakuten, primarily developing and deploying recommendation and targeting systems for the group's online marketplaces.

Sciences Po, a founding member of Democratic Commons, serves as the preeminent observer of democratic processes in France, uniquely combining approaches from the humanities and social sciences with data science. Sciences Po contributes to the consortium by providing cutting-edge expertise in political science, aimed at understanding and precisely defining the democratic applications of AI. Additionally, Sciences Po brings its proficiency in digital ethnography to pragmatically characterize and more accurately assess democratic biases.

Jean-Philippe Cointet

Founder & CEO

Jean-Philippe is a Professor at Sciences Po and researcher at the médialab, where he designs innovative computational sociology methods. He is specialized in text and network analysis, and is working on various kinds of corpora and sources questioning their socio-political dynamics. His research areas are diverse, ranging from (social) media analysis to science of science or political dynamics analyses. He holds a PhD in Complex Systems and was trained as an engineer at Ecole Polytechnique. He is also affiliated with the research center INCITE, from Columbia University. He defended his habilitation in Social Sciences at ENS in 2017. Jean-Philippe Cointet is the director of the Open Institute for Digital Transformations at Sciences Po, which coordinates the university’s work on digital technology. Currently, Jean-Philippe is working on the following projects: Democratic Commons (on ethical AI for resilient democracies), PostGenAI@Paris Cluster (an international center of excellence dedicated to post-generative AI), SoMe4Dem (on understanding causal mechanisms of digital citizenship), FUTURE-OBS (multi-scale and multi-disciplinary observations of socio-ecosystems in marine areas), DOSA (a digital observatory of social dimensions of antimicrobial resistance).

Martial Foucault

Founder & CEO

Martial Foucault is a distinguished political scientist and expert in public policy analysis. Between 2014 and 2024, he served as the Director of CEVIPOF, a leading research center for political science in France. Foucault's work focuses on electoral behavior, public opinion, and the impact of economic policies on voting patterns. His expertise in quantitative methods and data analysis has been instrumental in understanding the intersection of politics, economics, and public policy. In recent years, Foucault has turned his attention to the implications of AI on democratic processes and governance, contributing valuable insights to the debate on how emerging technologies can shape political landscapes. His role in the Democratic Commons project leverages his extensive experience in political analysis to ensure that AI applications in democracy are grounded in rigorous scientific understanding.

A founding member, Sorbonne University is a world-renowned multidisciplinary institution. For over 50 years, Sorbonne University, like Sciences Po, has been associated with the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), an internationally recognized research organization. The Sorbonne University experts involved in the project are researchers specialized in natural language processing, particularly in evaluating and fine-tuning Large Language Models to correct democratic biases in various use cases, especially for automatic summarization, machine translation, and assistance in drafting citizen contributions.

François Yvon

Senior Researcher

François Yvon is a CNRS senior researcher working in the MLIA team at the Institute of Intelligent Systems and Robotics (ISIR - CNRS/Sorbonne Université). In 1996 he obtained a computer science PhD from the ENST where he was recruited as a senior lecturer in the computer science and networks department. In 2007 he was appointed as full professor of computer science at Université Paris-Sud and also joined the LIMSI-CNRS (now the Interdisciplinary Laboratory of Digital Sciences, LISN - CNRS/Paris-Saclay University) in Orsay where he developped machine translation activities in the 'Traitement du langage parlé' team. He joined the CNRS while he was the director of the LIMSI (2013-2019) and then moved to ISIR in July 2023. His research covers a broad range of topics in natural language processing - from computational morphology to text mining and structured learning methods. Currently his work focuses on machine translation and on large multilingual language models.

https://fyvo.github.io/

Gaël Lejeune

Associate Professor

Gaël Lejeune is an associate professor in Sorbonne Université, specialized in natural language processing (NLP). His research focuses on the robustness of NLP systems tp variation in data: linguistic variation (languages, text genres, diachrony ...) and quality variation (data obtained via web scraping, OCR or ASR).

Benjamin Piwowarski

Research Director

Benjamin Piwowarski is a CNRS Research Director at ISIR (Sorbonne University). His research focuses on information retrieval (e.g., Google-like systems), natural language processing (document summarization, information extraction), and applied statistical learning, particularly representation learning (Deep Learning). His career trajectory includes work on information retrieval with structured documents (PhD 1999-2003), XML databases (postdoctoral research 2004-06 at the University of Chile), analysis of user-search engine interactions (Yahoo! 2006-08), and application of quantum physics mathematical formalism to information access models (2008-11). His current research interests center on text and knowledge representation using Deep Learning approaches, with applications in developing models for human-machine dialogue-based information retrieval and text generation (e.g., synthesizing tabular content into textual form).

Democratic Commons:

a groundbreaking French initiative to put AI at the service of democracy