I am a PhD candidate at STATQAM (UQAM). I recently submitted my thesis and expect to defend it in a few months. Before that, I studied philosophy at the Faculté de philosophie at Université Laval and completed a B.Sc. in Mathematics with a Statistics concentration at UQAM.
During my PhD, I developed software and methodology for modeling and analyzing genomic data using the coalescent process, under the supervision of Fabrice Larribe. For this, I mainly used tools from graph theory, circuit theory, and copula theory. Implementation was done in the Julia programming language. Much of the items listed on page Software are related to my research, directly or indirectly.
I am a long-time Linux user and free/open source software enthusiast. I began experimenting with Debian 3 "Woody" back in the early 2000s, and haven't stopped since. Nowadays, one of my hobbies is giving old machines a second life as nodes in a Kubernetes cluster, which I use, among other things, to host this website as well as relays in various decentralized networks (see sections Contact and I2P/Tor below).
Contact
The best ways to reach me are email and XMPP. In both cases, the address is the same: pf@patrickfournier.ca.
Social
About This Website
In addition to being a personal page, this website is an excuse for me to learn about web development and static websites. Everything you see is created from a bunch of HTML/CSS/Javascript files put together by a justfile and about 100 lines of AWK (source here). It is a lot of fun, but please excuse—and report!—any clunkiness or rough edges.
In terms of design, I aim for simplicity and accessibility. Although not strictly plain text, this website is very lean and even offers a decent experience on text-based browsers such as Lynx. While these may seem like relics from a forgotten era, they are a key tool for people with visual impairments. As an added benefit, access via lower bandwidth networks is also improved, which leads to the following section.
I2P/Tor
For those interested in these kinds of things, this website is registered and available on the invisible internet at patrickfournier.i2p (hi notbob!). You might also catch me on one of i2p's federated IRC server from time to time. If you prefer Tor and cryptic URLs, you can access it at oi45l3r4p2hxiu2hkucqer3knhlarfrqnlicet4a5kue3zqot4mkk3yd.onion. If you happen to be using the Tor browser, you should be offered the option to visit the onion site instead of the clear web one.