From reproducing blood flow through the human heart to modelling ships at sea, Chloé Papolla
has always done the same thing: making data tell the truth about a physical reality.
After a PhD in biomechanics, she joined Syroco in early 2021. Today, as Head of Data Science, she leads the team that builds a digital twin for every vessel: "a model that predicts how that specific ship behaves and consumes fuel." The team does it hand in hand with Syroco's naval engineers.
Because two ships that look identical on paper never behave the same way at sea.
Her team has two missions.
The first one is to make sense of everything a ship produces - the sensors on board, satellite positions, weather, crew reports - and turn that constant stream of raw data into something the whole product can rely on.
The second mission is to build the digital twin of each vessel. The naval engineers bring the physics of the ship, its hull, its engine, the way it responds to waves, while Chloé's team brings the real data from on board and the models that learn from it.
"It's genuinely teamwork, not a chain where each person passes the baton."
But building the twin is only half the job. The other half is getting the captain to trust it.
No one knows a ship better than its captain. He knows how it behaves in a heavy swell, what it burns at a given speed, how it responds when the sea turns. So when a model claims to know his ship, scepticism is the natural response.
And it should be. That instinct is exactly what you want from a captain.
For Chloé, that trust is built in three stages.
First, the captain has to recognise his ship in the twin. A Syroco twin is never an off-the-shelf model of "a 250-metre tanker". It's built from that ship's own physics and history: its hull, its engine, its past voyages, the way it has aged. The turning point is quiet: the captain reads the predictions and sees his own vessel looking back.
Then comes the reality test. Prediction meets reality, voyage after voyage: the model announced 12.5 knots at this power, in this sea. What did the ship actually do? Get it right often enough, and confidence settles in. Which is why nothing goes unmeasured.
Finally, the captain becomes part of the model. His feedback, like fuel consumption underestimated in a following sea, or a freshly cleaned hull, travels back to the team and sharpens the twin. He stops being a spectator and becomes a contributor.
"You don't trust a tool that's frozen. You trust something that listens."
A ship is never a fixed object. The hull fouls, the engine wears; the vessel that sailed last spring is not the one that sails today. Which is why the team doesn't fully trust its own twins either: the models are checked against reality without pause, and recalibrated every month to catch that slow drift before it matters.
So trust, on both sides of the bridge, works the same way. It isn't something a captain grants once and forgets. It isn't something a data team earns once and banks. It's never acquired at all.
It's kept alive, voyage after voyage.
Which is why Chloé never describes her job as building a finished tool.
"My job, really, is a permanent dialogue between science and the sea."