Francis Rousseaux

Composing an Interactive Virtual Opera: The Virtualis Project

Designing the computer-based interactive opera Virtualis has led the authors to develop new tools for working with music, especially in three-dimensional spaces designed for representing and manipulating it, as well as an interaction model based on physical forces rather than on the users intentions. Although opera and computing are two dissimilar interactive situations, the software environment presented in this article is intended (1) to combine them through the generalization of certain operatic functional relationships and (2) to offset the relative absence of the spectator from the classical performance of drama.

Pattern discovery in e-learning courses: a timebased approach

This work relies on connectivism and focuses on the interactions between learners and resources of e-learning materials aiming to discover patterns [13]. The theory of connectivism mainly tells, that knowledge is available through a network of connections. Based on Social Network Analysis, our Time-graph representation uses temporal metrics [12]. Even though longitudinal networks are the most widely used representations of temporal factors, here we considerer time-distribution criterion within a single graph. Path following techniques are not new, but the Time-graph configuration makes it in a specific fashion, that orders resources over a timeline. A resource has not the same impact at the start or at the end of a course. Hence given a specific instant, the Time-graph can inform learners, about important resources.

Time-weighted Social Network: Predict when an item will meet a collector

“For what else is this collection but a disorder to which habit has accommodated itself to such an extent that it can appear as order?”. Unpacking his library, Walter Benjamin describes how a collection is singular [2]. Collections are not unified wholes, but rather chains of undefined objects. Classify, search, arrange or browse collections are personal processes influenced by internal reflexions. Working on figural and non-figural collections, Piaget and Inhelder explain how space and time influence the way a collector looks to his collection [13]. As a result, representing collections is an issue for computer scientists. Here, we propose a time-based method, which consideres chronological events and draws a time-weighted graph defining patterns of items. We therefore show how this graph outputs different results depending on when it is requested. This work is based on an architecture, designed by Openrendezvous.com, a collaborative web-based application helping to make appointments. Our goal is to adapt a social graph used to define the perfect moment for two people to meet, to the collection case. We discuss how we can build a structure that helps to compute the ideal moment for an item to meet a collector.

An experimentation of VANETs for traffic management

Nowadays, wireless communication technologies have high influence on our daily lives. The vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) is now evolving quickly and attract attention from road operators, car manufacturers and governments. We unveil a fine traffic flow optimization method with VANETs. On the macroscopic level, our model identifies road segment profiles. On the microscopic level, vehicles send and receive alerts using low-level-of-details data. This paper gives workflows for both vehicle and infrastructure sides.

Recommender Engines Under the Influence of Popularity

One often thinks that the use of Information Technologies brings an infinity of choices. However, Popularity still influences people in our free, pervasive and connected world. It is a reality: popular items keep power and weak items tend to be forgotten. Several studies demonstrated that this natural phenomenon is accentuated today with recommender engines. In this article we present a comparative study of 8 recommendation techniques. We also present a personal recommendation approach, based on items timeline. We unveil a Popularity Influence index, which evaluates the way recommender engines are influenced by the phenomenon. This experiment is led by a pool of interdisciplinary researchers, either or both epistemologists and computer scientists. It includes diverse examples and references from e-business, cultural studies or participatory democracy along with others. We believe that Popularity belongs to a wide set of fields. Therefore, we chose to run this experiment in an E-learning context, where we observe pieces of knowledge popularity.

Discovering cultural conceptual structures from texts for ontology generation

Today, the development of the semantic web is heavily impacted by the knowledge acquisition bottleneck. To address this problem, the discovery of conceptual structures have to become automatic. In addition, it has to guarantee that these structures are socially-constructed and consensually-shared in accordance with the requirements for designing ontologies. In this research, we present a process to automatically discover ready-made cultural knowledge structures from texts fitting the needs of ontology engineering. Relying on a framework coming from cognitive anthropology, we designed the latter to identify hypernym/hyponym relations. During our experiment we obtained a promising 92.46% precision.

Knowledge Engineering or Digital Humanities? Territorial Intelligence, a Case in Point

Knowledge Engineering (KE) usually deals with representation and visualization challenges, sometimes socio or bio inspired, collective aspects being quite often taken into account. Nevertheless with knowledge-based Territorial Intelligence, KE is faced with natively situated know-how, distributed hope and network-centered emerging organizations, as far as this domain aims at providing tools to support and develop our local and territorial communities. Furthermore knowledge-based Territorial Intelligence has to cope with its own paradoxes and success, to challenge its sustainable existence: as a matter of fact, thanks to big data and its digital tools, people may have thought that they where living in a global village, territories-independent, practicing a perpetual nomadism. So they now require participation for defining their collective policies and social perspectives, leading to their common sustainable development. How knowledge-based Territorial Intelligence will manage to make available efficient solutions to support and develop our original way to collectively inhabit places and earth? That is the question we try to present throughout some technical and scientific aspects along this dedicated chapter.

Hypercalculia for the mind emulation

By imitating the high-speed computational behavior of a machine through a consciousness of the future, we suggest a reverse artificial intelligence in an attempt to achieve the computational whole mind emulation of high level thoughts. The methodology, using such reverse artificial intelligence which we run with control on the mind instead of a machine, is disclosed. We then generalize this ability to enable the proposed mind emulation through high-speed mental computation processes. We suggest a set of theoretical and empirical principles and methods for the mind transfer, which leads to an almost unlimited potential for the human beings and society. In this paper, we present the most basic case of experimenting with the inactive behaviors, then a new hypothesis.

Collecting or classifying

Informatics and AI claim, at least implicitly, that the world is made of objects organized into classes (taxonomies, ontologies...). In this paper, we explore another idea: we structure our material relationships by collecting objects within collections, which are never as static as classes. The notion of collection will appear as an efficient way to articulate organic life and conceptual life throughout a metastable equilibrium, more promising than the intensive categorization traditionaly made in informatics, as far as depicting and managing human experience is concerned.

Building Emic-Based Cultural Mediations to Support Artificial Cultural Awareness

Recently, studies about culturally-intelligent systems have arisen to manage digitized cultural diversity. The current systems possess an artificial awareness of cultures by mediating them through representations. Coming from an etic approach, these universal representations facilitate the mediation of different cultures but limit their understanding and thus, prevent the development of an higher degree of awareness. In this research, we propose a methodology to construct artificial cultural awareness from emic-based representations. We tested the latter through an experiment on the domain of ‘abortion’ with the Pro-Choice and Pro-Life communities.