Old news
09/2009
01/09/2009 - Looking for a job... until November!
From today, I'm no more affiliated with the IRIT in Toulouse and should be looking for a job. I say "should", because my application for a postdoc at the INRIA was accepted and I should be working from November 2009 until February 2011 in Nancy, within the CORTEX team, under the direction of Bernard Girau. September and October will nevertheless be busy, since I have many research projects to "finish" before going on something different.
08/2009
31/08/2009 - News... and forced holidays
Due to several changes in my personal life, some gastric based illness and many other factors, I had to rest at several occasions in July and August. Sadly this was probably not the most efficient way to publish, but was the perfect opportunity to think about what I really want to do with my life (whether professional or personal)...
06/2009
09/06/2009 - Young cognitive science researcher conference
After several other job interviews for tenured research positions, I went back to Toulouse for the CJCSC'09. This was a good opportunity to hear many diverse and interesting talks from many cognitive science fields. There were also discussions on the perspectives of research in cognitive science in the years to come, to prepare the workshop.
05/2009
07/05/09 - Job interviews
Today started the neverending journey through job interviews, that will span over most of May. Although I regret I cannot really focus on research these days, this is the opportunity to sort things out, and present my work in new ways, so it becomes a bit more intelligible. I can also perceive it as a chance to get my ideas clearer and make my research orientation explicit. Let's see in about a month for the results.
04/2009
08/04/09 - Seminar given at the ISIR
In preparation for the job interviews related to a tenured position at Polytech'Paris-UPMC/ISIR this year, I could come and present my work in front of a group of researchers from the Institute of Intelligent Systems and Robotics, working in diverse fields such as mechanical systems, control and artificial intelligence. This was the occasion to shortly discuss the applicability and limitations of my approach when dealing with robots with many degrees of freedom. The organization of such seminars itself was a really good initiative, due to the usual length of the actual job interviews, too short to go deep in the research topic and discuss fundamental issues. I was also received by the young, energetic and motivated team teaching in the robotics department of Polytech'Paris-UPMC.
03/2009
31/03/09 - Job interview for the CNRS
I went to Paris for the CNRS job interview. I was listened by a panel of experts in robotics, multi-agent systems and other fields my work is related to, but was unable to convince them of the viability of my approach. I clearly did not emphasize enough on the mathematical and technical aspects of my model. At least I got comments and a direction to improve my presentation. Now I need to find a way to give both the broad view on my approach to grasp its interest and applications, and go a bit deeper with my entangled dynamical systems with activity propagation between underdefined vectors. All of that in 10 minutes, I definitely need to work on it until my next try ^^
25/03/09 - Seminar of Charles Lenay
Being in Sussex for the Key Issues in Sensory Augmentation Workshop, Charles Lenay gave a seminar for Life and Mind on perceptual crossing. As the Director of the Perceptual Supplementation Group in the COSTECH laboratory (University of Compiègne), he presented their general approach, but also introduced several simple and synthetic experiments exploring the feeling of having a being interacting with you. Though I already knew about the device and earlier results after going to the CNRS school on Constructivism and Enaction in 2006, this was a great pleasure to learn more about their implications.
11/03/09 - Talk for the Life and Mind seminars
I had the opportunity this week to give a talk at the University of Sussex. The seminar group is called Life and Mind and deals with various topics going from philosophical issues to biology through evolution or robotics. Though I received very adequate comments and critiques, I was not really able to clarify some of my points due to different assumptions. My fault for not making my points clear from the start, I wish the discussions at the pub of the university helped a bit and that following exchanges will give me the opportunity to progress in that direction.
04/03/09 - University of Sussex
After going through various offices to get everything settled this morning, I'm am now a Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Sussex (US to make it short). I will be advised by Luc Berthouze and Ezequiel Di Paolo during the next six months, and will try to make progress on adapted learning mechanisms for interactivist representations. In that task, the context of the Informatics Department and Center for Computation Neuroscience and Robotics (CCNR group) may help a lot.
02/2009
16/02/09 - Application to the INRIA
Like the CNRS, the INRIA is a French national institute for research, but specialized in computer science and control. I finally sent my application today to become a tenured researcher (Chargé de Recherche - CR2).
15/02/09 - Big update on the website
The title is explicit. An application page has been added which lists the programs, libraries and platforms that have been or are under development. An odd position page is included as well. It gathers information about where I worked or went. Finally, the publication page has been updated to provide additional links for old papers.
05/02/09 - Talk at the LORIA for the CPER-MISN
I had the chance to make a presentation at the Lorraine Laboratory of IT Research and its Applications (LORIA) to present my PhD thesis and the work done in the Sensorimotor Intelligence Team. I received a lot of questions and critics, which is just great when you present any scientific work, specially when the questions are so adequate. I was also lucky enough to discover a bit more about the research undertaken in the CORTEX team/project and talk with several of its members. Thank you so much for this great opportunity :)
01/2009
06/01/09 - Application to the CNRS
Though this application can be roughly assimilated to the application to become an assistant professor, research is the main focus here. I applied to the National Center for Scientific Research in France (CNRS to become a tenured researcher (Chargé de Recherche - CR2) in order to work at the Montpellier Laboratory of Computer Science, Robotics, and Microelectronics (LIRMM).
12/2008
15/12/08 - GPGPU processing library and tutorial
My open-source library using shader programs on modern graphics card is finally online. The associated tutorial is not finished, but I'm focusing my efforts on it. The associated article has been accepted in Machine Vision and Applications (Springer) and should soon be available online.
13/12/08 - Qualification to become an assistant professor
I sent my application files to the reviewers appointed to me. I applied online 2 months ago to the qualification to become an assistant professor in the French universities. I can only cross my fingers now and wait for the decision of the commission.
08/12/08 - Léopold Escande PhD thesis award
I received a nice mail from the university president today. I have been awarded the Léopold Escande thesis award from the National Polytechnic Institute for my PhD thesis : Implicit coordination of sensorimotor interactions as a cornerstone of cognition.
05/12/08 - Rodney Brooks conference in Toulouse
For its 40th anniversary, the LAAS organized a series of conference with renowned speakers. Rodney Brooks was the invited speaker today and gave a delightful talk full of humour. Last time I saw Pr. Brooks and Pr. Chatilla together was at the 1st International Symposium on Information and Robot Technology (ISIRT), but it was back in March 2007 and in Tokyo... quite far away from Toulouse.
11/2008
14/11/08 - My PhD defense
I was lucky to defend my PhD today in front of a wonderful jury. Not only they are brilliant and working on complementary fields of research, but were also not too mean with my developments even after struggling with AirFrance going on strike... I must therefore thank Olivier Gapenne, Olivier Sigaud, Mark Bickhard, John Stewart, Pier Giorgio Zanone, Jean-Luc Basille and Jean-Christophe Buisson for coming and discussing.
10/2008
22/10/08 - Robotics GDR GT4 meeting in Paris
Under this name is hidden the working group of the French Research Group in Robotics (GDR Robotique) focused on methodologies. Several teams presented their research dealing with learning either on real robots or using simulations. A great chance to discover the variety of subjects in the community and who works on what.
06/10/08 - New website online
Well, obviously, the website you're currently surfing on is online! To view what the previous version looked like, you can still check the hosted websites page.
09/2008
30/09/08 - David Panzoli's PhD defense
David Panzoli from IRIT (UT1 site) defended his PhD thesis. After presenting a large number of cognitive theories (subsomption architecture?, ecological approach?, various cortex theories), he introduced his own model called the cortexionist architecture?.
26/09/08 - IROS'08 workshop
I participated in the IROS'08 workshop entitled From motor to interaction learning in robots? organized by Olivier Sigaud. I also presented a poster called Interactivist sensorimotor learning? (suche a vague title...). Though many talks dealt with global and centralized learning methods, others were focused on task-independant distributed learning algorithms. I further discovered the work of the CORTEX team? at LORIA and the neural network model SURE-REACH? presented by Oliver Herbort in his talk.
20/09/08 - Hard disk drive crash...
When connecting it to the power plug, my computer crashed. Sadly, it was no bug from Windows, no overheating but a physical failure of my HDD. It was no more detected, and trying all software solutions I knew did not help. Although I backed up most of my research work regularly, I lost some precious data I did not saved during the last few months. Hopefully, it survived until the 15th! Thank you hard drive for not giving up until the end of my thesis writing.
17/09/08 - New website
No one except me can surf on it right now, but a new PmWiki based website is under development. The goal is to finally be crawled by Google (damn JavaScript and Google incompatibility), be able to add content more easily from anywhere and for the site to also serve as a research platform, where I can put abstracts, notes and sort out my ideas.
15/09/08 - PhD manuscript sent
Today I finished correcting my PhD manuscript and sent it to the reviewers. Hurray!
08/2008
25/08/08 - Journey to Norway
I returned from a 12 days research & contact trip in Norway. With the group from the AMESAT?, we spent about 5 days in Oslo, getting contacts and exchanging information at the University of Oslo (both on the teaching and research sides). I visited the psychology institute, which was quite impressive and full of motivated people. We also visited different companies (Det Norske Veritas, AKER solutions, Simula) including some of the biggest ones in Norway. We finally went to the French-Norwegian chamber of commerce and French ambassy before leaving for Bergen where we spent the rest of the trip getting in touch with the culture and beautiful landscapes : wow...
07/2008
31/07/08 - EpiRob'08 conference at the University of Sussex
As always (well... this is only the second time I join the conference...), it was really amazing : interesting people, interesting talks, good key notes and speakers. Paul Baxter (PhD student at the University of Reading, UK) introduced me to his model, very similar to my own. He applies it to robotics and interestingly, his model is based on the neuroscientific developments from Joachin von Fuster, which I now have to read ^_^ Christopher Wilmott was there, motivated, jovial, good at asking and answering sharp questions as always. I also finally heard a talk on developmental robotics from Pierre-Yves Oudeyer. As a general comment on the trip, Brighton is a lovely city, yound and active.