Category: Uncategorized

The first half of 2016 has been an exciting one for those of us working in the sUAS (small Unmanned Aircraft Systems) industry. Commonly known as drones, these devices are currently being used in such areas as search and rescue, firefighting, wildlife monitoring, aerial photography, precision agriculture and many other arenas. In fact, Intel is experimenting with choreographed light displays involving hundreds of sUAS that may one day provide a safer alternative to fireworks shows, especially in fire prone areas like Southern California.

Source: Jason Isaacs: More independence for drone operation makes for promising future in business, educatio

Chercheur génial, écologiste radical au début des années 1970, ermite retiré du monde pendant 23 ans, il a eu trois ou quatre vies successives entre sa naissance, le 28 mars 1928 à Berlin, et sa mort, en 2014, quelque part dans l’Ariège.

Le monde des mathématiques l’a découvert en 1958, au congrès mondial d’Edimbourg, où il présenta une refondation de la géométrie algébrique. La géométrie algébrique, ce sera sa grande œuvre, une sorte de cathédrale conceptuelle construite en collaboration avec deux autres mathématiciens, Jean Dieudonné et Jean-Pierre Serre. En quoi cela consiste-t-il ? Difficile de dire, mais en gros, si on trace un cercle avec un compas, on fait de la géométrie. Si on écrit x2 + y2 = 1, c’est-à-dire l’équation d’un cercle, on devient un algébriste. La géométrie montre, l’algèbre démontre.

Grothendieck, lui, a voulu fonder une géométrie nouvelle à partir de deux concepts clé, les schémas et les topos.

De 1950 à 1966, il fit des mathématiques, seulement des mathématiques. Mais un jour, il finit par découvrir la politique. En 1966, il refusa d’aller chercher sa médaille Fields à Moscou, où deux intellectuels venaient d’être condamnés à plusieurs années de camp pour avoir publié des textes en Occident sans autorisation. L’année suivante, il passa trois semaines au Vietnam pour protester contre la guerre lancée par les Etats-Unis. À partir de 1971, il consacra l’essentiel de son temps à l’écologie radicale à travers un groupe qui avait été fondé par un autre mathématicien, le groupe « Survivre et vivre ». En août 1991, il choisit de disparaître dans un village tenu secret après avoir confié 20 000 pages de notes à l’un de ses anciens élèves.

Le nom d’Alexandre Grothendieck sonne un peu comme la promotion de l’évanescence dans l’ontologie radicale. Car sa disparition donne à croire qu’elle le résume et le raconte davantage que tout le reste. Le choix qu’il a fait de d’évader rétro-projette son ombre sur tous les événements antérieurs de sa vie. Comme s’il n’avait jamais eu d’autre intention que celle d’échapper un jour au commerce des hommes. Mais raisonner ainsi serait injuste, car ce serait oublier l’homme, ses vies et son œuvre, qui est monumentale et demeure en partie inexplorée.

Source: Alexandre Grothendieck : un mathématicien qui prit la tangente

California State University trustees named two women to lead the Chico and Channel Islands campuses, paving the way for the nation’s largest university system to have more women serving as presidents than at any time in its history.

Erika D. Beck, provost and executive vice president at Nevada State College in Henderson, will preside at CSU Channel Islands. She succeeds Richard R. Rush, who is retiring in June after 15 years as president.Chico State, the second-oldest school in the Cal State system, will be headed by Gayle E. Hutchinson, now provost and vice president of academic affairs at Channel Islands. Hutchinson succeeds Paul Zingg, who became president in 2004 and is also retiring in June.

The appointments, announced Wednesday, reflect Chancellor Timothy P. White’s push for more diversity in hiring as well as in the development of curriculum throughout the system, which educates about 460,000 students.

Source: Two women named to lead Cal State campuses Chico and Channel Islands – LA Times

Such an interesting article!

It was silkworms that first captured 13–year–old Maria Sibylla Merian’s attention. She would later graduate to a wider set of creatures, watching caterpillars, pupae, butterflies, and moths for days, weeks, and months. Paintbrush in hand, Merian recorded each stage of their life cycles, noting every change and movement. She depicted the silkworm moth from eggs, hatching larvae, molts, cocoons, all the way to adult moths. She distinguished between male and female, and showed a silkworm feeding on a mulberry leaf. Unlike many other girls her age, Merian was not disgusted by hairy crawling creatures or by tightly cocooned ‘date pits’ as she called the chrysalis. She pocked, squeezed, and prodded them to note how they ‘roll up,’ ‘twist and turn violently,’ or ‘lie there as if dead.’

Source: Maria Sibylla Merian, The Woman Who Made Science Beautiful – The Atlantic

CI is seeking to fill a tenure-track position in Computer Science at the Assistant Professor rank. The program is poised to grow and we are looking for enthusiastic candidates who will help build a world-class program. All areas of specialization are welcome; candidates with expertise in Software Engineering, Computer Security, Theory, Networks, and Data Mining, are particularly encouraged to apply.

Responsibilities include teaching undergraduate and graduate computer science courses, pursuing funded research and scholarly publications, contributing to general education and interdisciplinary courses, assisting in the development of new academic programs and pursuing appropriate industrial collaboration.

The position is also advertised in ACM: http://bit.ly/1JSDz7Y

Source: Assistant Professor of Computer Science, Computer Science, California State University Channel Islands

Google Street View offers panoramic views of more or less any city street in much of the developed world, as well as views along countless footpaths, inside shopping malls, and around museums and art galleries. It is an extraordinary feat of modern engineering that is changing the way we think about the world around us.

But while Street View can show us what distant places look like, it does not show what the process of traveling or exploring would be like. It’s easy to come up with a fix: simply play a sequence of Street View Images one after the other to create a movie.

But that doesn’t work as well as you might imagine. Running these images at 25 frames per second or thereabouts makes the scenery run ridiculously quickly. That may be acceptable when the scenery does not change, perhaps along freeways and motorways or through unchanging landscapes. But it is entirely unacceptable for busy street views or inside an art gallery.

So Google has come up with a solution: add additional frames between the ones recorded by the Street View cameras. But what should these frames look like?

Today, John Flynn and buddies at Google reveal how they have used the company’s vast machine learning know-how to work out what these missing frames should look like, just be studying the frames on either side. The result is a computational movie machine that can turn more or less any sequence of images into smooth running film by interpolating the missing the frames.

Source: Google’s Deep Learning Machine Learns to Synthesize Real World Images | MIT Technology Review