Archive for Lille
bébés Trump…
Posted in Books, Kids, pictures, Travel with tags antisemitism, apology of war crimes, baby Trump, French government, French politics, Gaza, Gaza war, genocide, Israel, Lille, Middle East, Occupied Palestinian Territory, Palestine, Palestinian refugees, Science Po', Stand Up To Trump, UNRWA on August 7, 2025 by xi'an
11 hours in Lille
Posted in Books, Travel, Wines with tags beer, bellfry, Chambre de Commerce et d'Industrie, Citadel, conurbation, day trip, ferret, Flanders, Gare du Nord, Lille, Louis XIV, Nord, street view, TGV, Vauban, Vieille Bourse, waffles, War of Spanish Succession on July 19, 2025 by xi'an
De pierre et d’os
Posted in Books, Kids, Mountains, pictures, Travel with tags aquarelle, Arctic, book adaptation, book review, chamanism, ethnography, Far North, First Nations, graphical novel, Greenland, husky dogs, Inuits, inukshuk, Lille, Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle, Northern lights, Paul-Émile Victor, qimuttoq, sledge dogs, supersition, tupilak on June 30, 2025 by xi'an
AI Narratives [book review]
Posted in Books with tags Ada Lovelace, AI, Alan Turing, Ann Leckie, anthropomorphisation, Auguste de Villiers de l'Isle Adam, automation, Blade Runner, book review, CHANCE, Charles Dickens, cybernetics, cyberpunk, dehumanization, difference engine, E.M. Forster, Emile Zola, golem, Homer, Iain Banks, Illiad, immortality, Isaac Asimov, Karel Čapek, Kempelen's chess player, Lille, literary criticism, Neuromancer, Prague, robotics, robots, science fiction, slavery, tea, technophobia, The Black Swan, Trollope, USSR, William Gibson, zen buddhism on June 13, 2025 by xi'an
AI Narratives: A history of imaginative thinking about intelligent machines is a 2020 collective book edited by Stephen Cave, Kanta Dihal, and Sarah Dillon, with about twenty contributing authors, through a series of 16 chapters on the relation between culture (literature, films) and our societal approach to AI, with varying perspectives, some overlap between chapters, a wide range of extrapolation, especially in relation with the oldest books (like Homer’s) and quotes from both books I enjoyed and books I had not heard of, to add to my to-red pile, like Roderick. Predominant place of Blade Runner, of Ĉapek’s Rossum’s Universal Robots, not only for introducing the term, and of Asimov, but also a detailed analysis of the great, thought-provoking, Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice. With a realization that Gibson’s Neuromancer had aged quite a lot… For the modern times, very little outside the US-UK realm, as for instance no mention made of Jules Verne or René Barjavel, although Zola makes an appearance when describing workers as automats, neither of the Germanic literature (from the Grimm Brothers onwards), nor of the non-negligible USSR science fiction production, nor yet of the Chinese input, like The three body problem. Other books that could have made it: the Murderbot diaries, and The Alchemy Wars trilogy, for digging into the blurry border between humans and AIs; A Memory Called Empire, for a clever approach to mind uploading, as well as the masterly Never let me go by Ishiguro, both dealing with a future where copies of humans The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay for the golem, the highly original take on the legal rights of humanoid robots, A Psalm for the Wild-Built because of… tea and Zen monk, obviously!
Among things I learned from AI Narratives, the story of Alan Turing (figuratively) mansplaining Ada Lovelace on her pronouncement that machines cannot be intelligent since they deliver what they are coded for. The mention of automatos in the Illiad. A mention of 1625 Gabriel Naudé Apologie &tc. that excludes magic as irrational, as well as introducing the term androide. The trivia that the creator of the (fraudulent) automaton chess player, Kempelen, also produced in 1791 an authentic if brainless speaking machine. The realisation that E.M Forster also wrote a futuristic novel, The Machine Stops (as well as the precursor of the symbolists, Villiers de l’Isle Adam, with L’Ève Future). Another trivia that cyberpunk first appeared in a 1983 short story by Bruce Bethke. A discussion of the elaborate Culture constructed by Iain Banks, albeit through volumes in the series I hade not read, along with the concept of OCP for outside context problem, akin to Taleb’s Black Swan. The least interesting (and final) chapter in the book is paradoxically the closest to data analysis, when Recchia runs a rather low-tech assessment of a subtitle dataset in relation with AI, if referring to Tufte’s rule of the baselin in the notes (p405).
Definitely enjoyable book, then, even though I mostly skimmed through the chapters during a day-trip to Lille on a Bank (!) holiday. Reading through it made me muse rather belatedly of a parallel between AI scare or adoration, and the non-AI societies, where individuals are (also) part of a structure large enough to miss the larger picture. From building pyramids to being part of the global economy. (This followed mostly from my surprise in seeing Dickens, Trollope, and Zola included in the discussion.)
[Disclaimer about potential self-plagiarism: this post or an edited version will eventually appear in my Books Review section in CHANCE.]
repulsive postdoc!
Posted in Statistics with tags ABC, Agence Nationale de la Recherche, ANR, approximate Bayesian inference, ERC, European Research Council, France, Lille, postdoctoral position, repulsiveness, Université Paris Dauphine on December 20, 2019 by xi'an
Rémi Bardenet has been awarded an ERC grant on Monte Carlo integration via repulsive point processes and is now looking for a postdoc starting next March. (Our own ABSINT ANR grant still has an open offer of a postdoctoral position on approximate Bayesian methods, feel free to contact me if potentially interested.)
