Minotaure, tu dois finir ta thèse (Simon Berjeaut), paroles

Simon Berjeaut était l'invité de Grantanfi (doctorants, l'avenir dure longtemps) sur France Culture le mercredi 21/11/2012.

Simon Berjeaut est l'auteur de la chanson du Minotaure, ou "Tu dois finir ta thèse", message d'espoir en chanson pour les doctorants et doctorantes en mal de manuscrit, dont je vous avais parlé il y a deux mois, et qu'Igor Carron avait proposé de rendre viral sur YouTube. La vidéo se télécharge là. Et les paroles sont un peu plus bas... En passant, un coucou à mes doctorantes et doctorants en cours et diplomé.e.s : Caroline Chaux, Jérôme Gauthier, Mai Quyen-Pham, Aurélie Pirayre, Arthur Marmin, Lauriane Bouard, Sarah Fajon, Surabhi Jagtap, Louna Al Souki, ainsi que Colombe Vendeuvre et Cyril Faure.

Maurits Cornelis Escher : Angels and Demons (1942)

C'était à l'époque cendreuse de Eyjafjallajökull, et cette chanson évoque le piton de la Fournaise. Pourquoi le Minotaure ? Pour Thésée, l'homme perdu dans le labyrinthe que seul un fil ténu rappelle vers l'issue, une métaphore taurine illustrative du parcours de rédigeant de chaque doctorant. Thêseús comme Odysseus tant la parcours semble voyage sans fin, mais borné, comme l'univers Lorentzien de M. C. Escher de "anges et démons", ou disque hyperbolique de Poncaré. Mais aussi l'évocation de cette période surréaliste, par Minotaure, revue d'avant-guerre (la seconde) qui a fait diffuser des Roberto Matta, Alberto Giacometti, Hans Bellmer, Victor Brauner ou Tristan Tzara. Les deux derniers me rappelant un voyage en Roumanie. Roumanie + T = Minotaure (anagramme faible).

Les paroles ? Les paroles !

Victor Brauner, Hypergenese de la Reapparition (1932)

Où est ton regard de braise
Et tes airs conquérants
Tes épaules en trapèze
Et ta belle énergie
Tu as le regard qui biaise
De tous les doctorants
Et tu deviens obèse
Pris dans ta léthargie

Tu dois finir ta thèse
Tu dois finir ta thèse

Ton esprit de synthèse
Ta volonté de fer
Et ton désir d’ascèse
Se sont-ils envolés ?
Au pied de la falaise
Tu ne sais plus comment faire
Ta volonté de glaise
Il faut la remodeler

Tu dois finir ta thèse
Tu dois finir ta thèse

Ce soir c'est reparti
Tu t'enfermes chez toi
Tu vas finir ta thèse
Ta décision est ferme
Ou au moins une partie
Ou bien le petit trois
Ou bien la parenthèse
Qu'il faut que je referme

Tu dois finir ta thèse

Tu vas finir demain
Tu dois finir le seize
Tu vas finir en juin
Bon, tu reprends une 16
Tu fumes un dernier joint
Et soudain tu t'apaises
Et doucement tu rejoins
Le mouvement des sans-thèse (fois trois)

Comme le dit Marie-Thérèse
Ta voisine martiniquaise
C'est comme le piton de la fournaise
Ça prendra comme une mayonnaise
C'est des foutaises
Tu vas finir ta thèse

Comme le dit Madame Hernandes
Dans sa sagesse toute portuguaise
Si aujourd'hui "nada se fez" (rien ne se fait)
"vai ficar para outra vez" (ça sera pour une autre fois)

C'est des fadaises !
Tu vas finir ta thèse

Tu aimerais trouver un max de pèze
Caché dans une attaché-case
Tu partirais à Saint-Tropez
Tu irais faire du steeple-chase

Tu ferais pas ta thèse
Tu ferais plus du tout ta thèse

Même si la vie te pèse
Écarte l'hypothèse
De finir ta thèse
Au père Lachaise
Enfile tes charentaises
Rassieds-toi sur ta chaise
Pas besoin de chanter la Marseillaise
Mets-toi à l'aise
Tu vas finir ta thèse

Et ne vous en déplaise
Et tant pis si j'ai tord
Mais il me semble plus aisé
De poursuivre une thèse
Plutôt qu'un Minotaure
Tout le monde peut pas être Thésée
Tout le monde peut pas être Thésée
Thésée, Thésée

Mais taisez-vous
Punaise !
[Quelle prise de thèse ?]

Tu vas finir ta thèse...
Tu vas finir ta thèse !

C'est infinissable
... Mais tu vas la finir
C'est insoutenable
... Mais tu vas la soutenir

Tu vas la finir
Tu vas la soutenir
Tu vas la publier, qui sait ?

Tu vas finir ta thèse
Tu vas finir ta thèse

Information overload - And no more trivia, fool!

[Update 2014/05/20 with Ann Blair publications] There is a recent concern about information overload. Or is there? According to the following independent sources:

• Science 2.0 Approach to Research, by Erik Duval (not family)
• Academic publishing is archaic, by Daniel Lemire

the problem is not so recent. Ann Blair already informed us in 2003 that there were Reading Strategies for Coping with Information Overload ca. 1550-1700:

The "multitude of books" was a subject of wonder and anxiety for authors who reflected on the scholarly condition in the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries. In the preface to his massive project of cataloguing all known books in the Bibliotheca univeralis (1545) Conrad Gesner complained of that "confusing and harmful abundance of books," a problem which he called on kings and princes and the learned to solve.  By 1685 the situation seemed absolutely dire to Adrien Baillet, who warned:

"We have reason to fear that the multitude of books which grows every day in a prodigious fashion will make the following centuries fall into a state as barbarous as that of the centuries that followed the fall of the Roman Empire. Unless we try to prevent this danger by separating those books which we must throw out or leave in oblivion from those which one should save and within the latter between what is useful and what is not."

In this way Baillet claimed to have warded off barbarity itself with his collection of judgments on the learned in his nine-volume (and still only half-completed) Jugemens des sçavans

The "information overload" or "scholar big data" is push further in: Too Much to Know. Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age (2010):

The flood of information brought to us by advancing technology is often accompanied by a distressing sense of “information overload,” yet this experience is not unique to modern times. In fact, says Ann M. Blair in this intriguing book, the invention of the printing press and the ensuing abundance of books provoked sixteenth- and seventeenth-century European scholars to register complaints very similar to our own. Blair examines methods of information management in ancient and medieval Europe as well as the Islamic world and China, then focuses particular attention on the organization, composition, and reception of Latin reference books in print in early modern Europe. She explores in detail the sophisticated and sometimes idiosyncratic techniques that scholars and readers developed in an era of new technology and exploding information.

Listen to 23' of Clay Shirky at Web 2.0 Expo NY, 19 September 2008, where you learn, along  the movie narration flood, "It's Not Information Overload. It's Filter Failure":

In Reading Strategies for Coping With Information Overload ca. 1550-1700, Ann Blair teaches us that:

The "multitude of books" was a subject of wonder and anxiety for authors who reflected on the scholarly condition in the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries. In the preface to his massive project of cataloguing all known books in the Bibliotheca univeralis (1545) Conrad Gesner complained of that "confusing and harmful abundance of books," a problem which he called on kings and princes and the learned to solve.1 By 1685 the situation seemed absolutely dire to Adrien Baillet, who warned [...]

So apparently, the information overload problem is no novelty. Looks like information is riding an exponential wave, as in the standard chart (left), whose derivative is just about an exponential. Reminds me of the following joke: $1$ and $e^x$ sit in an old favorite room of a restaurant. Waiting for food arrival - noontime. Suddenly, $1$ gets terrified and cry at $e^x$: "hide me, hide me, here enters a derivative operator!". Proud and fierce,  $e^x$ hides the constant behind her back, and defies the operator: "i am $e^x$, i don't fear you". "Sure!" the operator replies, "i am $\frac{\partial}{\partial y}$". 

As Clay Shirky says, "If you have a problem for a long time, it's not a problem... Maybe it's a fact!" (IMHO probably emphasized by the Internet/media mode of "content creation", more than often a mere duplication (pure redundancy) or basic distorsion (jamming) of pre-existing content, with reduced added value), to fill the media tubes and pipes (forlorn media ovation). Since more and more people write, blog, tweet and buzz about IO, further adding low valued load. IO might just be neither a true problem nor a false one. René Thom (in Paraboles et Catastrophes, Champs Flammarion, p. 127) reminds us that "Ce qui limite le vrai n’est pas le faux, mais l’insignifiant", approximately translated to "What limits truth, it is not forgery but trifle/insignificance" (quote courtesy of Olivier Rey, whose Itinéraire de l'égarement deserves close reading, admiration of no lover). IO as an inane vomit flood roar (sounds like a death metal song title, but only an anagram).

Yet still assuming that "more data = better decisions", some argue that the "real problem is the lack of efficient strategies to index, summarize, filter, cross-reference and archive information", or propose "A Framework for Information Overload Research in Organizations Insights from Organization Science, Accounting, Marketing, MIS, and Related Disciplines" (Eppler, Mengis, 2003). But more insignificant data may as well lead to zero decisions, as gaussian disturbances may vanish as the square root on the number of observations. Second thought, not so much with rounding, see Statistical Analysis for Rounding Data (Zhidong Bai, 2006). The current trend in signal or image processing is generally similar: acquire more data, at higher frequency, with more precision (watch out, formation on evil road), hoping signal processing, statistics and data mining will cope with the flood and deliver precious information. An extreme example arises in seismic processing, where petabytes of data ("but also storage systems that can handle petabytes of data daily") are gathered. Yet, due to the computational burden and memory footprint, the relative time spent on "fine processing" with respect to data reading, loading, handling, sorting seems tiny.

Thank to the availability of low cost sensors and band-width, the data overload plague is spreading. More and more data, less and less time to process it properly, massive low-quality batch filtering are favored. Signal and image processing enter the dark area of weak signals and information overlook. I pray everyday (no variation of me, Lord) for my colleagues to tell me: next step, we are going to acquire much less signals (and favor no more dilation of disk space), to spend the remaining time on their processing.

All PhDs unite: une chanson pour les thésard(e)s du monde entier (francophone)

[Mise à jour : la vidéo du Minotaure (ou "tu dois finir ta thèse) de Simon Berjeaut, mais surtout les paroles, sont à Minotaure, tu dois finir ta thèse (again)] Pour les doctorants du monde entier, une ode à la fin de thèse : "Tu dois finir ta thèse". La vidéo est téléchargeable ici :
http://www.laurent-duval.eu/_Share/Tu_dois_finir_ta_these.mp4
et mise sur You Tube, car elle ne semblait pas y être (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rbfse8Af_Ps) par Igor Carron (de Nuit Blanche). Merci à Elodie Jeandel pour l'info (sur Facebook).

Raah - Haar year (toute)

Today a call for paper, a celebration of Haar centenary, codes for multivariate denoising and a thought.

2010 is the centenary (with 1 % imprecision) of the Haar wavelet (or Haarlet). Oddly, it possesses an anagram, raah. According to Urban Dictionary, raah denotes:

A richly dressed person, usually with big hair and are commonly situated in Surrey. They enjoy prancing around in Ralph Lauren, Jack Wills and Abercrombie & Fitch. Their grooming and hair can be described as messy, but stylish.

To celebrate such a birthday, everybody is invited to contribute to the call for paper to Elevier Signal Processing: Advances in Multirate Filter Bank Structures and Multiscale Representations, with a 15 February 2010 deadline.

The CfP is featured at several other places:
http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/journaldescription.cws_home/505662/description#description
http://www.elsevier.com/inca/publications/misc/sigpromultirate.pdf
http://www.wikicfp.com/
http://www.ee.cuhk.edu.hk/~tblu/monsite/pdfs/CFPSigPro.pdf
and last but not least at Nuit Blanche:
http://nuit-blanche.blogspot.com/2010/01/cs-advances-in-multirate-filter-bank.html
Thank you Igor.

Not exclusive topics: Sampling theory, compressive sensing . Sparse representations . Multiscale models . Multiscale processing: interpolation, inpainting, restoration . Wavelet shrinkage and denoising . Oversampled filter banks, discrete frames . Rational and non-uniform multirate systems . Directional, steerable filter banks and wavelets . Nonlinear filter banks . (Multidimensional) filter bank design and optimization . Hybrid analog/digital filter banks . Fast and low-power schemes (lifting, integer design) . Multiscale and multirate applications to source and channel coding, equalization, adaptive filtering,...

The english version of the founding paper On the Theory of Orthogonal Function Systems (Zur Theorie der orthogonalen Funktionen-Systeme), translated for the magnificent collection of papers in Fundamental Papers in Wavelet Theory edited by Christopher Heil and David F. Walnut, is made available at WITS: Haarlet.

Matlab codes for Multivariate Dual Tree Wavelet Denoising (based on Stein's principle), were created to illustrate and reproduce the results presented in:



A nonlinear Stein-based estimator for multichannel image denoising
DOI:10.1109/TSP.2008.921757
Arxiv  
Caroline Chaux, Laurent Duval, Amel Benazza-Benyahia and Jean-Christophe Pesquet
IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing, August 2008, Volume 56, Issue 8, p. 3855-3870

They have been made available at Research codes, and can be used them freely for research purposes.



Finally, in homophonia memoriam, to Ar-lette Duval, in loving memory to her vanishing souvenirs (thanks Alois), totally ceased today.

Native = Na'vi E.T. - On Cameron's Avatar

The plot is clear. Just figure out that a Pandora blue inhabitant is an extra-terrestrial, then pure anagramming gives you: Na'vi ET = native. Avatar main plot is thus a basic western, just like Star Wars. Na'vis worship Nature, lives in tribes; with their bows and arrows they could impersonate fierce Indian Americans quite well, against (mostly) white exploiters.

Could it be called SciFi then? Utopia related for sure, oscillating between a green-powered tale (Heal the world...) and a Second Life warning (You walk into your dreams) with the humorous "un-obtain-ium", an difficult-to-obtain element akin to Thomas More negative places (u-topia, a-maurote). So the script is a bit more interesting than the basic plot.

Yet, although termed Cameron's long awaited child, the story is very reminiscent of both Ursula Le Guin The word for world is forest [1972/1976] (on the green side) and Poul Anderson Call me Joe [1957] (on the wheelchair side). Or simply Pocahontas? What is left in the box is Hope.

Do You Speak Na'vi? Giving Voice To 'Avatar' Aliens:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=121350582
Evoking Natives in Avatar:
http://www.bluecorncomics.com/2009/12/evoking-natives-in-avatar.htm
Avatar' and the Culture of the Na'vi:
http://www.scifisquad.com/2009/12/18/avatar-and-the-culture-of-the-navi/

Royal Society - (NOT) A coyly sortie

Today we celebrate an antanagram: while traditional anagrams usually reveal hidden meanings, antanagrams do the converse. Which differs from non-apt anagrams (i.e. unrelated to the subject).
Indeed, Royal Society Publishing celebrates its 350th anniversary with a announcement which is not a coyly sortie: it launches several commemorative initiatives, all of which are completely free, giving access to science treasures. No more tribal lazing with Trailblazing!

• Trailblazing is an online, interactive timeline showcasing sixty fascinating and inspiring articles selected from The Royal Society Digital Journal Archive. All articles are accompanied by an illustrated commentary, highlighting the significance of the ground-breaking discovery and its influence on the modern world. Trailblazing is free to access from today.
• The Royal Society Digital Journal Archive is arguably the most comprehensive publishing archive in science. It dates back to 1665 and contains more than 65,000 articles - from the very first peer-reviewed paper in Philosophical Transactions in 1665, to the most recent interdisciplinary article in Journal of the Royal Society Interface. The archive is free to access from today until 28 February 2010.
  

Following announcements at RSocPublishing twit.

Il y a deux minutes, l'antenne - Crumbles & Graffitis

Kriss est partie. Un ultime rendez-vous pour une voix de radio insolite et humaniste, ma favorite depuis près de 30 ans, le prochain Kriss Crumble, dimanche 22.

Son dernier livre : "La sagesse d'une femme de radio" (L'oeil neuf/Inter 2005).

Corinne Gorse sur Wikipedia

Logic Gone - Save wavelets from MountainView Monster!

A Googlet was long known to refer to any company or entity snatched up by Google (do you really need a link here?). All logic gone*, Google Inc.* now plans a wavelet invasion on a much larger basis, with its new real-time communication platform. Let us have a quick look at Google Wave's (a complete guide) terminology:

• Wave: A wave, specifically, refers to a specific threaded conversation. It can include just one person, or it can include a group of users or even robots. [...] like your entire instant messaging (IM) history with someone. Anything you’ve ever discussed in a single chat or conversation is a wave.
• Wavelet: A wavelet is also a threaded conversation, but only a subset of a larger conversation (or a wave). It’s like a single IM conversation – a small part of a larger conversation and a larger history. Wavelets, though, can be created and managed separately from a wave (sic).
• Blip: Even smaller than a Wavelet, a Blip is a single, individual message. It’s like a single line of an IM conversation. Blips can have other blips attached to them, called children.
  

Something smaller than a wavelet? A waveletelet? Is this even at a tweet level? No kidding. And it is going further on Internet Explorer**. To grab its next territories from lone PC**. So expect online terrors from it**! And its name is Google... Frame. A much larger basis, told you. Not a nun Movie, wait***! But a minutia woven*** masterplan. Now let MountainView**** Monster, Google, furbish its Wavelet Munition****. But let us not become "le gogo" de Google. And let us celebrate in peace the Haar wavelet centenary in 2010.

Amongst the latest "WITS: Where is the Starlet" updates: loglets, steerlets and tetrolets. And a few new SIVA conferences such as MIA 2009 in Paris at very short sight.

Nom: anthonome - Man on the moon

A small insect (Named: Anthonomus) to celebrate today's Moon landing anniversary. This one dedicates himself to apple trees, celebrating Isaac Newton's law of universal gravitation. Today's anagram is quite long, not mine, and especially meaningful:

Neil Armstrong : That's one small step for a man; one giant leap for mankind

A thin man ran... makes a large stride... left planet... pins flag on moon... on to Mars!

Aside the terrific achievement, that made me think of becoming an astronaut when a kid, the vision of microscopic human beings trying to tame the huge lunar ball leads me to other insects: dung beetles (aka bousiers here).

No wonder, Marie Dacke et al. found in Animal behaviour: Insect orientation to polarized moonlight (Nature, 2003), that one species of dung beetle (the African Scarabaeus zambesianus) navigates by using polarization patterns in moonlight. Now there are three types on dung beetles: rollers, that roll their stuff ball, tunnellers, that bury it and dwellers, that live inside.

Vain human being, whose side are you on? We know for sure there are three types of mathematicians: those who can count, and those who can't. Is it as well possible to categorize peoples (if not scientists) into such categories: those that roll? tunnel? dwell? Better listen again to the words of hope of John Fitzgerald Kennedy at Rice in September 1962:

We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard

Remaniement - Min man, Min woman, haha, anagram you are!

De retour de Versailles (là, serviles), c'est la valse des lettres (pas encore des arts). Comme un alphabet bouillonnant, l'encre roulante bruisse déjà d'un remaniement. Min. maternée, Rachida Dati (A hair addict, à sa chevelure impeccable) twisterait avec Michèle Alliot-Marie (depuis le temps que le militaire l'amoche..., elle est de celles que l'armée minent). MAM entérine un virement qui lui fait justice, avec un armement nié ; on ne voyait pas MAM internée, au contraire de Christine Boutin, qui arbora un temps une coupe de bichon instruite, et qui irait du logement aux prisons. Sans passer par la case, départ d'Orly... L'universitaire ire emmenera peut-être Xavier Darcos aux affaires sociales, propulsant Brice Hortefeux de son ouverture (des frontières) vers l'extérieur sur une cible intérieure, avec promesse de ne plus nommer de poulet au bréchet foireux. La fausse surprise, c'est l'arrivée de Frédéric Mitterand, qui pourra frimer, discréditant au besoin le patronyme.

Vite, on annonce la nouvelle au poste dans quelques secondes... En attendant le gouttage nominatif (name-droopping, you know what, i am happy). Un peu de musique afférente :

Pigs, de Pink Floyd [ou : 2^3 different ones]


Accouplés, de Marka [ou : remaniés sans foin]


et un proverbe attribué à la sagesse chinoise :

Bavardage est écume sur l'eau, action est goutte d'or

En d'autres termes : la parole est bruyante mais vaine tandis que l’action est discrète mais précieuse. Le bavardage s’étale en effet comme l’écume à la surface de l’eau mais il est tout aussi inutile et dénué de valeur. Au contraire, l’action peut être aussi infime et peu visible qu’une goutte, mais elle possède une valeur inestimable. Toute ressemblance...

Quelques sources bientôt invalides :
http://www.lemonde.fr/politique/article/2009/06/23/le-gouvernement-que-pourrait-presenter-sarkozy-des-ce-soir_1210468_823448.html
http://www.leparisien.fr/politique/remaniement-sarkozy-furieux-contre-frederic-mitterrand-23-06-2009-557496.php
http://www.lefigaro.fr/politique/2009/06/23/01002-20090623ARTFIG00565-un-remaniement-plus-large-que-prevu-.php
http://www.liberation.fr/politiques/0101575784-gouvernement-ceux-qui-pourraient-entrer-et-ceux-qui-devraient-sortir

WITS: Tetrolet wavelets

The WITS (and the Virtue) honors today tetrolets, a breed of Haar-type wavelet transform based on tetrominoes. The preprint: "Tetrolet Transform: A New Adaptive Haar Wavelet Algorithm for Sparse Image Representation", may be found at J. Krommweh page (or local copy). The abstract reads:

In order to get an efficient image representation we introduce a new adaptive Haar wavelet transform, called Tetrolet Transform. Tetrolets are Haar-type wavelets whose supports are tetrominoes which are shapes made by connecting four equal-sized squares. The corresponding filter bank algorithm is simple but enormously effective. In every level of the filter bank algorithm we divide the low-pass image into 4 × 4 blocks. Then in each block we determine a local tetrolet basis which is adapted to the image geometry in this block. An analysis of the adaptivity costs leads to modified versions of our method. Numerical results show the strong efficiency of the tetrolet transform for image compression

WITS: Steerlet wavelets

Let us welcome the steerlets, a new breed we have little information about so far, except it is featured at SPIE Wavelet XIII: Papadakis, Azencott and Bodmann at Univ. Houston: Three dimensional steerlets: a novel tool for extractiong textural and structural features in 3D images, SPIE Wavelet XIII, August 2009. Those guys from Texas do love longhorns. And don't forget the WAIP 2010 (Wavelet Applications in Industrial Processing) conference CfP deadline on June 22nd.

One of the nicest workshops ever (so far)

The workshop on approximation and optimization in image restoration and reconstruction held in Porquerolles on 8-12 June 2009. Nice water, impressive talks, especially by Ron DeVore (abstract) or Gabor T. Herman (abstract). But too bad a guy on TV only deserves an asshole entry.

Ars industrialis - Intelligence 2.0

Face à la puissance (auto-)destructrice du crétinisme consumériste effréné, favorisé par les industries de masses médiocres, captatrices d'attention, l'initiative la plus motivante est celle de l'association Ars Industrialis (www.arsindustrialis.org).

Cette "association internationale pour une politique industrielle des technologies de l'esprit" relativement jeune, fondée par un club des cinq comprenant le philosophe Bernard Stiegler, n'hésite pas à revendiquer l'esprit joyeux des jumelles de Jacques Demy. En quatre ans, elle a travaillé dans le secteur des technologies de l'esprit, œuvrant à analyser, discuter, proposer, individuellement et en collectif (cf. débats réguliers ouverts au théâtre de la colline, Paris 20e , largement diffusés en podcasts).

Leur ambitieux appel à la mobilisation des intelligences (je dirais intelligence 2.0 si ce n'était pas aussi galvaudé) rejette tout passéisme, car s'intéressant (avec compétence) aux "nouvelles technologies" ; en soulignant certes leurs aspects asservissants mais aussi en proposant de nouveaux usages bénéfiques. Cette attitude mêle aikido (en se préparant techniquement et mentalement à un adversaire puissant) et pharmacologie, dans le sens où ces nouveaux outils, comme les pharmakon à la fois remèdes et poisons, sont susceptibles de soigner comme de tuer (selon la dose prescrite).

Ars industrialis (l'association, pas l'insecte) fait un bilan pour ses quatre ans : samedi 13 juin 2009, 14 rue Malte Brun - Paris 20° - métro Gambetta, 14 heures. Ouvert à tous.

Mais avant de partir, il faudra bien découvrir ce qui les motive : c'était aujourd'hui jeudi 29 mai, dans l'émission Science publique sur France culture, "Pour en finir avec la mécroissance":

Si l’association « Ars Industrialis » n’existait pas, il faudrait l’inventer. À l’instar de Paul Valéry qui s’effrayait de « la baisse de la valeur esprit », ses membres fondateurs, dont le philosophe Bernard Stiegler, ont en commun de prendre au sérieux « la bêtise systémique » qui gangrène le capitalisme lorsque celui-ci devient fou. Le travail qu’ils ont abattu...

disponible sous peu en podcast (mp3 pour une semaine et en format streaming). Et surtout j'aime beaucoup ce logo où une vague base de Haar ou de Hadamard ferait des merveilles.

Les invités :

• Bernard Stiegler. Directeur de l’Institut de recherche et d’innovation (IRI) du Centre Pompidou et cofondateur de l’association Ars Industrialis (pages)
• Alain Giffard. Spécialiste des technologies de l'écrit. Président de la Mission interministérielle pour l'accès public à l'internet (blog)
• Christian Fauré. "Principal Entreprise Architect" chez Capgemini France (blog)

About Wolfram Alpha (and wavelets, of course) - ANKOSS

Is Wolfram Alpha the forthcoming search law from Mathematica founder? Await a true RAM flow about it in the next few days. Just tried it with a few queries. So far, Wolfram considers "wavelet" as "a small wave on the surface of a liquid", and displays the following relatively unsatisfactory " dandelion":
This nice dandelion could well have been generated by cellular automata. Unfortunately (to me), there seems to be very few connections between wavelets and finite automata (a former topic of interest of mine) or cellular ones so far. Whether WA is ANKOSS (Another Kind Of Semantic Search), based on automata or not, may not be obvious in the next few days. About the original ANKOS ("A new kind of science" by Stephen Wolfram), let me highlight the bright and funny review by Steven G. Krantz, among all the others, featured in Division by Zero.
I am keeping on trying with the Alpha engine, which at least has the merit to easily plot functions (as 1/x), and to be as honnest (and modest?) as Hal 9000:

Null-A

Three days ahead of schedule, let us celebrate Alfred Elton Van Vogt birthday (26 April 1912 – 26 January 2000). That's all folks.

WITS: MIMOlet wavelets

There might be a feeling of complexity in the burgeoning world of wavelets. A relatively general multiresolution framework, entitled MIMOlet (mee-moh-let), has been proposed by Guillaume Flanders et al, with a french-dutch-belgian team originating form Lille university. This scheme includes most of the known forms of discrete filter banks, critical or overcomplete, separable or directional. It borrows its name from MIMO (multi-input, multi-output) systems. More details to be found at this page (broken link at the time of writing). Its extension to the sphere (Booldelill et al.) is in progress, as a generalization to needlets (see for instance here).

Valentimes: The Great Gig in the Syzygy (Epoch Times),

The magic number 1234567890 (in epoch time) will occur in a few minutes, seconds (out) elapsed since the 00:00:00 UTC on January 1, 1970 fake Unix Genesis. The 1234567890 day coincides with Valentimes. Base 10 is not the handiest, so is 1234567890 as dull a number as 1729 (see the 1729 Dullness Hardy/Ramanujan anecdote)? Not. 1234567890 + 1 is prime, so is 1234567890^2 + 1.

Eventually, the countdown buzzword drives us to the following assertion:

One hour from now, another species of life form will disappear off the face of the planet forever...and the rate is accelerating

We will talk about that later, on January 19, 2038 (2^31 = 2147483647 overflow)

WITS: wavelet training, re-learning and writing (cfp)

On today's WITS the wavelet winter school goes back to Le Creusot, a wavelet and time-frequency training (continuous education type) and a wavelet (multirate and multiscale) call for papers.

L'Ecole analyse multirésolution pour l'image (école de printemps) goes back to Le Creusot, from 16 to 18 March 2009, registrations open until March 5th. The objectives are the following:

L’analyse multirésolution est certainement la déclinaison la plus spectaculaire de la théorie générale des ondelettes, tant par son efficacité à représenter l’information que par sa cohérence entre signaux discrets et signaux continus. Cette école vous fera découvrir cet outil particulièrement utile et fondateur, ainsi que sa richesse et son potentiel. Vous seront proposés:

• initiation à cet outil devenu classique en traitement du signal et des images;
• présentation générale de ses innombrables applications dans la recherche, l’industrie et la vie de tous les jours !
• approfondissements sur l’outil dans les applications générales et fondamentales (représentation, interprétation, compression, protection des données, restauration, etc);
• introduction aux nouveaux concepts associés comme la parcimonie ou “sparsité” qui révolutionne actuellement le domaine des signaux discrets.

A four days continuing education session (ELS043) on wavelets and related time-frequency transforms is proposed at EUROSAE (Paris) from 30 November to 3 December 2009, under the title: "Nouvelles méthodes de traitement des signaux - ondelettes, temps-fréquence : théorie, pratique et applications". Objectives again:

Acquérir une vision globale des différentes méthodes d'analyse de signaux et d'images dans un cadre non-stationnaire, en partant des techniques classiques basées sur la transformée de Fourier. Les transformations temps-fréquence et les décompositions en ondelettes sont mises en pratique sur des données simulées et réelles (signaux et images), permettant d'en découvrir les domaines d'application privilégiés. Elles sont mises en oeuvre en association avec des techniques d'estimation statistique adaptées.

Last, but not least, a special issue on Advances in Multirate Filter Bank Structures and Multiscale Representations (cfp) of Signal Processing will celebrate a 100 years of wavelets since Alfréd Haar founding paper, within the following scope:

A century after the first outbreak of wavelets in Alfréd Haar’s thesis in 1909, and twenty years after the advent of Multiresolution Analysis, filter banks and wavelet transforms lie at the heart of many digital signal processing and communication systems. During the last thirty years, they have been the focus of tremendous theoretical advances and practical applications in a growing digital world. They are for instance present, as local linear expansions, at the core of many existing or forthcoming audio, image or video compression algorithms. Beyond standards, many exciting developments have emerged in filter banks and wavelets from the confrontation between scientists from different fields (including signal and image processing, computer science, harmonic analysis, approximation theory, statistics, bioengineering, physics,y). At their confluence, multiscale representations of data, associated with their efficient processing in a multirate manner, have unveiled tools or refreshed methods impacting the whole data management process, from acquisition to interpretation, through communications, recovery and visualization. Multirate structures naturally shelter key concepts such as the duality between redundancy and sparsity, as well as means for extracting low dimensional structures from higher ones. In image processing in particular, various extensions of wavelets provide smart linear tools for building insightful geometrical representations of natural images. The purpose of this special issue is to report on recent progresses performed and emerging trends in the domain of multirate filter banks and multiscale representations of signals and images. Answers to the challenge of handling an increasing demand of information extraction and processing from large data sets will be explored.

WITS: Bathlet wavelets

The WITS (and the Virtue) honors today bathlets, a breed of wavelets based on a balanced weighted uncertainty approach. Colorado 7-eleven (7-11 math problem here) stores fear a Klingon-weaponed robber threatening clerks with a spiky, crescent shaped Star Trek inspired sword called bat'leth or Klingon's personal sword of honor. Since this description is only a coarse approximation, more details are to be found at The Denver Channel.

In the wavelet world, bathlets originate from the University of Bath, wavelets have been designed based on an Heisenberg uncertainty based metric balancing both their time and frequency spread. The Bath Wavelet warehouse serves both orthogonal and biorthogonal wavelet coefficients

A handfull of Bat'leth

Further reading on bathlets:
"Orthonormal wavelets with balanced uncertainty", DM Monro, BE Bassil and GJ Dickson, IEEE International Conference on Image Processing, 1996, Vol.2, pp.581-584 (local copy).
"Space-frequency balance in biorthogonal wavelets", DM Monro and BG Sherlock, IEEE International Conference on Image Processing, 1997, Vol.1, pp.624-627 (local copy).

Bat'leths: Sizing Your Bat'leth (for Vulcans or Klingons only)

Art is Arp - When art meets wavelets and compressive sensing

January 2009 issue (n° 106) of art magazine L'Oeil visits the atelier of François Morellet, (born Cholet, 1926). The following picture has been taken two month ago from Hans Jean Arp Museum in Strasbourg.



It is entitled "40000 carrés répartition aléatoire 50 % noir 50 % brun" (1961). Since the big picture is a little blurry, have a look at the high resolution detail (below). François Morellet (not Le Morlet). Doesn't it look like a random CS matrix, by an approximately wavelet-named guy? Or tell me this is just a coincidence, Igor...

Be seeing you!

Number 6 just died. At last a free man! Goodbye Patrick

Horst Tappert - That Rest Prop

Tart Prophets "Fatals Picards" have foreseen this day some time ago with their silly song "A l'enterrement de Derrick". Stephan Derrick, alias Horst Tappert, died on saturday, December 13th.

Fatals Picards - L'enterrement de Derrick

Smile in the sky - My God, it's full of stars

Funny sign in the sky in this cold and damp December: a crescent Moon and two "stars" have just offered us a cosmic smiley. The two brilliant "stars" are our sister planets Venus and Jupiter. This smiling sky has especially being reported from the chinese side of the world, under different angles:

China economy Net
Chine informations
Lhasa: The sky smiles in the night

and last a Youtube video. Maybe a smiling sign from 2001: A Space Odyssey Star-Child, for his 20th birthday.

Major en *let - In honor of Jean Morlet

Jean Morlet (or the Major en -let, in french in the text), one of the fathers of all wavelets, along with some precursors, as in the nice notice Precursors in mathematics: early wavelet bases, by Hans G. Feichtinger, is honored at the end of October in Marseille, France.

A preliminary program below the Morelet crocodile:
October 27 - 29th, 2008
Continuous wavelet transform and Morlet's wavelet, 1978-2008 : International colloquium in honor of Jean Morlet
Organizer: G. Saracco (CNRS, CEREGE Aix-en-Provence)

Centre International de Rencontres Mathematiques (CIRM), Campus de Luminy, Marseille, France

*Preliminary Program*:

1-Alex Grossmann: «Continuous wavelet theory and Morlet's wavelet» (Hommage à J. Morlet) , (CNRS-Evry)

2-Y. Meyer, membre de l'Académie des Sciences: «Des ondelettes continues en géophysique
aux bases orthogonales d'ondelettes» (hommage a J. Morlet) (ENS-Cahan)

3- Pierre Goupillaud : PR, Two superb mathematicians who's innovations were the product of asking question that others had overlooked. (Hommage à J. Morlet), (SEG., USA)

5-Patrick Flandrin, DR: Wavelets, surrogates and non-stationarities,(ENS-Lyon)

6-Stephane Jaffard, PR: Directional continuous wavelet transforms and application to directional smoothness of functions (Paris XII)

7-Ronald Coifman, PR: Wavelet and diffusion geometries on seismic data sets (Yale Univ., USA)

8-Alain Arneodo, DR: Surfing on the genome: a tribute to J. Morlet (ENS-Lyon)

9-Jean-Pierre Antoine: The wavelet transform on the sphere: continuous vs. discrete (Louvain, Belgique)

10-Jean-Luc Stark, : Compressed sensing in astronomy (CEA-Paris)

11-Nick Kinsbury: Complex-valued wavelets, the dual tree and the Hilbert Transform: Why these lead to
approximate shift invariance? (Cambridge Univ., GB)

12-Thierry Paul, DR: Non linear continuous wavelets and non linear coherent states (ENS-Cachan)

13-Ginette Saracco: Multi-scale tomography of buried magnetic or electrical sources: Its localization and characterization.
Application to archaeological structures or volcanic system (CNRS-CEREGE, Aix en provence)

14-Gregory Beylkin, PR: On approximation by Gaussian and its applications (Boulder Univ. Co, USA)

15-Marie Farge, DR: Continuous wavelet analysis of vortex bursting in turbulent flows (ENS-Paris)

16-Matthias Holschneider, PR, Directionnal Poisson wavelets on the sphere (Potsdam, Allemagne)

17- Jean-Claude Risset, DR emerite, medaille d'Or du CNRS, Morlet wavelet are good to hear (CNRS-LMA, Marseille)

18- Peter Frick, PR, Double Wavelet analysis: Method for recognizing stellar activity peculiarities (Moscou Russie)

19- Pascal Sailhac, From seismic wavelets to wavelet transform: using Berlage wavelets to the detection
and characterization of damped transient waves occurring in geophysical time-series", (IPG-Strasbourg)

20- Nicolas Thouveny, PR, Extraction of frequency modulation laws from Earth's magnetic field intensity records
by complex continuous wavelet analysis; contribution to understanding the geodynamo behavior. (CEREGE, Univ Aix-Marseille, Aix en Provence)

21- Say Song Goh, PR, Uncertainty Principles for the Continuous Wavelet Transform, (Rep Singapore)

22- Maurizio Fedi, Discrete and Continuous Wavelet Transform of potential fields with different choices of analyzing wavelets, (Naples Univ., Italie)

23- Roddam Narasimha, PR, Morlet Wavelets and the Solar Connection with Indian Monsoon Rainfall, (Bingalore, Inde)

24- Albert Cohen, PR, Adaptive multiresolution analysis based on anisotropic triangulations, (Univ. Pierre & Marie Curie, Paris)

25- Agissilaos Athanassoulis, Strengthening semiclassical approximations with the use of coarse-scale representations, (ENS-Ulm, Paris)

26- Nele de Shepper, Multi-dimensional continuous wavelet transforms and General Fourier transforms in Clifford Analysis, (Ghent Univ, Belgium)

Featured on the SIVA conferences web page.

Concern fees - Upcoming conferences - PCS 2009

The 2009 Picture Coding Symposium has been announced and its website made public
Website : PCS 2009
https://redpill.ecn.purdue.edu/~pcs2009/
Submission deadline: November 21 , 2008
Conference dates: May 6-8, 2009

Topics of interest include:

• Coding of still and moving pictures
• Content-based and object-based coding
• Scalable video coding
• Coding of multiview video and 3D graphics
• Modeling and synthetic coding
• Virtual/augmented reality and telepresence
• Coding for mobile, IP and sensor networks
• High fidelity visual data processing and coding
• Analysis for coding and adaptation
• Transcoding and transmoding
• Joint audio and visual processing and coding
• Subjective and objective quality assessment metrics and methods
• Error robustness, resilience and concealment
• Coding and indexing for database applications
• Protection and integrity of visual data
• Persistent association of information to visual data
• Joint source and channel coding
• Implementation architectures and VLSI
• New applications and techniques for visual data coding
• Standards for visual data coding

SIVA Conferences

If Mike's dog really ate his frog - On the peer review origin

I originally underestimated the peer review argument in Attempts to hedge out peer review, where Eric Weinstein associates it with the "If Mike's dog really ate his frog" growing meme. In most of the scientific world, we revere pi, setting high standards to what should be published and known. Thus, let's unveil the truth: the dog's name was Bagel, which could become a peer review paradigm, as Lenna is for image processing (another Lenna tells us about a very interesting bagel and salad diet, giving us the missing link between two paradigms).
Chad Orzel quotes this anectode in Uncertain principles, with Google slightly giving it more echoes (a thought to Richard Wright by the way), as pointed out on Nuit Blanche by Igor Carron. He also refers to the soft pion theorem, but what about very cold neutrons?

Concern Fees - About PIMRC 2009

Apparently, from the logs of the SIVA Conferences web page (post title anagramatic explanation), tons of radio people are looking for the next 2009 IEEE International Symposium on Personal, Indoor and Mobile Radio Communications Conference (PIMRC the 20th), which was planned in Yokohama (Japan). Luckily, PIMRC 2009 website has just been released, and holds in Tokyo (Japan again). Don't ask me why. Its 2009 theme is "Giga bit Wireless for Real Personal, Indoor and Mobile Radio Communications".

You may look at the 20th PIMRC 2009 call for papers. The submission dead-line is 06/03/2009 (03/06/09 American style, which looks arithmetically nicer but has ambiguities), and the conference is from 16/09/2009 to 18/09/2008. Topics follow:

PHY related topics
Antenna & Propagation
Modulation & Coding
Equalization and Synchronization
MIMO
Cognitive radio
Millimeter wave
WLAN, WPAN, BAN
Enabling technologies
Beamforming antenna, MEMS, RF CMOS, etc
MAC related topics
Ad-hoc network management
Resource management
Cross-layer management
802.11/15/16 MAC
3GPP/3GPP2 MAC
Network related topics
Cognitive wireless network
Cooperative network
Ecological wireless network
P1900/802.22
Multi-hop network
Mobile agent
Wireless ad-hoc network
Sensor network
Local dependent network
Mobile computing
Mobile IP network
Application related topics
Next generation digital home network
Secure network
Wireless robotics
Social wireless networks
Security
ITS
In-car/Intra-car communications
Millimeter Giga-bit applications
Medical ICT applications

Other signal/image processing people concerned by fees should look at the Signal, Image, Video and Applications conferences page. Submissions welcome.

Well if Mike's dog really ate his frog, let us update

The Mike from "if Mike's dog really ate his frog" is Michael D. Grossberg. After a PhD in Mathematics from MIT, after having his dog being quoted by co-author Yael Karshon, he is apparently active in the signal/image processing community, which is... interesting to me, at least. More interesting, let us have a closer look at Mike's place: www1.cs.columbia.edu/~mdog/. Crypting writings again? No, probably a spur of Mike's Dog. But what would happen if Mike's dog really ate his blog?

What if Mike's dog really ate his frog? - On Liar's grief, faked mythologies

If Mike's dog really ate his frog is taken from a talk by Eric Weinstein: Attempts to hedge out peer review (between slides 73 and 79). It is an if and only if condition which remained long undiscovered (even if cited). It anagrams to Liar's grief, faked mythologies, which is not unrelated to its origin (cryptic writings in a PhD thesis for a student to confound his advisor). An other reference may be found at Project Euclid; just enter "ate + frog" in the fulltext search box, you get this very serious paper:

The moment map and line bundles over presymplectic toric manifolds, Yael Karshon and Susan Tolman, J. Differential Geom. Volume 38, Number 3 (1993), 465-484.

Igor Carron at Nuit Blanche suggested to meme this sentence. Let us join the mob.

P.S.: all apologies to Eric Weinstein for a name misspelling. Instead of an insincere wite (blame), to you I write incense, gold and myrrh gifts in shape of anagrams, hoping to build together irenic new ties with forgiveness, since i renew it: my apology!

A real duet - On dual-tree wavelets (and a Matlab toolbox)

True pieces of art elude science (left picture borrowed from Flickr). Anyway, dual-tree wavelets form a real duet in Hilbert transform type harmony. But the true deal comes from some software implementing this possibly complex wavelet decomposition.

Version 1.2 of the M-band dual-tree wavelet Matlab toolbox has been released. It is available from Caroline Chaux webpage or directly from the link:
http://www-syscom.univ-mlv.fr/~chaux/toolbox/TOOLBOX_DTMband1D_v1.2.zip

The toolbox implements several 2-band and M-band wavelets (e.g. Meyer 2, 3 and 4 bands, Haar, Shannon etc.) in the Hilbert transform based dual-tree wavelet framework. Theoretical results, applications and comparisons may be found in the following papers from
http://www-syscom.univ-mlv.fr/~chaux/publications.html

Image Analysis Using a Dual-Tree M-Band Wavelet Transform
IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, Vol. 15, No.8, Aug. 2006, p. 2397-2412

Noise Covariance Properties in Dual-Tree Wavelet Decompositions
IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, Vol. 53, No. 12, Dec. 2007, pp. 4680-4700.

A Nonlinear Stein Based Estimator for Multichannel Image Denoising
IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing, Vol. 56, No. 8, Aug. 2008, pp. 3855-3870.

Ice Soup - About EUSIPCO 2008 (and signal in general)

The "Signal de Sauvabelin" is a beautiful wooden tower offering a great Laussane panorama. This "signal perspective" was celebrated at the very same place in Switzerland place last week at EUSIPCO 2008. Enjoy some other pictures taken from cold Swiss lakes (hence the Ice Soup) at Picasa.

Meanwhile, i may have another Signal Tower close to home, at La Defense (close to Paris), since Jean Nouvel recently won the contest for this renewal minded building.

Temporary exhibition of the contest's finalists at Cité Chaillot, from 25 June to 30 September 2008.

On my window by 2015. But since then, many other signal and image processing conferences will provide us with travel opportunities. The 17th European Signal Processing Conference, EUSIPCO 2009, conference will be held in Edinburgh, Scotland. An good reason to meet the 32th (Scottish) Signal Squadron? Discover the challenge, as they say. All along the watch tower, there must be some way out of here...

Concern Fees - About conferences (in signal and image processing)

Having spotted before the stricking anagrammatic link between "conferences" and "fees concern", through a digression on Juran's famous hammer and nail quote, this post initiates a series of annoucements on some upcoming signal and image processing conferences of interest since, generally, conference deadlines represent strong incentives for scientific outcomes. Due to the myriad of such events, let us consider this series, to the first order, as a self-remainder. A more complete list of signal and image processing conferences is also available.

First annoucement is SSP 2009 (IEEE Workshop on Statistical Signal Processing). It has been annouced in Cardiff, Wales, from 31/08/2009 to 03/09/2009 (present deadline: 27/04/2009).

The theoretical topics include: Adaptive and nonlinear signal processing, Blind detection and separation, Broadband beamforming, Cognitive signal processing, Detection and estimation, Distributed signal processing, Monte Carlo methods, Multi-modal techniques, Optimization in signal processing, System identification and calibration, Time-frequency and time-scale analysis; with applications in Array processing, radar and sonar, Automotive and industrial applications, Bioinformatics and genomic signal processing, Biosignal processing and medical imaging, Communication systems and networks, Information forensics and security, Multi-dimensional signal processing, New methods, directions and applications, Sensor network.

ICA 2009 (International conference on ICA and Signal Separation) is announced in Paraty, Brazil, to be help in Spring 2009.

Independent Component Analysis and Signal Separation is one of the most exciting current areas of research in statistical signal processing and unsupervised machine learning. The area has received attention from several research communities including machine learning, neural networks, statistical signal processing and Bayesian modeling. independent Component Analysis and Signal Separation has applications at the intersection of many science and engineering disciplines concerned with understanding and extracting useful information from data as diverse as neuronal activity and brain images, bioinformatics, communications, the world wide web, audio, video, sensor signals, or time series.

PCS 2009 (Picture Coding Symposium) takes places in Chicago, Illinois, USA (Purdue University) from 06/05/2009 to 08/05/2009. Deadline to be announced.

Topics of interest inculde: Coding of still and moving pictures, Content-based and object-based coding, Scalable video coding, Coding of multiview video and 3D graphics, Modeling and synthetic coding, Virtual/augmented reality and telepresence, Coding for mobile, IP and sensor networks, High fidelity visual data processing and coding, Analysis for coding and adaptation, Transcoding and transmoding, Joint audio and visual processing and coding, Subjective and objective quality assessment metrics and methods, Error robustness, resilience and concealment, Coding and indexing for database applications, Protection and integrity of visual data, Persistent association of information to visual data, Joint source and channel coding, Implementation architectures and VLSI, New applications and techniques for visual data coding, Standards for visual data coding.

Last for today, ISMM 2009 (9th International Symposium on Mathematical Morphology) in Groningen, The Netherlands, deadline on 16/01/2009, to be held from 24/08/2009 to 27/08/2009. Final website unknown at the present time, first announcement here.

Gross topics: Lattice Theory, Geometry and Topology, Signal Processing, Image Processing, Connectivity, Segmentation, Machine Learning, Algorithms and Architectures, with applications.