(Dear English reader, this post relates to an association of French Alumni in the Bay Area.)
Depuis quelques temps, j’aide à organiser le réseau des Centraliens dans la Baie de San Francisco, faisant suite à la réunion des Centraliens a San Diego l’an passé où j’ai fait de très belles rencontres. Cela nous à donné l’envie de renforcer le réseau en l’étendant à toutes les Écoles Centrales, en particulier celles de Pékin, Casablanca et Hyderabad, afin de permettre aux jeunes diplômés et entrepreneurs attirés par la baie de rencontrer des personnes susceptibles de les aider à s’intégrer, leur fournir de bons conseils et à comprendre l’état des affaires (il y de centraliens au sein de nombreuses grandes entreprises comme Apple, Lyft, Google, Uber, Airbnb, Sony or Western Digital.)
Subluminal
Slower than the speed of light, but not by much
Category Archives: language
How to retrieve and handle x-ray data
A bit wonky, but here’s where you can get x-ray data, how to use it in python, and some common conversion.
Here are two important database to know:CXRO databaseNIST database Continue readingNine months
In the past twelve months, I’ve seen 15 of my close friends living in the Bay Area having kids. That’s a lot, with more than one new cute little name to learn (Felix, Moritz, Ilya, Oliver, Hendrix…)
Since most of my friends are about my age or older — 35 on average — and often in a stable relationship for many years, I am left wondering why the sudden spike.I came up with two reasonable explanations and a ton of thoughts! Continue reading
UBI et Orbi
There’s been recently a lot of discussion around universal basic income (UBI). As we are entering in an increasingly certain era, where politics melts down and society braces for changes to come related to automation. There was an actual attempt to bring it to the mainstream in France during the last election cycle (incumbent Parti Socialiste was running on that platform, but they got crushed.)
Who’s afraid of being bored?
Here’s a reading list with articles and books that might be good resources for the discussion:
Art & Science (XI) – Resources in the Bay Area
Here’s a short list of Art & Science resources in the Bay Area.
It is not comprehensive, and I will augment it as I go!
In San Francisco
Grey Area (2665 Mission Street) is a space dedicated to art and technology (lots of VR and visual art.) The Exploratorium (Pier 15) has a lot of very neat experiments that do have an artistic component to them, while the Cal Academy of Science (Golden Gate Park) sometimes run events based on art and technology.
For 2018-2019, the French Embassy is assembling a series of events around arts and science called After Tomorrow. There’s been events at the Cal Academy of Arts and Gray Area, but oftentimes they’re here to promote a French artist, rather than giving a systematic treatment of art and science.
There’s also Leonardo/ISAST (International Society for Art, Science and Technology), which is based in the Bay Area and organizes event, such as the LASER talks, The Convening (for their 50th birthday.)
At Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
There is a large source of content at Berkeley Lab, especially given it’s the host of national user facilities:
the Advanced Light Source (x-ray imaging), the Molecular Foundry (electron microscopy), NERSC (computer simulations) and Joint Genome Institute (biology), each with over 1000 users per year from all over the world, and a rich history (including 12 Nobel Prize laureates). Over the past year I’ve tried to consolidate the material available. Here is some things you can find online:
- Berkeley Lab physics photowalk
- 2 Poets and a Particle Accelerator
- Amazing Science Images
- Berkeley Lab Arts & Science
- ALS Science as Art
- Molecular Foundry nano art contest (2018)
- Berkeley Lab instagram has a few pictures
- Bees and Bombs (LBNL’s Dave Whyte)
- The Climate Music Project, led by LBNL’s Bill Collins
- Higgs Boson
- The historical photo archive
I’ve been collecting data (art-at-lbl-gov goes straight to my mailbox,) and I have a bunch of scientific friends who are themselves artist, such as Sinead Griffin. I even ventured into this myself; the following picture was made by superimposing partially coherent light on atomic scale variations of a substrate seen with an x-ray microscope (a tribute to “Suprematist Composition: White on White” by Vladimir Malevich):
Incoherent on Coherent (Antoine Wojdyla, 2015)
I believe there are many cool things in tandem with BAM/PFA or SFMOMA, or even CalPerf: the music venue should try to get closer to what people are doing in the EECS department — and I believe the University of Michigan should do the same with UMS.
I’m not very familiar with what happens at UC Berkeley or Stanford in that field, apart from are a few independent events, such as this one. I would love to invite David Stork, Edward Tufte and others, and I’m sure that there are many ways to bring in other national labs, Bell Labs (Bell Labs researchers basically fled to national labs when things went down, but there seems to be a revival nowadays.)
And there’s of course some art on novel unusual media (silicon wafers or EUV photomasks) that could be used!
East Bay Express Arts & Ads
During the five years (already!) I’ve lived in Berkeley, I’ve always be faithful to the East Bay Express (EBX), which stayed strong when the Bay Guardian went down. I have great memories of columns from Anna Pulley, the culture notes from Sarah Burke, and the movie critics from Kelly Vance.
In these years, I’ve collected a cuts from the paper, which I believe capture the atmosphere of the East Bay ca 2015. Here’s a few:
Continue reading
Addictions
Around me, all I see is the blue glow of phones illuminating the faces of people.
These days, we get so many things to discover, information to watch, and we’re getting addicted.What I fault newspapers for is that day after day they draw our attention to insignificant things whereas only three or four times in our lives do we read a book in which there is something really essential. – Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time
Art and science (IX) – Neural networks
This is a continuation of a series of blog posts, written mostly in French, about arts and science
In the past few years, we’ve seen the emergence of Deep Neural Networks (DNN), and the latest developments are Generative Adverserial Networks (GAN), where the goal is to pit two neural networks against each other so that they find the best way to generate an object from a label or a simple drawing, or mimick the style of an artist.The first ripple in the vast ocean of possibility was Deep Dream, though it wasn’t technically a GAN: Now, things have evolved even more, and you can not only generate trippy videos, but also use neural network to emulate the style of an artist and generate from scratch content that is indeed appealing! Continue readingSPIE DCS 2018: CCSI – Computational Imaging
This year I’m chairing the Computational Imaging session at the SPIE Defense + Commercial Sensing, in Orlando, Fla., April 16-19, 2018, together with Aamod Shanker. We have invited a lot of amazing speakers and we are organizing a panel discussion on the trends in computational imaging.
Here’s the program:SESSION 6 TUE APRIL 17, 2018 – 11:10 AM TO 12:00 PMComputational Imaging I
[10656-22] “Ultra-miniature…”David G. Stork, Rambus Inc. (USA)
[10656-36] “Computed axial lithography: volumetric 3D printing of arbitrary geometries” Indrasen Bhattacharya
Lunch/Exhibition Break Tue 12:00 pm to 1:50 pmSESSION 7 TUE APRIL 17, 2018 – 1:50 PM TO 3:30 PM
Computational Imaging II
[10656-24] “Terahertz radar for imaging…”Goutam Chattopadhyay
[10656-23] “Computational imaging…” Lei Tian
[10656-26] “Achieving fast high-resolution 3D imaging” Dilworth Y. Parkinson
[10656-27] “Linear scattering theory in phase space” Aamod ShankerPANEL DISCUSSION TUE APRIL 17, 2018 -4:00 PM TO 6:00 PM
TUESDAY POSTER SESSION TUE 6:00 PM TO 8:00 PMSESSION 8 WED APRIL 18, 2018 – 8:00 AM TO 10:05 AMComputational Imaging III
[10656-28] “High resolution 3D imaging…” Michal Odstrcil
[10656-29] “A gigapixel camera array…” Roarke Horstmeyer
[10656-30] “EUV photolithography mask inspection using Fourier ptychography” Antoine Wojdyla,
[10656-31] “New systems for computational x-ray phase imaging…” Jonathan C. Petruccelli,
[10656-68] “Low dose x-ray imaging by photon counting detector”, Toru Aoki Continue reading
Oasys
With increasingly tight beamline specifications, optical modeling software becomes necessary in order to design and predict the performances of conceptual beamlines. This becomes particularly true with the advent of highly coherent light sources (such the proposed upgrade of the ALS), where additional considerations such mirror deformation under heat load and effects of partial coherence needs to be studied. Luca Rebuffi will present the latest features of OASYS/Shadow, an optical beamline modeling tool widely used in the synchrotron community and show how to get started with beamline simulations.
https://github.com/awojdyla/ALS-U_Examples
Program: Continue reading