Category Archives: projects

19 August 2018
english, projects, resources, science, science life

dlsr.org

Hi there!

Preparing for the new generation of synchrotron light source, I’ve just started dlsr.org (Diffraction-Limited Storage Ring), and created relevant articles on Wikipedia (entries for (Diffraction-Limited Storage Ring  and Beijing’s High Energy Photon Source.)

The goal is to have platform to share knowledge and ideas in a format more flexible than conferences and papers (it takes inspiration from Rüdiger Paschotta’s momentous Encyclopedia of Laser Physics and Technology, though it does not aim to be as comprehensive!)

Let me know if you’re interested in contributing!

18 August 2018
français, projects, resources

Confédération des Associations Centrale-Supéléc – San Francisco

(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.)

Continue reading →

17 June 2018
art & science, english, projects, resources

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:
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!
18 May 2018
english, projects

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 →

28 April 2018
art & science, english, projects, resources

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 reading →

8 April 2018
english, projects, resources, science, science life

SPIE 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 PM
Computational 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 pm

SESSION 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 Shanker

PANEL DISCUSSION TUE APRIL 17, 2018 -4:00 PM TO 6:00 PM

TUESDAY POSTER SESSION TUE 6:00 PM TO 8:00 PM

SESSION 8 WED APRIL 18, 2018 – 8:00 AM TO 10:05 AM
Computational 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 →

14 February 2018
art & science, english, mood, projects, resources, skepticality

Self-reference

Self-reference is cornerstone in Hofstadter’s Godel-Escher-Bach, a must read book for anyone interested in logic (and we shall rely logic in these days to stay sane.)

Here’s a bunch of examples of self-reference that I found interesting, curated just for you!

Barber’s paradox:

The barber is the “one who shaves all those, and those only, who do not shave themselves.” The question is, does the barber shave himself?

Self-referential figure (via xkcd):

Tupper’s formula that prints itself on a screen (via Brett Richardson) Continue reading →

10 January 2018
english, epistemology, projects, resources, science life

Learning Deep

In the past four years, there’s been a lot of progress in the field of machine learning, and here’s a story seen from the outskirts.

Eight years ago, for a mock start-up project, we tried to do some basic headtracking. At that time, my professor Stéphane Mallat told us that the most efficient way to do this was the Viola-Jones algorithm, which was still based on hard-coded features (integral images and Haar features) and a hard classifier (adaboost.)

(I was thrilled when a few years later Amazon Firephone was embedding similar features; unfortunately, this was a complete bomb — better technologies now exist and will make a splash pretty soon.)

By then, the most advanced book on machine learning was “Information Theory, Inference, and Learning” by David McKay, a terrific book to read, and also “Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning” by Chris Bishop (which I never read past chapter 3, lack of time.)

Oh boy, how things have changed!

Continue reading →

17 December 2017
english, epistemology, projects, resources, science, science life

Julia Language

A few years ago, I got interested in the then-nascent Julia language (julialang.org), a new open source language based on Matlab syntax with C-like performances, thanks to its just-in-time compiler.

Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST, Chile) data being processed with Julia on super computers with 225x speedup

Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST, Chile) data being processed with Julia on super computers with 200x speedup (from https://arxiv.org/pdf/1611.03404.pdf)

It now seems that the language is gaining traction, with many available packages, lots of REPL integration (it works with Atom+Hydrogen, and I suspect Jupyter gets its first initial from Julia and Python) and delivering on performances.

Julia is now used on supercomputers, such as Berkeley Lab’s NERSC, taught at MIT (by no less than Steven G Johnson, the guy who brought us FFTW and MEEP!), and I’ve noticed that some of the researchers from Harvard’s RoLi Lab I’ve invited to SPIE DCS 2018 are sharing their Julia code from their paper “Pan-neuronal calcium imaging with cellular resolution in freely swimming zebrafish“. Pretty cool!

Julia used for code-sharing in a Nature publication. I wish I could see that every day!

Julia used for code-sharing in a Nature publication. I wish I could see that every day!

I got a chance to attend parts of Julia Con 2017 in Berkeley. I was amazed by how dynamic was the the community, in part supported by Moore’s foundation (Carly Strasser, now head of Coko Foundation), and happy to see Chris Holdgraf (my former editor at the Science Review) thriving at the Berkeley Institute for Data Science (BIDS).

Julia picking up speed at Intel (picture taken dusing JuliaCon 2017)

Julia picking up speed at Intel (picture taken dusing JuliaCon 2017)

I started sharing some code for basic image processing (JLo) on Github. Tell me what you think!

(by the way, I finally shared my meep scripts on github, and it’s here!)

4 June 2017
art & science, english, projects, resources

Wafer art

My father is an artist, and he recently spent a few weeks in Berkeley, where he had the chance to paint. Since painting on a canvas is boring, I thought he could try to paint on pieces of silicon wafer, which are the principal component for the fabrication of microprocessors, and indeed he did:

Silicone (Romain Wojdyla, 2017)

Le Monde Upside Down II (Romain Wojdyla, 2017)

I was able to salvage an EUV photomask from my lab, which is basically the gold master for engraving these microchips. These surface are extremely precise (down to the atomic level), yet the paint stuck:

Floating Point (Romain Wojdyla, 2017)

There’s also a swath of art in-silico, not too far from David Hockney’s iPad paintings.

Untitled (Romain Wojdyla, 2011)

Happy birthday dad!

(some of his artwork is available here: romain.wojdyla.fr.)

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