Brilliant quote in latest SGU podcast

I’ve listening to the Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe podcast for a while now, and find it really entertaining, on top of being a healthy weekly dose of intellectual hygiene. Last week’s episode, #484, ended on a quote which struck me, summarizing something I’ve believed for a while, but had difficulty expressing, especially since this train of thought usually leads to some serious anti-democratic ideas. Oh well, one more contradiction I’m happy to live with; for instance, I am also probably both a misanthrope and a humanist, go figure.

Anyway, here’s the quote:

A democratic society, an open society, places an extraordinary intellectual responsibility on ordinary men and women because we are governed by what we think, we are governed by our opinions, so the content of our opinions and the quality of our opinions and the quality of the formation of our opinions basically determines the character of our society. That means in a democracy, in an open society, a thoughtless citizen of a democracy is a delinquent citizen of a democracy — Leon Wieseltier

Vidéo de la soutenance de Raphaël Laurent

La vidéo de la soutenance de thèse de Raphaël Laurent est maintenant disponible ! Il y a 3 manières d’y accéder :

• la voir directement incluse dans cette page ;
• télécharger la video au format flv (clic-droit et “save as…” ; le fichier fait environ 530 Mo) ;
• télécharger la video au format mp4 (clic-droit et “save as…” ; le fichier fait environ 440 Mo).

A noter une petite interruption technique après quelques minutes, qui ne gène pas la compréhension. En effet, nous étions en visio-conférence avec Pierre-Yves Oudeyer, qui n’avait pas pu faire le déplacement de Bordeaux. C’est d’ailleurs grâce à ça que nous avons eu l’opportunité d’enregistrer la vidéo de cette soutenance. Pierre-Yves ne voyait pas l’avancement dans les transparents de la soutenance, ce qui a été réglé, un peu artisanalement, mais le résultat fonctionne…

Game Connection 2014

Christophe Poyet (of Gate1) and I will be attending Game Connection 2014, in a couple of weeks (that’s the “business” side of Paris Games Week)! Christophe is my main “partner in crime” in the Parseval project, where we designed and developed an algorithm for real-time user performance evaluation. It is here applied to the domain of videogames: in other words, Parseval becomes in this context an Adaptive Difficulty Engine, probably the first of its kind!

As an avid gamer myself, I can definitely think of many games I played which would have benefited from a better calibration of difficulty (*cough* diablo3 *cough*), so why not an automatic calibration to my performance?

That would also open the possibility of practice modes optimally tailored to the player’s skill level. In online competitive games, such an offline practice mode would certainly be useful to latecomers. Why, I would even consider trying League of Legends, at last, if there was an offline practice mode against bots…

Anyway, here’s a small video promo for the Adaptive Difficulty Engine, courtesy of Webcastor. See you in Paris!

Soutenance de Raphaël Laurent

Avant-hier, mercredi 8 octobre 2014, a eu lieu la soutenance de thèse de Raphaël Laurent. Encore un grand merci à tous les membres du jury et de l’audience, mais surtout à Raphaël pour cette excellente présentation !

A venir sur le site : une vidéo de la soutenance et le texte de la thèse… Prochainement !