Scientific Dissemination

I take part in many scientific dissemination activities. I am currently taking over the responsibility of the coordination of the dissemination activities of the LIRIS lab with Fabrice Jaillet, following up on the work of Éric Duchêne and Aline Parreau. I am personally involved in multiple activities.

MATh en JEANS #

MATh en Jeans is an association organizing workshops with high school pupils. The goal as a researcher is to provide voluntary pupils with an open problem for them to do research. The problem is open in the sense that the teachers and researchers do not provide a solution, but just validate the scientific process. Each year, a conference is organized to gather pupils participating in various workshops in the region, for them to present their results with demos and oral presentations.

I acted as a researcher in multiple workshops, and since 2015 for a joint workshop between the Collège Charles Sénard and the Lycée Lamartinière Diderot. In this context, I developed several tools to serve as material for the pupils.

• A web page on sorting algorithms used to help the formalization of sorting algorithms. It was difficult for 11 year olds to not memorize all the numbers at once, and move the cards all around the table. The goal of this page was therefore to help the decomposition of their algorithms into elementary steps.
• A web page on topological exploration to introduce topology to young pupils through the exploration of planets. The planets are decomposed into square tiles connected on their sides, identified by colors. Two notebooks are provided, a global one and one on each tile. A block programming interface is also provided to automate the exploration and note taking.
• A web page to play LAP, a game listed in Sid Sackson’s A Gamut of Games. The goal was for pupils to derive strategies to efficiently play the game.

High School trainees #

I also serve as a coordinator for high school trainees in the lab. French pupils have one week internship around 14 and two weeks around 15. These internship are meant to help pupils in their orientation towards their desired jobs. In the past years, the LIRIS and Computer Science department of UCBL collaborated to host 16 pupils each year for two weeks of immersion. More information is available on the dedicated web page. In this context, I developed material for various workshops.

• A jupyter notebook on finding a camera position. The goal was to introduce numerical methods and optimization. Pupils were able to write a program that would try and optimize one camera parameter to fit to a given view. They used some sort of finite differences to determine whether the parameter should be increased or not, and hit some local minima. With more parameters, things got more difficult for them.

• A jupyter notebook on location an orientation table. This was an iteration over the camera position notebook, to try and provide a subject requiring less guidance. On this one, pupils computed line intersections solving 2x2 equation systems, and used some form of finite differences to optimize the table position (2 variables) based on two desired angles.

MMI #

The MMI is a fantastic place in Lyon dedicated to dissemination in Mathematics and Computer Science. In this context, I slightly contributed to a workshop associated to the Ça résonne exhibition by developping a companion app to explain JPEG compression to high school students, to be used along explanations by an animator.