NCube/papyrus huggingface dataset:
Hamiltonian Monte Carlo and consistent sampling for score matching based generative modeling

This thesis presents pertinent analysis around generative modeling of the Denoising Score Matching family with the goals of better understanding how they work and improving existing methods. These methods work by gradually reducing noise in images using deep neural networks. While the first chapters contextualize the problem of Denoising Score Matching, the following chapters focus on reformulating the training objective of the neural network and analysing the iterative generative process. I introduce the founding concepts of Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) for Hamiltonian Dynamics and adapt them to our framework of image synthesis by annealing of Gaussian noise. While Langevin Dynamics have thus far dominated generative processes in the Denoising Score Matching literature, Hamiltonian Dynamics sustained interest from their superior convergence rate. I demonstrate their efficiency in the next chapters and elaborate on the contexts in which their use is advantageous to complex image generation. In a complete ablation study, I present the independent and coupled gains from every proposed improvements and thereby elevate our comprehension of Denoising Score Matching methods.

Keyphrases: Generative Modeling, Denoising Score Matching, Hamiltonian Monte Carlo, Langevin Dynamics, Hamiltonian Dynamics
Mechanical characterization of rigid discrete interlocking materials

Rigid discrete interlocking materials (DIMs) are a class of materials that distinguish themselves by the unique way in which they deform: in DIMs, elements (connected through interlocking) can move freely within a range defined through contacts with neighbouring elements. This results in a biphasic deformation behaviour unique to these structures where no resistance is provided to deformation or a hard stop to deformation is met. It is yet unclear how the set of discrete and continuous parameters describing a DIM influences this biphasic behaviour. Likewise, we lack tools to properly characterize it. To that effect, we present a method which takes inspiration from homogenization and handles contacts by leveraging the definition of implicit surfaces, specifically tori, making up our elements. By defining an adequate energy function, we can minimize intersection between elements while deforming the DIM in an arbitrary way using standard optimization approaches. We explore the deformations that planar sheets of DIM can be subjected to and investigate how the coupling of constraints in two orthogonal directions affects these deformations. Our results give insights on how the tuning of various parameters describing the DIM affects these deformations.

Keyphrases: Surfaces implicites, Discrete interlocking materials, Implicit surfaces, Optimization, Planar sheets
Étude de modèles neuronaux de questions-réponses

In the field of natural language processing, the question-answer (QA) task involving the development of systems generating a plausible answer to a question asked in natural language by a user from an information source, remains a hot topic. It has many practical applications including fine-grained information retrieval on the web. Today, following a query, current search engines return lists of classified documents but they do not provide an answer to the user’s question.  Since more than fifty years, a number of approaches and technologies have been developed which have led to significant advances in QA. Among these, word embeddings, numerical vectors representing the meaning of words in contexts, the development of model or benchmark datasets and the use of neural networks (NN) have enabled the development of efficient QA systems.  In this context, this thesis focused on the study of the BIDAF (Bidirectional Attention Flow) model, one of the most efficient NN-based QA systems at the start of this work, tested using SQuAD (Stanford Question Answering Dataset), one of the most popular benchmarks in QA. BIDAF’s initial study showed a number of notable structural differences between its literary description and its implementation. Different variants of BIDAF were therefore developed and tested to which were added word embedding training during model training as well as cyclic modulation of the learning rate.  The models of structures similar to the literary description of BIDAF with training of word embeddings and a simplified version showed better performances, i.e. 59.56% in exact match (EM) and 67.09% in F1, and EM = 60.20% and F1 = 67.69 %, respectively. This performance was improved by modulating the learning rate to EM = 61.42% and                F1 = 68.46%.

Keyphrases: embeddings, BIDAF, Question-answer task, Neural networks
L’aparté du spectateur : le pouvoir « immertiel » du monologue intérieur

This master’s thesis studies the influence of the inner monologue on the immersion of a spectator when he/she audioviews a narrative film work. More specifically, it is interested in describing the different perceptual mechanisms involved in the processing of sensory information and the ways in which these influence the production and perception of an inner speech in the viewer. From a functionalist cognitive perspective, this dissertation explores different hypotheses and concepts related to attentional, memory and language processes in humans, which are themselves strongly involved in the decoding of a fictional and narrative work. The proposed research allows us to revisit the general theory of PECMA flow developed by Torben Grodal (1997), which conceives the cinematic experience as a sensory processing flow. The transhistorical and intersectorial approach adopted in this dissertation allows us to address certain materialist conceptions related to the physiological and neurological functioning of the human brain, by combining them with different theories from the humanities and social sciences related to the dialogical self, the narrative self, as well as bottom-up and top-down processing. Finally, the analysis of an excerpt from The Tree of Life (2011), by director Terrence Malick, demonstrates how the experience of audio-viewing a film can contribute to the establishment of a necessary distance from the narrative, which proves to be essential in the actualization and perception of an “immertial” inner monologue in the subject.  Using the notions developed in the different chapters and based on the PECMA flow model, the master’s thesis illustrates how a filmic work can contribute to the emergence, in parallel to the audiovisioning, of a very particular inner conversation in the spectator's mind, which directly participates in his filmic immersiveness. A particular attention will be paid to the use of the voice-over in cinema, to demonstrate how its treatment in the work under study makes it an element of the cinematographic language that favors the elaboration of a trialogue between the thinking subject confronted with its own inner monologue and its position of receiver of the discourse(s) transmitted by the film.

Keyphrases: immersion, neurosciences, PECMA flow, The Tree of Life, cinema, cognitivism, immersion, immertial, inner monologue, neurosciences, PECMA flow, spectator, The Tree of Life, voice-over
Rehaussement de la mémoire de travail et de l'inhibition de la douleur par la neuromodulation du cortex préfrontal dorsolatéral gauche chez des personnes jeunes et âgées = Improving working memory and pain inhibition using neuromodulation of left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex in young and older persons

Objective: This thesis aimed to examine whether pain inhibition by working memory (WM) engagement can be enhanced by Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation (tDCS) in young and older healthy volunteers. Directing attention away from painful stimuli is under the control of WM that allows the selection of task-relevant information and directing attention towards task execution. However, top-down inhibition of nociceptive activity and pain may be altered in normal aging due to decreased WM. tDCS is a promising method in this regard since anodal tDCS of the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) was shown to improve WM performance. Methods: Two experiments were conducted on forty healthy (first study) and fifteen older volunteers (second study). They participated in two tDCS sessions (sham and anodal tDCS), in which the pain was evoked by electrical stimulation at the ankle. Participants performed an n-back task (0-back and 2-back) while they received random electrical stimulation to produce pain and the nociceptive flexion reflex, an index of spinal nociception. The experimental protocol comprised five counterbalanced conditions (0-back, 2-back, pain, 0-back with pain and 2-back with pain) that were performed twice (pre-tDCS baseline and during tDCS). Results: In both studies, neuromodulation of left DLPFC enhanced pain inhibition by WM. However, the nociceptive flexion reflex was not modulated by WM enhancement suggesting that improvement of pain inhibition by WM using tDCS is supraspinal and independent of descending inhibitory pathways. These studies improve our understanding of the interactions between cognition, pain and age and show how neuromodulation may change these interactions to improve pain inhibition. Findings support the development of neuromodulation protocols for pain management in older persons.

Keyphrases: Neuromodulation, Nociception, Cognition, Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation, Pain, Nociceptive, Aging, Descending modulation, Working memory
Les enfants de Caïn : la complexité du meurtre dans l’œuvre d’Honoré de Balzac

The literary work of Honoré de Balzac testifies to a deep knowledge and reflection of the judicial system. Violence and crime, certainly not the brightest sides of humanity, are nevertheless an integral part of society. Since Balzacʼs ambition is to show human nature as it is, he agrees to depict murder without euphemisms. Far from entirely rejecting the bloody romantic aesthetic, he describes crime as a fundamentally ambivalent action, meaning that he neither absolutely condemns it nor openly defends it. We find in Balzac what very few writers, and even fewer philosophers, can account for : the very complexity of life itself. Balzacʼs social commitment invites us to think about his way of putting murder in fiction in relation to the sociological and historical context of his works. In Balzacʼs reflections on murder, four important themes constantly recur : money (economic aspect), youth, family (social aspects) and remorse (moral aspect). The philosophical dimension of La Comédie humaine justifies the choice of an equally philosophical reading of Balzacʼs work. The murders of four short stories belonging to the Études philosophiques (El Verdugo, LʼAuberge rouge, Les Marana and Un drame au bord de la mer), ensure a multiple reflection on themes such as justice, law, family name, honour, guilt and the shift from an old society to a new money-dominated society.

Keyphrases: Honoré de Balzac, La Comédie humaine, Violence, XIXe siècle, Murder, Short story, French literature, 19th century
Pièces d'eau ; suivi de Lisibilités de la trace dans The Obituary de Gail Scott

The creative work pièces d’eau is a collection of poetic prose texts that tease out fractures between the terms through which a place is made intelligible and the sensory information they seek to designate. The pieces each invoke forms of life constituting an externality to the architectural, patrimonial and economic development of place. Whether they proceed from a hagiographic impulse, a fractional knowledge, a struggle to form sentences, or a hysteric certainty, the pièces d’eau of the title are indisposed, involuntary documents of the progress of which they are the refuse. The essay, Lisibilité de la trace dans The Obituary de Gail Scott, addresses legibility as an epistemological, historiographic and aesthetic notion. Reading traces calls for a constantly renewed engagement with material at the edges of legibility. In The Obituary, the deployment of an aesthetic articulated around the paradigm of the trace mobilizes a deep ambivalence with regards to processes by which the past becomes legible in the present. Written across the aporias of historiographic thought, Scott’s poetic and narrative work in this novel beckons a reappraisal of the political imaginary of knowledge and of the literary modalities that define our sensate engagement with the past.

Keyphrases: trace, lisibilité, prose poetry, literary aesthetics, historiography, poetics, legibility
Empreintes du désir dans le poème d'Espriu

The poet Salvador Espriu (1913-1985) is the author of a body of work that meditates on absence. His long composite poem, written over several decades suggests the inscription of the poem as a singular expression in the horizon of the work seen as a spiritual itinerary. Espriu’s poem is haunted by the possibility of grasping, through language, what is not available to the senses. So as to understand this articulation of the sensible (poem, language, presence) and the suprasensible (poetry, the work, absence), I call on the notion of desire, considered both as a fundamental drive of the literary and as a representation of figurative discourse. In order to strip this desire of the metaphors that correspond to the theme of love, and to extract the shape of an impulse I pass through archive of representations of Eros in texts from the European literary tradition (Plato, Apuleius, Dante, Llull), before questioning the desire at work in Salvador Espriu’s poetics, this desire which delves in the images of death, the words of the Catalan language and literary and religious inscriptions, using them as a support to access what is beyond them.

Keyphrases: absence, Salvador Espriu, tradition, Catalan language, vernacular literature, Poetry
Un investissement des plus attachants : la perspective des Québécois(ses) amateurs de la photographie animalière

The relationship between human beings and their natural environments has been explored in various research fields using different research traditions. This qualitative research thesis draws on both social science literature and the natural sciences to better understand what connects human beings to elements of their natural environment. It focuses specifically on photography and the notion of the amateur. Using the sociology of attachment as a conceptual framework and the notions or serious leisure and amateurs, I interviewed 13 wildlife photographers in order to explore 1) the role of photography in the attachment relationship between photographers and wildlife species, and 2) how the elements of the framework of attachments (object, device, collective and human body) overlap with each other for these individuals who practise photography as a serious leisure activity. My analysis reveals a cycle of engagement in which the more amateur photographers invest (emotionally and in terms of time and money) the more attached they become to practising wildlife photography. This commitment and the value they attach to the natural allows them to potentially become engaged as concerned citizens in a context of ecological crisis. Finally, despite the amateur photographers’ strong appreciation of nature and the natural, the thesis invites us to reflect on how distinctions between the artificial and the natural may become blurred, particularly where digital photo treatment is concerned.

Keyphrases: amateur, attachment, wildlife photography, wildlife species, ecological crisis, attachment
Intelligence artificielle : du mythe de la créature artificielle à son actualisation contemporaine

Although science has yet to unlock the secrets of human consciousness, recent advances in Artificial Intelligence research have caused the myth of the artificial creature to resurface in the realm of the imaginary. This dissertation aims to understand the actualization of this ancient myth through the contemporary scientific promise of AI and its incarnation in the cinematic science fiction imagination. After a historical review of the evolution of the field of research in AI, I insist on the role played by science fiction cinema in its ability to build a credible scientific imagination. I then come back to the imaginary of the myth of the artificial creature to highlight the point where it meets science through the use of the medium of cinema, capable of transmitting this "elsewhere" contained in the scientific promise and materialize it through science fiction. I form a corpus of seven films retracing the joint genealogy of the scientific evolution of AI and its projection into the imagination by comparing it in the analysis of current events of technoscientific research at the time of the release of each film in the corpus. By this method I arrive at the following list: Frankenstein (1931); 2001, A Space Odyssey (1968); Blade Runner (1982); Terminator 2 (1991); A.I: Artificial Intelligence (2001); Her (2013); Ex Machina (2015); Blade Runner 2049 (2017). This allows me to describe the evolution of the promise of strong AI in the discussion that the real entertains with the imaginary of the myth of the artificial creature. By focusing on the technologies which underlie the creation of each of these creatures, I am able to analyze how science fiction materializes the scientific promise of a strong AI, and this even before the erection of its consecrated domain (i.e. Frankenstein). However, two films withstood our analytical framework, Blade Runner and Blade Runner 2049, by offering an alternate story of AI from an artificial creature not entirely technical but cyborg, at the interstice of our biological world and that of the machine.

Keyphrases: science, cyborg, robot, Artificial intelligence, creature, myth, imaginary, promise, movies
Passages et connexions : adapter artistiquement et médiatiquement les témoignages de personnes vivant avec un trouble anxieux

Anxiety disorders are among the most common mental health issues in Canada. Not only is anxiety prevalent in a pathological form, it is also a state most human beings experience during their life, which makes it an interesting starting point to approach the issues surrounding mental health in general. Anxiety disorders, as other illnesses and disabilities, are often invisible. This makes them all the more challenging to live with. This research-creation project engages with this problem by reflecting on how we can “make visible”. More precisely, it aims to explore and understand how testimonies of persons living with an anxiety disorder can be adapted through arts and media – and therefore be rendered visible in various ways. The research was undertaken in three stages: 1) the collection, through the topical life story method, of testimonies by people living with an anxiety disorder, 2) artistic adaptions of these accounts by invited artists, 3) receiving feedback from the participants who had offered their testimony about the adaptation of their story. The research project allowed me to investigate how experiences of anxiety disorders can be translated into art, but also how the people involved in such a process (both artists and those sharing their story) experience this process. In the spirit of research-creation, I also set forth to share the stories, art pieces and knowledge resulting from this exchange to a larger audience through the medium of the web. Guided by the concept of curation, I endeavoured a second (media-oriented) adaptation phase, resulting in an online exhibition, Anxiogenèse. This allowed me to reflect in a more personal way about adaptation as a creative process, in addition to contributing to raising awareness about anxiety disorders. Finally, analysis of the research data highlights a few key ideas: on the ways in which elements that are external to the original testimony contribute to the adaptation process; on how participants construe the adaptations of the testimonials in ways that are literal, metaphorical and abstract; on the ways that the participants connect and relate to each other despite not having met; and lastly, on how the concept of adaptation takes on various meanings throughout the project, including through the curation process.

Keyphrases: Adaptation, Arts, Curation, Anxiety disorders, Mental health, Testimony, Narrative, Research-creation, Online exhibition
Entre locals et incomers : « Where is the community? » : appropriation collective d’une île écossaise et conflit social

The Scottish land tenure system is one of the most unequal in Europe. Most of the territory is owned by a minority of landowners. In the early 1990s, some rural communities in the Highlands and Islands created the first Community Land Trusts (CLT) and thus developed new forms of local governance based on direct democracy. These small local revolutions culminated in the consolidation of a national land reform in the early 2000s. At first glance, this contemporary legal upheaval fosters competition between two interest groups : landowners and crofters (Scottish peasants). The objective of this dissertation is to put this binary vision of social conflict into perspective. My ethnographic research carried out on the island of Great Bernera in the Outer Hebrides was focused on intra-community conflict in this new political and legal context. My analysis concentrate on the contradictions of a model of democratic governance based on the principle of the Rule of Law with the constraints of the old local normative system characterized by relational, identity and cultural logics. I present the testimonies of a group of residents who consider themselves “locals” and who value cultural and genealogical criteria as founding principles of a community. This vision contradicts the point of view of foreigners (“incomers”) who, by the culmination of the project of collective appropriation of the island, hope for the realization of a political social community.

Keyphrases: Buyout movement, Scotland, Communities, Legal pluralism, Land ownership, Buyout movement, Conflicts