NCube/papyrus huggingface dataset:
Auditory frequency processing during wakefulness and sleep

Learning a new language or a new skill while sleeping would be the dream come true. For decades this idea has been rejected based on the assumption that the sleeping brain is rather unresponsive and isolated. However, a small number of studies demonstrate that auditory information could be perceived and processed during sleep, and that even new information could be acquired. It is still unknown which kind of information can be processed, and whether processing steps performed during sleep are comparable to those performed during wakefulness. The aim of this thesis is to investigate the processing of auditory frequency information during sleep relative to wakefulness. Throughout this thesis frequency processing was measured via adaptation. Adaptation refers to a reduction in cortical activation for a prolonged or repeatedly presented signal. We tested the possibility to alter cortical frequency processing via notched music listening during wakefulness, as well as via notched noise exposure during whole night sleep (i.e., notched-music and notched-noise are sound signals from which certain frequencies have been removed). Furthermore the processing of frequency information was tested throughout whole night sleep. Results show that several day long notched-music listening induces changes in cortical frequency processing relative to the applied notch. Similar changes were detected after one night of notched-noise exposure, indicating a higher level of auditory information processing of the sleeping brain. However no differences in frequency processing could be detected during sleep, indicating that adaptation might function differently during sleep relative to wakefulness.

Keyphrases: Adaptation, Sleep, Auditory processing, Frequency processing, Notch
Interface travail-famille et santé psychologique au travail : investigation de la directionalité des liens

Despite the growing effort of researchers and practitioners to understand the relationship between the work-family interface and the psychological health of workers, it is still clear that the links between these variables over time are still poorly understood. Thus, there is little evidence of whether the work-family interface precedes psychological health or vice versa, even when considering both positive and negative manifestations of the two concepts. This thesis aims to empirically explore the direction of the specific links between work-family conflict and work-life enrichment with burnout and psychological well-being at work, over a six-month period. A prospective complete panel design was used to better understand the effects of the constructs over time. Structural equation modeling analyzes have concurrently tested different predictive models. The analyzes show a partially reciprocal model, where work-family conflict and burnout have a bidirectional relationship and where burnout and psychological well-being at work are predictors of the work-family interface at work over a period of six months. The main findings of this doctoral study are then interpreted according to the current state of knowledge on the subject. The contributions and limitations of this study are outlined and future research directions are suggested.

Keyphrases: psychologie positive, psychological health at work, psychological well-being at work, burnout, work- family interface, work-family conflict, work-family enrichment, work and organizational psychology, positive psychology
Le modèle GREM jumelé à un champ magnétique aléatoire

In this doctoral thesis we study the extreme value statistics of the two level Generalized Random Energy Model (GREM) coupled with a random magnetic field. This model generalizes both the Random Energy Model (REM) combined with a random magnetic field in [1, 10] and that of the GREM in the presence of a uniform external field found in [6]. This dissertation aims to determine the extreme value statistics from a statistical mechanics perspective, specifically the maximum, entropy as well as free energy, generalizing the behavior found in [1, 6]. The results herein explain clearly the effects of the random magnetic field on the maximum’s order of magnitude, as well as that of entropy and of free energy. The proofs for the maximum and for the entropy rely greatly on an application of large deviation theory which reduces the problem to that of a GREM in the absence of the random magnetic field on a lesser amount of configurations. The methods introduced in this thesis are general and extend to the k-level GREM in the presence of a random magnetic field and to the Branching Random Walk Model (BRM) coupled with a random magnetic field.

Keyphrases: Spin Glasses, Generalized Random Energy Model, Large Deviations, Extreme values, Law of Large Numbers, Legendre-Fenchel Transform
Iterative Solvers for Physics-based Simulations and Displays

Realistic computer-generated images and simulations require complex models to properly capture the many subtle behaviors of each physical phenomenon. The mathematical equations underlying these models are complicated, and cannot be solved analytically. Numerical procedures must thus be used to obtain approximate solutions. These procedures are often iterative algorithms, where an initial guess is progressively improved to converge to a desired solution. Iterative methods are a convenient and efficient way to compute solutions to complex systems, and are at the core of most modern simulation methods. In this thesis by publication, we present three papers where iterative algorithms play a major role in a simulation or rendering method. First, we propose a method to improve the visual quality of fluid simulations. By creating a high-resolution surface representation around an input fluid simulation, stabilized with iterative methods, we introduce additional details atop of the simulation. Second, we describe a method to compute fluid simulations using model reduction. We design a novel vector field basis to represent fluid velocity, creating a method specifically tailored to improve all iterative components of the simulation. Finally, we present an algorithm to compute high-quality images for multifocal displays in a virtual reality context. Displaying images on multiple display layers incurs significant additional costs, but we formulate the image decomposition problem so as to allow an efficient solution using a simple iterative algorithm.

Keyphrases: simulation de fluides, Iterative solvers, fluid simulation, upres, model reduction, multifocal displays
Méthodes pour la réduction d’attaques actives à passives en cryptographie quantique

Quantum mechanics offers an undeniable advantage over classical mechanics for conceiving protocols for cryptographic tasks. However, it also enables complex attacks that make quantum protocols hard to analyse and cryptographers are thus always looking for new tools to simplify proofs. In this thesis, we introduce new techniques that simplify the analysis of quantum cryptographic protocols and we showcase their usefulness with some applications. Our techniques are used to show that, under certain conditions, the security of a protocol against an attacker that more or less follows the honest behaviour (passive) is a sufficient condition to show the security against arbitrary attacks (active). We first demonstrate a general technique for reducing the security of a quantum protocol against an attacker with some amount of quantum memory to its security against an attacker with no quantum memory at all. This technique is especially useful due to the fact that attacks that have access to a quantum memory are notoriously difficult to analyse. We then introduce a second technique for certifying that a quantum population is close to a given mixed reference state : given n quantum registers, it is possible to make sure that the state of these n registers is close to φ ⊗n for some mixed state φ. This technique offers a general framework for analysing a common situation in quantum cryptography where we want to certify that a state prepared by a distrusted source is close to the honest state. Both our techniques allowed us to contribute to the advancement of knowledge in quantum cryptography. Our first result is the main tool used to solve two open problems : the first concerning the cryptographic power of the one bit cut-and-choose primitive, and the second concerning the security of the BCJL bit commitment protocol. Our second technique is used to prove the security of a protocol that implements the task of producing a common random bit string that is almost uniformly distributed, even if one of the parties is dishonest. Our protocol outperforms any classical protocol for this task.

Keyphrases: cut-and-choose, quantum cryptography, bit commitment, coin-tossing, quantum sampling, mixed state certification, (non-)adaptive attacks, bounded/noisy storage model
Representation Learning for Visual Data

This thesis by articles contributes to the field of deep learning, and more specifically the subfield of deep generative modeling, through work on restricted Boltzmann machines, generative adversarial networks and style transfer networks.  The first article examines the idea of tackling the problem of estimating the negative phase gradients in Boltzmann machines by sampling from a physical implementation of the model. We provide an empirical evaluation of the impact of various constraints associated with physical implementations of restricted Boltzmann machines (RBMs), namely noisy parameters, finite parameter amplitude and restricted connectivity patterns, on their performance as measured by negative log-likelihood through software simulation.  The second article tackles the inference problem in generative adversarial networks (GANs). It proposes a simple and straightforward extension to the GAN framework, named adversarially learned inference (ALI), which allows inference to be learned jointly with generation in a fully-adversarial framework. We show that the learned representation is useful for auxiliary tasks such as semi-supervised learning by obtaining a performance competitive with the then-state-of-the-art on the SVHN and CIFAR10 semi-supervised learning tasks.  Finally, the third article proposes a simple and scalable technique to train a single feedforward style transfer network to model multiple styles. It introduces a conditioning mechanism named conditional instance normalization which allows the network to capture multiple styles in parallel by learning a different set of instance normalization parameters for each style. This mechanism is shown to be very efficient and effective in practice, and has inspired multiple efforts to adapt the idea to problems outside of the artistic style transfer domain.

Keyphrases: Neural network, Machine learning, Deep learning, Unsupervised learning, Energy-based models, Physical computing, Generative modeling, Generative adversarial network, Image synthesis, Style transfer
Reparametrization in deep learning

Deep learning is a connectionist approach to machine learning that successfully harnessed our massive production of data and recent increase in computational resources. In designing efficient deep learning algorithms come three principal themes: expressivity, trainability, and generalizability. We will explore in this thesis these questions through the point of view of reparametrization.  In particular, chapter 3 confronts a popular conjecture in deep learning attempting to explain why large neural network are learning among many plausible hypotheses one that generalize: flat minima reached through learning generalize better. We demonstrate the serious limitations this conjecture encounters by reparametrization on several simple and popular models and interrogate the interpretations put on experimental observations.  Chapter 5 explores the framework of nonlinear independent components enabling closed form density evaluation through change of variable. More precisely, this work proposes Real NVP, an architecture using expressive and easily invertible computational layers trainable by standard gradient descent algorithms. We showcase its successes and shortcomings in modelling high dimensional data, and explain the techniques developed in that design.

Keyphrases: Neural networks, Deep neural networks, Machine learning, Deep learning, Unsupervised learning, Probabilistic modelling, Probabilistic models, Generative modelling, Generative models, Generator networks, Variational inference, Generalization, Reparametrization trick
«Falling stars and the Golden Age of Hollywood» : étude de la figure de la star vieillissante dans le cinéma hollywoodien des années 30 aux années 60 :
étude de cas : le méta-personnage de Bette Davis, origines et influences

This dissertation traces the evolution of aging female stars in Hollywood’s film industry during its Golden Age, from the 1930s until the 1960s. My overarching goal is to explore the capacity of cinema to inform our memory and our self-consciousness of aging. The first chapter examines the star’s mythology, her coming of age, her her rise and fall, in films from the 1930s and 1940s, focusing particularly on the career and agency of Bette Davis. The second chapter discusses Hollywood films of the 1950s as a medium for memory (as in All About Eve, Sunset Boulevard, and The Star). Relying on the philosophical reflections of Cavell, Deleuze, Bergson, and Schefer, I examine how, and the extent to which a film can retain the past, recall it, or foreshadow the disappearance of a period of cinema’s history. In the third and final chapter, I focus on the performances of aging Hollywood stars in the 1950s and 1960s, such as Vivien Leigh, Judy Garland, Natalie Wood, and Kim Novak. In this period, Hollywood capitalizes on the aging of female stars to arouse a particular nostalgic, cinephilic affect. Female aging is presented as a grandiose performance, a tragicomic masquerade, inducing us to regard age and gender as cultural constructions, staged shows in which aging women are willingly costumed, made up, and accessorized. Whereas in the 1930s aging stars appeared surreptitiously, in the 1950s aging stars begin to fill theaters, seemingly guarding a disappearing culture and its memory, and proudly displaying their outmoded manners and tastes. They are eminent representatives of a declining Golden Age. In the 1960s, Hollywood cruelly exposes these aging stars, using an aesthetic ranging from the gory to the burlesque, in what critics called “hagsploitation,” “hag horror,” or “Grande Dame Guignol.” The figure thus put forward guides viewers through a ritual that engages with memory and recounts the passage of a period of cinema’s history. In its attempt to shape our worldview and our sense of history in this way, Hollywood’s storytelling promises to revitalize the interrogation of some of the defining problems of traditional metaphysics and critique.

Keyphrases: Aging, Aging star, Film-philosophy, Falling star, Disappearance, Memory, Time, Theatrum mundi, Masquerade, Golden Age of Hollywood, Aging star, Performance, Gilles Deleuze, Stanley Cavell, Bette Davis, Gloria Swanson
L'État et l'espace colonial : savoirs géographiques entre la France et la Nouvelle-France aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles

The French monarchy accumulated a large number of geographic documents describing its colonies. The thesis submits to close examination the role of the state in an intellectual activity consisting of observing, recording and representing graphically the colonial territory. Exploiting various types of documents – topographic, cadastral, hydrographic and general maps –, the study aims not to present an inclusive portrait of cartographic activity, but rather to explore various thematic issues, notably: the bounding of colonial territory, courtiers’ cartography, validation mechanisms, specialization and useful knowledge, the uses of geographical information. With regard to a historiography increasingly preoccupied with the modes of territorial dispossession and of the inscription of knowledge, the thesis analyzes the contexts and mechanisms of the production, collection, archiving and re-use of geographical documents produced by or for the state in New France. In exploring the colonial context of imperial cartographic activity, the study confirms the importance of the state in this field. But it affords a more precise view of that activity in emphasizing the complexity of the genesis of maps that sooner or later gravitated toward the metropolitan centre.

Keyphrases: Canada, Jean Deshayes, History, Cartography, Mapping, Maps, New France, Knowledge, Geography, State, Territory
Les enjeux normatifs de la reconnaissance publique dans la France des Lumières : gloire, célébrité, mérite

This dissertation examines how and why normative issues about public recognition developed in Enlightenment France. It shows that this question gained significance during the transitional period towards modernity as two important phenomena intersected. On the one hand, Enlightenment thinkers – who questioned the arbitrary foundations of authority – made glory into a process of recognition based on merit, which, in turn, could engender a harmonious and just society. On the other hand, the century saw the advent of a celebrity culture, which enabled the multiplication of famed individuals, especially emanating from the capital’s arts and literary circles. Instead of distinguishing individuals whose merit and useful accomplishments gave rise to unanimous admiration, as the economy of glory would demand, celebrity built upon things such as controversies, revelations about private lives, and the consumption of entertainment. From its inception, celebrity was perceived as a contributing factor to moral degeneracy and as a sign of cultural decay.  This dissertation examines moral, aesthetic, and biographical texts that contributed to the creation, promotion, and critique of the economies of public recognition. An analysis of these texts published over a 150-year period – from the Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes to the first third of the nineteenth century – sheds light on their arguments with regards to the type of order (literary, social, or political) that they hoped to consolidate or engender. These texts offer a unique view into the particularities of this defining moment shaped by the elimination of traditional hierarchies and the advent of individuals as autonomous moral subjects.  This dissertation historicises modern celebrity culture through an examination of its representations and of the conflicts it generated. Although celebrity has been theorized as a media phenomenon that creates a relationship of intimacy between famed individuals and the public, this study shows that, during the period in question, it was largely conceived as a deregulation of glory’s economy of feelings. This economy was based on a theory of moral sentiments that enabled the natural recognition of true merit, and that would, in due course, solve the tension between the subjectivity of opinions and the objectivity of values. To the contrary, celebrity fuelled passions – such as envy, ambition, and greed – which prompted the creation of immediate and undeserved renown. Celebrity was inscribed in a coherent set of aesthetic and sociocultural manifestations – including, fashion, rococo, bel esprit, satire, persiflage, light reading, cabals, and spectacles – while its systematic definition took shape through a critique of elite mores.

Keyphrases: Moeurs, France, Public recognition, Glory, Celebrity, Merit, Mores, Literary criticism, Decline, 18th century
Poétique de mystères : appropriation du genre et inscription du savoir culturel dans le polar d’Afrique francophone

African literary history took time to recognize the aesthetic and epistemological value of the detective novel. Although the Francophone African crime fiction has been the subject of many critical studies in recent years, we note that these studies do not take into account the mechanisms of appropriation, the process by which African crime fiction fits in a movement to articulate a discourse on African society, its knowledge and its cultural practices.  It is these mechanisms of appropriation and the inscription of cultural knowledge this thesis seeks to study by examining sixteen detective novels coming from the Congo, Mali, Senegal, Gabon and Cameroon. Each of these novels, while based on a double knowledge (African and Western) draws on social contradictions, identifies knowledge and shows the limits of certain practices formely considered hegemonic.  Based on a sociocritical approach integrated with that of gender poetics, this study aims to show that the specificity of the African crime fiction resides not only in the confrontation of various types of knowledge but also in the convocation of social discourses on current African affairs : parallel to reflections on society and cultural practices, the texts mobilize the African social imagination, which produces a series of social discourses based on mystical practices and the question of African immigration in France. We argue that, contrary to a certain criticism that analyzes the African detective novel from the political and ideological point of view, the singularity of African crime fiction lies in the duplication of the investigation which makes African crime fiction a relatively conventional form:  there is not only a police investigation; the suspects and the culprits are often otherwise so than according to the conventions of detective fiction.

Keyphrases: Roman francophone contemporain, Contemporary francophone novel, African literature, Detective fiction, Poetics of genres, Sociocritism
La Réception de Lautréamont de 1870 à 1917

Long before Surrealists seized upon Lautréamont in the name of poetic modernity, Les Chants de Maldoror (1869) and Poésies (1870) had been read by a whole literary generation which broached upon them in discussions about decadence and symbolism. But that reception is not obvious : Isidore Ducasse’s work is not a perfect reflection of the era’s aspirations, and the lack of information about its author generates a void to be filled only by a mythic story. It is necessary to parse this half-century of readings, full of ideological hijacks, fantasies about a supposed poète maudit as well as of literary disputes in which what is at stake is the discovery of a new Rimbaud. With the help of analytic tools borrowed from network sociology, our aim is to declineate the literary landscape in the years 1868 to 1917 in order to show how a literary myth took shape, through small journals and circles, at the turn of a century.

Keyphrases: Lautréamont, Maldoror, Ducasse, Reception, Myth, Social Networks, Sociology