Villes détruites, villes construites : Réflexion sur les stratégies politiques et militaires à partir de l’exemple des conflits israélo-arabes (Liban, Israël, Palestine)

À la fois terrain, enjeu et instrument, la ville est une composante évidente de la problématique du conflit. Cette réflexion géopolitique, partant d’observations et de recherches sur la situation au Proche-Orient, tente d’apporter un éclairage sur les liens existants entre villes et stratégies politiques et militaires. Ce faisant, il s’agit de mesurer la nature complexe, parfois contradictoire mais bien réelle, de ce lien autour duquel se matérialisent les stratégies politiques et militaires, selon des rapports de force changeants. Au cours des conflits qui ont émaillé l’histoire du Proche-Orient, trois axes de la stratégie militaire et politique d’Israël et de ses voisins arabes peuvent être repérés : la guerre ouverte, la zone tampon (ou glacis), l’occupation et l’annexion. Quelle est la place de la ville dans ces axes stratégiques ? Du fait de l’omniprésence de la ville dans ce contexte de guerre, on peut repérer trois situations pour les villes : la ville détruite, la ville occupée, la ville produite. Dans chacun des cas, Beyrouth et plus largement des villes du Liban, les villes palestiniennes ou encore les « villes-colonies », la Homa Oumigdal des implantations juives en Cisjordanie, sont autant d’exemples sur lesquels notre propos s’appuie. Aussi cherchons-nous à montrer comment les villes peuvent matérialiser la dimension spatiale des pensées politique (idéologique) et militaire illustrées par des actes et des faits.The town is an obvious component of a conflict, being at the same time the battleground, the instrument, and the stake. This reflection, starting from geopolitical observations and research on the situation in the Near East, attempts to shed light on the links between cities, and political and military strategies. In doing so, it is possible to measure the complex, sometimes contradictory but true nature of this link, around which political and military strategies materialize according to changing power relationships. During the conflicts which have punctuated the history of the Near East, three strands of the political and military strategies of Israel and its Arab neighbours can be identified : open warfare, the buffer zone (or glacis), occupation and annexation. What is the place of the city in these strategic axes ? The city is omnipresent in the war context, making it possible to identify three situations : the destroyed city, the occupied city, the resulting city. In each case, Beirut and more generally Lebanon’s cities, Palestinian cities or “city-colonies,” the Homa Oumigdal of Jewish settlements in the West Bank are reliable examples. Thus, we attempt to show how cities can bring about a spatial dimension of thought, both political (ideological) and military, illustrated by deeds and facts

Modeling ASR Ambiguity for Dialogue State Tracking Using Word Confusion Networks

Spoken dialogue systems typically use a list of top-N ASR hypotheses for inferring the semantic meaning and tracking the state of the dialogue. However ASR graphs, such as confusion networks (confnets), provide a compact representation of a richer hypothesis space than a top-N ASR list. In this paper, we study the benefits of using confusion networks with a state-of-the-art neural dialogue state tracker (DST). We encode the 2-dimensional confnet into a 1-dimensional sequence of embeddings using an attentional confusion network encoder which can be used with any DST system. Our confnet encoder is plugged into the state-of-the-art 'Global-locally Self-Attentive Dialogue State Tacker' (GLAD) model for DST and obtains significant improvements in both accuracy and inference time compared to using top-N ASR hypotheses.Comment: Accepted at Interspeech-202

Optical Excitation of Nuclear Spin Coherence in Tm3+:YAG

A thulium-doped crystal is experimentally shown to be an excellent candidate for broadband quantum storage in a solid-state medium. For the first time, nuclear spin coherence is optically excited, detected and characterized in such a crystal. The lifetime of the spin coherence -- the potential storage entity -- is measured by means of Raman echo to be about 300 $\mu$s over a wide range of ground state splittings. This flexibility, attractive for broadband operation, and well fitted to existing quantum sources, results from the simple hyperfine structure, contrasting with Pr- and Eu- doped crystals

Optical Excitation of Nuclear Spin Coherence in Tm3+:YAG

A thulium-doped crystal is experimentally shown to be an excellent candidate for broadband quantum storage in a solid-state medium. For the first time, nuclear spin coherence is optically excited, detected and characterized in such a crystal. The lifetime of the spin coherence -- the potential storage entity -- is measured by means of Raman echo to be about 300 $\mu$s over a wide range of ground state splittings. This flexibility, attractive for broadband operation, and well fitted to existing quantum sources, results from the simple hyperfine structure, contrasting with Pr- and Eu- doped crystals

Homogeneous linewidth of the intraband transition at 1.55µm in GaN/AlN quantum dots.

PosterWe present homogeneous linewidth measurements of the intraband transition at 1.55 m in GaN/AlN quantum dots by means of non-linear spectral hole-burning experiments. The square-root dependence of the differential transmission signal with the incident pump power reveals the importance of electron-electron scattering in the population relaxation dynamics. We find on the contrary that this scattering process plays a minor role in the coherence relaxation dynamics since the homogeneous linewidth of 15 meV at 5K does not depend on the incident pump power. This suggests the predominance of other dephasing mechanisms such as spectral diffusion, and temperature-dependent measurements support this hypothesi