Gouverner par la proximité : Allouer des fonds à des projets de recherche dans les années 1960

International audienceThe early 1960s saw the establishment of a policy for the development of contractual research, based on a new inter-ministerial financing system—the Fonds de développement de la recherche scientifique et technique (“Scientific and Technical Research Development Fund”)—which replaced the classic practice of regular funding allocation to French research institutions. The article shows that this system is based on government by proximity to the research projects, whose implementation can be understood as deriving both from an incomplete reform project, and from the way the academic world worked at the time.Le début des années 1960 constitue le moment de la mise en place d’une politique de développement de la recherche sur contrat autour d’un dispositif interministériel de financement inédit, le Fonds de développement de la recherche scientifique et technique, qui rompt avec les pratiques classiques d’allocation de fonds récurrents aux institutions de recherche. Cet article montre que le fonctionnement de ce dispositif repose sur un gouvernement par la proximité des projets de recherche, dont la mise en place s’explique au croisement d’un projet réformateur incomplètement institué et des caractéristiques de fonctionnement du monde académique de l’époque

Multidisciplinary and multiobjective optimization: Comparison of several methods

10 pagesEngineering design of complex systems is a decision making process that aims at choosing from among a set of options that implies an irrevocable allocation of resources. It is inherently a multidisciplinary and multi-objective process. The paper describes some classical multidisciplinary optimization (MDO) methods with their advantages and drawbacks. Some new approaches combining genetic algorithms (MOGA) and collaborative optimization (CO) are presented. They allow to: 1) increase the convergence rate when a design problem can be broken up regarding design variables, and 2) provide an optimal set of design variables in case of multi-level multi-objective design problem

Mean-variance dynamic portfolio allocation with transaction costs: a Wiener chaos expansion approach

This paper studies the multi-period mean-variance portfolio allocation problem with transaction costs. Many methods have been proposed these last years to challenge the famous uni-period Markowitz strategy.But these methods cannot integrate transaction costs or become computationally heavy and hardly applicable. In this paper, we try to tackle this allocation problem by proposing an innovative approach which relies on representing the set of admissible portfolios by a finite dimensional Wiener chaos expansion. This numerical method is able to find an optimal strategy for the allocation problem subject to transaction costs. To complete the study, the link between optimal portfolios submitted to transaction costs and the underlying risk aversion is investigated. Then a competitive and compliant benchmark based on the sequential uni-period Markowitz strategy is built to highlight the efficiency of our approach

De la scène à l’estrade

Nemo nisi per amicitiam cognoscitur Je connais François Picard depuis les années où j’ai commencé à m’occuper des musiques turques à Paris : en particulier, je me souviens bien de son passage dans le studio de Radio-France où Talip Özkan enregistrait son CD l’ Art du tanbûr, en 1994. Puis nous nous sommes retrouvés à Strasbourg en 1996, quand il y enseignait l’ethnomusicologie et que j’étais moi-même rattaché provisoirement au département d’études turques de l’Université qui ne s’appelait pas..

Leishmania infantum infection of primary human myeloid cells

Circulating phagocytic cells often serve as cellular targets for a large number of pathogens such as Leishmania parasites. Studying primary human cells in an infectious context requires lengthy procedures for cell isolation that may affect the analysis performed. Using whole blood and a no-lyse and no-wash flow cytometric assay (NoNo assay), we monitored the Leishmania infantum infection of primary human cells. We demonstrated, using fluorescent parasites, that among monocyte cell populations, L. infantum preferentially infects classical (CD14+CD16−) and intermediate (CD14+CD16+) primary human monocytes in whole blood. Because classical monocytes are the preponderant population, they represent the larger L. infantum reservoir. Moreover, we also found that, concomitantly to monocyte infection, a subset of PMNs is infected early in whole blood. Of interest, in whole blood, PMNs are less infected compared to classical monocytes. Overall, by using this NoNo assay, we provided a novel avenue in our understanding of host–leishmania interactions.European Community’s Seventh Framework Programme under grant agreement No. 602773 (Project KINDRED) and Infect-ERA ERA-NET (Project InLeish) to J.E. J.E. also thanks the Canada Research Chair program for financial assistance. S.A. is supported by a post-doctoral fellowship granted by Fédération pour la Recherche Médicale (FRM: SPF20160936115) and by Infect-Era (ANR-16-IFEC-0002). This work was supported by the Northern Portugal Regional Operational Programme (NORTE 2020), under the Portugal 2020 Partnership Agreement, through the European Regional Development Fund (FEDER) (NORTE-01-0145-FEDER-000013) and the Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia (FCT) (contract CEECIND/00185/2020 to RS)

Nanorhéomètre pour l’étude des liquides confiné

International audienceNanorhéomètre pour la mesure des propriétés mécaniques sans contac

Decentralized K-means using randomized Gossip protocols for clustering large datasets

International audienceIn this paper, we consider the clustering of very large datasets distributed over a network of computational units using a decentralized K-means algorithm. To obtain the same codebook at each node of the network, we use a randomized gossip aggregation protocol where only small messages are ex- changed. We theoretically show the equivalence of the algorithm with a centralized K-means, provided a bound on the number of messages each node has to send is met. We provide experiments showing that the consensus is reached for a number of messages consistent with the bound, but also for a smaller number of messages, albeit with a less smooth evolution of the objective function