Jan 2015 (To be reviewed)
I have got an initial education centered on mathematics and physics, accompanied by knowledge computer science which I first acquired in my spare time and later through formal education at the École normale supérieure (Paris).
And I believe I could summarize my motivation by the fact that I like building.
I like building mathematical proofs out of axioms, logic circuits out of logic gates, programs out of instructions. And then I like combining all of them into more complexe systems and their multiple layers (Hardware, OS, Compilation, Program, Library, etc.) and their interactions (protocols, APIs). I also like discovering new building blocks (FPGA, Quantum computing).
This interest for building includes not only the result, but also the construction process itself, the way we need to design digital systems and organize their development and evolution.
Like any process, the architecture itself can be automated. It is called procedural generation and fascinates me because it is like teaching the computer how to build by itself. I have used it especially in computer graphics — particularly during my internship with M.-P. Cani — but we can also find auto-generated content, and even programs (genetic programming, machine learning).
But this automation still requires to communicate with humans, for them to explain what they need, and this issue meet another of my interests which is human/machine interaction. The machine should be able to understand the human.
And the opposite is interesting too. This interaction should provide
humans both the ability to do things and the ability to do them easily. I
like thinking about who is going to use the resulting product, how, and
what for and design the experience and play with its affordances to build specific usages.
UI design also interests me for its aesthetic purpose. I have been playing with computer graphics and digital art since my first use of a computer and enjoy the issues, both artistic and technical, raised by matricial and vectorial drawing, 3D modeling and rendering, etc.
Still about getting the computer understand the human, I also investigated natural language processing, mixing formal grammar with the challenging human factor and the language reflexivity.
I think this human factor also motivates me to work with people with different backgrounds, and different points of view over what I do. I like teaching because I see it as yet another kind of construction, with human building blocks, and as for procedural generation, I enjoy seeing the creation growing by itself, learning from what I created myself.
