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Abstract This paper examines the future of cities by shifting the focus to the African continent. The aim is to consider African cities as places for exploring new imaginaries and new ways of inhabiting the world. This reflection comes at a crucial time …

Abstract When it comes to building, as with energy, the new doesn't make the old disappear. The extraordinary rise of concrete between 1950 and 2000, far from eradicating other building materials, allowed them to grow : glass of course, steel, wood, but …

Abstract New York, the city of exile for the Surrealists and ethnologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, is the capital of the modern, but also the refuge of the archaic. " Ali Baba's cave ", it provides backdoor exits and an escape from the time of …

Abstract In this seminar, I will present how the study of plant-pollinator communities benefits from interaction network approaches. These approaches, which integrate both all the species making up the communities and the interactions that link these …

Abstract As with all living things, plant-pollinator interactions are not just two-by-two exchanges, but form part of the planet's living fabric, in the form of interaction networks that link almost all species to one another, from close to close, in an …

Abstract The usual semi-classical correspondence (called quantum-classical) shows that the fixed-time evolution of wave packets by a wave equation reveals the geodesic flow in the small-wavelength limit λ → 0. This geodesic flow is determined by the …

Abstract In these last two lectures, we are interested in models of random (q+1)-regular graphs with N vertices. We study the spectral hole of the adjacency matrix, in the limit where N tends to infinity. We present a result due to Joel Friedman, and …

Abstract Mutual understanding during a conversation is an extremely fast and efficient process : we can process three words per second, often more. However, this observation is not consistent with laboratory experiments showing that processing a single …

Abstract Conversational agents, chatbots and large language models   : from Eliza to ChatGPT and ChatLLAMA. How have very large conversational models been trained ? What are their limits, ethical issues, uses and …

Abstract Animals behave flexibly, seamlessly generalizing knowledge between apparently different scenarios. This is the hallmark of intelligence. To do this, representations and computations in the brain must also be flexible and generalise. In this talk …

Children's Drawings and Geometric Universals: How to Explain Them? Abstract In addition to examining the transcultural diversity of geometric signs, across cultures as well as history, the analysis of children's drawings provides a third route to the …

Abstract Driven by the challenge of anthropogenic climate change, the reconstruction of the Holocene climate has provided historians and archaeologists with new insights into the human past. We are learning that the instability of the Earth system has …

Abstract Poor countries raise relatively few taxes, and this limits their ability to take action to help their populations. How are tax revenues distributed ? How can these countries increase their fiscal …

Abstract The second lecture looked at control structures on a larger scale than the commands (statements ) of the first lecture : the scale of mechanisms for breaking programs down into subroutines, procedures, functions and methods. These linguistic …