Les défis pour voir des robots opérant dans l'environnement de tous les jours des humains et sur une longue durée soulignent l'importance de leur adaptation aux changements qui peuvent être imprévisibles au moment de leur construction. C'est pourquoi, les robots doivent être capables d'apprendre continuellement dans des espaces infinis, non-stationnaires et de grande dimension. Il leur est impossible d'explorer tout son environnement pour apprendre pendant la durée limitée de sa vie. Pour être utile et acquérir des compétences, le robot doit au contraire être capable de savoir quelles parties échantillonner, et quels types de compétences il a intérêt à acquérir. Une manière de collecter des données est de décider par soi-même où explorer. Une autre manière est de se référer à un mentor. Nous appelons ces deux manières de collecter des données des modes d'échantillonnage. Le premier mode d'échantillonnage correspond à des algorithmes développés dans la littérature pour automatiquement pousser l'agent vers des parties intéressantes de l'environnement ou vers des types de compétences utiles. De tels algorithmes sont appelés des algorithmes de curiosité artificielle ou motivation intrinsèque. Le deuxième mode d'échantillonnage correspond au guidage social ou l'imitation, où un partenaire humain indique où explorer et où ne pas explorer. D'une étude des liens entre ces deux méthodes concurrentes, nous avons finalement construit une architecture algorithmique où les deux modes s'entremêlent en un structure hiérarchique, appelée Socially Guided Intrinsic Motivation (SGIM).

Quels sont les principes fondateurs de l'auto-organisation des sociétés humaines ? Produits d'une évolution culturelle rapide, qui a pris le pas sur l'évolution biologique, celles-ci réclament une approche par des formalismes radicalement différents de ceux utilisés généralement dans l'étude des autres sociétés animales. Concrètement, la modélisation des rapports entre individus et collectif considère le plus souvent des agents qui peuvent être représentés sous la forme d'une hiérarchie de règles, chacune se plaçant en position méta par rapport aux règles du niveau inférieur. Celles-ci peuvent s'interpréter, selon les niveaux, comme des règles de comportement, des règles de décision, des règles de transmission culturelle ou génétique. L'émergence de régularités au niveau collectif peut alors s'interpréter comme la sélection d'une distribution particulière sur l'ensemble des règles et métarègles définissant les agents. Dès lors, le problème de l'auto-organisation dans les systèmes économiques et sociaux se reformule autour de la question suivante : « Peut-on endogénéiser les distributions des métarègles de comportement de manière à ce qu'elles soient le produit des dynamiques collectives qu'elles définissent ? ». Nous montrons dans cette thèse que la prise en compte, dans les modèles formels, de la spécificité de l'imitation humaine permet de répondre positivement à cette question, un point essentiel étant qu'une règle d'imitation peut être sa propre métarègle. Nous proposons ainsi un cadre formel pour l'étude de sociétés d'agents mimétiques auto-organisées, les jeux métamimétiques ; le concept d'équilibre correspondant est alors l'état contrefactuellement stable : aucun agent ne peut s'imaginer mieux qu'il n'est en se mettant contrefactuellement à la place de l'un de ses voisins. Nous étudions ensuite les propriétés de ces jeux en prenant comme champs d'application le problème de l'émergence de la coopération dans un dilemme de prisonnier spatialisé. Nous montrons au passage, que cette approche permet d'échapper au dilemme. Plus généralement, nous nous plaçons dans le cadre de la théorie des jeux stochastiques et nous explicitons le rôle structurant des perturbations dans ce type de système dynamique, les structures spatio-temporelles émergentes étant le produit du couplage entre la dynamique endogène des systèmes métamimétiques et la structure interne des perturbations. En rupture avec l'approche traditionnelle, ceci nous amène à interpréter l'hétérogénéité auto-organisée des systèmes sociaux humains comme une différenciation par un processus de co-évolution d'une multiplicité de critères possibles, plutôt que par un processus d'optimisation global d'un critère unique.

This study deals with the problem of moral development discontinuity prevalent in today's multicultural societies. Black adolescents are confronted by many obstacles in their situatedness in the home, school and society. It has been revealed that the black adolescent in the multicultural situation is exploited, dehumanised and exposed to impersonal situations when he should be offered moral guidance and challenging moral dilemmas in order to develop his moral sense, however he is consequently reduced to an object that is tossed to and fro by his fellow human beings. The black adolescent, it has been shown, needs his fellow human beings, as transmitters of moral values to help him to achieve a moral-self. This study examines the three multicultural situations, the home, the school and the society and shows that morals are not inherited but acquired through mutual contact. The acquisition of morals manifests itself under conditions characterised by respect, modelling, imitation, indoctrination, reward and punishment, conformity, loyalty, communication, exemplification, socialisation, experience and learning as determined by the home, school and society. It was also found that in their acquisition of morals in a multicultural society, black adolescents experience confusion brought about by the cultural differences of their society. \\!hat they previously regarded as the right thing to do in their cultural background receives negative responses in the multicultural situation. It was further found that black adolescents in a multicultural situation are not provided with sufficient opportunities to participate meaningfully in moulding their new moral environment. The multicultural environment is cold and unfriendly, as a result black adolescents are barred from expanding and anchoring themselves in their new situation to face the challenges confronting them with confidence. The empirical research revealed that in the home parents are too busy with their professional upgrading and the positions they hold at work to bother about the moral upbringing of their children. In school teachers emphasise scholastic achievement above moral development. The society does not provide black adolescents with moral role models to imitate. Society has become to technocratic, with devices such as the TV, radio, Internet and video games, to guide black adolescents in their moral intemalisation. / Psychology of Education / D. Ed. (Psychology of Education)

In An Image of Africa, Chinua Achebe indicts Conrad’s Heart of Darkness for exemplifying the kind of purist rhetoric that has long benefited Western ontology while propagating reductive renderings of African experience. Edward Said refers to this dynamic as the way in which societies define themselves contextually against an imagined Other. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s fiction exposes how, by occupying cultural dominance, Western, white male values are normalized as universal. Nevertheless, these values are de-naturalized by their inconsistencies in the lived experiences of Adichie’s black, African women. Women who are at once aware of and participant in, the pretentions that underlie social interaction—pointing to the inevitability of performativity and disrupting the illusion of pure identity. These realizations interrupt Conrad’s essentialist conception of identity and reclaim diverse ontological possibilities for the Other.

Cette thèse s’interroge sur la difficulté qu’on rencontre pour définir l’œuvre de Théophile de Viau (1590-1626). Ensemble disparate sur le plan formel et esthétique, l’œuvre semble pâtir de l’émergence tardive d’un auteur que le procès en libertinage a construit, pour une large part (1623-1625). L’étude menée ici consiste à aller au rebours d’une lecture qui ferait des écrits théophiliens un ensemble dirigé vers cette création artificielle d’un auteur. En prenant appui sur la production poétique antérieure au procès (circa. 1614-1623), cette thèse tente de définir le mouvement de dispersion apparemment contradictoire d’une trajectoire sociale, entraînée par le mouvement de ses publications, et celui d’une densification de l’écriture littéraire autour de pratiques saillantes. En effet, pour envisager les procédures réelles de l’œuvre de Théophile de Viau, pour en dégager les lignes de force et les points de rupture, le présent travail prend appui sur le concept de désœuvrement. Qu’il s’agisse des origines sociales et symboliques du poète, des tensions que soulève le service de plume, ou des ambiguïtés des positionnements littéraires du poète vis-à-vis de la culture de l’imitation et de la tradition rhétorique des lieux communs, tout porte à croire que l’identité poétique de Théophile de Viau s’est construite sur un mouvement paradoxal de dégagement à autrui effectué dans les lieux mêmes de l’altérité, au cœur de l’identité du poète. / This thesis is concerned with the difficulty one encounters when trying to define the work of Theophile de Viau (1590-1626). The set of texts it consists in is heterogeneous both formally and aesthetically, and seems to suffer the late emergence of an author who was in a large part made by his trial for licentiousness. (1623-1625). My aim here is to go against the interpretation that considers theophelian writings as a unity directed towards the artificial creation of an author. By studying the poems written before the trial (around 1614-1623), this thesis aims at defining an apparently contradictory scattered social trajectory, led by the movement of his publications, as well as the densification of his literary writing around striking practices. Indeed, in order to consider the real processes at stake in Theophile de Viau’s work, in order to distinguish its lines of force and breaking points, the present study is based on the concept of désoeuvrement (deconstructing the concept of his oeuvre). Whether it be the social and symbolical origins of the poet, the tensions raised by his patronage, or the ambiguities of the literary positions of the poet regarding the culture of imitation and the rhetoric of common places, everything leads us to believe that Theophile de Viau’s poetic identity was built on a paradoxical movement of disengagement towards others carried out in the very places of otherness. Otherness is at the heart of the poet’s identity.

Useless things. I normally use trash things like pattern in painting still life. My father suffers from obsessive compulsive disorder – accumulation of things. In addition to painting, I also work with objects themselves. My interest also closely related to how the concepts of the subject, object and artifact are appliing in contemporary art. There are the tradition of imitation fact, principle of ready-made, the issue of technical reproducibility and virtual reality of things in history of art. As a central theme of my thesis, I selected the part of bodywork Tatra 613, which carries all the testimony about ,,useless and hopeless "situation in which it is located. It is also an object monumental and visually very aesthetic. Yet it is not my intention to settle for the principle of redy-made. Asked about artwork as intermediaries art and its seemingly useless producing and reproducing, I want to try to create another such usless situation. That's why I make a cardboard copy (1: 1) of this object. I also make video with motive 3D copy of the same object. I like to create some voltage between that useless object and valuable art practice. I think, it does not just mean such futility when these objects will be viewed as an art.

St Vitus' Cathedral in Prague: Liturgy, Symbolism and Architectural Imitation in Medieval Bohemia In this thesis, the focus is put on the Wenceslas Chapel in St Vitus' Cathedral, the unusual design of which seems to have two levels of meanings: On the one hand, it was probably designed as a recreation of an earlier rotunda that had been founded by St Wenceslas. On the other hand, it seems that the intention was made the chapel and the whole cathedral would resemble the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, where the Calvary Chapel occupied the same position as the Wenceslas Chapel. This was most likely inspired by presence of the Imperial insignia containing the valuable Passion relics that Charles had acquired in 1350 and placed in the basilica, probably near the Wenceslas Chapel. Perhaps from that reason Charles had the new Gothic chapel decorated with semi-precious stones, because its red spots were associated with the blood of Christ and the Passion. The Wenceslas Chapel together with two Passion chapels at Karlstein Castle, containing Charles IV's private passion treasure, gave rise to the "Passion" architecture of the Luxembourg period. It included the church of St Margaret in the Cistercian monastery in Zlatá Koruna and the Resurrection Chapel attached to the church of SS Peter and Paul at...

In der vorliegenden Dissertation wurde ein datengetriebenes Verfahren zum maschinellen Lernen von Mensch-Roboter Interaktionen auf Basis von Mensch-Mensch Demonstrationen entwickelt. Während einer Trainingsphase werden Bewegungen zweier Interakteure mittels Motion Capture erfasst und in einem Zwei-Personen Interaktionsmodell gelernt. Zur Laufzeit wird das Modell sowohl zur Erkennung von Bewegungen des menschlichen Interaktionspartners als auch zur Generierung angepasster Roboterbewegungen eingesetzt. Die Leistungsfähigkeit des Ansatzes wird in drei komplexen Anwendungen evaluiert, die jeweils kontinuierliche Bewegungskoordination zwischen Mensch und Roboter erfordern. Das Ergebnis der Dissertation ist ein Lernverfahren, das intuitive, zielgerichtete und sichere Kollaboration mit Robotern ermöglicht.

Waking up in a world where everyone carries a miniature supercomputer, interaction designers find themselves in their forerunners dreams. Faced with the reality of planetary-scale we have to confront the task of articulating approaches responsive this accidental ubiquity of computation. This thesis attempts such a formulation by defining computation as a strange material, a plasticity shaped equally by its technical properties and the mode of production by which is its continuously re-produced. The definition is applied through a methodology of excursions — participatory explorations into two seemingly disparate sites of computation, connected in they ways they manifest a labor of care. First, we visit the social infrastructures that constitute the Linux kernel, examining strangle entanglements of programming and care in the world's largest design process. This is followed by a tour into the thorny lands of artificial intelligence, situated in the smart replies of LinkedIn. Here, we investigate the fluctuating border between the artificial and the human with participants performing AI, formulating new Turing tests in the process. These excursions afford an understanding of computation as fundamentally re-produced through interaction, a strange kind of affective work the understanding of which is crucial if we ambition to disarm the critical accidents of our present future.

Architecture Jail Escape It is a specific device for futuroptimist people based on the philosophy of posthumanism and transhumanism, a version of their own faith in endless life on the net. It is a belief in the possibility of technological transformation of humanity that will allow us to overcome our physical and biological limits. Clause 2.0 is architecture for pioneers - the protagonist of this transformation - enabling the longest and most complete stay in virtual reality. This avant-garde is anxious 2.0. Escapist personalities of digital age soldiers are looking for a haven and their own version of the world in the cyberspace. They create a vision of paradise and colonize (cyber) space without the political consequences of the finiteness of the physical world and the exhaustion of natural resources. They live on the frontier of the being, and they want to unburden themselves and merge with the world they understand more. They fight with their own brain and body that cannot break away from the world. The endlessness of the virtual space has the limits of body and senses. Long-term stay in a cyberspace is a loss of sense of time and space. This monastic life in clause 2.0 is able to keep them in shape, by observing the ritual, the physical performance of walking that they must undergo so that they can exist every day in their version of the digital monastery. These versions are infinite, and they can be ritually traced among them. Clause geometry isolates them from one another. The clause is a monastic concept that allows the people to live hermetically, as well as the physical world. The gateway to the virtual space is a "zero architecture" - a room, a cell, a cube on a 4x4 meter plan, rid of any visual architectural site. It provides only a flat floor as the reflection point for an endless virtual world and four walls and a ceiling with a corresponding thickness for a sufficient separation from the outside world. The world of infinite freedom opens behind this "zero architecture". It seems that not through "architectural innovation and political subversion" a modern architect's dream of architecture will be realized as machines for the liberation of man but through the abandonment of physical architecture as such. The prospect of "zero architecture" opens up a space where the new architecture will no longer be "luxuries and good homes, not the architecture of separation and imprisonment, but it will ultimately be the architecture of freedom.