Contact: firstname.lastname@irif.fr
Presentation: My work is about Directed Algebraic Topology, which is at the interface between the geometric models of concurrency (some of them topological, other ones combinatorial) and algebraic topology (
CV in English). The main geometric models I am interested in are several variants of Grandis' d-spaces (multipointed or not), trace spaces giving rise to semicategorical variants called flows, Moore variants or these notions, and several improvements of the notion of precubical set (non-symmetric and symmetric transverse set, partial precubical set).
Keywords: homotopy, category, topology, combinatorics, concurrency.
Warnings: I do not work on higher category theory just because I don't need this theory. I did use strict globular and strict cubical higher dimensional categories in the past: that was a deadend for my work. The understanding of the link between the two geometric models of concurrency which are the multipointed d-spaces and the flows does not require either to use some weak version of the notion of topologically enriched semicategory (unlike what I thought for several years). Instead, it is a Moore version of the notion of topologically enriched semicategory which is required (the so-called Moore flows introduced in
PDF, and explored further in
PDF,
PDF and
PDF). I do not work on homotopy type theory (
HoTT) either.
Artificial Intelligence: Given all the nonsense one reads in the newspapers about AI, I feel obliged to state my point of view here. In French, I recommend the reading of the book
"Le mythe de la singularité. Faut-il craindre l’intelligence artificielle ?" by Jean-Gabriel Ganascia. I don't know whether this book is translated in English. The book deconstructs the myth of the technological singularity, which is the day when a supposed general artificial intelligence will appear.
Artificial Intelligence does not exist (French talk with available English subtitles by Luc Julia). It's simply a new programming tool that opens up new perspectives. As far as generative AI is concerned, it simply produces probable sequences of words and symbols without really understanding what it's talking about. We talk about
stochastic parrot. Sometimes this leads to interesting things, sometimes to nonsense.