School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences

About: School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences is a facility organization based out in Villejuif, France. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Politics & Context (language use). The organization has 1230 authors who have published 2084 publications receiving 57740 citations. The organization is also known as: Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales & EHESS.

Deciphering the Chemistry of Cultural Heritage: Targeting Material Properties by Coupling Spectral Imaging with Image Analysis.

Abstract: ConspectusThe chemical study of materials from natural history and cultural heritage, which provide information for art history, archeology, or paleontology, presents a series of specific challenges. The complexity of these ancient and historical materials, which are chemically heterogeneous, the product of alteration processes, and inherently not reproducible, is a major obstacle to a thorough understanding of their making and long-term behavior (e.g., fossilization). These challenges required the development of methodologies and instruments coupling imaging and data processing approaches that are optimized for the specific properties of the materials. This Account discusses how these characteristics not only constrain their study but also open up specific innovative avenues for providing key historical information. Synchrotron methods have extensively been used since the late 1990s to study heritage objects, in particular for their potential to provide speciation information from excitation spectroscopies and to image complex heritage objects and samples in two and three dimensions at high resolution. We examine in practice how the identification of key intrinsic chemical specificities has offered fertile ground for the development of novel synchrotron approaches allowing a better stochastic description of the properties of ancient and historical materials. These developments encompass three main aspects: (1) The multiscale heterogeneity of these materials can provide an essential source of information in the development of probes targeting their multiple scales of homogeneity. (2) Chemical alteration can be described in many ways, e.g., by segmenting datasets in a semiquantitative way to jointly inform morphological and chemical transformation pathways. (3) The intrinsic individuality of chemical signatures in artifacts triggers the development of specific strategies, such as those focusing on weak signal detection. We propose a rereading of the advent of these new methodologies for analysis and characterization and examine how they have led to innovative strategies combining materials science, instrument development, history, and data science. In particular, we show that spectral imaging and the search for correlations in image datasets have provided a powerful way to address what archeologists have called the uncertainty and ambiguity of the material record. This approach has implications beyond synchrotron techniques and extends in particular to a series of rapidly developing approaches that couple spectral and spatial information, as in hyperspectral imaging and spatially resolved mass spectrometry. The preeminence of correlations holds promise for the future development of machine learning methods for processing data on historical objects. Beyond heritage, these developments are an original source of inspiration for the study of materials in many related fields, such as environmental, geochemical, or life sciences, which deal with systems whose alteration and heterogeneity cannot be neglected.

What governs a language’s lexicon? Determining the organizing principles of phonological neighbourhood networks

Abstract: The lexicons of natural language can be characterized as a network of words, where each word is linked to phonologically similar words. These networks are called phonological neighbourhood networks (PNNs). In this paper, we investigate the extent to which observed properties of these networks are mathematical consequences of the definition of PNNs, consequences of linguistic restrictions on what possible words can sound like (phonotactics), or consequences of deeper cognitive constraints that govern lexical development. To test this question, we generate random lexicons, with a variety of methods, and derive PNNs from these lexicons. These PNNs are then compared to a real network. We conclude that most observed characteristics of PNNs are either intrinsic to the definition of PNNs, or are phonotactic effects. However, there are some properties—such as extreme assortativity by degree—which may reflect true cognitive organizing principles.

Preuve algébrique du critère de planarité de Wu-Liu

Abstract: W. Wu and Y. Liu have sketched topological proof of a planarity criterium, which consists of associating to each crossing of an embedding of a graph G in the sphere an edge of a graph H associated to G . The graph H is defined by a Tremaux tree of G (maximal depth-first-search subtree of G ). The method is to test whether these edges form a cocycle of H . We give here a complete algebraic proof of their criterium, inspired by Tutte's theory of crossings [9]. The present work can be construed as a more efficient version of Tutte's method.

A K-Nearest Neighbours Approach To Unsupervised Spoken Term Discovery

Abstract: Unsupervised spoken term discovery is the task of finding recurrent acoustic patterns in speech without any annotations. Current approaches consists of two steps: (1) discovering similar patterns in speech, and (2) partitioning those pairs of acoustic tokens using graph clustering methods. We propose a new approach for the first step. Previous systems used various approximation algorithms to make the search tractable on large amounts of data. Our approach is based on an optimized k-nearest neighbours (KNN) search coupled with a fixed word embedding algorithm. The results show that the KNN algorithm is robust across languages, consistently-performs the DTW-based baseline, and is competitive with current state-of-the-art spoken term discovery systems.

Tourism and heritage in the enhancement of Tianjin

Abstract: This article examines what is being promoted about Tianjin’s rich heritage through its tourism and heritage practices An industrial city traditionally known for its crafts and gastronomy, Tianjin has gradually begun to promote its Chinese heritage and, since the 2000s, its city centre, which is noteworthy for its former foreign concessions and 19th- and 20th-century architectural heritage After long neglect, the city centre has become a major component in the promotion of the city Based on the analysis of tourism materials and studies conducted since the mid-2000s, this article first discusses the development of tourism in Tianjin and the chronology and interweaving of the services involved in heritage development Then, it focuses on the reception of the city’s tourism offerings and on urban development operations in two sectors, Wudadao (or ‘Five avenues’), located in the former British Concession, and the ‘I-Style Town’ in the former Italian Concession