Traces

The aim of this paper is to examine a broad scope of third world–oriented training and scientific initiatives conducted in Poland as part of a global specialist network, locating those initiatives within a broader context of socialist development aids politics. To address the complex technoscientific construction of othering we discuss the research centers that supported work abroad, the forms of professional education delivered by Polish specialists abroad or by students from developing countries studying in Poland, and the international development assistance programs that formed the main framework for research into tropical design, planning, and construction.

The Iberian Mediterranean Basin is home to one of the largest groups of prehistoric rock art sites in Europe. Despite the cultural relevance of prehistoric Spanish Levantine rock art, pigment composition remains partially unknown, and the nature of the binders used for painting has yet to be disclosed. In this work, we present the first omic analysis applied to one of the flagship Levantine rock art sites: the Valltorta ravine (Castell{\'o}n, Spain). We used high-throughput sequencing to provide the first description of the bacterial communities colonizing the rock art patina, which proved to be dominated by Firmicutes species and might have a protective effect on the paintings. Proteomic analysis was also performed on rock art microsamples in order to determine the organic binders present in Levantine prehistoric rock art pigments. This information could shed light on the controversial dating of this UNESCO Cultural Heritage, and contribute to defining the chrono-cultural framework of the societies responsible for these paintings.

Trace Base Management System (TBMS) offers processing and querying functionalities for traces that may be of interest to users of tracked systems. Our goal is to ensure the importing of various external traces into kernel for Trace-Based System (kTBS), which is a TBMS developed in the LIRIS laboratory. To overcome the problem of traces heterogeneity, we propose to define a generic collector. To this end, a user with enough knowledge of the tracked system is prompted to define its kTBS trace model and correspondences between the elements of this model and the elements of the trace to import. The system generalises the mappings previously elicited by the user through interaction to create mapping rules. After this phase, the collector will generate modelled traces from the existing ones and the already defined mapping rules.

Knowledge acquisition is a crucial problem for the design of Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITSs). To overcome this problem, authoring tools have been proposed. Over two dozen of authoring tools have been built since the earliest days of ITS, but each of them focuses on a particular kind of ITSs such as constraint-based tutors or model-tracing tutors. In the context of the AMBRE project, we are interested in ITSs teaching problem-solving methods. Such ITSs enable learners to acquire a specific method in problem-solving. Despite of the variety of existing authoring tools, these tools do not meet our needs either because approach adopted do not match to AMBRE principle or because they do not allow to represent all knowledge needed to design an AMBRE ITS. We propose AMBRE-KB, an authoring tool to help authors to elicit knowledge needed for the design of AMBRE ITSs. This tool supports the acquisition of knowledge to be taught, and the description of problems to be solved. We present the authoring process and illustrate it using French verb conjugation domain. A preliminary evaluation shows that AMBRE-KB is successful in producing domains models but more thorough evaluation is planned.

We present an architecture for self-motivated agents to organize their behaviors according to possibilities of interactions proposed by the environment, and to modify the environment to construct new possibilities of interactions. The long-term goal is to design agents that construct their own knowledge of objects through experience, rather than exploiting pre-coded knowledge, and exploit this knowledge to generate complex behaviors that satisfy their intrinsic motivation principles. Self-motivation is defined here as a tendency, based on inborn behavioral preferences, to experiment and to respond to behavioral opportunities afforded by the environment. Over time, the agent integrates, through its experience, relations between interactions and object affording them in the form of data structures, called signatures of interaction, which encode the minimal spatial configurations affording an interaction. The agent then exploits these signatures to recognize distant possibilities of interactions (or affordances), but also incomplete affordances. These structures help the agent defining behaviors that can construct affordances from separated elements. Experiments with a simulated agent show that they learn to navigate in their environment, reaching, avoiding and constructing objects according to the valence of the interactions that they afford.

International audience

Microorganisms dwelling in sediments have a crucial role in biogeochemical cycles and are expected to have a strong influence on the cycle of arsenic, a metalloid responsible for severe water pollution and presenting major health risks for human populations. We present here a metagenomic study of the sediment from two harbours on the Mediterranean French coast, l'Estaque and St Mandrier. The first site is highly polluted with arsenic and heavy metals, while the arsenic concentration in the second site is below toxicity levels. The goal of this study was to elucidate the potential impact of the microbial community on the chemical parameters observed in complementary geochemical studies performed on the same sites. The metagenomic sequences, along with those from four publicly available metagenomes used as control data sets, were analysed with the RAMMCAP workflow. The resulting functional profiles were compared to determine the over-represented Gene Ontology categories in the metagenomes of interest. Categories related to arsenic resistance and dissimilatory sulphate reduction were over-represented in l'Estaque. More importantly, despite very similar profiles, the identification of specific sequence markers for sulphate-reducing bacteria and sulphur-oxidizing bacteria showed that sulphate reduction was significantly more associated with l'Estaque than with St Mandrier. We propose that biotic sulphate reduction, arsenate reduction and fermentation may together explain the higher mobility of arsenic observed in l'Estaque in previous physico-chemical studies of this site. This study also demonstrates that it is possible to draw sound conclusions from comparing complex and similar unassembled metagenomes at the functional level, even with very low sequence coverage.