A trip into the mind of Wajdi

For the past few years, I have been teaching data visualization to data science students at Université Paris Cité at the IUT de Paris — Rives de Seine . And while teaching Python coding is a relatively simple thing, I have decided to shift the course toward a more useful and pedagogical angle: how to make data speak, and how to make good charts, the correct way. One of the chapters I spend around 25% of the course time on is bad data visualization: mistakes made with charts, misleading visual design, and how a graph can quietly manipulate the reader. This is the part of the course where I get 100% attendance and around 97% active interaction from my students. Yes, I am a statistician, and I keep track of a lot of metrics. It is probably because this is the single course section where they are not required to open their computer, nor to work on a practical exercise. I start the chapter by dimming the light of the room. I launch my slides. No explanation. No theory. No code. Just charts...

 Sometimes you start playing with an idea, time passes and you end up with a project that you need to finish. I am sure this is not the case with most people, however this describes perfectly the process with which I've made the StyleZ app . I have always been fascinated by the applications where neural networks are used, outside of the traditional context. One of the ideas that were proposed to utilize such technology is style transfer. The Scream by Edvard Munch In this post, I will explain the steps I followed to implement and deploy a Neural Network Style Transfer App. The ideas is not to make a technical post, but to lay out the process to take a very small project from an idea to production Neural Style Transfer Neural style transfer is an optimization technique used to take two images, the first a content image such as the image of a person, a building or any other image or photo, and the second a style reference image (such as an artwork by a famous painter for exampl...

#KohLanta : Finale de la saison 2021 Koh-Lanta est aujourd'hui un programme incontournable du paysage audiovisuel français. Cette émission inspirée du “Survivor” polarise les réseaux sociaux et suscite à la fois l’excitation, la joie et parfois la **colère** de ses milliers de fans. Comme dans la vraie vie, où la nature humaine avec ses *qualités* et ses *défauts* se dévoile face aux épreuves, les **communautés** et les alliances se forment.  Et souvent  la “trahison” et la “déception” se manifestent  (tiens, c’est comme si je te décrivais un épisode lambda de #Kohlanta 🧐)  Dans cet article,  je joins l'utile à l'agréable et je partage quelques insights interessants, pour montrer que, comme dans la vraie vie (et exactement pareil dans #Kohlanta), les communautés sont souvent la formation sociale la plus **dominante** dans les interactions humaines et que le fait de partager la même vision/personnalité ou les mêmes opinions, joue un rôle important dans la forma...

The Procession of the Trojan Horse in Troy by Domenico Tiepolo (1773)   First things first: could someone remind me of the main goal (or goals) of using Linkedin as a professional social network?  It undeniably seems to me that, while I had more than a few thousand connections and followers, for all the times I have opened Linkedin to check what was going on (or to reply to that desperate student looking for advice or an internship), I could not fully process what was posted and the quantity of things that are of absolutely no interest to me personally. In this post, I will explain the reasons that lead me to delete a big chunk of my Linkedin Network, and how I defined and identified those that have to be deleted As for Facebook, Instagram or even Twitter, every place has its own use.  Keeping in touch with close friends and family on Facebook, taking interest in following beloved artists and brands on Instagram, and enjoying the occasional discussions with likeminded peo...