Section: Highlights of the Year

Highlights of the Year

Official launch of Dylnet:

The aim of DyLNet (https://dylnet.univ-grenoble-alpes.fr/dylnet-project?language=en) is to observe and characterise the relations between child socialisation and oral language learning during the preschool period by means of an innovative multidisciplinary approach that combines work in the fields of language acquisition, sociolinguistics and network science.

It is implemented through the 3-year follow-up of all the children and teaching staff ($\approx 220$) at a socially mixed preschool. The social interactions between individuals are recorded using wireless sensor technology which will record inter-individual proximity data at 5 second intervals. These sensors will be worn for one week every month for a period of 3 years. The children's language development is monitored on the basis of their results in general language tests and the recording of their social use of language in natural interactions, through microphones implemented on the sensors. Finally, the children's social profiles is identified by means of questionnaires sent to their families.

Thanks to the analytical power of the network science, the social interaction data will be matched against the children's linguistic performances and sociolinguistic usage. The task, in particular, will be to examine the influence of the children's social relations on their language development (if individuals stay in the same peer community between two observation times, does the linguistic distance between them falls over the same period?) and, equally, the influence of language on these social relations (if two individuals belong to the same linguistic group at time $T$, does the probability that they will be in the same peer community increase at time $T+n$?). We shall also examine the interactions between the pupils and the teaching staff – teachers and classroom assistants – in order to observe whether their frequency has an impact on the children's language development. Finally, DyLNet will result in the provision to the scientific community of a database indicating the relations between the recorded interaction frequencies and the language descriptions of a broad school community of children and adults followed up over three years.

Because preschool is the first step in a child's school career, it is necessary to understand how children from different social backgrounds integrate and adapt to it. Oral language plays a key role in this process because it is the mean and result of socialisation at school. Social inequalities are a key factor in this chain since, as of age 2, children from different backgrounds do not exhibit the same level of language skills and do not all use, to the same extent, the linguistic codes that are encouraged at school. These early differences, which are transmitted within the family, have given rise to numerous studies that have revealed the influence of the nature and quantity of the speech addressed to children in different social environments. However, these works tell us little about the influence of peers, which may modulate the impact of the family given that peer groups give rise to a certain social mix. The DyLNet project will bring an important insight to this under-researched issue.

Official launch of the Blaise Pascal Foundation

The foundation Blaise Pascal (hereafter denoted by FBP) has been created on the 14th of November 2016. Its founders are the CNRS and the University of Lyon. The objectives of the foundation are to promote mathematics and computer science and to attract young people to scientific fields like computer science and mathematics. The FBP closely pays attention to gender issues in these scientific domains and to the difficulties for disadvantaged public to embrace scientific careers.

The actions of the FBP focus on: - a support to actors that promote mathematics and computer science via allocated funding based on call of proposals; - a structuring of actors to increase the impacts of their actions, to coordinate the efforts and to share experiences; - a development of innovative experiences via summer camps and clubs of mathematics and computer science.

The FBP has received an initial funding from the French government and its founders. To maintain its activities in the long term, external funding must be raised. Additional information on the FBP can be found here: http://fondationblaisepascal.strikingly.com.

Isabelle Guérin Lassous is the managing director of the foundation Blaise Pascal.

Books on Dynamic Networks by Márton Karsai

After a book chapter on Control Strategies of Contagion Processes in Time-varying Networks in Temporal Network Epidemiology in collaboration with Nicola Perra [57], a full book on Bursty Human Dynamics was just released at the end of the year in collaboration with Hang-Hyun Jo and Kimmo Kaski [56].

Public Data Lab and Fake News Field Guide

In February 2017, Tommaso Venturini has founded the Public Data Lab in collaboration with researchers from King’s College London, the University of Amsterdam, the Politecnico di Milano, the University of Aalborg and other European research centres.

The PDL (http://publicdatalab.org) a network of young European researchers working on digital data and public interventions. The Public Data Lab seeks to facilitate research, engagement and debate around the future of the data society. We want to develop and disseminate innovative research, teaching, design and participation formats for the creation and use of public data. We work in collaboration with an interdisciplinary network of researchers, practitioners, journalists, civil society groups, designers, developers and public institutions across the world. Our approach is characterized by:

• Intervention around social, political, economic and ecological issues;

• Participation through involving different publics in the co-design of our work;

• Artisanship in advancing the craft of developing data projects and experiences;

• Openness in sharing our research, data and code for all to use.

In 2007, The Public Data Lab has published Field Guide on Fake News (http://fakenews.publicdatalab.org), which exemplifies our empirical approach to public debate inquiry and the way in which we mobilize digital methods in collaboration with stakeholders. The field guide has been selected as one of the project to be showcased during the celebration of the 50 years of the Inria.

More recently the PDL has received a small funding by the OrganiCities programme (http://organicity.eu/open-call/) to “develop a prototype service to support people in experimentation with urban data”. In the Save Our Air project we will experiment combining air quality data and discursive inscriptions about urban environment.

Inria 50th anniversary

This year Inria has celebrated its 50th anniversary. In [19] the authors reflect on Inria's evolution through the decades and present its vision for the future.