Alexandre R.J. Francois

Simply manage lists of prioritized items The second iteration of the Priorities App pushes further the minimalistic UX design and adds a new feature: lists of lists. I presented the motivation behind the app and the design of the first version in a previous post . Priorities App 2.0 is  available for download on the App Store . The home screen looks exactly the same as in the first iteration. The model is completely backward compatible, and users who do not need the lists of lists feature will not even be aware of it. This was a strong design requirement for 2.0. The new feature is the ability to define inclusion relationships between any one item and any number of other existing items. From a user perspective, this mechanism provides a way to organize items hierarchically. Technically, it only amounts to a display/navigation convenience, as the underlying model is still a single master list of items.  In practice an item can be a "subitem" of any existing item. Th...

Simply manage a list of prioritized items With a little bit of free time on my hands, I decided to get up to date on how to make an iOS app from scratch in Swift and publish it in the App Store (as a paying App, which turned out to be an interesting experience in itself). This blog post is about the motivation behind the app and the design of the first version (well, technically version 1.2 - Download on the App Store! ). A list of prioritized items? I have been thinking for a long time about a simple app to facilitate my grocery/essentials shopping: I always buy the same basic items (milk, bread, cheese, tomatoes, chicken, yogurt, etc.), all I need to know when I am shopping is which items I will need again soon (or urgently). When I realize I will need something soon, I need a simple way to find the item (if already in the list) and put it back in the list of things to get. If it's a new item, I should be able to add it easily, and not have to add it again in the future...

Every step is a first step if it's a step in the right direction. - Terry Pratchett, I Shall Wear Midnight

Rabbit The Rabbit adventure came to an end - read about it here and here . It's been an incredible journey and I will be forever grateful to have been part of it. I got to work with extremely talented people on really challenging problems, and yes, it did (and does) feel like a family. Thank you Rabbits!

Where have I been these past 2 years? Helping create this...   rabb.it One-click togetherness - the world just got flatter.

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"People understand static relationships better than dynamic relationships because the latter requires their understanding to change constantly." Andrew Koenig, Destructors Considered Harmful (Dr. Dobbs, 8 January 2012)

"The matter of time is especially worth raising in a biological context, since for organisms making a living in a world 'red in tooth and claw,' timing is of the essence.  The organism's nervous system cannot afford the luxury of taking several days or even several minutes to decide whether and where to flee from a predator. [...] Biologically speaking, a quick and dirty solution is better than a slow and perfect one." (p.50) Patricia s. Churchland, Christof Koch, Terence J. Sejnowski, "What Is Computational Neuroscience," in Computational Neuroscience pp. 46-55. Edited by Eric L. Schwartz. 1993. MIT Press.

"[...] Through this work we have come to value:        Individuals and interactions over processes and tools [...]" Manifesto for Agile Software Development

"[...] the timing of computers and networks is rigidly coupled to regular cycles of an underlying clock; the wide variation in impulse timings in neuronal systems, often with a strong apparently random component, contrasts markedly with the temporal regimen in these computational devices." (p. 42) Donald H. Perkel, "Computational Neuroscience: Scope and Structure," in Computational Neuroscience, pp.38-45. Edited by Eric L. Schwartz. 1993. MIT Press.

"I took a required class about the ethics of science as an undergrad at UCLA, and it was all about who gets the funding." James Franco, Wired Aug. 2011: Ethics, Shmetics, p.118

"It is very easy to confound what science says about the characteristics of reality and our perception of it." Peter Gärdenfors, Conceptual Spaces, 2000, p.9.

“The question isn’t whether computers have a soul, but whether humans have a soul.” David Cope discussing a computer's ability to compose music .

Today I gave my first Prezi.com presentation, at the Workshop for Young French Scientists organized at USC by the Office for Science and Technology of the French Embassy in the US . I was introduced to this new presentation tool at the recent ACM Creativity & Cognition Conference. The zooming presentation model seems very promising, although I still have a lot to learn to fully utilize the medium. The non-powerpointness of the presentation was refreshing and, I believe, appreciated. Check out the presentation at: prezi.com/9gk_dql_-ife

"Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self." -- Cyril Connolly Or like my mother liked to say: "Bien faire et laisser braire" (Do good and let (them) bray).

New Computational Paradigms for Computer Music , G. Assayag and A. Gerzso Eds., Editions Delatour France / IRCAM, 2009, ISBN 978-2-7521-0054-2. Check out the flyer ( pdf ). I authored the chapter titled "Time and Perception in Music and Computation," pp. 125-146, excerpts of which appeared in this blog earlier this year - see Brain - Time - Music - Computing .

An Ant's Life will be one of four projects presented to a panel of distinguished judges in competition for final awards in the SIGGRAPH 2009 Research Challenge competition , during the conference, on August 4, 2009, 1:45-3:00pm, at the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center in New Orleans, LA. The first person interactive game was collectively designed and prototyped by the 13 students in the Spring session of the course Collaborative Development of Interactive Software Systems (COMP150-CIS) at Tufts University , under the guidance of visiting assistant professor Alexandre R.J. François , who created the course. The SIGGRAPH 2009 competition challenged participants to "choose a specific animal, or a specific animal's sense, and develop a system that will enable a person to experience the physical or social world as that animal does." In An Ant's Life, the players experience the world as members of an ant colony, from hatching through successive life phases i...

This is the last post in the series Brain - Time - Music - Computing . Previous: Time and the Brain The notion of computation was explicitly created for use outside of the flow of MWT. Models of computation provide primitives for describing processes in a purely timeless context (computability), or in an artificial and abstract flow of time marked by computational operations (algorithmic complexity). The resulting abstract manifestation of time in computing is enforced as a strong invariant, universally and implicitly relied upon. This state of affairs has serious implications for the design and use of computing artifacts in MW. Music exists at the confluence of creation, representation and performance, where inherent limitations of time representations in computation become evident. Music systems fall into two broad categories: online or real-time systems, and off-line system. The significance of these categories in the context of interaction is explored in [1]. Henkjan Honing more speci...

This is part 4 of 5 in the series Brain - Time - Music - Computing . Previous: Time and Perception Next: Time in Computation If the flow of MWT is immutable, the human brain hardly perceives it as such. Gooddy, in his book Time and the Nervous System [3], distinguishes between Personal Time (PT) and Government Time (GT). The former marks the flow of time (MWT) as perceived by the individual brain; the latter refers to the passage of time as measured by a collectively recognized reference clock, from the brain’s perspective an external synchronization device to MWT. Alteration in the perception of time, of the flow of one’s PT, occur within the perceiving agent’s mind. Fraisse emphasizes the necessity to separate the perception of duration, which takes place in the psychological present, and the estimation of duration which “takes place when memory is used either to associate a moment in the past with a moment in the present or to link two past event” [2]. Memory frees the mind from the c...

This is part 3 of 5 in the series Brain - Time - Music - Computing . Previous: The Brain in Middle World Next: Time and the Brain Scales of time in MW play a crucial role in the recognition and interpretation of temporal patterns, by the brain, as symbolic relationships such as causality and synchrony. Events that are perceived as shortly following each other in time tend to be interpreted in a causality relationship. Brains learn the range of latencies that may separate an action and the perception of its effect in MW. The quantitative characterization of acceptable latencies is crucial to the understanding of interaction. Human-computer interaction researchers [4][1] categorize acceptable time delays into three orders of magnitude, which coincide with Newell’s cognitive band in his time scale of human actions [5]: the 0.1s (100ms) scale characterizes perceptual processing, perceived instantaneous reaction; the 1s scale characterizes immediate response, continuous flow of thought (cons...