ELIE EVENTS
Public Thesis Defense of Arthur SLUYTERS
Public thesis defense of Arthur SLUYTERS"An Integrated Development Environment for Gesture-based Interactive Applications: Instantiation to Radar Gestures"When: 18/03/2024 at 10 AM Where: Ocean room - de Serres building LLN + TEAMS LINK Chairman: Supervisors: Other jury members: Abstract Imagine controlling your TV or Virtual Reality headset with just a flick of the hand, as easily as swiping on your smartphone. These gestures, known as “mid-air” gestures, are closer than you may think, thanks to recent technological improvements. They offer plenty of benefits compared to more traditional input methods, by allowing greater freedom of movement, eliminating the need for physical touch, and making interactions feel more natural and enjoyable. However, mid-air gestures come with a unique set of challenges. First, how can we accurately capture and interpret these movements in real-time? The system should be lightning-fast, reliable, and intuitive, without imposing constraints on the user. Then, how should we integrate these gestures into everyday applications? Crafting a highly usable gesture-based interface currently requires many hard-to-come-by skills, including expertise in gesture recognition, application development, and user experience design. This thesis directly addresses these challenges by proposing innovative solutions to foster the development of gesture-based interfaces, in the form of tools and methodologies. Our exploration focuses on the use of radar sensors for gesture recognition, which boast a compact form factor, low power consumption, and the ability to detect gestures through solid surfaces and in challenging lighting conditions, all while preserving user privacy. |
Public Thesis Defense of Céline LAMARCHE
Public thesis defense of Céline LAMARCHE"Assessing 29 years of global land cover dynamics from satellite Earth Observation"
Teams linkAbstract:Land use and land cover change contribute significantly to anthropogenic CO2 emissions and biodiversity loss. However, current inventory-based statistics miss year-to-year land changes, preventing a comprehensive global understanding. Earth observation by satellite provides valuable information for mapping global annual changes at the pixel level. Yet, consistency is crucial to capture change signals among variability from natural surface fluctuations or evolving satellite mission capabilities. In this thesis, we co-develop and evaluate the very first global annual land cover change time series at 300 m from 1992 to 2020, maintaining consistency across space, time and satellite missions. This dataset, currently used for Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) climate modeling and Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) analysis, enables us to quantify and analyze the global dynamics of land cover change over the last 30 years. This research also contributes to enhancing the qualification of land cover datasets. While validation guidelines are well-established for individual product assessment, we introduced a stratified random sampling method for product benchmarking, tailored to areas prone to discrepancies between products, to highlight the satellite product strengths and weaknesses. To improve climate and land surface, we enabled the conversion of land cover categories to plant functional types (PFT) composition per pixel. This was made possible thanks to the development of a globally applicable framework to seamlessly integrate multiple high-resolution datasets that might otherwise not be compatible. Finally, we investigate the impact of uncertainty in Earth observation surface reflectance measurement on the categorical land cover classification process. Building on a Monte Carlo simulation, we quantify errors and propose a classification ensemble approach to effectively mitigate them. This work contributes to more informed land accounting in the context of rapid anthropogenic change and climate evolution, supporting the assessment of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) environmental-economic accounting systems. Jury members:Prof. Pierre DEFOURNY (Supervisor) Prof. Patrick BOGAERT (Secretary) Dr. Gregory DUVEILLER (Max Planck Institute for Biochemistry, Germany) Dr. Martin Stefan BRANDT (University of Copenhagen, Denmark) Prof. Emmanuel HANERT (President) |
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