08 August 2007

Back from Scifoo 2007

First of all: What is SCIFOO ? Forget about all those definitions about 'unconference' or 'science', here is the non-official definition: Scifoo is an event where you're invited and that just makes jealous all your friends and colleagues ! And it just works as I don't have any more friends and my colleagues hate me. A few people have been to Scifoo twice but I hate them :-)

Scifoo 2007: webcam mosaic

Many things have already been said on the blogosphere about the event: see here, here or here and I just can say that it was GREAT (You're JEALOUS, I KNOW !)!! :-) I felt so small beside all those great minds, It was really intimidating.

I want to thank again Timo Hannay for the invitation and my boss Philippe Gesnouin for paying the trip.

Thanks also to Duncan, Deepak , Euan, Richard, Attila, and some other... (it was nice to put a name on your faces !) for trying on making me speak about myself :-) The tent was also too noisy: as a French, is was really difficult to understand or speak with the people there.

The fame is something relative: I didn't know who was Martha Steward, nor Freeman Dyson, nor James Randi.

The presentations I really liked:
- James Randi : The One Million Dollar Paranormal Challenge
- Lincoln Stein : James Watson's Personal Genome Sequence
- Jonathan Eisen: The Human Commensal Flora
- HowToons.
- Photosynth
- Freebase
- (...)

Strangely, I received a lot of positive feedback about my drawings while it was just some quick doodles. I haven't been drawing for a long time and this gave me the desire to go back to my drawing board, so may be this summer I will draw some scientits'portraits ... (just women, this is far more pleasant !)

OK, and now ladies and gentlemen, here are the latest cartoons I drew during Scifoo.

scifoo12.jpeg


scifoo13.jpeg
see also
Eva's talk at TED


scifoo14.jpeg


scifoo15.jpeg


scifoo16.jpeg


scifoo17.jpeg


scifoo18.jpeg


scifoo19.jpeg


scifoo20.jpeg


scifoo21.jpeg


scifoo22.jpeg
.. but that was not the first time I was on the cover of Nature




scifoo24.jpeg


scifoo25.jpeg


At Google, the toilets contain some documentation about java programming
scifoo23.jpeg


scifoo26.jpeg


scifoo27.jpeg


scifoo28.jpeg


The power of the CUBE
scifoo29.jpeg

4 comments:

Paul Guermonprez said...

i'm jalous too (and i work for intel ...)

Anonymous said...

BooHoo!

You're right, it does make me jealous that I wasn't invited. Especially reading all the posts about how good it was.

I want to have a conversation about junit in the toilets!

Keith said...

I love your drawings!

Anonymous said...

Great job, Pierre! I LOVE the one about Craig Venter vs. Martha Stewart, and of course the last one.

I would be very much interested in hearing your opinion (as a relatively 'normal' guy) meeting all the self-proclaimed visionaries who think they can change the world. This at least was my impression after reading all the blog posts on scifoo.