We are part of the show "Le Saviez vous ?" on France 3 !

Shortly after defending our thesis, Nico was contacted by the French TV channel France 3, who invited us to participate in their program "Le Saviez-vous ?". We were obviously not going to miss such a great opportunity. The show was filmed a few days ago, and will be broadcast on February 3rd, 2023 on France 3 Lorraine. It will also be available in replay on their website!

In this article, we will tell you how it happened, and the different steps of preparation of the show!

First contacts

After the first contact with the journalist, we talked with the Inria communication team to ask for advice. A second call was scheduled with France 3 to prepare more precisely the content of the interview. During this thirty-minute call with Katia Schmitt, who will animate the program, we discussed different subjects that could appear in the interview. Our interlocutors had read an article in Vosges Matin that mentioned Nico's background and the VirtualSociety project. They then discussed many topics from this article, such as Nicolas' school cursus, thesis funding, robotics, artificial intelligence, and, of course, VirtualSociety.

Preparing the show

With a list of about ten topics to talk about, we worked on the answers we could give to the different questions we had imagined. The difficulty is not so much to answer, but to be clear and extremely concise, since the show lasts only 6 minutes 20! So we thought long and hard about some of the potential questions, including artificial intelligence, in order to provide answers that were both short, easy to understand and interesting. Nico even met with one of his former professors and internship supervisor to discuss the vulgarization of artificial intelligence, and asked different people in our research lab for their opinions on his answers.

The D-day

On the shooting day, we went to the France Television studio with Jimmy and Virginie, who is in communication department of Inria. Once we arrived and were introduced, we went through the make-up before finally arriving at the set of the show. The team welcomes us very nicely and explains the process.

We start by re-discussing the topics; finally, artificial intelligence and the PhD will not be part of the questions. Then, we will do the interview twice, once to practice, and again to shoot. After the first one, the journalist suggests that we also remove the part about robotics, in order to focus totally on VirtualSociety, and thus have a simpler message. We then move on to the real shoot, with questions that were quite different from the previous rehearsal. Nico was a bit stressed, but 6 minutes goes by very quickly.

Even if the exercise was not easy, we would like to thank very warmly Katia Schmitt, the journalist, who was very welcoming and who really did everything to help us to talk about our project in the best way. The idea of the show is to highlight different projects, and the team's willingness to help the guests talk about their field is really noticeable!

After that, let's go to the make-up removal and back to the lab to... go to the cafeteria and continue working on VirtualSociety !

We hope you'll like the result (and we will too :D).