84 research outputs found

    Image Processing Using FPGAs

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    This book presents a selection of papers representing current research on using field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) for realising image processing algorithms. These papers are reprints of papers selected for a Special Issue of the Journal of Imaging on image processing using FPGAs. A diverse range of topics is covered, including parallel soft processors, memory management, image filters, segmentation, clustering, image analysis, and image compression. Applications include traffic sign recognition for autonomous driving, cell detection for histopathology, and video compression. Collectively, they represent the current state-of-the-art on image processing using FPGAs

    Negative space of things: a practice-based research approach to understand the role of objects in the Internet of Things

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    This is a practice-based research thesis situated in the research context of the ‘Internet of Things’, and critiques contemporary theoretical discourse related to the 21st century turn of connecting everyday objects to the World Wide Web. In the last decade we have seen the ‘Internet of Things’ articulated predominately through three commercial design fictions, each a response to the shift towards pervasive”, “ubiquitous” (Weiser 1991), or “context-ware” (Schilit, 1994) computing; where we inhabit spaces with objects capable of sensing, recording and relaying data about themselves and their environments. Through reflecting upon these existing design fictions, through a new combination of theories and practice-based research that embodies them, this thesis proposes a recovery to understanding the role of objects in the ‘Internet of Things’, which this author believes has been lost since its conception in the mid 2000s. In 2000, HP Labs presented Cooltown, which addressed what HP identified as the ‘convergence of Web technology, wireless networks, and portable client devices provides’. Cooltown’s primary discourse was to provide ‘new design opportunities for computer/communications systems, through an infrastructure to support "web presence" for people, places and things.’ (Anders 1998; Barton & Kindberg 2002). IBM’s Smarter Planet followed this in 2008 and shifted importance from the act of connecting objects to understanding the value of data as it flows between these objects in a network (Castells 1996; Sterling 2005; Latour 2005). Finally, Cisco presented The Internet of Everything in 2012 and moved the argument on one stage further, identifying that the importance of connected objects lies in the sum of their communication across silos of networks, where data can provide potential insight from which you can improve services (Bleecker 2006). Despite these design and theoretical fictions, the affordances of the Internet of Things first proposed in the mid 2000s has regressed from data to product, driven largely by unchanged discourse argued by those designers at its conception and also the enticement of being the next Google acquisition; instead of pigeons reporting on the environmental conditions of a city (Da Costa 2006), we have thermostats controllable from your smartphone (www.scottishpower.co.uk/connect). Therefore the aim of this thesis is to re-examine the initial potential of the Internet of Things, which is tested through a series of design interventions as research for art and design, (produced as part of my EPSRC funded doctoral studies on the Tales of Things and Electronic Memory research project and also whilst employed as a research assistant on two EPSRC funded research programmes of work Sixth Sense Transport, and The Connected High Street), to understand how we use data to allow an alternative discourse to emerge in order to recover the role of a networked object, rather than producing prototypical systems

    A forecast of space technology, 1980 - 2000

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    The future of space technology in the United States during the period 1980-2000 was presented, in relation to its overall role within the space program. Conclusions were drawn and certain critical areas were identified. Three different methods to support this work were discussed: (1) by industry, largely without NASA or other government support, (2) partially by industry, but requiring a fraction of NASA or similar government support, (3) currently unique to space requirements and therefore relying almost totally on NASA support. The proposed work was divided into the following areas: (1) management of information (acquisition, transfer, processing, storing) (2) management of energy (earth-to-orbit operations, space power and propulsion), (3) management of matter (animate, inanimate, transfer, storage), (4) basic scientific resources for technological advancement (cryogenics, superconductivity, microstructures, coherent radiation and integrated optics technology)

    Technology 2004, Vol. 2

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    Proceedings from symposia of the Technology 2004 Conference, November 8-10, 1994, Washington, DC. Volume 2 features papers on computers and software, virtual reality simulation, environmental technology, video and imaging, medical technology and life sciences, robotics and artificial intelligence, and electronics

    Technology 2002: the Third National Technology Transfer Conference and Exposition, Volume 1

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    The proceedings from the conference are presented. The topics covered include the following: computer technology, advanced manufacturing, materials science, biotechnology, and electronics

    Phase-Change Meta-Devices for Tuneable Bandpass Filtering in the Infrared

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    Tuneable light filters, especially those which are compact and fast to tune, are essential in a wide range of technologies, especially for multispectral imaging applications. However, state-of-the-art approaches to create such filters all possess drawbacks, with many wavelength regions poorly served. This thesis attempts to address this problem by combining metasurfaces which support extraordinary optical transmission (ultra-thin band-pass filters) with chalcogenide phase-change materials (adding dynamic tuneability). The optical properties of phase-change materials are very different in their amorphous and crystalline states and switching between such states can be rapidly controlled via thermal excitations. In this work nine different phase-change materials, including alloys of GeTe, GeSbTe, GeSbSeTe and GaLaS, were optically and elementally characterised and assessed for their application-specific suitability. The resulting materials data was used to computationally design and evaluate a range of tuneable infrared filter device designs both optically and thermally. These filters exhibit high transmission (≈80% at best) with large spectral tuning ranges of approximately +50% relative to their shortest wavelength; this range is sufficient to cover entire atmospheric transmission windows. This is the first such combination of phase-change materials and extraordinary optical transmission for application from the visible through to long-wave infrared (14 ÎŒm) regions of the spectrum. A rigorous computational study was conducted to produce comprehensive design guidelines for such filters, and confirm the viability of in-situ electrical switching. Several filter devices were experimentally fabricated, and the viability for a number of applications, including tuneable filtering, chemical sensing and infrared displays, was investigated and confirmed computationally.Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC

    Video Games for Earthly Survival: Gaming in the Post-Anthropocene

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    In this paper I evaluate the sixth mass extinction on planet Earth, and its implications for the medium of the video game. The Anthropocene, a term popularized by the end of the 20th century to refer to the geological impact of human beings on planet Earth, assumes temporal development, a ‘before’ and ‘after’ the appearance of humankind. The ‘after’ period, the Post-Anthropocene, is repeatedly claimed by scientists to be approaching within the next few decades, as over-consumption is destroying vital resources of the planet. Allegedly, the sixth mass extinction in the history of our planet is already unfolding, and might determine the disappearance of life from Earth and, as far as we know, from the Universe and beyond. Video games responding to the arrival of the future is not just imagined in fictional settings (e.g. The Legenda of Zelda: Majora’s Mask, Nintendo, 2000; Horizon: Zero Dawn, Guerrilla Games, 2017), but within game design. In the last decade an increasing number of video games requiring limited human intervention has been released. Incremental/ idle games such as Cookie Clicker (Julien Thiennot, 2013) and AdVenture Capitalist (Hyper Hippo Productions, 2014) require an initial input from the player to start, and then keep playing themselves in the background operations of a laptop or smartphone. Virtual environments can be entirely designed by algorithms, as experimented by Hello Games for No Man’s Sky (2016). Artificial Intelligence is also used to play games. Screeps, a massive-multiplayer online game, requires players to program an AI that will play the game in their place, and which will “live within the game even while you are offline” (Screeps Team, 2014). Ghost cars in racing games replace the human actor with a representation of their performance. The same concept is further explored by the Drivatar of the Forza Motorsport series (Microsoft Studios, 2005-2017), which simulates the driving style of the player and competes online against other AI-controlled cars. These are only some of the examples that suggest that human beings are becoming peripheral in the act of playing games. In short, it is probably becoming ‘easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of gaming’. While studies on games with no players, and on the non-human side of gaming, have been proposed in the past, my presentation takes a non-normative and non-systemic approach to the study of games for the Post-Anthropocene. I am concerned with the creative potential of the paradoxes, spoofs, and contradictions opened by games that take Man/Anthropos as being no longer at the centre of ‘interaction’, ‘fun’, and many other mythological aspects of digital gaming. Nonhuman gaming questions the historical, political, ecological and even geological situatedness of our knowledge on games and gamers, interaction and passivity, life and death

    The Paranoiac-Critical Method of Reflectance Transformation Imaging

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    A performative talk examining Reflectance Transformation Imaging (RTI), an open source computational photographic process that is transforming methodologies in archaeology and heritage conservation for its ability to interactively re-light artefacts within a virtual hemisphere of illumination and extrude a digital topography that is hyper-legible in space-time, from its contemporary application in facial recognition via Bertrand Tavernier's 1980 science fiction film La Mort en Direct and a return of the death mask through digital extrusion, ultimately locating a progenitor of the heightened objectivity promised by RTI paradoxically in Surrealist photography and the fugitive facialities of Salvador Dali's Paranoiac-Critical Method. As emerging imaging technologies such as RTI are seen to open novel ways of extracting latent data from historical artefacts, reassembling objects of study in a new (virtual) light, collateral opportunities provided by these technologies to re-enter archival still and moving image recordings inadvertently recalibrate their spatio-temporal ground and destabilise their indexical reading through an excessive production of new traces and signs. If methodologies can be seen to play a significant role in constructing their objects of study, then emerging computational imaging operations such as RTI have their own subjectivities to disclose: In performing a media archaeology of this digital process, the talk proposes that we not only narrate the subjects of our study but the very tools of investigation themselves

    Study of the automated bioliogical laboratory project definition. Volume III - System engineering studies Final report, 10 Aug. 1964 - 10 Aug. 1965

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    Systems engineering studies for automated biological laboratory for exploration of life on Mar
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