The architectures of seeing and going:or, are cities shaped by bodies or minds? And is there a syntax ofspatial cognition?

In my first paper to this Symposium, it was argued that the human cognitive subjectplayed a key part the shaping and working of the city. The key mechanism was thesynchronisation of diachronically experienced (and usually diachronically created)information into higher order pictures of spatial relations, the guiding form for whichwas an abstracted notion of a grid formed by linearised spaces. This notion wasargued to be both perceptual and conceptual, serving at once as an abstractedrepresentation of the space of the city and as a means of solving problems, such asnavigational problems. In this paper, the question addressed is where the notion ofthe ideal grid comes from, why it has the properties it does, and what it has to dowith the real grids of cities, which are commonly of the 'deformed' or 'interrupted'rather than 'ideal' kinds (Hillier, 1996). The answer, it is proposed, lies in the verynature of complex spaces, defining these as spaces in which objects are placed so asto partially block seeing and going, and, in particular, in certain divergences in thelogics of metric and visual accessibility in such spaces. The real grid, deformed orinterrupted, is, it is argued the practical resolution of these divergent logics, and theideal grid its abstract resolution. In both resolutions, however, the resolution is moreon the terms of the visual than the metric, suggesting that cognitive factors are morepowerful than metric factors in shaping the space of the city. The question is thanraised: do people have or acquire the concept of the grid, perhaps as some kind ofperceptual-conceptual invariance of spatial experience in complex spaces, and dothey use it as a model to interact with complex spatial patterns of the urban kind?This possibility is examined against the background of current opinion in the cognitivesciences

The aceToolbox: low-level audiovisual feature extraction for retrieval and classification

In this paper we present an overview of a software platform that has been developed within the aceMedia project, termed the aceToolbox, that provides global and local lowlevel feature extraction from audio-visual content. The toolbox is based on the MPEG-7 eXperimental Model (XM), with extensions to provide descriptor extraction from arbitrarily shaped image segments, thereby supporting local descriptors reflecting real image content. We describe the architecture of the toolbox as well as providing an overview of the descriptors supported to date. We also briefly describe the segmentation algorithm provided. We then demonstrate the usefulness of the toolbox in the context of two different content processing scenarios: similarity-based retrieval in large collections and scene-level classification of still images

Between social physics and phenomenology

In recent years, both phenomenology and social physics, which might be thought of asoccupying the humanistic and scientific poles of urban discourse, have taken an interestin space syntax as a means of furthering their academic aims. Here we suggest that thiscould presage a far deeper theoretical integration of the multi-disciplinary study of citiesthan either currently envisage

Grounding semantics in robots for Visual Question Answering

In this thesis I describe an operational implementation of an object detection and description system that incorporates in an end-to-end Visual Question Answering system and evaluated it on two visual question answering datasets for compositional language and elementary visual reasoning

Semantic mutation testing

This is the Pre-print version of the Article. The official published version can be obtained from the link below - Copyright @ 2011 ElsevierMutation testing is a powerful and flexible test technique. Traditional mutation testing makes a small change to the syntax of a description (usually a program) in order to create a mutant. A test suite is considered to be good if it distinguishes between the original description and all of the (functionally non-equivalent) mutants. These mutants can be seen as representing potential small slips and thus mutation testing aims to produce a test suite that is good at finding such slips. It has also been argued that a test suite that finds such small changes is likely to find larger changes. This paper describes a new approach to mutation testing, called semantic mutation testing. Rather than mutate the description, semantic mutation testing mutates the semantics of the language in which the description is written. The mutations of the semantics of the language represent possible misunderstandings of the description language and thus capture a different class of faults. Since the likely misunderstandings are highly context dependent, this context should be used to determine which semantic mutants should be produced. The approach is illustrated through examples with statecharts and C code. The paper also describes a semantic mutation testing tool for C and the results of experiments that investigated the nature of some semantic mutation operators for C