Community-driven approaches to open source archaeological imaging

No abstract available

Can Computers Create Art?

This essay discusses whether computers, using Artificial Intelligence (AI), could create art. First, the history of technologies that automated aspects of art is surveyed, including photography and animation. In each case, there were initial fears and denial of the technology, followed by a blossoming of new creative and professional opportunities for artists. The current hype and reality of Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools for art making is then discussed, together with predictions about how AI tools will be used. It is then speculated about whether it could ever happen that AI systems could be credited with authorship of artwork. It is theorized that art is something created by social agents, and so computers cannot be credited with authorship of art in our current understanding. A few ways that this could change are also hypothesized.Comment: to appear in Arts, special issue on Machine as Artist (21st Century

Dynamic response of full-scale sandwich composite structures subject to air-blast loading

Glass-fibre reinforced polymer (GFRP) sandwich structures (1.6 m × 1.3 m) were subject to 30 kg charges of C4 explosive at stand-off distances 8–14 m. Experiments provide detailed data for sandwich panel response, which are often used in civil and military structures, where air-blast loading represents a serious threat. High-speed photography, with digital image correlation (DIC), was employed to monitor the deformation of these structures during the blasts. Failure mechanisms were revealed in the DIC data, confirmed in post-test sectioning. The experimental data provides for the development of analytical and computational models. Moreover, it underlines the importance of support boundary conditions with regards to blast mitigation. These findings were analysed further in finite element simulations, where boundary stiffness was, as expected, shown to strongly influence the panel deformation. In-depth parametric studies are ongoing to establish the hierarchy of the various factors that influence the blast response of sandwich composite structures

Control over Contemporary Photography: A Tangle of Copyright, Right of Publicity, and the First Amendment

Professional photographers who make photographs of people negotiate a tense relationship between their own creative freedoms and the right of their subjects to control their images. This negotiation formally takes place over the terrain of copyright, right of publicity, and the First Amendment. Informally, photographers describe implied understandings and practice norms guiding their relationship with subjects, infrequently memorialized in short, boilerplate contractual releases. This short essay explores these formal and informal practices described by contemporary professional photographers. Although the evidence for this essay comes from professional photographic practice culled from interviews with contemporary photographers, the analysis of the evidence speaks to the more general challenge of balancing privacy and freedom of expression in the digital age. At the outset of this essay, I describe the scope of the empirical project and the process of collecting data. Then, in three parts, I describe how photographers simultaneously collaborate with and control the subjects of the photographs they make in order to assert themselves as civic storytellers with broad free speech rights in our digital age. I identify a conflict between photographers and their subjects, which serves to maximize the aesthetic freedom of photographers at the expense of their subjects. This conflict resolves in the photographers’ accounts through their caretaking role over their photographs on behalf of the subjects themselves. I conclude with a brief explanation of why it matters to better understand these professional photographic norms in our Internet age when free speech and privacy are increasingly in conflict

W. M. Keck Foundation 2010 Annual Report

Contains board chair's message, 2010 program highlights and grantee profiles, grants list, financial statements, and lists of board members and committee members

ROTOЯ Review

The ROTOЯ partnership between Huddersfield Art Gallery and the University of Huddersfield was established in 2011. ROTOЯ I and II was a programme of eight exhibitions and accompanying events that commenced in 2012 and was completed in 2013. ROTOЯ continues into 2014 and the programme for 2015 and 2016 is already firmly underway. In brief, the aim of ROTOЯ is to improve the cultural vitality of Kirklees, expand audiences, and provide new ways for people to engage with and understand academic research in contemporary art and design. Why ROTOЯ , Why Now? As Vice Chancellors position their institutions’ identities and future trajectories in context to national and international league tables, Professor John Goddard1 proposes the notion of the ‘civic’ university as a ‘place embedded’ institution; one that is committed to ‘place making’ and which recognises its responsibility to engaging with the public. The civic university has deep institutional connections to different social, cultural and economic spheres within its locality and beyond. A fundamental question for both the university sector and cultural organisations alike, including local authority, is how the many different articulations of public engagement and cultural leadership which exist can be brought together to form one coherent, common language. It is critical that we reach out and engage the community so we can participate in local issues, impact upon society, help to forge well-being and maintain a robust cultural economy. Within the lexicon of public centered objectives sits the Arts Council England’s strategic goals, and those of the Arts and Humanities Research Council – in particular its current Cultural Value initiative. What these developments reveal is that art and design education and professional practice, its projected oeuvre as well as its relationship to cultural life and public funding, is now challenged with having to comprehensively audit its usefulness in financially austere times. It was in the wake of these concerns coming to light, and of the 2010 Government Spending Review that ROTOЯ was conceived. These issues and the discussions surrounding them are not completely new. Research into the social benefits of the arts, for both the individual and the community, was championed by the Community Arts Movement in the 1960s. During the 1980s and ‘90s, John Myerscough and Janet Wolff, amongst others, provided significant debate on the role and value of the arts in the public domain. What these discussions demonstrated was a growing concern that the cultural sector could not, and should not, be understood in terms of economic benefit alone. Thankfully, the value of the relationships between art, education, culture and society is now recognised as being far more complex than the reductive quantification of their market and GDP benefits. Writing in ‘Art School (Propositions for the 21st Century)’, Ernesto Pujol proposes:‘…it is absolutely crucial that art schools consider their institutional role in support of democracy. The history of creative expression is linked to the history of freedom. There is a link between the state of artistic expression and the state of democracy.’ When we were approached by Huddersfield Art Gallery to work collaboratively on an exhibition programme that could showcase academic staff research, one of our first concerns was to ask the question, how can we really contribute to cultural leadership within the town?’ The many soundbite examples of public engagement that we might underline within our annual reports or website news are one thing, but what really makes a difference to a town’s cultural identity, and what affects people in their daily lives? With these questions in mind we sought a distinctive programme within the muncipal gallery space, that would introduce academic research in art, design and architecture beyond the university in innovative ways

Focus Is All You Need: Loss Functions For Event-based Vision

Event cameras are novel vision sensors that output pixel-level brightness changes ("events") instead of traditional video frames. These asynchronous sensors offer several advantages over traditional cameras, such as, high temporal resolution, very high dynamic range, and no motion blur. To unlock the potential of such sensors, motion compensation methods have been recently proposed. We present a collection and taxonomy of twenty two objective functions to analyze event alignment in motion compensation approaches (Fig. 1). We call them Focus Loss Functions since they have strong connections with functions used in traditional shape-from-focus applications. The proposed loss functions allow bringing mature computer vision tools to the realm of event cameras. We compare the accuracy and runtime performance of all loss functions on a publicly available dataset, and conclude that the variance, the gradient and the Laplacian magnitudes are among the best loss functions. The applicability of the loss functions is shown on multiple tasks: rotational motion, depth and optical flow estimation. The proposed focus loss functions allow to unlock the outstanding properties of event cameras.Comment: 29 pages, 19 figures, 4 table