Quantifying aesthetics of visual design applied to automatic design

In today\u27s Instagram world, with advances in ubiquitous computing and access to social networks, digital media is adopted by art and culture. In this dissertation, we study what makes a good design by investigating mechanisms to bring aesthetics of design from realm of subjection to objection. These mechanisms are a combination of three main approaches: learning theories and principles of design by collaborating with professional designers, mathematically and statistically modeling good designs from large scale datasets, and crowdscourcing to model perceived aesthetics of designs from general public responses. We then apply the knowledge gained in automatic design creation tools to help non-designers in self-publishing, and designers in inspiration and creativity. Arguably, unlike visual arts where the main goals may be abstract, visual design is conceptualized and created to convey a message and communicate with audiences. Therefore, we develop a semantic design mining framework to automatically link the design elements, layout, color, typography, and photos to linguistic concepts. The inferred semantics are applied to a design expert system to leverage user interactions in order to create personalized designs via recommendation algorithms based on the user\u27s preferences

can we measure the beauty of an image

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Towards Learning Representations in Visual Computing Tasks

abstract: The performance of most of the visual computing tasks depends on the quality of the features extracted from the raw data. Insightful feature representation increases the performance of many learning algorithms by exposing the underlying explanatory factors of the output for the unobserved input. A good representation should also handle anomalies in the data such as missing samples and noisy input caused by the undesired, external factors of variation. It should also reduce the data redundancy. Over the years, many feature extraction processes have been invented to produce good representations of raw images and videos. The feature extraction processes can be categorized into three groups. The first group contains processes that are hand-crafted for a specific task. Hand-engineering features requires the knowledge of domain experts and manual labor. However, the feature extraction process is interpretable and explainable. Next group contains the latent-feature extraction processes. While the original feature lies in a high-dimensional space, the relevant factors for a task often lie on a lower dimensional manifold. The latent-feature extraction employs hidden variables to expose the underlying data properties that cannot be directly measured from the input. Latent features seek a specific structure such as sparsity or low-rank into the derived representation through sophisticated optimization techniques. The last category is that of deep features. These are obtained by passing raw input data with minimal pre-processing through a deep network. Its parameters are computed by iteratively minimizing a task-based loss. In this dissertation, I present four pieces of work where I create and learn suitable data representations. The first task employs hand-crafted features to perform clinically-relevant retrieval of diabetic retinopathy images. The second task uses latent features to perform content-adaptive image enhancement. The third task ranks a pair of images based on their aestheticism. The goal of the last task is to capture localized image artifacts in small datasets with patch-level labels. For both these tasks, I propose novel deep architectures and show significant improvement over the previous state-of-art approaches. A suitable combination of feature representations augmented with an appropriate learning approach can increase performance for most visual computing tasks.Dissertation/ThesisDoctoral Dissertation Computer Science 201

2009-2010 Course Catalog

2009-2010 Course Catalo

Creating Through Mind and Emotions

The texts presented in Proportion Harmonies and Identities (PHI) Creating Through Mind and Emotions were compiled to establish a multidisciplinary platform for presenting, interacting, and disseminating research. This platform also aims to foster the awareness and discussion on Creating Through Mind and Emotions, focusing on different visions relevant to Architecture, Arts and Humanities, Design and Social Sciences, and its importance and benefits for the sense of identity, both individual and communal. The idea of Creating Through Mind and Emotions has been a powerful motor for development since the Western Early Modern Age. Its theoretical and practical foundations have become the working tools of scientists, philosophers, and artists, who seek strategies and policies to accelerate the development process in different contexts

Design as research in architecture

info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Modern building reuse : documentation, maintenance, recovery and renewal

Index “Foreword” by Vincenzo Riso / The definition of the Field “Two or three things I know about conservation of modern architecture” by Benedetto di Cristina / “Some considerations on the preservation of 20th century architectural heritage” by Teresa Ferreira / “The Architectural Press photographs at the core of the modern architecture paradigms, UK 1950/1970” by Paulo Catrica / “Intervening in modern architecture: a design theme and a research problema” [EN e PT] by José Miguel Rodrigues / “Design as Research in Architecture” [EN e PT] by Pedro Bandeira / “Inspection and condition assessment: Concepts, methods and tools” [EN e PT] by Paulo J. S. Cruz / “Architecture of the 20th century in Seine-Saint-Denis: an emerging heritage” [EN e FR] by Bruno Mengoli / “A conversation on the habitability of the domestic space. The client, the architect, the inhabitant and the house” [EN e PT] by Ana Luísa Rodrigues / “Improving the energy efficiency of existing building envelope” By Peter Erlacher / Marianna Marchesi / “The Tugendhat House between craft tradition and technological innovation. Preservation as sustainable building policy” [EN e PT] by Ivo Hammer / “Cost-effective rehabilitation of the building envelope of a housing development. From diagnosis to completion of the Work” [EN e PT] by Vasco Freitas, Pedro Gonçalves & Sara Stingl de Freitas / “Restoration of Alvar Aalto’s Library in Vyborg” by Maija Kairamo / “Vedute, abstract from «Subtopia: Photography Architecture and the New Towns programme»” by Paulo CatricaThe volume gathers the transcriptions of a great part of the lectures given within the second edition of the Doctoral Programme in Architecture of EAUM of the academic year 2011-12. Under the motto Architecture: Sustainability, Conservation and Technology and considering all the didactic intentions, we thought about Modern Building Reuse: Documentation, Maintenance, Recovery and Renewal as a specific thematic line, which could embody the current changes in architectural education and professional practice, and their significant impact on the way architectural knowledge is today developed

Images and Sequences: A Demonstration Project on the Use of Photography as a Tool for Academic Motivation in Logan Junior High School

This is a report of an after-school, non-credit, photo-enrichment course that was developed and offered to students at the Logan Junior High School during the period March 30 through May 6, 1981. The artistic intent of this course was to teach students how to see with a camera, recording images on transparency film, and later arranging transparencies into idea-development or story-telling sequences. The educational intent was to see if such a course would motivate students to perform better in other classes and improve their school relationships in general. The course was of too short a duration to develop any hard facts to support an affirmative answer to the question of educational (behavioral) intent. This is not to say that the course did not motivate such changes, or that the opposite was proven. There was no evidence of improved, static or degraded behavioral states. There was, however, evidence that teacher/ administrator/ counselor biases had something to do with a student\u27s perceived performance. Moreover, there was a degree of unanimity in this respect. Because of the search for motivational factors, I re-discovered Seymour Halleck\u27s construct of stylism, and found it to be applicable to the student population of the project to a large degree. Again, and because this was not a sought-for answer, but a matter of serendipity, I developed no materials to justify the extent, much less the existence of such an observation. And so it is just that: an observation, and probably the most significant finding of the study. Because of the significance of stylism, I have developed the literature search to explain it, and the report of the project to demonstrate this construct in action. It may be that by coming to terms with this construct, educators can develop a protocol for teaching students previously considered to be an educational enigma. Suggestions to this end are offered in the conclusions