Analyzing Trajectory Gaps for Possible Rendezvous: A Summary of Results

Given trajectory data with gaps, we investigate methods to identify possible rendezvous regions. Societal applications include improving maritime safety and regulations. The challenges come from two aspects. If trajectory data are not available around the rendezvous then either linear or shortest-path interpolation may fail to detect the possible rendezvous. Furthermore, the problem is computationally expensive due to the large number of gaps and associated trajectories. In this paper, we first use the plane sweep algorithm as a baseline. Then we propose a new filtering framework using the concept of a space-time grid. Experimental results and case study on real-world maritime trajectory data show that the proposed approach substantially improves the Area Pruning Efficiency over the baseline technique

Unsettling Responsibility in Science Education

This open access book engages with the response-ability of science education to Indigenous ways-of-living-with-Nature. Higgins deconstructs the ways in which the structures of science education—its concepts, categories, policies, and practices—contribute to the exclusion (or problematic inclusion) of Indigenous science while also shaping its ability respond. Herein, he undertakes an unsettling homework to address the ways in which settler colonial logics linger and lurk within sedimented and stratified knowledge-practices, turning the gaze back onto science education. This homework critically inhabits culture, theory, ontology, and history as they relate to the multicultural science education debate, a central curricular location that acts as both a potential entry point and problematic gatekeeping device, in order to (re)open the space of responsiveness towards Indigenous ways-of-knowing-in-being

The Possibility of Big Data Spatio-Temporal Analytics for Understanding Human Behavior and Their Spatial Patterns in Urban Area

13301甲第4630号博士（学術）金沢大学博士論文本文Ful

An analytic solution to the alibi query in the space-time prisms model for moving object data

Moving objects produce trajectories, which are stored in databases by means of finite samples of time-stamped locations. When speed limitations in these sample points are also known, space-time prisms (also called beads) (Pfoser and Jensen 1999, Egenhofer 2003, Miller 2005) can be used to model the uncertainty about an object's location in between sample points. In this setting, a query of particular interest that has been studied in the literature of geographic information systems (GIS) is the alibi query. This boolean query asks whether two moving objects could have physically met. This adds up to deciding whether the chains of space-time prisms (also called necklaces of beads) of these objects intersect. This problem can be reduced to deciding whether two space-time prisms intersect. The alibi query can be seen as a constraint database query. In the constraint database model, spatial and spatiotemporal data are stored by boolean combinations of polynomial equalities and inequalities over the real numbers. The relational calculus augmented with polynomial constraints is the standard first-order query language for constraint databases and the alibi query can be expressed in it. The evaluation of the alibi query in the constraint database model relies on the elimination of a block of three existential quantifiers. Implementations of general purpose elimination algorithms, such as those provided by QEPCAD, Redlog, and Mathematica, are, for practical purposes, too slow in answering the alibi query for two specific space-time prisms. These software packages completely fail to answer the alibi query in the parametric case (i.e., when it is formulated in terms of parameters representing the sample points and speed constraints). The main contribution of this article is an analytical solution to the parametric alibi query, which can be used to answer the alibi query on two specific space-time prisms in constant time (a matter of milliseconds in our implementation). It solves the alibi query for chains of space-time prisms in time proportional to the sum of the lengths of the chains. To back this claim up, we implemented our method in Mathematica alongside the traditional quantifier elimination method. The solutions we propose are based on the geometric argumentation and they illustrate the fact that some practical problems require creative solutions, where at least in theory, existing systems could provide a solution.Fil: Kuijpers, Bart. Hasselt University; BélgicaFil: Grimson, Rafael. Hasselt University; Bélgica. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; ArgentinaFil: Othmans, Walied. Hasselt University; Bélgic

Personal Finance: Economic Citizenship and Financial form in the Contemporary Novel

My dissertation, “Personal Finance: Economic Citizenship and Financial Form in the Contemporary Novel” theorises the novel’s engagement with the post-1970s financialisation of the economy from the ground up. Contrary to the dominant perception of finance as a turn away from the solidity of industry and production in favour of a realm of hyperbolic abstraction, finance capital emerges in this project as a thickly material concern. My writing follows the money, tracking the way that finance is routed through social forms: urban planning, philanthrocapitalism, migrant access to citizenship in global cities, and the fleshy finance of corporate nanotechnology. These material forms do not replace the abstract form of finance capital; rather, the two must be theorised together. Nowhere is this articulated more eloquently than in the contemporary novel. As a form that has emerged to mediate the relationship between the individual and the social, investigating the broadest economic shifts with the sensitive instrument of character, the contemporary novel is both an essential archive and a highly ambivalent response to new financial realities. A second and related claim of “Personal Finance” concerns the complexity of theorising a mode of capital that is both deeply national and rapaciously global. Critical work on finance in the humanities slips swiftly from identifying the lived experience of finance in a US context to arguing that this financialised form of citizenship will play out identically across the globe. Countering this claim informs both the archive and the methodology of my project. My dissertation reads a set of contemporary US novels that trace the felt experiences of the global economy within North America alongside a set of contemporary novels from the wider Anglophone world. Building on recent theoretical work in literature and economics and urban studies, the emphasis of “Personal Finance” throughout is to unsettle hegemonic claims about the financial, the global, and the national through the material and affective archive of the contemporary novel

Obiter Dicta

"Stitched together over five years of journaling, Obiter Dicta is a commonplace book of freewheeling explorations representing the transcription of a dozen notebooks, since painstakingly reimagined for publication. Organized after Theodor Adorno’s Minima Moralia, this unschooled exercise in aesthetic thought—gleefully dilettantish, oftentimes dangerously close to the epigrammatic—interrogates an array of subject matter (although inescapably circling back to the curiously resemblant histories of Western visual art and instrumental music) through the lens of drive-by speculation. Erick Verran’s approach to philosophical inquiry follows the brute-force literary technique of Jacques Derrida to exhaustively favor the material grammar of a signifier over hand-me-down meaning, juxtaposing outer semblances with their buried systems and our etched-in-stone intuitions about color and illusion, shape and value, with lessons stolen from seemingly unrelatable disciplines. Interlarded with extracts of Ludwig Wittgenstein but also Wallace Stevens, Cormac McCarthy as well as Roland Barthes, this cache of incidental remarks eschews what’s granular for the biggest picture available, leaving below the hyper-specialized fields of academia for a bird’s-eye view of their crop circles. Obiter Dicta is an unapologetic experiment in intellectual dot-connecting that challenges much long-standing wisdom about everything from illuminated manuscripts to Minecraft and the evolution of European music with lyrical brevity; that is, before jumping to the next topic.

Eventful gender: an ethnographic exploration of gender knowledge production at international academic conferences

The concept of gender is both celebrated and maligned in academic discourse; gender is credited with opening up or closing down debates, including or excluding concepts and the groups they designate. But how does gender come to mean what it means? This thesis is a deconstructive study of gender, which explores the conceptual negotiations that establish ‘what counts’ as gender. I argue that conceptual work on gender is bound up in political contestations which affect how social identities and processes entailed in thinking about gender are expressed and understood. The study is located in the embodied ‘context’ of international academic knowledge production, where conceptual negotiations cannot rely on familiar understandings of gender. Three national women’s studies association conferences were researched, in the United Kingdom, United States and India. The study used an ethnographic approach which included pre- and post-conference interviews with c.10 participants per conference, and a group meeting; materials collected from the conferences; autoethnographic research on the conferences and my doctoral trajectory. The thesis moves through a cumulative theorisation, which involves four stages of deconstructive analysis derived from Derrida’s oeuvre. The first stage establishes gender as ‘critical concept’; I analyse participants’ conceptual negotiations around what gender is and does. The second stage entails ‘surrounding’ the concept of gender; I use autoethnographic research to explore participants’ and conference delegates’ performative ‘surrounding’ of gender with intersectionality. Thirdly, ‘marking out’ focuses on conference conventions, which are understood in the study as bearing their own performative and citational qualities for the conceptualisation of gender. Finally, in seeking the ‘chink/crevice’ in the concept of gender, I ask if something unexpected can ‘happen’ to gender: an event. The study as a whole theorises ‘eventful gender’ as conceptual work that is inextricable from embodied, situated and mobile analyses of academic practice and knowledge construction and production