Real-Time Character Rise Motions

This paper presents an uncomplicated dynamic controller for generating physically-plausible three-dimensional full-body biped character rise motions on-the-fly at run-time. Our low-dimensional controller uses fundamental reference information (e.g., center-of-mass, hands, and feet locations) to produce balanced biped get-up poses by means of a real-time physically-based simulation. The key idea is to use a simple approximate model (i.e., similar to the inverted-pendulum stepping model) to create continuous reference trajectories that can be seamlessly tracked by an articulated biped character to create balanced rise-motions. Our approach does not use any key-framed data or any computationally expensive processing (e.g., offline-optimization or search algorithms). We demonstrate the effectiveness and ease of our technique through example (i.e., a biped character picking itself up from different laying positions)

Eyes that hear. The synesthetic representation of soundspace through architectural photography

This paper investigates the representation of sound phenomena in contemporary architectural photography. This aspect will be highlighted through a phenomenological analysis conducted on the photographs of the Elbphilharmonie Hamburg, designed by Swiss architecture firm Herzog & de Meuron. Focusing our analysis on the aesthetic features of photographs, the aim of stimulating the audience sensorially and emotionally becomes evident. We usually only focus on visual aspects, neglecting the synesthetic effects generated on the observers. Starting from an analysis of the portrayed persons in terms of expressions, gestures, postures and corporeal directions, the goal is to highlight how they change in relation to the building's sound space, and, as a consequence how they are able to influence the perceiver outside the frame. The interpretation of these clues is based on Herman Schmitz's felt body theory and Gernot Böhme's New Aesthetics.Cet essai étudie la représentation du son dans les photographies contemporaines d’architecture. Cela est mis en évidence par une analyse esthétique phénoménologique menée sur les photographies de Elbphilharmonie Hamburg. Si on analyse les caractéristiques esthétiques des photographies d’aujourd’hui, on peut remarquer qu’elles visent à stimuler le public d’un point de vue émotif et sensoriel. Lorsque nous regardons ces images, normalement nous nous concentrons uniquement sur les aspects visuels, en négligeant les effets synesthésiques provoqués. A partir d’une analyse des expressions du visage, des gestes, des postures et des directions corporels des caractères représentés, cet essai veut souligner comment ils changent par rapport à l’espace sonore et en conséquence dans quelle manière ils peuvent influencer le récepteur hors le cadre. L'interprétation de ces indices est inspirée à la théorie de corps-propre de Hermann Schmitz et de la nouvelle esthétique de Gernot Böhm

Toward Kinecting cognition by behaviour recognition-based deep learning and big data

The majority of older people wish to live independently at home as long as possible despite having a range of age-related conditions including cognitive impairment. To facilitate this, there has been an extensive focus on exploring the capability of new technologies with limited success. This paper investigates whether MS Kinect (a motion-based sensing 3-D scanner device) within the MiiHome (My Intelligent Home) project in conjunction with other sensory data, machine learning and big data techniques can assist in the diagnosis and prognosis of cognitive impairment and hence prolong independent living. A pool of Kinect devices and various sensors powered by minicomputers providing internet connectivity are being installed in up to 200 homes. This enables continuous remote monitoring of elderly residents living alone. Passive and off-the-shelf sensor technologies were chosen to implement data acquisition specifically from sources that are part of the fabric of the homes, so that no extra effort is required from the participants. Various constraints including environmental, geometrical and big data were identified and appropriately dealt with. A visualization tool (MAGID) was developed for validation and verification of numerous behavioural activities. Then, a subset of data, from twelve pensioners aged over 65 with age-related cognitive decline and frailty, were collected over a period of 6 months. These data were subjected to several machine learning algorithms (multilayer perceptron neural network, neuro-fuzzy and deep learning) for classification and to extract routine behavioural patterns. These patterns were then analysed further to ascertain any health-related information and their attributes. For the first time, important routine behaviour related to Activities of Daily Living (ADL) of elderly people with cognitive and physical decline has been learnt by machine learning techniques from selected sample data obtained by MS Kinect. Medically important behaviour, e.g. eating, walking, sitting, was best learnt by deep learning with accuracy of 99.30% during training stage and average error rate of 1.83% with maximum of 12.98% during the implementation phase. Observations obtained from the application of the above learnt behaviours are presented as trends over a period of time. These trends, supplemented by other sensory signals, have provided a clearer picture of physical (in)activities (including falls) of the pensioners. The calculated behavioural attributes related to key indicators of health events can be used to model the trajectory of health status related to cognitive decline in a home setting. These results, based on a small number of elderly residents over a short period of time, imply that within the results obtained from the MiiHome project, it is possible to find indicators of cognitive decline. However, further studies are needed for full clinical validation of these indications in conjunction with assessment of cognitive decline of the participants

Depressives and the Scenes of Queer Writing

My dissertation attempts to answer the question: What exactly does a reparative reading look like? The question refers to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick\u27s provocative essay on paranoid and reparative reading practices, in which Sedgwick describes how the hermeneutics of suspicion has become central to a whole range of intellectual projects across the humanities and social sciences. Criticizing this dominant critical mode for its political blindness and unintended replication of repressive social structures, Sedgwick looks for an alternative in what she calls reparative reading . Past attempts to expand on Sedgwick\u27s brief yet suggestive remarks regarding reparative reading have foundered due to a lack of critical language. My dissertation is an attempt to develop this language. Retiring the term reparative , I return to the figure of the depressive within the works of psychoanalyst Melanie Klein and experimental psychologist Silvan Tomkins, as well as Sedgwick herself, and trace the recursive contours of a depressive mode. I demonstrate how such a recursive mode is responsive to its own contingency and changing environment and how it offers alternatives to the normalizing teleologies and assumptions of paranoid critical practices. Experimental in form and method, my dissertation enacts the same depressive mode it purports to describe, ultimately locating the depressive within particular forms, or scenes, of queer writing

Black middle-class neighborhoods in Louisville through multiple lenses.

This dissertation is an articles-based, mixed methods study that analyzes Black middle-class neighborhood attainment in Louisville. Racialized social structure theory is the theoretical framework that is employed to make sense of the adverse positionality of Black middle-class neighborhoods. Racialized social structure theory posits that individuals are placed in racial categories that are hierarchically arranged, which, at the neighborhood level, translates to White and Black householders advancing their material interests in competing ways. These competing interests are asymmetrical in terms of power relations, which means that the neighborhood choices of the Black middle-class are constrained by the routinized ways that the racialized social structure diminishes their claims to middle-class status. The first and second articles primarily utilize the 2016 American Community Survey to compare Black middle-class neighborhood attainment across similarly sized urban areas and to analyze the spatial proximity of Black middle-class households and households considered poor, respectively. These articles find that the segregation levels faced by the Black middle class affect how many Black middle-class households live in prototypical middle-class neighborhoods and show that durable geographical patterns are interwoven with the racial characterizations of neighborhoods, both yielding disadvantages to neighborhoods with growing Black populations. In the third article, the perspectives of middle-class Blacks are brought to the forefront and uncover that a great deal of ownership is expressed by respondents in terms of the home buying process and their neighborhood lives and a relationship is found between familial class background and neighborhood preferences. Overall, Black middle-class neighborhoods in Louisville are socioeconomically heterogeneous. However, this heterogeneity reflects neighborhood choices that are constrained by trade-offs between living in neighborhoods conducive to wealth-building or living in neighborhoods that are less economically advantaged, but allow for more social comfort

Epistemological Insecurity in the Anthropocene

This dissertation analyzes how increased mainstream awareness of climate change and other complex environmental phenomena transforms some of the basic tools we use to understand the world, including notions of agency, evidence, and causality. More specifically, this project highlights numerous contemporary literary and cultural narratives that formally and thematically depict impromptu systems of action and comprehension developed by humans confronting the unique forms of information overload that result from damaged and rapidly changing environments. Following critics like Ulrich Beck, Rob Nixon, and Stacy Alaimo, I suggest our current era of ecological instability and destructive environmental practices dictate what I refer to as epistemological insecurity—a condition in which a subject’s growing awareness of systems degradation coincides with an onslaught of incomprehensibly vast, ever-expanding information about the system itself, rendering the individual subject incapable of making the kinds of risk assessments necessary to effectively navigate their environment. Over four chapters covering works of literature and television from the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, including Thomas Pynchon’s Crying of Lot 49, Lucy Ellmann’s Ducks, Newburyport, the 2019 HBO miniseries Chernobyl, and several recent works of science fiction, I explore the ad hoc epistemic systems humans generate when entangled in material and informational ecosystems. My overarching argument is that as the formidability of unstable material environments becomes increasingly prevalent, it is necessary to consider how our stories, relationships, and the production of knowledge itself are transformed by the often incomprehensible nature of the sprawling social and ecological interconnections that structure our lives. Seeking models for such stories, relationships, and epistemic strategies, my dissertation casts a wide, interdisciplinary net that includes climate prognosticators, energy and information infrastructures, encyclopedias, cybernetics, geopolitics, geoengineering proposals, and conspiracy theories to engage with an array of diverse approaches to epistemological breakdown amidst destabilized environments