236 research outputs found
The idea of evolution in digital architecture: Toward united ontologies?
Humans have always sought to grasp nature’s working principles and apply acquired intelligence to artefacts since nature has always been the source of inspiration, solution and creativity. For this reason, there is a comprehensive interrelationship between the philosophy of nature and architecture. After Charles Darwin’s revolutionary work, living beings have started to be comprehended as changing, evolving and developing dynamic entities. Evolution theory has been accepted as the interpretive power of biology after several discussions and objections among scientists. In time, the working principles of evolutionary mechanisms have begun to be explained from genetic code to organism and environmental level. Afterwards, simulating nature’s evolutionary logic in the digital interface has become achievable with computational systems’ advancements. Ultimately, architects have begun to utilise evolutionary understanding in design theories and methodologies through computational procedures since the 1990s. Although several studies about technical and pragmatic elements of evolutionary tools in design, there is still little research on the historical, theoretical and philosophical foundations of evolutionary understanding in digital architecture. This paper fills this literature gap by critically reviewing the evolutionary understanding embedded in digital architecture theories and designs since the beginning of the 1990s. The original contribution is the proposed intellectual framework seeking to understand and conceptualise how evolutionary processes were defined in biology and philosophy, then represented through computational procedures, to be finally utilised by architectural designers. The network of references and concepts is deeply connected with the communication between natural processes and their computational simulations. For this reason, another original contribution is the utilisation of theoretical limits and operative principles of computation procedures to shed light on the limitations, shortcomings and potentials of design theories regarding their speculations on the relationship between natural and computational ontologies
Architecture and the creation of worlds
This thesis is an enquiry by creative practice into the academic and aesthetic
(avant-garde) practice of architecture. It explores the notion of the virtual as
pure potentiality following an event, and defines architecture as the site of such
potentiality. (Alain Badiou names event as the moment /encounter which initiates
a radical break from a given situation /state of affairs. There are four types of
event: artistic, political, scientific and amorous).The thesis follows two parallel strands of enquiry. One, into the material
production of the architectural object and topological space, this is titled the
actual; and the other, an investigation into the philosophical and antagonistic
nature of the virtual, this is titled the virtual. The actual deals with the literature
review, methodology, context of study and proposal for (the site of) actual
engagement with theory, including a design element (House of the Chinese
Mantis); while the virtual explores (through a series of five international and
interdisciplinary conference papers) the philosophical problems of emergence.
The 'context of study' in the actual centres around the move from the fetish of
commodities to seduction and concludes with eroticism, while the body of work
in the virtual concentrates on the notions of sovereignty, becoming, and concrete
subjectivity.Following the technological practices of the avant-garde between hypersurface
theory and catalytic formations in architecture, the thesis rejects the claims of
virtual space as the digital space of computer -based design, and of emergence as
mimetic and /or algorithm based design. It argues that the virtual is the
intangible space of creative unfolding following Bergson and Deleuze, but
resists the claim in Deleuze that event is a chance occurring. Also, it resists the
claim in Baudrillard that seduction and /or enchanted simulation are event and
abandons them to focus on the amorous (one of the four events in Badiou). This
creates an inflection in the enquiry, moving the thesis towards Plato and the
Renaissance, and a contemporary resurrection in architecture, of the tragic, as
concrete manifestation of the amorous encounter.The method of inquiry is structured after the nomadic logic of the War Machine
in the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari, and of the revolutionary nature of
fidelity to the scientific event in Badiou, which argues that new knowledge is
created by 'revolutions' and from the anomalies and collaborations which arise
as a result of such 'detours'; it is a strategy justified by the science historians
Feyerabend, Kuhn and Lakatos.The thesis takes the form of two books (the actual and the virtual), and concludes
that the avant-garde practice of architecture, with its infinite potentialities is
distinct from the bureaucratic or State apparatus of building, and that the
commonplace appropriation of the avant-garde by the State, as seen in the
institutional recourse to parametrics, appears unproductive and uncreative with
regard to knowledge
Reflections on organization, emergence, and control in sociotechnical systems
Human and artificial organizations may be described as networks of
interacting parts. Those parts exchange data and control information and, as a
result of these interactions, organizations produce emergent behaviors and
purposes -- traits the characterize "the whole" as "greater than the sum of its
parts". In this chapter it is argued that, rather than a static and immutable
property, emergence should be interpreted as the result of dynamic interactions
between forces of opposite sign: centripetal (positive) forces strengthening
emergence by consolidating the whole and centrifugal (negative) forces that
weaken the social persona and as such are detrimental to emergence. The result
of this interaction is called in this chapter as "quality of emergence". This
problem is discussed in the context of a particular class of organizations:
conventional hierarchies. We highlight how traditional designs produce
behaviors that may severely impact the quality of emergence. Finally we discuss
a particular class of organizations that do not suffer from the limitations
typical of strict hierarchies and result in greater quality of emergence. In
some case, however, these enhancements are counterweighted by a reduced degree
of controllability and verifiability.Comment: Preliminary version of a chapter to appear in a forthcoming book
edited by Robert Macdougall and to be published by Lexington in 201
HasTEE: Programming Trusted Execution Environments with Haskell
Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) are hardware-enforced memory isolation
units, emerging as a pivotal security solution for security-critical
applications. TEEs, like Intel SGX and ARM TrustZone, allow the isolation of
confidential code and data within an untrusted host environment, such as the
cloud and IoT. Despite strong security guarantees, TEE adoption has been
hindered by an awkward programming model. This model requires manual
application partitioning and the use of error-prone, memory-unsafe, and
potentially information-leaking low-level C/C++ libraries.
We address the above with \textit{HasTEE}, a domain-specific language (DSL)
embedded in Haskell for programming TEE applications. HasTEE includes a port of
the GHC runtime for the Intel-SGX TEE. HasTEE uses Haskell's type system to
automatically partition an application and to enforce \textit{Information Flow
Control} on confidential data. The DSL, being embedded in Haskell, allows for
the usage of higher-order functions, monads, and a restricted set of I/O
operations to write any standard Haskell application. Contrary to previous
work, HasTEE is lightweight, simple, and is provided as a \emph{simple security
library}; thus avoiding any GHC modifications. We show the applicability of
HasTEE by implementing case studies on federated learning, an encrypted
password wallet, and a differentially-private data clean room.Comment: To appear in Haskell Symposium 202
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