Machines, Logic and Quantum Physics

Though the truths of logic and pure mathematics are objective and independent of any contingent facts or laws of nature, our knowledge of these truths depends entirely on our knowledge of the laws of physics. Recent progress in the quantum theory of computation has provided practical instances of this, and forces us to abandon the classical view that computation, and hence mathematical proof, are purely logical notions independent of that of computation as a physical process. Henceforward, a proof must be regarded not as an abstract object or process but as a physical process, a species of computation, whose scope and reliability depend on our knowledge of the physics of the computer concerned.Comment: 19 pages, 8 figure

Saving soil for sustainable land use

This paper experiments with some costs-benefit analyses, seeking a balance between soil-take and buildability due to land policy and management. The activities have been carried out inside the MITO lab (Lab for Multimedia Information for Territorial Objects) of the Polytechnic University of Bari. Reports have been produced about the Southern Italian Apulia Region, which is rich in farmland and coastline, often invaded by construction, with a severe loss of nature, a degradation of the soil, landscape, and ecosystem services. A methodological approach to the assessment of sustainability of urban expansion related, on one hand, to "plus values" deriving from the transformation of urban fringes and, on the other hand to the analysis of the transition of land-use, with the aim of "saving soil" against urban sprawl. The loss of natural and agricultural surfaces due to the expanding artificial lands is an unsustainable character of urban development, especially in the manner in which it was carried out in past decades. We try to assess how plus value can be considered "unearned", and to understand if the "land value recapture" can compensate for the negative environmental effects of urban expansion. We measured the transition from farmlands and natural habitat to urbanization with the support of the use of some Geographic Information Systems (GIS) tools, in favor of a new artificial land cover in the region of Apulia, Southern Italy. Data have been collected at the regional scale and at the local level, producing information about land use change and increases of property values due to improvements, referring to the 258 municipalities of the region. Looking at the results of our measurements, we started an interpretation of the driving forces that favor the plus values due to the transition of land-use. Compensation, easements, recapture of plus value, and improvement are, nowadays in Italy, discussed as major land-policy tools for managing environmental and landscape preservation. The interplay between urban economics and environmentally sound regulations reveals some controversial issues in urban governance and nature preservation: perhaps some abstract regulations, conjoined with non-case-oriented urban policies, consider these keywords as the old chemists considered the Philosopher's Stone. The analyses show criticality emerging themes in emblematic cases, studied in some municipal contexts

Revisiting the city of Edo and the National Museum of Western Art in Tokyo : unlimited organisms, between reason and emotion

Creating through mind and emotions / coordenação de Mário S. Ming Kong, Maria do Rosário Monteiro, Maria João Pereira Neto. - Londres : CRC Press, 2022. - P. 139-147.At the beginning of the Edo period (1603-1867), the city of Edo in Japan, which corresponds today to the central area of Tokyo, was the object of a profound urban transformation that was deemed necessary because of the city’s new condition as the country’s political and military center. Tokugawa Ieyasu (1543-1616), the first Shogun of the Edo period and a mentor for said transformation, devised a system of moats that spiraled outwards from Edo Castle and was to continue growing. Today, Tokyo is the city with the largest urban area in the world. In that city, the National Museum of Western Art, designed by Le Corbusier (1887-1965) in 1955 and completed in 1959, was based on the Musée à Croissance Illimitée [Museum of Unlimited Growth], an unrealized proposal the architect had presented in 1939. That museum was organized around a square-shaped nucleus, around which exhibition galleries built on pilotis could be added successively and without limit. This idea of the possible growth of the Tokyo museum was abandoned early on, but the Musée proposal continues to be pertinent. Recognizing the fact that they share structural principles based on possible unlimited growth, this paper proposes revisiting Edo and the National Museum of Western Art in Tokyo, setting out a discussion of the respective creations as organisms that balance reason and emotion

Towards homeostatic architecture: simulation of the generative process of a termite mound construction

This report sets out to the theme of the generation of a ‘living’, homeostatic and self-organizing architectural structure. The main research question this project addresses is what innovative techniques of design, construction and materials could prospectively be developed and eventually applied to create and sustain human-made buildings which are mostly adaptive, self-controlled and self-functioning, without option to a vast supply of materials and peripheral services. The hypothesis is that through the implementation of the biological building behaviour of termites, in terms of collective construction mechanisms that are based on environmental stimuli, we could achieve a simulation of the generative process of their adaptive structures, capable to inform in many ways human construction. The essay explicates the development of the 3-dimensional, agent-based simulation of the termite collective construction and analyzes the results, which involve besides physical modelling of the evolved structures. It finally elucidates the potential of this emerging and adaptive architectural performance to be translated to human practice and thus enlighten new ecological engineering and design methodologies

Staging urban emergence through collective creativity: Devising an outdoor mobile augmented reality tool

The unpredictability of global geopolitical conflicts, economic trends, and impacts of climate change, coupled with an increasing urban population, necessitates a more profound commitment to resilience thinking in urban planning and design. In contrast to top-down planning and designing for sustainability, allowing for emergence to take place seems to contribute to a capacity to better deal with this complex unpredictability, by allowing incremental changes through bottom-up, self-organized adaptation made by diverse actors in the proximity of various social, economical and functional entities in the urban context.The present thesis looks into the processes of creating urban emergence from both theoretical and practical perspectives. The theoretical section of the thesis first looks into the relationship between the processes and the qualities of a compact city. The Japanese city of Tokyo is used as an example of a resilient compact city that continuously emerges through incremental micro-adaptations by individual actors guided by urban rules that ‘let it happen’ without much central control or top-down design of the individual outcomes. The thesis then connects such rule-based emergent processes and the qualities of a compact city to complex adaptive system’s (CAS) theory, emphasizing the value of incremental and individual multiple-stakeholder input. The latter part of the thesis focuses on how to create a platform that can combine the bottom-up, emergent, rule-based planning approaches, and collective creativity based on individual participation and input from the public. This section is dedicated to developing a tool for a collaborative urban design using outdoor mobile augmented reality (MAR) by research-through-design method.The thesis thus has three parts addressing the topics: 1. urban planning processes and resulting urban qualities concerning compact city – i.e., density and diversity; 2. the processes of urban emergence, which generates complexity that renders urban resilience from the urban planning theory perspective; 3. developing a tool for non-expert citizens and other stakeholders to design and visualize an urban neighborhood by simulating the rule-based urban emergence using outdoor MAR. The results include a proposal for a complementary hybrid planning approaches that might approximate the CAS in urban systems with qualities that contribute to urban resiliency. Thereafter, the results describe specifications and design criteria for a tool as a public collaborative design platform using outdoor MAR to promote public participation: Urban CoBuilder. The processes of developing and prototyping such a tool to test various urban concepts concerning identified adaptive urban planning approaches are also presented with an assessment of the MAR tool based on focus group user tests. Future studies need to better include the potential of crowdsourcing public creativity through mass participation using the collaborative design tool and actual integration of these participatory design results in urban policies

Design Outfit An Interdisciplinary Think + Act Tank

The Design Outfit is a real project derived from a conceptual program. The program, or set of concepts from which the project sprang, critically approached three aspects of design practice: I) reality: how design proceeds from initial sketches to finishing touches, with all steps and scales given comparable attention II) collaboration: how designers interface with one another and others throughout a design process III) social awareness: how designers can shape and place their efforts in relation to social significance The project was designed to explore and test these aspects of design. Based at Henninger High, a public Syracuse City school located on the north side, a group of Syracuse University students paired with a group of high school students to lead a design exploration. Their ultimate goal was to design and build an installation at the school, but the process itself was also approached as a product. The first of two semesters consisted primarily of design lessons lead by the Syracuse University students. The collaborative strategy was to engage and teach the high school students while simultaneously extrapolating from discussions the ways in which the school facility and culture operated. From this understanding came the beginnings of a design. In the second semester, Syracuse University students focused their efforts on developing and realizing a design. They interfaced primarily with three parties: the high school community, craft technicians, and the school district bureaucracy. Unexpected turns and barriers became the norm, ultimately leading to behind-schedule production and a minimal chance of the installation being realized in site. The process essentially became the product, and a compilation of text and images recapitulates and critiques the exploration

A review of geometry representation and processing methods for cartesian and multiaxial robot-based additive manufacturing

Nowadays, robot-based additive manufacturing (RBAM) is emerging as a potential solution to increase manufacturing flexibility. Such technology allows to change the orientation of the material deposition unit during printing, making it possible to fabricate complex parts with optimized material distribution. In this context, the representation of parts geometries and their subsequent processing become aspects of primary importance. In particular, part orientation, multiaxial deposition, slicing, and infill strategies must be properly evaluated so as to obtain satisfactory outputs and avoid printing failures. Some advanced features can be found in commercial slicing software (e.g., adaptive slicing, advanced path strategies, and non-planar slicing), although the procedure may result excessively constrained due to the limited number of available options. Several approaches and algorithms have been proposed for each phase and their combination must be determined accurately to achieve the best results. This paper reviews the state-of-the-art works addressing the primary methods for the representation of geometries and the subsequent geometry processing for RBAM. For each category, tools and software found in the literature and commercially available are discussed. Comparison tables are then reported to assist in the selection of the most appropriate approaches. The presented review can be helpful for designers, researchers and practitioners to identify possible future directions and open issues

Urban Air Rights as Market Devices: Exploring Financialization in Taipei Metropolitan Area

This thesis is the first geographical study which critically explores the role of urban air rights - the right to build upwards on and above a land tract – in processes of urban financialization. The thesis highlights the economic lives of air rights in the Taipei Metropolitan Area, Taiwan, showing how they are not only a market-based urban policy and planning tool but are also closely involved in economic processes of making markets, assets, and profits. Three types of urban air rights - Bonus Floor Area (BFA), Transferable Development Rights (TDR) and Incremental Floor Area (IFA) – that are prevalent in urban Taipei are explored in detail. The thesis examines the relations between the proliferation of air rights production and urban financialization through an experimental methodology of ‘following urban air rights’ through the socio-technical operations of their assembly and circulation. It argues that air rights are ‘market devices’ and, as such, they are constitutive of the contingent processes of commodification, marketization and capitalization that amount to urban financialization. Through case studies, the thesis shows how airspaces are commodified and, significantly, how they also become an asset class that is marketized and traded and/or capitalized upon and borrowed against (i.e. leveraged). Moreover, by exploring these processes, the thesis shows how air rights ‘overflow’ into popular urban politics: air rights become a site of struggle over rights to the financialized city. More broadly, the thesis contributes to theoretical debates on urban financialization by examining how the urban-finance nexus is teeming with socio-technical practices. By focusing on air rights as market devices, the thesis provides an analytical grammar for studying how urban air rights constitute urban financialization. It also demonstrates how a methodology of ‘following the air rights’ enables exploration of the multifaceted qualities and multiple markets that air rights configure

A Mobile Robot Project

We are building a mobile robot which will roam around the AI lab observing and later perhaps doing. Our approach to building the robot and its controlling software differs from that used in many other projects in a number of ways. (1) We model the world as three dimensional rather than two. (2) We build no special environment for our robot and insist that it must operate in the same real world that we inhabit. (3) In order to adequately deal with uncertainty of perception and control we build relational maps rather than maps embedded in a coordinate system, and we maintain explicit models of all uncertainties. (4) We explicitly monitor the computational performance of the components of the control system, in order to refine the design of a real time control system for mobile robots based on a special purpose distributed computation engine. (5) We use vision as our primary sense and relegate acoustic sensors to local obstacle detection. (6) We use a new architecture for an intelligent system designed to provide integration of many early vision processes, and robust real-time performance even in cases of sensory overload, failure of certain early vision processes to deliver much information in particular situations, and computation module failure.MIT Artificial Intelligence Laborator