Mediated city: Annual review 2012

The research projects under Mediated City explore questions that traverse through various disciplines to create new knowledge. Here, design catalyses changes in people’s practices to cross boundary domains, such as art, business, geospatial science, interaction design and creative writing. Common themes under Mediated City are:• Activating public engagement in social, environmental and political issues• Creating spaces for dialogue and diversity• Altering our perception and relationship of place• Making histories accessible and meaningful in today’s world.This report documents the 2012 research activities for Mediated City including symposia, conferences, workshops, exhibitions, prototypes, and scholarly outputs including books, book chapters, conference papers, presentations, and journal articles.&nbsp

In quest of code

Architects who apply their generative modelling and scripting skills for creating virtual and prototypical spaces through the usage of algorithms and bespoke coding are increasingly confronted with an application in the real material world. The article suggests computational design strategies and two different architectural and urban prototypes for an era in which intelligent material, robotic assistants, smart geometries, changing human habitat converge with demographic, cultural and natural earth data to govern a global rethinking of socio-architectural ecologies. Since the beginning of humankind our ecosystem planet earth has served as feeding ground and shelter. Civilisation and industrialisation have triggered a verification of territory, ownership, economic wealth and power. Henceforth ethical rules, societal regulation and intuitive values were partly overridden and replaced. Long-distant transport vehicles such as cargo ships and trains allowed for accelerating the mixing up of goods and technologies. Architects solved industrial and infrastructural problems with new ideas and emerging building types; shaping urban and peripheral environments. A great idea manifested through extensive exchange of cultures and knowledge - however, strangely enough climaxed in an ultimate exploitation of our natural resources. A situation we can hardly understand or handle. As a result we are facing a situation of re-scripting our human, urban and architectural ecological system. Thus the article touches upon this very shift starting in the 18th century traversing through the implementation of the Internet, to regulate our physical world and data-autobahns filled with informing bits and bytes. The question is, which questions to ask for the best solution we can offer.Architekten, die ihre generativen Modellierungs- und Skripting-Fähigkeiten zur Erstellung virtueller und prototypischer Räume durch den Einsatz von Algorithmen und maßgeschneiderter Codierung anwenden, werden zunehmend mit einer Anwendung in der realen materiellen Welt konfrontiert. Die Autorin präsentiert computergestützte Entwurfsstrategien an zwei architektonische und urbane Prototypen für eine Ära vor, in der intelligentes Material, Roboterassistenten und sich ändernder menschlicher Lebensraum mit demographischen, kulturellen und natürlichen Geodaten konvergieren, um ein globales Umdenken sozialarchitektonischer Ökologien zu steuern. Seit dem Beginn der Menschheit dient unser Ökosystem Planet Erde als Nahrungsgrund und Zufluchtsort. Zivilisation und Industrialisierung haben Decetten von Territorium, Eigentum, wirtschaftlichem Reichtum und Macht ausgelöst. Fortan wurden ethische Regeln, gesellschaftliche Regulierung und intuitive Werte teilweise außer Kraft gesetzt und ersetzt. Fernverkehrsfahrzeuge wie Frachtschiffe und Züge ermöglichten eine beschleunigte Vermischung von Gütern und Technologien. Architekten lösen industrielle und infrastrukturelle Probleme mit neuen Ideen und neuen Gebäudetypen; Gestaltung städtischer und peripherer Umgebungen. Eine großartige Idee, die sich in einem ausgedehnten Austausch von Kulturen und Wissen manifestierte, endete seltsamerweise in einer ultimativen Ausbeutung unserer natürlichen Ressourcen. Eine Situation, die wir kaum verstehen oder handhaben können. Als Ergebnis stehen wir vor der Frage, wie wir unser menschliches, urbanes und architektonisches Ökosystem umgestalten. Der Artikel greift diese Verschiebung auf

Mapping Topographic Structure in White Matter Pathways with Level Set Trees

Fiber tractography on diffusion imaging data offers rich potential for describing white matter pathways in the human brain, but characterizing the spatial organization in these large and complex data sets remains a challenge. We show that level set trees---which provide a concise representation of the hierarchical mode structure of probability density functions---offer a statistically-principled framework for visualizing and analyzing topography in fiber streamlines. Using diffusion spectrum imaging data collected on neurologically healthy controls (N=30), we mapped white matter pathways from the cortex into the striatum using a deterministic tractography algorithm that estimates fiber bundles as dimensionless streamlines. Level set trees were used for interactive exploration of patterns in the endpoint distributions of the mapped fiber tracks and an efficient segmentation of the tracks that has empirical accuracy comparable to standard nonparametric clustering methods. We show that level set trees can also be generalized to model pseudo-density functions in order to analyze a broader array of data types, including entire fiber streamlines. Finally, resampling methods show the reliability of the level set tree as a descriptive measure of topographic structure, illustrating its potential as a statistical descriptor in brain imaging analysis. These results highlight the broad applicability of level set trees for visualizing and analyzing high-dimensional data like fiber tractography output

Monitoring and Presenting Energy Consumption to Increase WPI Sustainability Efforts

The purpose of this project was to develop a proposal for the implementation of an Energy Monitoring Dashboard at Worceste

Economic modeling of carbon dioxide integrated pipeline network for enhanced oil recovery and geologic sequestration in the Texas Gulf Coast region

Naturally occurring CO2 is transported via pipelines to oil fields in West Texas to enhance production. A similar pipeline system is proposed for the Gulf Coast region of Texas. The CO2 would come from anthropogenic sources. Using GIS data, oil fields and CO2 sources are selected and a pipeline route is designed, taking into consideration rights of way and environmental sensitivities. We modified several pipeline cost models from the literature to capture recent construction cost escalations. Our resulting cost estimates agree with mid-to-high range cost quotes for pipelines reported to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission by the companies.Bureau of Economic Geolog

High-level feature detection from video in TRECVid: a 5-year retrospective of achievements

Successful and effective content-based access to digital video requires fast, accurate and scalable methods to determine the video content automatically. A variety of contemporary approaches to this rely on text taken from speech within the video, or on matching one video frame against others using low-level characteristics like colour, texture, or shapes, or on determining and matching objects appearing within the video. Possibly the most important technique, however, is one which determines the presence or absence of a high-level or semantic feature, within a video clip or shot. By utilizing dozens, hundreds or even thousands of such semantic features we can support many kinds of content-based video navigation. Critically however, this depends on being able to determine whether each feature is or is not present in a video clip. The last 5 years have seen much progress in the development of techniques to determine the presence of semantic features within video. This progress can be tracked in the annual TRECVid benchmarking activity where dozens of research groups measure the effectiveness of their techniques on common data and using an open, metrics-based approach. In this chapter we summarise the work done on the TRECVid high-level feature task, showing the progress made year-on-year. This provides a fairly comprehensive statement on where the state-of-the-art is regarding this important task, not just for one research group or for one approach, but across the spectrum. We then use this past and on-going work as a basis for highlighting the trends that are emerging in this area, and the questions which remain to be addressed before we can achieve large-scale, fast and reliable high-level feature detection on video