LEGaTO: first steps towards energy-efficient toolset for heterogeneous computing

LEGaTO is a three-year EU H2020 project which started in December 2017. The LEGaTO project will leverage task-based programming models to provide a software ecosystem for Made-in-Europe heterogeneous hardware composed of CPUs, GPUs, FPGAs and dataflow engines. The aim is to attain one order of magnitude energy savings from the edge to the converged cloud/HPC.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

The Portrayal of Powerful Women in the Media

The purpose of this research is to investigate the portrayal of powerful women in the media and to gain a perspective of different ways the media tend to elaborate and focus on gender issues to a greater extent than the general public may think. I intend to demonstrate that powerful women are often portrayed unfairly in the media and that this could affect the progress they make in their careers. I hypothesize that although women are making strides in the right direction, the often negative portrayal of powerful women in the media can be unwarranted and lead to the unfair perception of women in powerful positions. First, I address background information that includes the progress professional and influential women have made in corporate America. I then discuss how many of these advancements, although they are a start, are not as substantial as they should be in the twenty-first century. Next, I investigate the possibility that the media might hinder women’s abilities to move up into positions of power due the influence that the media have on our perceptions and behaviors. To demonstrate that the media do in fact focus on gender issues when portraying powerful women, I investigated how the media portrayed three specific women in power. I chose to examine media portrayals of Carly Fiorina, former CEO of Hewlett-Packard, Katie Couric, anchor of CBS Evening News, and Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the United States House of Representatives. By concentrating not only on women in corporate America, but also on a woman in the world of journalism, and one in the political world, I was able to gain a perspective on whether unfair media portrayals of women in corporations are parallel in their portrayals of influential women in general

‘Ten Years Ahead of His Time’: The East End Elegance of Martin Peters

Martin Peters was a successful footballer whose public persona matched the way he played the game, without fuss or fanfare. A key English player of the 1960s, he does not usually feature in discussions about the connection between fashion and football in that decade. The focus is usually placed on players with celebrity status, especially George Best. This paper, working at the intersection of sport and fashion history and cultural studies, broadens the discussion by giving consideration to the non-celebrity-type player. This is done via an examination of the off-field dress and style of Martin Peters. The case is made, from studying the sartorial presentation of Peters, that we can recognize a connection between the player and other young men who favoured a low-key identification with the Mod culture of the time. This position supports a shift within the cultural historical study of British youth and masculine identity from the spectacular to the unspectacular

Augmented reality as a Thirdspace: Simultaneous experience of the physical and virtual

With the proliferation of devices that display augmented reality (AR), now is the time for scholars and practitioners to evaluate and engage critically with emerging applications of the medium. AR mediates the way users see their bodies, hear their environment and engage with places. Applied in various forms, including social media, e-commerce, gaming, enterprise and art, the medium facilitates a hybrid experience of physical and digital spaces. This article employs a model of real-and-imagined space from geographer Edward Soja to examine how the user of an AR app navigates the two intertwined spaces of physical and digital, experiencing what Soja calls a 'Third-space'. The article illustrates the potential for headset-based AR to engender such a Thirdspace through the author's practice-led research project, the installation Through the Wardrobe. This installation demonstrates how AR has the potential to shift the way that users view and interact with their world with artistic applications providing an opportunity to question assumptions of social norms, identity and uses of physical space.Comment: Preprint of chapter published in Proceedings of the 3rd International and Interdisciplinary Conference on Images and Imagination, edited by D. Villa and F. Zuccoli, 2023, Springer Nature, reproduced with permission of Springer Natur

Electric Corset: an approach to wearables innovation

One criticism of electronic textiles and wearable technology is that instead of being integrated into the modern wardrobe, the electronic garment is perceived as the ‘other’, as an ‘unusual’ item within the wardrobe. Contemporary fashion is a field of play in which individuals constantly manage personal expressions of social belonging and transgression, at the same time as it closes down the potential for new forms as a result of increasingly fast fashion supply chains. The Electric Corset project proposes that the uptake of wearables is compromised when development is based on modern categories of dress/dressing, and proposes that designers look to obsolete and ‘in-between’ items of dress to rethink the foundations of wearables development. In collaboration with Nottingham Museums and Galleries Costume and Textiles Collection, we have reproduced a small selection of such items, and recast them as ‘sacrificial’ toiles to provide a non-precious basis for embodied experimentation. The paper describes some of the barriers to innovation in wearable technologies, and frames our approach through the twin concepts of deconstruction and reconstruction in fashion theory. It reports on our experiences of embodied responses to the toiles within the making process, and presents early findings from a pilot study using improvisation