Using MapReduce Streaming for Distributed Life Simulation on the Cloud

Distributed software simulations are indispensable in the study of large-scale life models but often require the use of technically complex lower-level distributed computing frameworks, such as MPI. We propose to overcome the complexity challenge by applying the emerging MapReduce (MR) model to distributed life simulations and by running such simulations on the cloud. Technically, we design optimized MR streaming algorithms for discrete and continuous versions of Conway’s life according to a general MR streaming pattern. We chose life because it is simple enough as a testbed for MR’s applicability to a-life simulations and general enough to make our results applicable to various lattice-based a-life models. We implement and empirically evaluate our algorithms’ performance on Amazon’s Elastic MR cloud. Our experiments demonstrate that a single MR optimization technique called strip partitioning can reduce the execution time of continuous life simulations by 64%. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to propose and evaluate MR streaming algorithms for lattice-based simulations. Our algorithms can serve as prototypes in the development of novel MR simulation algorithms for large-scale lattice-based a-life models.https://digitalcommons.chapman.edu/scs_books/1014/thumbnail.jp

Media Infrastructures and the Politics of Digital Time

Digital media everyday inscribe new patterns of time, promising instant communication, synchronous collaboration, intricate time management, and profound new advantages in speed. The essays in this volume reconsider these outward interfaces of convenience by calling attention to their supporting infrastructures, the networks of digital time that exert pressures of conformity and standardization on the temporalities of lived experience and have important ramifications for social relations, stratifications of power, practices of cooperation, and ways of life. Interdisciplinary in method and international in scope, the volume draws together insights from media and communication studies, cultural studies, and science and technology studies while staging an important encounter between two distinct approaches to the temporal patterning of media infrastructures, a North American strain emphasizing the social and cultural experiences of lived time and a European tradition, prominent especially in Germany, focusing on technological time and time-critical processes

Annual report on research activities 2005-2006

https://commons.ln.edu.hk/research_annual_report/1004/thumbnail.jp

A complex systems approach to education in Switzerland

The insights gained from the study of complex systems in biological, social, and engineered systems enables us not only to observe and understand, but also to actively design systems which will be capable of successfully coping with complex and dynamically changing situations. The methods and mindset required for this approach have been applied to educational systems with their diverse levels of scale and complexity. Based on the general case made by Yaneer Bar-Yam, this paper applies the complex systems approach to the educational system in Switzerland. It confirms that the complex systems approach is valid. Indeed, many recommendations made for the general case have already been implemented in the Swiss education system. To address existing problems and difficulties, further steps are recommended. This paper contributes to the further establishment complex systems approach by shedding light on an area which concerns us all, which is a frequent topic of discussion and dispute among politicians and the public, where billions of dollars have been spent without achieving the desired results, and where it is difficult to directly derive consequences from actions taken. The analysis of the education system's different levels, their complexity and scale will clarify how such a dynamic system should be approached, and how it can be guided towards the desired performance

Better: navigating imaginaries in design and synthetic biology to question 'better'

Designers, engineers, marketers, politicians, and scientists all craft motivating visions of better futures. In some of these, “better” will be delivered by science and technology; in others, the consumption of designed things will better us or the world. “Better” has become a contemporary version of progress, shed of some of its philosophical baggage. But better is not a universal good or a verified measure: it is imbued with politics and values. And better will not be delivered equally, if at all. “What is better?”, “Whose better?”, and “Who decides?” are questions with great implications for the way we live and hope to live. At a time when social, economic, and environmental conditions place in question the dominant paradigms of better defined by globalisation and technology, Better, a PhD by project, investigates some of the powerful dreams triggered by a banal word and develops critical design techniques to find new ways to ask better questions. This thesis contends that the “dream of better” is so influential in advanced technological societies that it is what science and technology studies scholars term a sociotechnical imaginary. The imaginary is used as a critical design tool to examine better, revealing links between design and the emerging technoscience of synthetic biology and other ideological spaces, like Silicon Valley. As a young field, synthetic biology offers a space to test and expand critical design’s potential. The practical research includes six critical design projects that engage with synthetic biology and its vision-making processes, using techniques from designed fictions to curation. The written thesis comprises six chapters informed throughout by commentary on the practice. The first chapter looks at the influence of dominant concepts of better on design, separating design’s intrinsic optimism from engineering and market-led ideas of the optimum and optimisation. It situates critical design practice as an optimistic activity, seeking alternative meanings of better. The next three chapters track how the imaginary of better has shaped synthetic biology and the field’s evolving culture of design. Meanings of better have proliferated since 1999, as synthetic biology’s visionaries promise to better biology, better the world, and even to better nature itself. But resistance has revealed the existence of alternative betters. Chapter Five explores critical design’s examination of synthetic biology’s dreams of betters. Recognising the mutual colonisation of critical design and synthetic biology, which is contributing to the emerging platform of biodesign, the chapter discusses how navigating imaginaries can improve future critical practice. It encourages framing technoscience within society, rather than placing society downstream of it. Chapter Six proposes that the social imaginary itself can be a critical design object. Designing “critical imaginaries” can open up our understanding of better, offering a process to reimagine the world. The critical imaginary is not a utopian effort to produce prescriptive visions of how the world ought to be. It is a heterotopian design technique to include diverse views and generate worlds that could be made, asking “what ought the world to be?

An Approach Based on Particle Swarm Optimization for Inspection of Spacecraft Hulls by a Swarm of Miniaturized Robots

The remoteness and hazards that are inherent to the operating environments of space infrastructures promote their need for automated robotic inspection. In particular, micrometeoroid and orbital debris impact and structural fatigue are common sources of damage to spacecraft hulls. Vibration sensing has been used to detect structural damage in spacecraft hulls as well as in structural health monitoring practices in industry by deploying static sensors. In this paper, we propose using a swarm of miniaturized vibration-sensing mobile robots realizing a network of mobile sensors. We present a distributed inspection algorithm based on the bio-inspired particle swarm optimization and evolutionary algorithm niching techniques to deliver the task of enumeration and localization of an a priori unknown number of vibration sources on a simplified 2.5D spacecraft surface. Our algorithm is deployed on a swarm of simulated cm-scale wheeled robots. These are guided in their inspection task by sensing vibrations arising from failure points on the surface which are detected by on-board accelerometers. We study three performance metrics: (1) proximity of the localized sources to the ground truth locations, (2) time to localize each source, and (3) time to finish the inspection task given a 75% inspection coverage threshold. We find that our swarm is able to successfully localize the present so