4,727 research outputs found
Information actors beyond modernity and coloniality in times of climate change:A comparative design ethnography on the making of monitors for sustainable futures in Curaçao and Amsterdam, between 2019-2022
In his dissertation, Mr. Goilo developed a cutting-edge theoretical framework for an Anthropology of Information. This study compares information in the context of modernity in Amsterdam and coloniality in Curaçao through the making process of monitors and develops five ways to understand how information can act towards sustainable futures. The research also discusses how the two contexts, that is modernity and coloniality, have been in informational symbiosis for centuries which is producing negative informational side effects within the age of the Anthropocene. By exploring the modernity-coloniality symbiosis of information, the author explains how scholars, policymakers, and data-analysts can act through historical and structural roots of contemporary global inequities related to the production and distribution of information. Ultimately, the five theses propose conditions towards the collective production of knowledge towards a more sustainable planet
Beam scanning by liquid-crystal biasing in a modified SIW structure
A fixed-frequency beam-scanning 1D antenna based on Liquid Crystals (LCs) is designed for application in 2D scanning with lateral alignment. The 2D array environment imposes full decoupling of adjacent 1D antennas, which often conflicts with the LC requirement of DC biasing: the proposed design accommodates both. The LC medium is placed inside a Substrate Integrated Waveguide (SIW) modified to work as a Groove Gap Waveguide, with radiating slots etched on the upper broad wall, that radiates as a Leaky-Wave Antenna (LWA). This allows effective application of the DC bias voltage needed for tuning the LCs. At the same time, the RF field remains laterally confined, enabling the possibility to lay several antennas in parallel and achieve 2D beam scanning. The design is validated by simulation employing the actual properties of a commercial LC medium
Reframing museum epistemology for the information age: a discursive design approach to revealing complexity
This practice-based research inquiry examines the impact of an epistemic shift, brought about by the dawning of the information age and advances in networked communication technologies, on physical knowledge institutions - focusing on museums. The research charts adapting knowledge schemas used in museum knowledge organisation and discusses the potential for a new knowledge schema, the network, to establish a new epistemology for museums that reflects contemporary hyperlinked and networked knowledge. The research investigates the potential for networked and shared virtual reality spaces to reveal new âknowledge monumentsâ reflecting the epistemic values of the network society and the space of flows.
The central practice for this thesis focuses on two main elements. The first is applying networks and visual complexity to reveal multi-linearity and adapting perspectives in relational knowledge networks. This concept was explored through two discursive design projects, the Museum Collection Engine, which uses data visualisation, cloud data, and image recognition within an immersive projection dome to create a dynamic and searchable museum collection that returns new and interlinking constellations of museum objects and knowledge. The second discursive design project was Shared Pasts: Decoding Complexity, an AR app with a unique âanti-personalisationâ recommendation system designed to reveal complex narratives around historic objects and places. The second element is folksonomy and co-design in developing new community-focused archives using the community's language to build the dataset and socially tagged metadata. This was tested by developing two discursive prototypes, Women Reclaiming AI and Sanctuary Stories
Sensing Collectives: Aesthetic and Political Practices Intertwined
Are aesthetics and politics really two different things? The book takes a new look at how they intertwine, by turning from theory to practice. Case studies trace how sensory experiences are created and how collective interests are shaped. They investigate how aesthetics and politics are entangled, both in building and disrupting collective orders, in governance and innovation. This ranges from populist rallies and artistic activism over alternative lifestyles and consumer culture to corporate PR and governmental policies. Authors are academics and artists. The result is a new mapping of the intermingling and co-constitution of aesthetics and politics in engagements with collective orders
Living Labor
For much of the twentieth century, the iconic figure of the U.S. working class was a white, male industrial worker. But in the contemporary age of capitalist globalization new stories about work and workers are emerging to refashion this image. Living Labor examines these narratives and, in the process, offers an innovative reading of American fiction and film through the lens of precarious work. It argues that since the 1980s, novelists and filmmakersâincluding Russell Banks, Helena VĂramontes, Karen Tei Yamashita, Francisco Goldman, David Riker, Ramin Bahrani, Clint Eastwood, Courtney Hunt, and Ryan Cooglerâhave chronicled the demise of the industrial proletariat, and the tentative and unfinished emergence of a new, much more diverse and perilously positioned working class. In bringing together stories of work that are also stories of race, ethnicity, gender, and colonialism, Living Labor challenges the often-assumed division between class and identity politics. Through the concept of living labor and its discussion of solidarity, the book reframes traditional notions of class, helping us understand both the challenges working people face and the possibilities for collective consciousness and action in the global present
Accounting in action in the New Zealand health reform process: an analysis informed by a specific case study of a major health provider
This thesis constitutes an empirical study of accounting in action, focussing attention on patient based cost systems. The thesis contributes an in depth understanding of the mobilisation of casemix and related information systems at a large regional hospital, Health Waikato (HW), in the centre of the North Island of New Zealand. The field research consisted of primarily unstructured and semi-structured interviews and documentary analysis. I present the research in the later part of the thesis from a constructionist, interpretive perspective. This consists of richly descriptive case studies of aspects of the change process as it has impacted upon the research site. The themes of the analysis are related, at the macro level, to the resurrection of neoclassical economics policies and the relative ascendancy of free market solutions. The process through which areas of knowledge and in this case particularly public policy become problematised is explicated.
My research attempts to describe the experiences and perceptions of medical and managerial\financial staff at a work unit level within a single hospital. A part of this process has involved investigation of the implementation of traditional accounting technologies in unfamiliar environments. The research is primarily concerned to elaborate upon the social context of accounting systems implementation using theoretical insights derived from Latour (particularly: 1987, 1993). The research has sought to explicate the change process as a process of translation. Traditional accounting techniques have been explicated as âblack boxâ technology with which the organisation has been redefined in economic terms.
In the study, the power of accounting in the translation and inscription of data (the fabrication of accounting systems per Preston et al, 1992), is central to understanding the role of accounting systems as technology. Drawing from the work of Latour helps to provide a frame of reference to allow an assimilation of disparate changes and influences as they have come to affect the health sector at a national level, within New Zealand, and also at an organisational level, within a large regional health provider. The research contributes in explicating the relevance of Latourâs rules of method, and underlying theoretical framework for an organisational analysis focusing upon accounting. Latour uses a very general conception of technology which encompasses anything emerging from what he terms the process of âtranslationâ. In this context Latour uses the term to refer to the production or âfabricationâ of âquasi-objectsâ. This is most easily seen as consisting of the physical objects which âpopulate our western societiesâ, but for Latour also includes inscriptions and âfacts/artefactsâ. I regard accounting and information systems as consisting of mixtures (or perhaps âcollectivesâ) of technological quasi-objects in this very general sense.
The focus of the research has been upon the identification of problems, the choice of accounting techniques and their implementation. Together with other devices the use of accounting techniques may be seen as a central part of the process through which change is made acceptable within the organisation. Supporters are enrolled into the change process in part by being exposed to the accounting inscriptions which are used to represent the cost and profit ârealityâ of their unit and the whole organisation. The research process has involved detailed investigation on a case by case basis to enable a thorough description of the accounting techniques being put in place.
The title of the thesis is based on Latour (1987) "Science in Action". Conventions developed in Actor Network Theory might suggest my title would be better understood as "Accounting as Actant" but it seems to me that Latour was clearly aware of this same point when he chose this title for his book
Dense RGB-D SLAM and object localisation for robotics and industrial applications
Dense reconstruction and object localisation are two critical steps in robotic and industrial applications. The former entails a joint estimation of camera egomotion and the structure of the surrounding environment, also known as Simultaneous Localisation and Mapping (SLAM), and the latter aims to locate the object in the reconstructed scenes. This thesis addresses the challenges of dense SLAM with RGB-D cameras and object localisation towards robotic and industrial applications.
Camera drift is an essential issue in camera egomotion estimation. Due to the accumulated error in camera pose estimation, the estimated camera trajectory is inaccurate, and the reconstruction of the environment is inconsistent. This thesis analyses camera drift in SLAM under the probabilistic inference framework and proposes an online map fusion strategy with standard deviation estimation based on frame-to-model camera tracking. The camera pose is estimated by aligning the input image with the global map model, and the global map merges the information in the images by weighted fusion with standard deviation modelling. In addition, a pre-screening step is applied before map fusion to preclude the adverse effect of accumulated errors and noises on camera egomotion estimation. Experimental results indicated that the proposed method mitigates camera drift and improves the global consistency of camera trajectories.
Another critical challenge for dense RGB-D SLAM in industrial scenarios is to handle mechanical and plastic components that usually have reflective and shiny surfaces. Photometric alignment in frame-to-model camera tracking tends to fail on such objects due to the inconsistency in intensity patterns of the images and the global map model. This thesis addresses this problem and proposes RSO-SLAM, namely a SLAM approach to reflective and shiny object reconstruction. RSO-SLAM adopts frame-to-model camera tracking and combines local photometric alignment and global geometric registration. This study revealed the effectiveness and excellent performance of the proposed RSO-SLAM on both plastic and metallic objects. In addition, a case study involving the cover of a electric vehicle battery with metallic surface demonstrated the superior performance of the RSO-SLAM approach in the reconstruction of a common industrial product.
With the reconstructed point cloud model of the object, the problem of object localisation is tackled as point cloud registration in the thesis. Iterative Closest Point (ICP) is arguably the best-known method for point cloud registration, but it is susceptible to sub-optimal convergence due to the multimodal solution space. This thesis proposes the Bees Algorithm (BA) enhanced with the Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) procedure for point cloud registration. SVD accelerates the speed of the local search of the BA, helping the algorithm to rapidly identify the local optima. It also enhances the precision of the obtained solutions. At the same time, the global outlook of the BA ensures adequate exploration of the whole solution space. Experimental results demonstrated the remarkable performance of the SVD-enhanced BA in terms of consistency and precision. Additional tests on noisy datasets demonstrated the robustness of the proposed procedure to imprecision in the models
Collaborative and Cooperative Robotics Applications using Visual Perception
The objective of this Thesis is to develop novel integrated strategies for collaborative and cooperative robotic applications. Commonly, industrial robots operate in structured environments and in work-cell separated from human operators. Nowadays, collaborative robots have the capacity of sharing the workspace and collaborate with humans or other robots to perform complex tasks. These robots often operate in an unstructured environment, whereby they need sensors and algorithms to get information about environment changes.
Advanced vision and control techniques have been analyzed to evaluate their performance and their applicability to industrial tasks. Then, some selected techniques have been applied for the first time to an industrial context. A Peg-in-Hole task has been chosen as first case study, since it has been extensively studied but still remains challenging: it requires accuracy both in the determination of the hole poses and in the robot positioning.
Two solutions have been developed and tested. Experimental results have been discussed to highlight the advantages and disadvantages of each technique. Grasping partially known objects in unstructured environments is one of the most challenging issues in robotics. It is a complex task and requires to address multiple subproblems, in order to be accomplished, including object localization and grasp pose detection.
Also for this class of issues some vision techniques have been analyzed. One of these has been adapted to be used in industrial scenarios. Moreover, as a second case study, a robot-to-robot object handover task in a partially structured environment and in the absence of explicit communication between the robots has been developed and validated.
Finally, the two case studies have been integrated in two real industrial setups to demonstrate the applicability of the strategies to solving industrial problems
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