Deep Understanding of Technical Documents : Automated Generation of Pseudocode from Digital Diagrams & Analysis/Synthesis of Mathematical Formulas

The technical document is an entity that consists of several essential and interconnected parts, often referred to as modalities. Despite the extensive attention that certain parts have already received, per say the textual information, there are several aspects that severely under researched. Two such modalities are the utility of diagram images and the deep automated understanding of mathematical formulas. Inspired by existing holistic approaches to the deep understanding of technical documents, we develop a novel formal scheme for the modelling of digital diagram images. This extends to a generative framework that allows for the creation of artificial images and their annotation. We contribute on the field with the creation of a novel synthetic dataset and its generation mechanism. We propose the conversion of the pseudocode generation problem to an image captioning task and provide a family of techniques based on adaptive image partitioning. We address the mathematical formulas’ semantic understanding by conducting an evaluating survey on the field, published in May 2021. We then propose a formal synthesis framework that utilized formula graphs as metadata, reaching for novel valuable formulas. The synthesis framework is validated by a deep geometric learning mechanism, that outsources formula data to simulate the missing a priori knowledge. We close with the proof of concept, the description of the overall pipeline and our future aims

Digital architecture and difference: a theory of ethical transpositions towards nomadic embodiments in digital architecture

This thesis contributes to histories and theories of digital architecture of the past two decades, as it questions the narratives of its novelty. The main argument this thesis puts forward is that a plethora of methodologies, displacing the centrality of the architect from the architectural design process, has folded into the discipline in the process of its rewriting along digital protocols. These steer architecture onto a post-human path. However, while the redefinition of the practice unfolds, it does so epistemically only without redefining the new subject of architecture emerging from these processes, which therefore remains anchored to humanist-modern definitions. This unaccounted-for position, I argue, prevents novelty from emerging. Simultaneously, the thesis unfolds a creative approach – while drawing on nomadic, critical theory concepts, there surfaces an alternative genealogy already underpinning digital methodologies that enable a reconceptualization of novelty framed with difference to be articulated through nomadic digital embodiment. Regarding the first claim, I turn to the narratives as well as to the mechanisms of digital discourse emerging in two modes of production – mathematical and biological – in exploration of the ways perceptions of novelty are articulated: a) through close readings of its narratives as they consolidate into digital architectural theory (Carpo 2011; Lynn 2003, 2012; Terzidis 2006; Migayrou 2004, 2009); b) through an analysis of the two digital methodologies that support these narratives – parametric architecture and biodigital architecture. In parallel, this thesis draws on twentieth-century critical theory and twenty-firstcentury nomadic feminist theory to rethink two thematic topics: difference and subjectivity. Specifically, these are Gilles Deleuze’s non-essentialist, nonrepresentational philosophy of difference (1968, 1980, 1988) and Rosi Braidotti’s nomadic feminist reconceptualization of post-human, nonunitary subjectivity (2006, 2011, 2015). Nomadic feminist theory also informs my methodology. I draw on Rosi Braidotti’s cartographing and transposing (2006, 2011) because they engender a non-dualist approach to research itself that is dynamic and affirmative, insisting on grounding techniques – grounding in subject positions that are nevertheless post-human and nonunitary. This leads to a redefinition of novel digital practices with ethical ones

Cyborg Music: A Future Musicotechnographic Aesthetic

This dissertation-assemblage is a rhizo-text of a rhizo-enquiry. It is part musicoethnography and part philosophical analysis. It looks at the work(ing practices) of four contemporary musickers. It situates a rhizo-analysis of their work, as described in four vignette studies, in discussions of, inter alia, rhizo-aesthetics, cyborgs, and boundaries in Entangled Network Space. It includes a speculative consideration of what might happen to music and musicking in the future, especially in the light of current trends in the expansion of technicity in their methods of composition, production, and distribution. It draws particularly on the philosophical writings of Alfred North Whitehead, Gilles Deleuze (particularly in association with Félix Guattari), Bernard Stiegler, Bruno Latour, Manuel DeLanda, Christopher Vitale, and Ian Hodder

ECLAP 2012 Conference on Information Technologies for Performing Arts, Media Access and Entertainment

It has been a long history of Information Technology innovations within the Cultural Heritage areas. The Performing arts has also been enforced with a number of new innovations which unveil a range of synergies and possibilities. Most of the technologies and innovations produced for digital libraries, media entertainment and education can be exploited in the field of performing arts, with adaptation and repurposing. Performing arts offer many interesting challenges and opportunities for research and innovations and exploitation of cutting edge research results from interdisciplinary areas. For these reasons, the ECLAP 2012 can be regarded as a continuation of past conferences such as AXMEDIS and WEDELMUSIC (both pressed by IEEE and FUP). ECLAP is an European Commission project to create a social network and media access service for performing arts institutions in Europe, to create the e-library of performing arts, exploiting innovative solutions coming from the ICT

Life, Universe and Everything

The iroha song of human concepts (2021) The iroha is a Japanese poem of a perfect pangram and isogram, containing each character of the Japanese syllabary exactly once. It also mimics an ultimate conceptual engineering, in that there is more and more restricted scope for meaningful expressions, given more and more condensed means of description. This culminates in crystallizations of human values by auto-condensations of meaningful concepts. Instead of distilling Japanese values of 11th century, I try for those of human concepts, given our merging mind, language and culture

Diasporic Agencies: Mapping the City Otherwise

Diasporic Agencies addresses the neglected subject of how architecture and urban design can respond to the consequences of increasing migration. Arguing that diasporic inhabitations can only be understood as the co-production of space, subjectivity and politics, the book explores questions of difference, belonging and movement in the city. Through focusing on a series of examples, it reveals how diasporas produce new types of spaces and develop new subjectivities in the contemporary European metropolis. It explores the way in which geo-politics affects individual lives and how national and regional borders inscribe themselves onto diasporic bodies. The book claims that the multiple belongings of diasporic citizens, half-here and half-there, provoke a crisis in the standard modes of architectural representation that tend to homogenise and flatten experience. Instead Diasporic Agencies makes a case for a non-representational approach, where the displacement of the diasporic subject and their consequent reterritorialisation of space are developed as modes of thinking and doing. In parallel, mapping otherwise is proposed as a tool for spatial practitioners to work with these multi-layered spaces. The book is aimed at spatial practitioners and theorists of all sorts - architects, artists, geographers, urban designers - anyone with a general interest in mapping or those interested in working through issues related to migration and the contemporary city

Speed and becoming in the urban public sphere

Concerns about speed and politics focus on the loss of the self-present political subject, whose critical will can direct and legitimate political discourse. The hope of sustaining such a subject is understood to be threatened by the erosion of the ideal-normative grounds that are said to support critical subjectivity (e.g. the city, the community, public space). While the concerns about the character and control of public space are certainly to be taken seriously, it is not clear why we should attach these concerns to a loss of a critical political subjectivity and an erosion of public debate. The argument here begins by acknowledging that speed is an ambivalent quality in politics, both creating a potential to open debate to new identities, and posing the risk that oppositional politics will stall in hard oppositions, or in a failure to recognize that which is truly novel in an event. Both of these risks require that recognized identities begin to 'leak', and become open to a world whose potential exceeds the recognized permutations of the possible. This thesis explores how a public, and its implied subjectivities, are maintained 'at speed', within the multiple timespaces of the contemporary city. Instead of an objective speed that comes from without, and overwhelms the subject, time is conceptualized as duration; an immanent view of time in which speed is characterized as repeated disruptions. A public can form around these repeated disruptions. The public is understood to be an assemblage, in Deleuze and Guattari's use of the term, which is sustained by the circulation of texts. A public actualizes wherever, and whenever, there is a successful conjunction of text and context. These conjunctions are not determined, but are only determinable in the event of their actualization. However, it is possible to create a diagram of the assemblage which highlights the potential that exists for the formation of a public, as well as the potential to go beyond recognized subjectivities and open the assemblage to a process of becoming. This thesis creates such a diagram for the smog-event in Toronto, Canada, and engages in an 'experimental critique'. An experimental critique seeks to explore how the event has been placed into circulation in the public sphere, and to encourage experimentation with the limits of recognised identities and possibilities that are sustained in the public assemblage