Parameterizing the Spillage Left Behind: Datafication, Machine Learning Algorithms, and the Question of Ecological Agency

With “datafication” practices becoming more common in digital ecologies, humans have become increasingly reliant on emerging technologies and other actors that can store, comprehend, and analyze information. This thesis offers a proposed model of mediative agency to address the importance of interrogating how non-human actors interpret and make meaning from data. Mediative agents contribute to the disbursement of rhetoric, as well as our understanding of information, by granting visibility and assigning value to data. These processes effectively play a role in shaping reality through agents’ parameterization of data broadly, allowing non-human actors to take on a complex agency that can alter rhetorical trajectories. In interrogating the structures of power that contribute to the dissemination of rhetoric within digital ecologies, mediative agency acts as a speculative modeling approach that allows rhetors to theorize various functions of agency and anticipate how non-human agency might further develop as technological environments change in the immediate future

Robust health stream processing

2014 Fall.Includes bibliographical references.As the cost of personal health sensors decrease along with improvements in battery life and connectivity, it becomes more feasible to allow patients to leave full-time care environments sooner. Such devices could lead to greater independence for the elderly, as well as for others who would normally require full-time care. It would also allow surgery patients to spend less time in the hospital, both pre- and post-operation, as all data could be gathered via remote sensors in the patients home. While sensor technology is rapidly approaching the point where this is a feasible option, we still lack in processing frameworks which would make such a leap not only feasible but safe. This work focuses on developing a framework which is robust to both failures of processing elements as well as interference from other computations processing health sensor data. We work with 3 disparate data streams and accompanying computations: electroencephalogram (EEG) data gathered for a brain-computer interface (BCI) application, electrocardiogram (ECG) data gathered for arrhythmia detection, and thorax data gathered from monitoring patient sleep status

Incremental design forays on middle income housing

Thesis (M. Arch.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Architecture, 2013.This electronic version was submitted by the student author. The certified thesis is available in the Institute Archives and Special Collections.Cataloged from student-submitted PDF version of thesis. Pages 172 and 173 blank.Includes bibliographical references (p. 166-171).Housing today has little do with architecture. Design is a currency of services, while housing today is intensively packaged as a consumer good. It is packaged with land as speculative real-estate, and bundled abstractly into mortgage-backed securities for trade in global investment markets. Both strategies allow people of ordinary means to assume it's monumental cost. Because so very few can buy housing outright, it is built by debt and for debt. This thesis proposes an alternative, in which the critical role of mortgage-financing is directly supplanted by a new set of incremental residential design services. It proposes that middle and low income housing can be not only paid for, but also designed and built during occupancy. Proposed as the centerpiece of a new mode of professional architectural practice, this flexible timeline facilitates reconsideration of housing's materials, labor logistics, and constructional methodologies. The same timeline can accommodate its individual owners' changing needs throughout a progressively tailored and domestically integrated process. Though rental markets may fluctuate, credit scores plummet, mortgage qualifications creep, and income-inequality may intensify, incremental design services can pin the production of housing to that irrespectively distributed and far more egalitarian commodity of time. Given more or less time, these can serve both middle and low income households at equal and unsubsidized standards. The structure of this thesis first elaborates and quantifies the underlying need and argument for designed incremental housing in the United States. It then explores the enabling strategies, attitudes, and issues that arise surrounding three distinct design exercises. These each comprise an approximately eighty thousand dollar magnitude of cash expense, but diverge in value by articulating design logistics as a parallel currency. They are respectively urban, suburban, and rural in setting. They are tailored to a plausibly fictitious clientele of respectively high, middle, and low incomes, and so adopting HUD's definition of affordable housing costs as 30% or less of household income, are conducted in the course of three, six, and twelve years respectively. Their single and central commonality is a complete prohibition of paper debt.by Christopher M. Miller.M.Arch

Design and performance optimization of asynchronous networks-on-chip

As digital systems continue to grow in complexity, the design of conventional synchronous systems is facing unprecedented challenges. The number of transistors on individual chips is already in the multi-billion range, and a greatly increasing number of components are being integrated onto a single chip. As a consequence, modern digital designs are under strong time-to-market pressure, and there is a critical need for composable design approaches for large complex systems. In the past two decades, networks-on-chip (NoC’s) have been a highly active research area. In a NoC-based system, functional blocks are first designed individually and may run at different clock rates. These modules are then connected through a structured network for on-chip global communication. However, due to the rigidity of centrally-clocked NoC’s, there have been bottlenecks of system scalability, energy and performance, which cannot be easily solved with synchronous approaches. As a result, there has been significant recent interest in combing the notion of asynchrony with NoC designs. Since the NoC approach inherently separates the communication infrastructure, and its timing, from computational elements, it is a natural match for an asynchronous paradigm. Asynchronous NoC’s, therefore, enable a modular and extensible system composition for an ‘object-orient’ design style. The thesis aims to significantly advance the state-of-art and viability of asynchronous and globally-asynchronous locally-synchronous (GALS) networks-on-chip, to enable high-performance and low-energy systems. The proposed asynchronous NoC’s are nearly entirely based on standard cells, which eases their integration into industrial design flows. The contributions are instantiated in three different directions. First, practical acceleration techniques are proposed for optimizing the system latency, in order to break through the latency bottleneck in the memory interfaces of many on-chip parallel processors. Novel asynchronous network protocols are proposed, along with concrete NoC designs. A new concept, called ‘monitoring network’, is introduced. Monitoring networks are lightweight shadow networks used for fast-forwarding anticipated traffic information, ahead of the actual packet traffic. The routers are therefore allowed to initiate and perform arbitration and channel allocation in advance. The technique is successfully applied to two topologies which belong to two different categories – a variant mesh-of-trees (MoT) structure and a 2D-mesh topology. Considerable and stable latency improvements are observed across a wide range of traffic patterns, along with moderate throughput gains. Second, for the first time, a high-performance and low-power asynchronous NoC router is compared directly to a leading commercial synchronous counterpart in an advanced industrial technology. The asynchronous router design shows significant performance improvements, as well as area and power savings. The proposed asynchronous router integrates several advanced techniques, including a low-latency circular FIFO for buffer design, and a novel end-to-end credit-based virtual channel (VC) flow control. In addition, a semi-automated design flow is created, which uses portions of a standard synchronous tool flow. Finally, a high-performance multi-resource asynchronous arbiter design is developed. This small but important component can be directly used in existing asynchronous NoC’s for performance optimization. In addition, this standalone design promises use in opening up new NoC directions, as well as for general use in parallel systems. In the proposed arbiter design, the allocation of a resource to a client is divided into several steps. Multiple successive client-resource pairs can be selected rapidly in pipelined sequence, and the completion of the assignments can overlap in parallel. In sum, the thesis provides a set of advanced design solutions for performance optimization of asynchronous and GALS networks-on-chip. These solutions are at different levels, from network protocols, down to router- and component-level optimizations, which can be directly applied to existing basic asynchronous NoC designs to provide a leap in performance improvement

Backwards is the way forward: feedback in the cortical hierarchy predicts the expected future

Clark offers a powerful description of the brain as a prediction machine, which offers progress on two distinct levels. First, on an abstract conceptual level, it provides a unifying framework for perception, action, and cognition (including subdivisions such as attention, expectation, and imagination). Second, hierarchical prediction offers progress on a concrete descriptive level for testing and constraining conceptual elements and mechanisms of predictive coding models (estimation of predictions, prediction errors, and internal models)

SAFA: Stack and frame architecture

Ph.DDOCTOR OF PHILOSOPH

Integrated material practice in free-form timber structures

Integrated material practice in free-form timber structures is a practice-led research project at CITA (Centre for IT and Architecture) that develops a digitally-augmented material practice around glue-laminated timber. The project is part of the InnoChain ETN and has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No 642877. The advent of digital tools and computation has shifted the focus of many material practices from the shaping of material to the shaping of information. The ability to process large amounts of data quickly has made computation commonplace in the design and manufacture of buildings, especially in iterative digital design workflows. The simulation of material performance and the shift from models as representational tools to functional ones has opened up new methods of working between digital model and physical material. Wood has gained a new relevance in contemporary construction because it is sustainable, renewable, and stores carbon. In light of the climate crisis and concerns about overpopulation, and coupled with developments in adhesives and process technology, it is returning to the forefront of construction. However, as a grown and heterogeneous material, its properties and behaviours nevertheless present barriers to its utilization in architecturally demanding areas. Similarly, the integration of the properties, material behaviours, and production constraints of glue-laminated timber (glulam) assemblies into early-stage architectural design workflows remains a challenging specialist and inter-disciplinary affair. Drawing on a partnership with Dsearch – the digital research network at White Arkitekter in Sweden – and Blumer Lehmann AG – a leading Swiss timber contractor – this research examines the design and fabrication of glue-laminated timber structures and seeks a means to link industrial timber fabrication with early-stage architectural design through the application of computational modelling, design, and an interrogation of established timber production processes. A particular focus is placed on large-scale free-form glulam structures due to their high performance demands and the challenge of exploiting the bending properties of timber. By proposing a computationally-augmented material practice in which design intent is informed by material and fabrication constraints, the research aims to discover new potentials in timber architecture. The central figure in the research is the glulam blank - the glue-laminated near-net shape of large-scale timber components. The design space that the blank occupies - between sawn, graded lumber and the finished architectural component - holds the potential to yield new types of timber components and new structural morphologies. Engaging with this space therefore requires new interfaces for design modelling and production that take into account the affordances of timber and timber processing. The contribution of this research is a framework for a material practice that integrates processes of computational modelling, architectural design, and timber fabrication and acts as a broker between domains of architectural design and industrial timber production. The research identifies four different notions of feedback that allow this material practice to form

Physics Avoidance & Cooperative Semantics: Inferentialism and Mark Wilson’s Engagement with Naturalism Qua Applied Mathematics

Mark Wilson argues that the standard categorizations of "Theory T thinking"— logic-centered conceptions of scientific organization (canonized via logical empiricists in the mid-twentieth century)—dampens the understanding and appreciation of those strategic subtleties working within science. By "Theory T thinking," we mean to describe the simplistic methodology in which mathematical science allegedly supplies ‘processes’ that parallel nature's own in a tidily isomorphic fashion, wherein "Theory T’s" feigned rigor and methodological dogmas advance inadequate discrimination that fails to distinguish between explanatory structures that are architecturally distinct. One of Wilson's main goals is to reverse such premature exclusions and, thus, early on Wilson returns to John Locke's original physical concerns regarding material science and the congeries of descriptive concern insofar as capturing varied phenomena (i.e., cohesion, elasticity, fracture, and the transmission of coherent work) encountered amongst ordinary solids like wood and steel are concerned. Of course, Wilson methodologically updates such a purview by appealing to multiscalar techniques of modern computing, drawing from Robert Batterman's work on the greediness of scales and Jim Woodward's insights on causation

Propositions for an Environmental Arts Pedagogy: A/r/tographic experimentations with movement and materiality

This chapter works through a series of methodological experimentations with movement and materiality in order to explore the potentials of environmental arts pedagogies. We address the question of what environmental arts pedagogies might come to look like in the ever-changing contexts of children’s social and environmental worlds. This leads us to engage with the movements and materialities of learning environments as they come to co-compose pedagogical encounters. In doing so, we draw on new materialist accounts of matter as agentic, fluid and dynamic; movement as a choreographic architecting of experience; and a/r/tographic approaches to pedagogical engagement and embodied practice. Taking up the use of concepts as methods, we develop a series of artistic and pedagogical experimentations with concepts of ‘corridors’, ‘flight’, ‘viscosity’ and ‘construction’. In teasing out the implications of these concepts for an environmental arts pedagogy, we combine imagery and text to both render and diagram the movement of bodies, materials and environments in passage through each of these four conceptual enactments. This leads us to develop a series of propositions for an environmental arts pedagogy based on our creative research process. In doing so, we aim to sketch the contours of an environmental arts pedagogy that combines the speculative imagination with embodied, sensorial, and empirical experiences