Urban Forests and Landscape Ecology

Urbanization is a dominant driver of landscape transformation across the world, with cities representing centers of economic and socio-cultural development. Today, more than 4.2 billion people live in urban areas, which represent ~3% of the Earth’s land area. By 2050, it is predicted this number will increase to 6.6 billion people (~70% of the predicted global population). As the human population grows, cities around the globe will continue to expand, increasing the demand for food and services. Within cities, urban forests provide multiple nature-based solutions, as well as other environmental services and socio-economic benefits, such as heat mitigation and social integration. Urban forests are also important for coping with psychological stress during events, such as the COVID-19 pandemic. Therefore, urban forests are a priority for basic and applied forest research because they are intimately connected with people’s physical, cultural, and economic well-being in the urban environment, and can also be important reservoirs of biodiversity. To promote a better understanding of urban forests and landscape ecology, this book in “Urban Forests and Landscape Ecology” compiled research set in urban forests and focused on some spatially explicit processes. Studies presented in this book are highly interdisciplinary and use a wide range of research approaches. This book present nine scientific publications from global urban forests demonstrating that these forests, as a nature-based solution, provide multiple environmental services and are crucial to improve urban livability and thereby the wellbeing of city dwellers

Acoustic monitoring of wildlife in inaccessible areas and automatic detection of bird songs from continuous recordings

The use of new technology for wildlife monitoring comes with both possible benefits and challenges. Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and automatic recording units (ARUs) can allow researchers to automatically record videos, photographs, and audio recordings of animals in unusual or inaccessible locations. However, new acoustic monitoring techniques require innovative methods to extract and utilize data from acoustic recordings. In this project we developed novel technology to record bird songs in inaccessible areas and demonstrated a useful method for extracting and classifying songs from continuous recordings. The autonomous aerial acoustic recording system (AAARS) was a UAV developed at the University of Tennessee capable of generating high-quality WAV recordings of bird songs in a variety of landscapes. The AAARS was completely silent in flight controlled by a ground-based computer monitoring station. I developed a model to convert the AAARS GPS-based flight path into a microphone exposure surface to relate species-specific acoustic signals recorded to area of microphone coverage. The vocalizations per unit area per unit time for a given focal species could then be used as an index of relative abundance or as an input in density estimation. Once collected, extraction and classification of birdsongs from acoustic recordings remains a major technological challenge. I used quadratic discrimination analysis to differentiate between inter- and intra-specific bird songs using up to sixteen acoustic measurements on human-extracted signals from audio spectrograms of five focal songbird species. Measurement-based classification was successful at separating the five species apart with only ≤5% classification error. I then used a template-matching model to extract target birdsongs from continuous field recordings and investigated the efficiency of different analytical options for classification of five focal songbird species. Decision trees, neural networks, and quadratic discriminant analysis all produced similar classification results. The means to optimize the analytical approach varied by species. I concluded that a species-specific approach should be used to accurately extract and classify songs from continuous recordings

Naturalizace jednoty vědomí: mohou neurovědy vysvětlit zásadní rys subjektivity?

Naturalizace jednoty vědomí: mohou neurovědy vysvětlit zásadní rys subjektivity? Martin Vraný Abstrakt Cílem disertační práce je analyzovat pojem jednoty vědomí coby explanandum pro přírodní vědy a zhodnotit, do jaké míry se daří hlavním neurovědeckým teoriím vědomí tuto jednotu vysvětlit. Práce je motivována přesvědčením, že právě jednota vědomí představuje největší výzvu, které čelí vědecké pokusy vysvětlit vědomí. V úvodu práce tvrdím, že důvodem proč některé teorie vědomí vedou k tomu, co Dennett nazývá karteziánským materialismem, je právě to, že se dostatečně nevěnují problému jednoty vědomí. Pokud bychom dobře rozuměli jednotě vědomí a její roli v přírodě, snáze bychom se vyhnuli tendenci vykládat vědomí způsobem, který je vskrytu homunkulární. Druhá kapitola analyzuje různé aspekty, z jejichž hlediska se vědomí považuje za jednotné. Dva z těchto aspektů představují obzvlášt' velkou výzvu při naturalizaci vědomí a zároveň jsou spolu neslučitelně spjaté. Jde o jednotu vědomých obsahů v určitém čase a jednotu ve smyslu jednoho subjektu majícího vědomé obsahy, schopného na ně reflektovat. Třetí kapitola se zabývá hlavními pojmovými a metodologickými obtížemi, které...Naturalizing the Unity of Consciousness: can neuroscience explain a fundamental feature of subjectivity? Martin Vraný Abstract The aim of the dissertation is to analyze the concept of the unity of conscious- ness as an explanandum for natural sciences and assess how good an explanation do leading neuroscientific theories of consciousness provide. The motivation be- hind this project is the idea that it is the unity which poses the greatest challenge for the scientific quest for consciousness. I argue in the Introduction that the reason why some theories of consciousness lead to what Dennett calls Cartesian materialism is precisely because they fail to address the problem of the unity of consciousness. If we had a good understanding of the unity of consciousness and its place in nature, we could more easily avoid the tendency to devise accounts of consciousness that are homuncular in disguise. In chapter 2 I analyze various aspects in which consciousness is thought be unified and conclude that two such aspects are particularly challenging for natu- ralizing the unity and that they cannot be treated separately. They are the unity of conscious contents at a time and the unity in the sense of a single subject having conscious contents and being able to reflect on them. Chapter 3 describes main conceptual and...Ústav filosofie a religionistikyInstitute of Philosophy and Religious StudiesFaculty of ArtsFilozofická fakult

Métaheuristiques pour l’évaluation objective de la qualité d’images et de vidéos

Le travail présenté dans cette thèse s’inscrit dans le domaine d’évaluation objective de la qualité d’images et de vidéos et plus particulièrement sur l’évaluation de qualité avec réfé- rence complète. Il s’agit d’un domaine de recherche actif qui s’est imposé avec l’évolution rapide des technologies de l’informatique, des communications et des réseaux. Malgré la richesse des travaux dans ce domaine, et l’abondance des méthodes objectives d’évaluation (les métriques), le problème d’évaluation de qualité d’image reste toujours posé. En effet, les métriques présentées sont généralement spécifiques à un type particulier de dé- gradation, sensibles aux données bruitées par plusieurs types de dégradations, d’où l’idée de s’orienter vers de nouvelles approches recommandant la fusion de différentes métriques pour quantifier la qualité de l’image en se basant sur les techniques d’apprentissage et les métaheuristiques d’optimisation. Dans cette thèse, nous avons développé de nouvelles méthodes basées sur la programmation génétique multigène (MGGP) comme une technique d’apprentissage évolutive inspirée de l’évolution naturelle, permettant, à partir d’un ensemble d’apprentissage, de trouver de bons modèles de combinaison de métriques de qualité d’image, en optimisant simultanément deux objectifs concurrents : l’adéquation de modèles par rapport à leur corrélation avec les scores subjectifs de divers types de distorsions dans les images, et la complexité de leur structure. En raison de la croissance explosive des applications orientées écran, nous avons exploité les avantages offerts par MGGP afin de développer une mé- thode générique pour l’évaluation objective des images de contenu d’écran. Les résultats d’expérimentation menée sur les grands benchmarks, ont montré les performances supé- rieures des méthodes proposées par rapport aux mesures de pointe, y compris d’autres approches de fusion récemment publiées

2016 Research Week

RESEARCH WEEK 2016 TABLE OF CONTENTS ADMINISTRATION RESEARCH COMMITTEES ACTIVITY SCHEDULE LETTERS OF ENDORSEMENT GENERAL SESSION FACULTY, STAFF, AND STUDENT POSTER PRESENTATIONS FACULTY AND STUDENT ORAL PRESENTATION

First steps in the study of cyber-psycho-cognitive operations

Dissertação (mestrado)—Universidade de Brasília, Instituto de Relações Internacionais, Programa de Pós-Graduação em Relações Internacionais, 2019.O presente trabalho é uma análise dos mecanismos informáticos e tecno-comunicacionais envolvidos na articulação de mundos da vida orientados estrategicamente para estimular, prever ou minar o desenvolvimento das condições psico-cognitivas adequadas para a construção e sustento da legitimidade racional de uma autoridade ou ação política. A aplicação de instrumentos “arqueológicos” Foucauldianos ao estudo das narrativas políticas que engendraram e surgiram de “Russiagate” permitiu situar a teoria num contexto histórico e validar a premissa da convergência e incorporação de tendências de agendamento comuns e de práticas típicas de operações psicológicas tradicionais. Contudo, os efeitos tanto da disponibilidade comercial das TICs com capacidade de “deep learning”, quanto da estruturação baseada em conhecimento permitida pela ubiquidade e centralidade econômica dessas tecnologias, tornam o conjunto de mecanismos analisados num fenômeno que merece uma conceptualização e marco investigativo únicos. A obra é uma contribuição a esse empreendimento.This is an analysis of the ICT-based mechanisms involved in the articulation of lifeworlds that are strategically oriented to foster, prevent or undermine the development of psycho-cognitive conditions adequate for the construction or sustainability of an authority’s or a political action’s rational legitimacy. While grounding theory to a historical context, the application of Foucauldian “archeological” instruments to the study of the political narratives giving birth and springing from “Russiagate” also served to validate the premised convergence and incorporation of common agenda-setting trends and practices typical of traditional psychological operations. However, the effects of both the commercial availability of deep-learning ICTs and the cognition-based structuration afforded by their ubiquity and economic centrality set this “dispositif” apart, thereby deserving a unique conceptualization and research framework. This study is a contribution to such endeavor

Semantic discovery and reuse of business process patterns

Patterns currently play an important role in modern information systems (IS) development and their use has mainly been restricted to the design and implementation phases of the development lifecycle. Given the increasing significance of business modelling in IS development, patterns have the potential of providing a viable solution for promoting reusability of recurrent generalized models in the very early stages of development. As a statement of research-in-progress this paper focuses on business process patterns and proposes an initial methodological framework for the discovery and reuse of business process patterns within the IS development lifecycle. The framework borrows ideas from the domain engineering literature and proposes the use of semantics to drive both the discovery of patterns as well as their reuse