'Don't box me in': Blurred lines in 'Waking Life' and 'A Scanner Darkly'

This is the author's accepted manuscript. The final published article is available from the link below.This article seeks to evaluate the visual style of Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly, predominantly through an analysis of the films’ aesthetics. The use of Rotoshop as an expressive means to illustrate character and theme, where identity becomes sketched and multi-faceted rather than fixed or stable is explored here. Yet this aesthetic play with borders has a greater resonance than simply a means by which to delineate thematic preoccupations with troubled identity. While such representations are indeed key to these two films, the darkly outlined contours of character borders, which move and slide incessantly, also comment on the blurred divide between live action and animation. Central to the argument is the use of the animated line in understanding these two films; the line provides impetus for exploring several issues raised by the films and the use of Rotoshop. This article explores the following key ideas: the animated line and aesthetic analysis; Rotoshop technology; the representation of fragmentary identity; and the relationship between photo-real cinema and animation, with a particular focus on narrative and spectacle. The author addresses Rotoshop within the context of technology and spectacle; taking industry practices into account allows for an appreciation of how a technological innovation such as Rotoshop can change the shape of live-action cinema

The Data Big Bang and the Expanding Digital Universe: High-Dimensional, Complex and Massive Data Sets in an Inflationary Epoch

Recent and forthcoming advances in instrumentation, and giant new surveys, are creating astronomical data sets that are not amenable to the methods of analysis familiar to astronomers. Traditional methods are often inadequate not merely because of the size in bytes of the data sets, but also because of the complexity of modern data sets. Mathematical limitations of familiar algorithms and techniques in dealing with such data sets create a critical need for new paradigms for the representation, analysis and scientific visualization (as opposed to illustrative visualization) of heterogeneous, multiresolution data across application domains. Some of the problems presented by the new data sets have been addressed by other disciplines such as applied mathematics, statistics and machine learning and have been utilized by other sciences such as space-based geosciences. Unfortunately, valuable results pertaining to these problems are mostly to be found only in publications outside of astronomy. Here we offer brief overviews of a number of concepts, techniques and developments, some "old" and some new. These are generally unknown to most of the astronomical community, but are vital to the analysis and visualization of complex datasets and images. In order for astronomers to take advantage of the richness and complexity of the new era of data, and to be able to identify, adopt, and apply new solutions, the astronomical community needs a certain degree of awareness and understanding of the new concepts. One of the goals of this paper is to help bridge the gap between applied mathematics, artificial intelligence and computer science on the one side and astronomy on the other.Comment: 24 pages, 8 Figures, 1 Table. Accepted for publication: "Advances in Astronomy, special issue "Robotic Astronomy

Problems in merging Earth sensing satellite data sets

Satellite remote sensing systems provide a tremendous source of data flow to the Earth science community. These systems provide scientists with data of types and on a scale previously unattainable. Looking forward to the capabilities of Space Station and the Earth Observing System (EOS), the full realization of the potential of satellite remote sensing will be handicapped by inadequate information systems. There is a growing emphasis in Earth science research to ask questions which are multidisciplinary in nature and global in scale. Many of these research projects emphasize the interactions of the land surface, the atmosphere, and the oceans through various physical mechanisms. Conducting this research requires large and complex data sets and teams of multidisciplinary scientists, often working at remote locations. A review of the problems of merging these large volumes of data into spatially referenced and manageable data sets is presented

Living Knowledge

Diversity, especially manifested in language and knowledge, is a function of local goals, needs, competences, beliefs, culture, opinions and personal experience. The Living Knowledge project considers diversity as an asset rather than a problem. With the project, foundational ideas emerged from the synergic contribution of different disciplines, methodologies (with which many partners were previously unfamiliar) and technologies flowed in concrete diversity-aware applications such as the Future Predictor and the Media Content Analyser providing users with better structured information while coping with Web scale complexities. The key notions of diversity, fact, opinion and bias have been defined in relation to three methodologies: Media Content Analysis (MCA) which operates from a social sciences perspective; Multimodal Genre Analysis (MGA) which operates from a semiotic perspective and Facet Analysis (FA) which operates from a knowledge representation and organization perspective. A conceptual architecture that pulls all of them together has become the core of the tools for automatic extraction and the way they interact. In particular, the conceptual architecture has been implemented with the Media Content Analyser application. The scientific and technological results obtained are described in the following

Dynamic Animations of Journal Maps: Indicators of Structural Changes and Interdisciplinary Developments

The dynamic analysis of structural change in the organization of the sciences requires methodologically the integration of multivariate and time-series analysis. Structural change--e.g., interdisciplinary development--is often an objective of government interventions. Recent developments in multi-dimensional scaling (MDS) enable us to distinguish the stress originating in each time-slice from the stress originating from the sequencing of time-slices, and thus to locally optimize the trade-offs between these two sources of variance in the animation. Furthermore, visualization programs like Pajek and Visone allow us to show not only the positions of the nodes, but also their relational attributes like betweenness centrality. Betweenness centrality in the vector space can be considered as an indicator of interdisciplinarity. Using this indicator, the dynamics of the citation impact environments of the journals Cognitive Science, Social Networks, and Nanotechnology are animated and assessed in terms of interdisciplinarity among the disciplines involved

D-STEM: a Design led approach to STEM innovation

Advances in the Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths (STEM) disciplines offer opportunities for designers to propose and make products with advanced, enhanced and engineered properties and functionalities. In turn, these advanced characteristics are becoming increasingly necessary as resources become ever more strained through 21st century demands, such as ageing populations, connected communities, depleting raw materials, waste management and energy supply. We need to make things that are smarter, make our lives easier, better and simpler. The products of tomorrow need to do more with less. The issue is how to maximize the potential for exploiting opportunities offered by STEM developments and how best to enable designers to strengthen their position within the innovation ecosystem. As a society, we need designers able to navigate emerging developments from the STEM community to a level that enables understanding and knowledge of the new material properties, the skill set to facilitate absorption into the design ‘toolbox’ and the agility to identify, manage and contextualise innovation opportunities emerging from STEM developments. This paper proposes the blueprint for a new design led approach to STEM innovation that begins to redefine studio culture for the 21st Century

D-STEM: a Design led approach to STEM innovation

Advances in the Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths (STEM) disciplines offer opportunities for designers to propose and make products with advanced, enhanced and engineered properties and functionalities. In turn, these advanced characteristics are becoming increasingly necessary as resources become ever more strained through 21st century demands, such as ageing populations, connected communities, depleting raw materials, waste management and energy supply. We need to make things that are smarter, make our lives easier, better and simpler. The products of tomorrow need to do more with less. The issue is how to maximize the potential for exploiting opportunities offered by STEM developments and how best to enable designers to strengthen their position within the innovation ecosystem. As a society, we need designers able to navigate emerging developments from the STEM community to a level that enables understanding and knowledge of the new material properties, the skill set to facilitate absorption into the design ‘toolbox’ and the agility to identify, manage and contextualise innovation opportunities emerging from STEM developments. This paper proposes the blueprint for a new design led approach to STEM innovation that begins to redefine studio culture for the 21st Century

Image annotation with Photocopain

Photo annotation is a resource-intensive task, yet is increasingly essential as image archives and personal photo collections grow in size. There is an inherent conflict in the process of describing and archiving personal experiences, because casual users are generally unwilling to expend large amounts of effort on creating the annotations which are required to organise their collections so that they can make best use of them. This paper describes the Photocopain system, a semi-automatic image annotation system which combines information about the context in which a photograph was captured with information from other readily available sources in order to generate outline annotations for that photograph that the user may further extend or amend