Personalised aesthetics with residual adapters

The use of computational methods to evaluate aesthetics in photography has gained interest in recent years due to the popularization of convolutional neural networks and the availability of new annotated datasets. Most studies in this area have focused on designing models that do not take into account individual preferences for the prediction of the aesthetic value of pictures. We propose a model based on residual learning that is capable of learning subjective, user specific preferences over aesthetics in photography, while surpassing the state-of-the-art methods and keeping a limited number of user-specific parameters in the model. Our model can also be used for picture enhancement, and it is suitable for content-based or hybrid recommender systems in which the amount of computational resources is limited.Comment: 12 pages, 4 figures. In Iberian Conference on Pattern Recognition and Image Analysis proceeding

Fairytale Theory and Explorations of Gender Stereotypes in Post-1970s Rapunzel Adaptations

Although Rapunzel criticism habitually concerns literary fairytales, this thesis contributes to the field a sustained examination of the feminist and patriarchal uses to which Rapunzel has been put, with close attention to the range of media, forms, and styles into which ‗Rapunzel‘ has been adapted, from 1970 onwards. It argues that each adaptation appropriates ‗Rapunzel‘ to repeat or disturb gender ideologies, and also extends or contracts the scope of the fairytale and its feminism. Underpinned by memetics, selective adaptation and fairytale theories, and Adrienne Rich‘s concept of ‗re-vision‘, individual chapters focus upon redrawing the boundaries of what makes a (feminist) Rapunzel adaptation a (feminist) Rapunzel adaptation. The thesis also examines the difficult question of why Rapunzel motifs or ‗memes‘ have persisted and whether this is due to the power of cultural ideologies or to certain universal human urges to which ‗Rapunzel‘ ostensibly appeals. As what is meant by feminism changes from the 1970s through to the present day, the selected works are considered in terms of terms of second- and third-wave feminism and postfeminism. Chapter 1 (the Introduction) establishes the approach and rationale. Chapter 2 examines the Grimm ‗Rapunzel‘ variants of 1812 and 1857 as a prelude to examining the ideological uses to which Rapunzel is put post-1970. Chapter 3 focuses on how four feminist poets subject the memes and morals of ‗Rapunzel‘ to different feminist revisions, and thereby challenge the patriarchal meanings invested by the Grimms. Chapter 4 extends this work by examining a feminist moral fable, two complex short stories, a psychological novella, and a graphic novel, in order to draw contrasts between celebratory and darker, more disturbing ‗post-fairytale‘ feminist Rapunzels. Demonstrating the many genres and media into which feminist Rapunzels have been translated, several adapters use the tale on behalf of various kinds of individualism and subjectivisation, and suggest a movement toward greater psychological complexity and interiority in their treatment of Rapunzel memes. Chapter 5 focuses on how Rapunzel memes translate to screen in the feminist reworking Rapunzel Let Down Your Hair (1978) and the postfeminist adaptations Barbie as Rapunzel (2002), Shrek the Third (2007), and Disney‘s Tangled (2010) and Into the Woods (2014). Chapter 6, the final chapter, further extends the analysis by examining Rapunzel‘s general prevalence in the cultural imagination, namely in adverts and on television. By assembling and giving fresh analyses of rare and well-known Rapunzel tales, the chapters critique the gender essentialism in fairytales and reinstate Rapunzel as key to fairytale debate. This research has led to the conclusion that post-1970s Rapunzels exemplify how fairytales appropriate or discard memes in accordance with the possibilities of genre and medium, as well as with the changing face of feminism over the last four decades

Home and the Woman Question: A Feminist Genealogy of Neoliberal Discourse

This thesis is about the woman question and how it presents in neoliberal discourse through the story of home. It begins with an observation that home has an increasing visibility in popular culture and academia where it is explored, investigated and displayed. Home is also of interest to feminist theorists who recognise the struggle women have to be at home in the world and the potential of home as a critical space. In contrast to feminist theory and cultural celebration, home has a utilitarian, hidden and abstract quality in Government discourse in Britain. My argument is that the woman question threads through this abstract rendition of home, yet as home becomes more prominent, gender disappears. Questions of gendered and unpaid domestic labour, of women's rights in the public sphere, and of lived material inequalities, circulate in academic and cultural debates yet do not disrupt the story of home as it is played out in policy settings. In this study I analyse neoliberal discourse and its social turn to discern its logic, and how it works strategically through policy language to reconfigure or produce gendered subjects and social life in its own terms. Feminist theorists have uncovered neoliberal strategies and their effects, and I have drawn on their work to focus on subjectivity, agency and situation as an indication of the presence of home where it is abstract or absent as a word in neoliberal language. The study aims to bring unspoken and unwritten assumptions about home into view, so as to focus on the work that home does to constitute and regulate gender. The purpose is to make contemporary configurations of the woman question, as they filter through the idea of home, available to feminist critique and politics

Impact of Ear Occlusion on In-Ear Sounds Generated by Intra-oral Behaviors

We conducted a case study with one volunteer and a recording setup to detect sounds induced by the actions: jaw clenching, tooth grinding, reading, eating, and drinking. The setup consisted of two in-ear microphones, where the left ear was semi-occluded with a commercially available earpiece and the right ear was occluded with a mouldable silicon ear piece. Investigations in the time and frequency domains demonstrated that for behaviors such as eating, tooth grinding, and reading, sounds could be recorded with both sensors. For jaw clenching, however, occluding the ear with a mouldable piece was necessary to enable its detection. This can be attributed to the fact that the mouldable ear piece sealed the ear canal and isolated it from the environment, resulting in a detectable change in pressure. In conclusion, our work suggests that detecting behaviors such as eating, grinding, reading with a semi-occluded ear is possible, whereas, behaviors such as clenching require the complete occlusion of the ear if the activity should be easily detectable. Nevertheless, the latter approach may limit real-world applicability because it hinders the hearing capabilities.</p

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

Artistic prototypes : from laboratory practices to curatorial strategies

PhDMy thesis introduces new kinds of understandings of artistic practice taking place in laboratories and engaging with the design, production and critique of technological artefacts. The recent spread of artworks based on physical computing widened and enhanced the role of prototyping in the making of new media art. Indeed prototyping can be now considered as a medium in its own right. My point of departure was an investigation of artists working in academic labs, which led me to question the relationship between research and aesthetic production. My initial argument was that the research process is having a specific impact on art practice, with artefacts understood at least by their makers as incomplete and expecting further manipulation. These artworks are open to transformation and collaborative intervention and refuse any form of material or conceptual black-boxing. The notion of artistic prototypes emerges to enrich the vocabulary to comprehend, evaluate and curate the outcomes of these practices. By analysing a range of artworks that could be conceptualised as prototypical, I soon realised that artistic prototypes are often created for activist purposes too, as a way to critique current behaviours and attitudes and to demonstrate that alternative ones are possible. A major contribution of the thesis is a theoretical framework that outlines the behaviour of artistic prototypes. Openness and fictionality are introduced as key features and it is explained how they support both activism and research. The thesis also provides a contingent aesthetics of prototyping addressing both practitioners’ choices and public reception. A further contribution comprises a number of curatorial projects that develop or respond to the framework. The latter can have an impact on creative practitioners, and on curators and heritage professionals, to the point of deeply affecting established principles of conservation and interpretation