Position Paper for the Second W3C Workshop on the Web of Things

International audienceInteraction Affordances are central to the W3C Web of Things (WoT): they allow Consumers to identify and use the capabilities provided by Web Things. 1 Ideally, interaction affordances would allow consumers to arrive-and-operate in any W3C WoT environment: given an entry URI, consumers would be able to achieve their tasks in an autonomous manner by navigating the hypermedia and deciding among the various options presented to them at run time. A central challenge then, which is not typically within the scope of Web engineering , is how to design, program, debug, monitor, and regulate such autonomous consumers of Web Things. The engineering of similar autonomous systems has been studied to a large extent in research on multi-agent systems (MAS), and we believe that tapping into the large body of MAS research holds great promise for unlocking the full potential of the W3C WoT. In this position paper, we motivate and present our vision for autonomous systems in the WoT, and support this vision with a prototype for industrial manufacturing. We then discuss some of the challenges and opportunities raised by bringing autonomy to the WoT

Synthesising process controllers from formal models of transformable assembly systems

When producing complex and highly customisable products in low volumes (or in ‘batch sizes of one’), automation of production systems is critical for competitiveness and profitability in high labour-cost economies. To facilitate batch-size-of-one production, ‘topology generation’, ‘realisability’, and ‘control’ algorithms have been developed as part of the Evolvable Assembly Systems (EAS) project. The topology generation algorithm computes all the possible sequences of parallel activities that assembly resources can perform on parts and is run offline whenever the layout of the production facility changes, whereas realisability checking and controller generation are performed at run-time to check whether a production facility with a given set of assembly resources can assemble a desired product, and how the product should be assembled, e.g., which resources to use, and when. Generated controllers are output in Business to Manufacturing Markup Language (B2MML). Taken together, the algorithms thus represent a step toward a complete path from the formal specification of an assembly system and the products to be assembled, to the automated synthesis of executable process plans. This paper presents each algorithm in sufficient detail to allow their reimplementation by other researchers. Topology generation is the most expensive step in the approach. A preliminary experimental evaluation of the scalability of topology generation is presented, which suggests that, for small to medium sized production facilities, the time required for recomputing the topology is sufficiently small not to preclude frequent factory transformations, e.g., the addition of new resources.Funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council via grants EP/K018205/1 and EP/K014161/1

The New Reflexivity: Puzzle Films, Found Footage, and Cinematic Narration in the Digital Age

“The New Reflexivity” tracks two narrative styles of contemporary Hollywood production that have yet to be studied in tandem: the puzzle film and the found footage horror film. In early August 1999, near the end of what D.N. Rodowick refers to as “the summer of digital paranoia,” two films entered the wide-release U.S. theatrical marketplace and enjoyed surprisingly massive financial success, just as news of the “death of film” circulated widely. Though each might typically be classified as belonging to the horror genre, both the unreliable “puzzle film” The Sixth Sense and the fake-documentary “found footage film” The Blair Witch Project stood as harbingers of new narrative currents in global cinema. This dissertation looks closely at these two films, reading them as illustrative of two decidedly millennial narrative styles, styles that stepped out strikingly from the computer-generated shadows cast by big-budget Hollywood. The industrial shift to digital media that coincides with the rise of these films in the late 90s reframed the cinematic image as inherently manipulable, no longer a necessary index of physical reality. Directors become image-writers, constructing photorealistic imagery from scratch. Meanwhile, DVDs and online paratexts encourage cinephiles to digitize, to attain and interact with cinema in novel ways. “The New Reflexivity” reads The Sixth Sense and The Blair Witch Project as reflexive allegories of cinema’s and society’s encounters with new digital media. The most basic narrative tricks and conceits of puzzle films and found footage films produce an unusually intense and ludic engagement with narrative boundaries and limits, thus undermining the naturalized practices of classical Hollywood narration. Writers and directors of these films treat recorded events and narrative worlds as reviewable, remixable, and upgradeable, just as Hollywood digitizes and tries to keep up with new media. Though a great deal of critical attention has been paid to both puzzle and found footage films separately, no lengthy critical survey has yet been undertaken that considers these movies in terms of their shared formal and thematic concerns. Rewriting the rules of popular cinematic narration, these films encourage viewers to be suspicious of what they see onscreen, to be aware of the possibility of unreliable narration, or CGI and the “Photoshopped.” Urgent to film and cultural studies, “The New Reflexivity” suggests that these genres’ complicitous critique of new media is decidedly instructive for a networked society struggling with what it means to be digital

Video activism in the shadow of Wellywood : an exegesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Fine Arts at Massey University, Wellington, New Zealand

This creative practice-based research was conducted in Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand, the home of ground-breaking movie companies Wingnut Films, Weta Workshop, Weta Digital, and Park Road Post. Following the success of director Peter Jackson’s The Lord of The Rings and The Hobbit trilogies, with pioneering special effects led By Richard Taylor, Wellington city has colloquially become known as Wellywood, in honour of our film industry’s connections to Hollywood. Parts of Aotearoa have since been renamed by government tourism agencies and businesses to reflect their use as locations in the films set in the fictional world of Middle Earth. Throughout the course of this research, the “Wellywood” movie industry has faced a range of issues including workers’ rights and workplace harassment and has attracted criticism for its influence on government policy. In the Shadow of Wellywood is an experimentally animated video work satirizing the dominant studio system and its ability to shape our national identity and consumerist desires. This tale of celebrity dreams of stardom turning into nightmares draws upon tropes of action, melodrama, musical, film noir, and road movie genres to locate the narrative within the artificial world of the production studio. In using movie-themed action figures as stand-ins for Hollywood actors, and animating them using rudimentary techniques, the work considers the celebrity cycle and the technological advances of the industry. The artificial setting satirically suggests that we no longer have a national cinema, but one of transplanted culture. In combining analogue and digital video technologies the creative process reflected upon obsolescence, and the place of handmade animation techniques within an increasingly digital environment. In continuing to work with obsolete video technology rather than upgrading to the latest format the research has been conducted with the intention of developing an environmentally sustainable method of studio-based production. This research has identified a gap in the field of video art practice through continuing to use equipment that others no longer want and rejecting the latest movie industry technologies as a mode of critical engagement. This research makes an original contribution to the creative field of video activism through using equipment until it literally wears out and accepting the resulting inconsistencies in production. The creative processes used in the development of the final work explored a methodology of experimentation, collaboration, and iterative testing designed to critique mainstream movie production and distribution systems, and to explore alternatives. Through adapting the situationist principles of détournement, psycho-geography and the dérive, this research demonstrates the continued relevance of Guy Debord’s key text Society of the Spectacle (1967) for re-contextualizing the movie industry as an instance of the spectacle, an artificial capitalist system designed to manipulate the consumer, and for identifying ways to resist and critique it. A series of expanded cinema collaborations with musicians during the developmental stages of the research allowed for testing the concept of a studio backlot and exploring the notion of special effects. The animation studio built for this research drew upon traditions of repurposing established by pre-digital experimental film and expanded cinema artists. The portable micro cinema designed for screening In the Shadow of Wellywood locates the work outside of mainstream networks and within an alternative system of distribution underscoring the project’s positioning as a form of video activism