The Tempest

This Creative Project in Creative Writing consists of an original feature-length screenplay titled The Tempest, which follows the story of a boy, Jax, who the night before the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, watches a US Army General hand off secret intelligence to Japanese soldiers on US soil. Silenced by the death of his friend, Jax hides the evidence, which his granddaughter, Miranda, uncovers seventy years later. Miranda is a 14-year-old wallflower struggling to come to terms with the death of her mother when dementia threatens to take away her O\u27Pa Jax. She grew up listening to his wild stories, but the journal she uncovers supports his story and may prove, once and for all, that Jax isn\u27t losing his mind. As she pieces together the story of that night she begins to unravel a bigger cover-up that someone is willing to kill to keep buried, and Miranda becomes the target. Facing her painful past and To prove Jax\u27s innocence and save her family\u27s future, Miranda must break the constraints and gender limitations placed on her by her family. While on the surface, The Tempest, is an plot driven adventure about a teen girl playing detective, at its core it is about the relationship between love and loss, and the crippling affect dementia has on family. Much like Shakespeare\u27s The Tempest, the screenplay also explores how the lies and betrayals of one generation can destroy those of the next. The relationship between structure and character play an important part in The Tempest and its non-linear approach is utilized on several different levels. First, this idea of generational secrets influences the structure of the screenplay with regard to timeline and space. The non-linear approach is more conducive in following two separate protagonists in two different time periods, and affords the story an ample foundation on which to build. Secondly, it provides the room necessary to explore character and movement in different ways, contrasting Jax in the first decade of his life dealing with the loss of his friend, with him in his last decade mourning the loss of his memories. In addition, it showcases Miranda\u27s struggle to maintain her two roles; a carious teenager wanting freedom is hampered by her position as Jax\u27s caretaker. Finally, the screenplay\u27s imbrication of structure and character highlights their symbiotic nature by maintaining the emotional integrity of the story

Thesis Proposal and Project: The Cave

This piece is a work of creative writing, inspired by a true story. Slowly, it transitioned from creative nonfiction to a work of science fiction

Guarding and Searching Polyhedra

Guarding and searching problems have been of fundamental interest since the early years of Computational Geometry. Both are well-developed areas of research and have been thoroughly studied in planar polygonal settings. In this thesis we tackle the Art Gallery Problem and the Searchlight Scheduling Problem in 3-dimensional polyhedral environments, putting special emphasis on edge guards and orthogonal polyhedra. We solve the Art Gallery Problem with reflex edge guards in orthogonal polyhedra having reflex edges in just two directions: generalizing a classic theorem by O'Rourke, we prove that r/2 + 1 reflex edge guards are sufficient and occasionally necessary, where r is the number of reflex edges. We also show how to compute guard locations in O(n log n) time. Then we investigate the Art Gallery Problem with mutually parallel edge guards in orthogonal polyhedra with e edges, showing that 11e/72 edge guards are always sufficient and can be found in linear time, improving upon the previous state of the art, which was e/6. We also give tight inequalities relating e with the number of reflex edges r, obtaining an upper bound on the guard number of 7r/12 + 1. We further study the Art Gallery Problem with edge guards in polyhedra having faces oriented in just four directions, obtaining a lower bound of e/6 - 1 edge guards and an upper bound of (e+r)/6 edge guards. All the previously mentioned results hold for polyhedra of any genus. Additionally, several guard types and guarding modes are discussed, namely open and closed edge guards, and orthogonal and non-orthogonal guarding. Next, we model the Searchlight Scheduling Problem, the problem of searching a given polyhedron by suitably turning some half-planes around their axes, in order to catch an evasive intruder. After discussing several generalizations of classic theorems, we study the problem of efficiently placing guards in a given polyhedron, in order to make it searchable. For general polyhedra, we give an upper bound of r^2 on the number of guards, which reduces to r for orthogonal polyhedra. Then we prove that it is strongly NP-hard to decide if a given polyhedron is entirely searchable by a given set of guards. We further prove that, even under the assumption that an orthogonal polyhedron is searchable, approximating the minimum search time within a small-enough constant factor to the optimum is still strongly NP-hard. Finally, we show that deciding if a specific region of an orthogonal polyhedron is searchable is strongly PSPACE-hard. By further improving our construction, we show that the same problem is strongly PSPACE-complete even for planar orthogonal polygons. Our last results are especially meaningful because no similar hardness theorems for 2-dimensional scenarios were previously known

Automatic video segmentation employing object/camera modeling techniques

Practically established video compression and storage techniques still process video sequences as rectangular images without further semantic structure. However, humans watching a video sequence immediately recognize acting objects as semantic units. This semantic object separation is currently not reflected in the technical system, making it difficult to manipulate the video at the object level. The realization of object-based manipulation will introduce many new possibilities for working with videos like composing new scenes from pre-existing video objects or enabling user-interaction with the scene. Moreover, object-based video compression, as defined in the MPEG-4 standard, can provide high compression ratios because the foreground objects can be sent independently from the background. In the case that the scene background is static, the background views can even be combined into a large panoramic sprite image, from which the current camera view is extracted. This results in a higher compression ratio since the sprite image for each scene only has to be sent once. A prerequisite for employing object-based video processing is automatic (or at least user-assisted semi-automatic) segmentation of the input video into semantic units, the video objects. This segmentation is a difficult problem because the computer does not have the vast amount of pre-knowledge that humans subconsciously use for object detection. Thus, even the simple definition of the desired output of a segmentation system is difficult. The subject of this thesis is to provide algorithms for segmentation that are applicable to common video material and that are computationally efficient. The thesis is conceptually separated into three parts. In Part I, an automatic segmentation system for general video content is described in detail. Part II introduces object models as a tool to incorporate userdefined knowledge about the objects to be extracted into the segmentation process. Part III concentrates on the modeling of camera motion in order to relate the observed camera motion to real-world camera parameters. The segmentation system that is described in Part I is based on a background-subtraction technique. The pure background image that is required for this technique is synthesized from the input video itself. Sequences that contain rotational camera motion can also be processed since the camera motion is estimated and the input images are aligned into a panoramic scene-background. This approach is fully compatible to the MPEG-4 video-encoding framework, such that the segmentation system can be easily combined with an object-based MPEG-4 video codec. After an introduction to the theory of projective geometry in Chapter 2, which is required for the derivation of camera-motion models, the estimation of camera motion is discussed in Chapters 3 and 4. It is important that the camera-motion estimation is not influenced by foreground object motion. At the same time, the estimation should provide accurate motion parameters such that all input frames can be combined seamlessly into a background image. The core motion estimation is based on a feature-based approach where the motion parameters are determined with a robust-estimation algorithm (RANSAC) in order to distinguish the camera motion from simultaneously visible object motion. Our experiments showed that the robustness of the original RANSAC algorithm in practice does not reach the theoretically predicted performance. An analysis of the problem has revealed that this is caused by numerical instabilities that can be significantly reduced by a modification that we describe in Chapter 4. The synthetization of static-background images is discussed in Chapter 5. In particular, we present a new algorithm for the removal of the foreground objects from the background image such that a pure scene background remains. The proposed algorithm is optimized to synthesize the background even for difficult scenes in which the background is only visible for short periods of time. The problem is solved by clustering the image content for each region over time, such that each cluster comprises static content. Furthermore, it is exploited that the times, in which foreground objects appear in an image region, are similar to the corresponding times of neighboring image areas. The reconstructed background could be used directly as the sprite image in an MPEG-4 video coder. However, we have discovered that the counterintuitive approach of splitting the background into several independent parts can reduce the overall amount of data. In the case of general camera motion, the construction of a single sprite image is even impossible. In Chapter 6, a multi-sprite partitioning algorithm is presented, which separates the video sequence into a number of segments, for which independent sprites are synthesized. The partitioning is computed in such a way that the total area of the resulting sprites is minimized, while simultaneously satisfying additional constraints. These include a limited sprite-buffer size at the decoder, and the restriction that the image resolution in the sprite should never fall below the input-image resolution. The described multisprite approach is fully compatible to the MPEG-4 standard, but provides three advantages. First, any arbitrary rotational camera motion can be processed. Second, the coding-cost for transmitting the sprite images is lower, and finally, the quality of the decoded sprite images is better than in previously proposed sprite-generation algorithms. Segmentation masks for the foreground objects are computed with a change-detection algorithm that compares the pure background image with the input images. A special effect that occurs in the change detection is the problem of image misregistration. Since the change detection compares co-located image pixels in the camera-motion compensated images, a small error in the motion estimation can introduce segmentation errors because non-corresponding pixels are compared. We approach this problem in Chapter 7 by integrating risk-maps into the segmentation algorithm that identify pixels for which misregistration would probably result in errors. For these image areas, the change-detection algorithm is modified to disregard the difference values for the pixels marked in the risk-map. This modification significantly reduces the number of false object detections in fine-textured image areas. The algorithmic building-blocks described above can be combined into a segmentation system in various ways, depending on whether camera motion has to be considered or whether real-time execution is required. These different systems and example applications are discussed in Chapter 8. Part II of the thesis extends the described segmentation system to consider object models in the analysis. Object models allow the user to specify which objects should be extracted from the video. In Chapters 9 and 10, a graph-based object model is presented in which the features of the main object regions are summarized in the graph nodes, and the spatial relations between these regions are expressed with the graph edges. The segmentation algorithm is extended by an object-detection algorithm that searches the input image for the user-defined object model. We provide two objectdetection algorithms. The first one is specific for cartoon sequences and uses an efficient sub-graph matching algorithm, whereas the second processes natural video sequences. With the object-model extension, the segmentation system can be controlled to extract individual objects, even if the input sequence comprises many objects. Chapter 11 proposes an alternative approach to incorporate object models into a segmentation algorithm. The chapter describes a semi-automatic segmentation algorithm, in which the user coarsely marks the object and the computer refines this to the exact object boundary. Afterwards, the object is tracked automatically through the sequence. In this algorithm, the object model is defined as the texture along the object contour. This texture is extracted in the first frame and then used during the object tracking to localize the original object. The core of the algorithm uses a graph representation of the image and a newly developed algorithm for computing shortest circular-paths in planar graphs. The proposed algorithm is faster than the currently known algorithms for this problem, and it can also be applied to many alternative problems like shape matching. Part III of the thesis elaborates on different techniques to derive information about the physical 3-D world from the camera motion. In the segmentation system, we employ camera-motion estimation, but the obtained parameters have no direct physical meaning. Chapter 12 discusses an extension to the camera-motion estimation to factorize the motion parameters into physically meaningful parameters (rotation angles, focal-length) using camera autocalibration techniques. The speciality of the algorithm is that it can process camera motion that spans several sprites by employing the above multi-sprite technique. Consequently, the algorithm can be applied to arbitrary rotational camera motion. For the analysis of video sequences, it is often required to determine and follow the position of the objects. Clearly, the object position in image coordinates provides little information if the viewing direction of the camera is not known. Chapter 13 provides a new algorithm to deduce the transformation between the image coordinates and the real-world coordinates for the special application of sport-video analysis. In sport videos, the camera view can be derived from markings on the playing field. For this reason, we employ a model of the playing field that describes the arrangement of lines. After detecting significant lines in the input image, a combinatorial search is carried out to establish correspondences between lines in the input image and lines in the model. The algorithm requires no information about the specific color of the playing field and it is very robust to occlusions or poor lighting conditions. Moreover, the algorithm is generic in the sense that it can be applied to any type of sport by simply exchanging the model of the playing field. In Chapter 14, we again consider panoramic background images and particularly focus ib their visualization. Apart from the planar backgroundsprites discussed previously, a frequently-used visualization technique for panoramic images are projections onto a cylinder surface which is unwrapped into a rectangular image. However, the disadvantage of this approach is that the viewer has no good orientation in the panoramic image because he looks into all directions at the same time. In order to provide a more intuitive presentation of wide-angle views, we have developed a visualization technique specialized for the case of indoor environments. We present an algorithm to determine the 3-D shape of the room in which the image was captured, or, more generally, to compute a complete floor plan if several panoramic images captured in each of the rooms are provided. Based on the obtained 3-D geometry, a graphical model of the rooms is constructed, where the walls are displayed with textures that are extracted from the panoramic images. This representation enables to conduct virtual walk-throughs in the reconstructed room and therefore, provides a better orientation for the user. Summarizing, we can conclude that all segmentation techniques employ some definition of foreground objects. These definitions are either explicit, using object models like in Part II of this thesis, or they are implicitly defined like in the background synthetization in Part I. The results of this thesis show that implicit descriptions, which extract their definition from video content, work well when the sequence is long enough to extract this information reliably. However, high-level semantics are difficult to integrate into the segmentation approaches that are based on implicit models. Intead, those semantics should be added as postprocessing steps. On the other hand, explicit object models apply semantic pre-knowledge at early stages of the segmentation. Moreover, they can be applied to short video sequences or even still pictures since no background model has to be extracted from the video. The definition of a general object-modeling technique that is widely applicable and that also enables an accurate segmentation remains an important yet challenging problem for further research

Facility 47 - A Novel

FACILITY 47 is a psychological horror novel set in Germany just after the end of World War II. The novel is written in a naturalistic style that seeks to ground paranormal genre elements in a believable world. The story follows a group of Americans, led by Michael Powell, as they seek out and become trapped within an abandoned Nazi research facility in the Harz Mountains that contains a very dangerous secret; an unknown force capable of controlling people’s actions and forcing them to destroy themselves. FACILITY 47 focuses on a character driven by greed, moral outrage at dubious American postwar policy, and a desire to create a world for himself where he is in control. In the end of the novel, Michael learns that the obsessive quest for control can have catastrophic consequences, but this discovery is made too late to save himself or his friends from the mysterious power inside the facility

Wayfinding Pasifikafuturism : an indigenous science fiction vision of the ocean in space : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Creative Writing at Massey University, Manawatu, New Zealand

This thesis examines science fiction space stories written by Indigenous writers and asks how these texts look to the past while commenting on the present and providing transformative imaginaries of our existence as Indigenous peoples in the future. It also investigates how these texts challenge the inherent colonialism of the science fiction genre and its norm of the white, male, heteronormative, cisgender point of view. This thesis comprises two sections, creative and critical. Twenty percent provides the critical analyses and eighty percent makes up the creative section. The critical component is in two parts. The first part defines the specific point of view adopted in this thesis, which is that of science fiction literature written by Māori and Pasifika authors as the Indigenous peoples of the Pacific. This point of view is captured within the term I have developed and called, “Pasifikafuturism”, a theoretical construct that situates Oceanic science fiction in the afterlife of colonisation and seeks to move beyond postcolonialism to create Pacific conceptions of the future. Pasifikafuturism is located alongside other Alternative Futurisms with which it has commonalities, including Afrofuturism, Indigenous Futurism, Queer Indigenous Futurism, Chicanafuturism, Latinofuturism, and Africanfuturism. Pasifikafuturism is identified within the context of the Pacific Ocean and the ancestral practices and methodologies of wayfinding and waka building. The second part of the critical study comprises a close reading of two science fiction space stories written by Indigenous authors. The first is Witi Ihimaera’s space novella Dead of Night, a story about six people travelling through space to the end of the universe, or Te Kore. The second is Nnedi Okorafor’s novella Binti in which the titular protagonist, a young Indigenous woman from the Himba tribe in Namib, is the first person in her community to travel into space to attend an intergalactic university. In the creative portion of this thesis, Pasifikafuturism is explored imaginatively in an original novel titled Na Viro, which is shaped and informed by my critical research. Na Viro is a work of science fiction set in interstellar space and the Pacific. Tia, the protagonist in Na Viro, is a young Fijian woman who travels into space to rescue her sister from a whirlpool. This thesis argues that science fiction, and specifically space stories, can be used as a lens through which to examine the histories and ancestral knowledge of Indigenous peoples adversely impacted by colonialism; and as a way of reclaiming and re-growing Indigenous knowledge that has survived. Furthermore, I use Pacific wayfinding as a methodological framework to enable the envisioning of transformative futures in science fiction stories where our knowledges are centralised, privileged, and respected

Spring 2006

Spring 2006. Full Issue, 114 pages in total including front matter & table of contents. Contents: Editors\u27 Note, 7 Fiction Burton, Lindsay, My Mother\u27s Story, 20 Fincke, Gary, Childish, 39 Fincke, Gary, WOOM! BALL, 41 Guidry, Jacqueline, What Corinna Heard, 53 Schuman, David, Indian Casino, 98 Poetry Admussen, Nick, Her Shift, 9 Altman, Taylor, Cityscapes, 10 Altman, Taylor, When Death Comes to Tampa, 11 Aronson, Rebecca, West, 12 Ballard, Barry, Filament, 13 Bartley, Jackie, Sirocco, 14 Bartley, Jackie, Rome in Rain, 15 Becker, Claire, Boar\u27s Ears, 16 Becker, Claire, Untoward, 17 Bolling, Doug, Questions, 19 Campion, Matthew, Wonder at the Green Light, 27 Carpathios, Neil, Moving On, 28 Carpathios, Neil, The Country of Marriage, 30 Corwin, Nina, What Can Happen to Seagulls, 31 De Winter, Corrine, St. Cecilia, 32 De Winter, Corrine, Danaid, 34 Espach, Alison, On Plants, 36 Espach, Alison, Dimension, 37 Estrada, Lucía, [The bone mask], 38 Foust, Graham, Just Two of My Many Concerns about Bone, 42 Foust, Graham, Academy Fight Song, 43 Foust, Graham, The Moviest Thing, 44 Gallaher, John, Measure Twice, Cut Once, 45 Gordon, Chris, Named After Titans, 46 Gordon, Chris, This Is My Wilderness, 47 Grace, Andrew, Vantage, 48 Griffith, Kevin, Paranoia, My Sweet, 49 Griffith, Kevin, The Severed Hand, 50 Griffith, Kevin, The First Sentence of the Story, 51 Griffith, Kevin, Old Man Swimming Laps at the Y, 52 Gutstein, Daniel, What We Had Seen, 58 Harrod, Lois Marie, At the Writer\u27s Conference, 59 Hogan, Michael, Drought in Jalisco, 60 Johnson, Peter, American Male, Acting Up, 61 Jones, Jeff P., It Shouldn\u27t Be, 62 Kern, Matthew, Old Time Religion, 63 Kryder, John B., At the Gallery, 65 Lacey, John, Powerball, 67 Laferriere, Ashley, Coins, 68 Laferriere, Ashley, Foreign Thing, 69 Lewis, Brian, Shades of Almighty Despair Dispelled, 70 MacNeil, Maura, The Harbor House, 71 MacNeil, Maura, Invention of Longing, 72 Martin, Timothy, The Untruth, 73 McCord, Sandy, Circus, 74 Meehan, Charlie, Your Father\u27s Den, 75 Millerd, Ashley, Crowded City, 76 Morgan, Caleb, Why Not, 77 Morris, Wilda, warning, 78 Murawski, Elisabeth, Rome, Starry Night, 79 Murphy, Caitlin, Ego Is A Cologne, 81 Murphy, Caitlin, Applesauce Adaptation, 82 Nagle, Kerrin, The Daily Commute, 83 Nostrand, Sudie, [So intense is the tenderness], 84 Nostrand, Sudie, [A moment ago], 85 Passarella, Lee, Relativity Theory, 86 Pennington, Hadley, How I wrote a girl, 87 Pennington, Hadley, The Idle Dance, 90 Perel, Jane Lunin, Louie Loves Kids, 92 Read, Caitlin, Chiloé, 93 Reynolds, Emily, The Orange, 94 Reynolds, Emily, Visiting Hours, 95 Roney-O\u27Brien, Susan, The day you died, 96 Scanlon, Leone, Picking Blueberries, 97 Schwarcz, Vera, Dark Woods Blew, 99 Smith, Steven Ray, Forty Hours, 100 Stickney, Sarah, The Leaf Pile, 101 Thomas, Michael Paul, Brooklyn, Late Morning, 102 Thomas, Ron, Angiogram, 103 Vealy, Kyle, [(Upon waking with;], 104 Weiland, Shanti, Mormon Boys, 105 Weiland, Shanti, God Poem, Part V: Getting His Attention, 106 Contributors\u27 Notes, 10

City lighting and dark-time landscape as a service

Master’s thesis Curriculum in Landscape ArchitectureThis Master’s Thesis studies a dark-time landscape and lighting solutions in landscape and cityscape. Nowadays cities are more complex 24-hours systems. Life around the clock emphasizes an importance of designs to create safe and pleasant appearance of public spaces also in dark-time. The aim of this Thesis is to find the principles of modern lighting and develop the process between lighting design and landscape design. In this Thesis the four lighting perspectives are 24-hour city, user-centered lighting, light as visual factor in space and sustainability and resilience. The theory is based on landscape architecture. Spaces can be created by lighting as well as lighting infra at day and at dark time is part of the urban environment. Furthermore, rapidly developing technology enables resilience solutions and still follows the increasing need of new lighting solutions to be more user-centered. The survey among professionals was made to find out the current situation between landscape design and lighting design projects. The lighting criteria concept (LCC) was created from the current situation of lighting design. Dark-time landscape was analyzed in different scales. Lynch method of spatial analyzes was used in bigger scale to analyze areas’ landmarks, nodes and districts during the dark-time. In closer scale layers of lights analyze were used to find to the space and place feeling and to create more pleasant dark-time landscape. Two ongoing build environment projects, Jätkäsaari and Tripla in Helsinki were used as case areas. After Lynch method of spatial analyzes different kind of urban environments were taken to closer analyzing. These conceptual areas are a park, a hybrid space and a post-industrial site. In these conceptual urban enviroments were used as an example to create lighting as a service. The results emphasize the importance of dark-time experience of an urban landscape and a collaboration for achieving a new lighting solutions