Egyptian Ceremony in the Virtual Temple- Avatars for Virtual Heritage

With Virtual Reality, students can directly interact with distant times and places, giving them greater understanding and empathy for other cultures. Egyptian religious performance and ritual were central to the culture, and monumental temples were their dramatic performance spaces. The Earth Theater at Carnegie Museum of Natural History supports the Virtual Egyptian Temple, a three-dimensional, computer-graphic simulation of a Ptolemaic Era temple. We propose to stage an important religious event from that time, the Egyptian Oracle, virtually “in” the temple at the Earth Theater and two other large-screen theaters. An expert puppeteer will control the temple virtual High Priest and lesser constructs, a live educator, and even with the audience in the role of the Egyptian public. A live puppeteer can experiment and improvise in ways no artificial intelligence can and decades of educational research show the best way to learn about a social activity is to see it and do it

Adopting test automation at Effizency to Improve Agility and Software Quality

Digital solutions have long been used as a means to solve everyday problems. Over time these solutions have been improved and refined. These solutions have emerged to help humans, primarily with tasks that can be cumbersome or repetitive. The demand for repetitive tasks and process optimization through digital means is peaked. For this reason, many companies in the software development area have adopted the use of automated tests capable of doing autonomously and quickly the tasks that previously required a lot of resources to perform, thus jumping on the "Automation Bandwagon”. By applying this approach, companies have the goal to improve the quality standards of the software offered by reducing the number of bugs and identifying them as early as possible in the development process. To observe the applicability, optimization, and efficiency of the automation of autonomous testing in a specific system, the concepts and technologies proposed here were applied in a professional scenario of a young company, Effizency. This company aims to facilitate the sale of energy services and electrical optimization. Effizency currently works using an agile approach and is constantly looking for ways to improve its development process. The company is currently facing the challenge of increasing the quality of its software and at the same time reducing the repetitiveness of its validation processes. Through this dissertation, it is expected that an improvement will be identified in terms of both a reduction of process repetition, time consumption and an increase in the test coverage performed. The main objective of this dissertation is to improve the quality of a company's software and the agility of its development process. This objective will be achieved using automated testing.As soluções digitais são usadas para resolver problemas do dia a dia há muito tempo. Ao longo do tempo, estas têm sido melhoradas e aperfeiçoadas. Estas soluções surgiram com o objetivo de ajudar o ser humano nas suas tarefas, maioritariamente tarefas que podem ser pesadas ou repetitivas. A procura pela automatização de tarefas repetitivas e de otimização de processos através de meios digitais está no seu auge. Por essa razão, muitas empresas na área de desenvolvimento de software adotaram o uso de testes automáticos capazes de fazer de forma autónoma e rápida as tarefas que anteriormente necessitariam de muitos recursos para realizar, entrando assim no “Vagão da Automatização”. Ao aplicar esta abordagem, as empresas têm o objetivo de melhorar os padrões de qualidade do software oferecidos reduzindo o número de bugs e identificando-os o mais cedo possível no processo de desenvolvimento. Com o intuito de observar a aplicabilidade, otimização e eficiência da automação de testes autónomos num sistema em concreto foi realizada a aplicação dos conceitos e tecnologias aqui propostos num cenário profissional de uma empresa jovem, Effizency. A Effizency trabalha atualmente utilizando uma abordagem ágil e está constantemente à procura de formas de melhorar o seu processo de desenvolvimento. Atualmente a empresa, enfrenta o desafio de aumentar a qualidade do seu software e, ao mesmo tempo reduzir o a repetitividade dos seus processos de validação. Através desta dissertação, espera-se que seja identificada uma melhoria tanto em termos de uma redução da repetição do processo, do consumo de tempo e de um aumento da cobertura dos testes realizados. O principal objetivo desta dissertação é melhorar a qualidade do software de uma empresa e a agilidade do seu processo de desenvolvimento. Este objetivo será alcançado através de testes automatizados

Building a semi-autonomous sociable robot platform for robust interpersonal telecommunication

Thesis (M. Eng.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2008.Includes bibliographical references (p. 73-74).This thesis presents the design of a software platform for the Huggable project. The Huggable is a new kind of robotic companion being developed at the MIT Media Lab for health care, education, entertainment and social communication applications. This work focuses on the social communication application as it pertains to using a semi-autonomous robotic avatar in a remote environment. The software platform consists of an extensible and robust distributed software system that connects a remote human puppeteer to the Huggable robot via internet. The paper discusses design decisions made in building the software platform and describes the technologies created for the social communication application. An informal trial of the system reveals how the system's puppeteering interface can be improved, and pinpoints where performance enhancements are needed for this particular application.by Robert Lopez Toscano.M.Eng

Peter and the Wolf

Peter and the Wolf is a retelling of the classic symphonic fairy tale for children, queerly remade. Incorporating elements of film, live audio, and imposed communication technologies, the performance boldly imagines what has transpired in the theatre in the six months since the artists were forced to abandon the theatre, leaving the characters to their own devices. Peter and the Wolf explores the perception of identity through a layered, mediated lens, inviting viewers to reflect on new definitions of otherness, agency and representation. Told largely from the perspective of the Wolf, the performance challenges diametric oppositions of the self through an infinite journey of simultaneity, moving away from a normative polarities of Either and Or towards an inclusive Neither alive with possibilities

Captura de movimento e animação como meio de criação e treinamento em performance

In 2014 a group of students, faculty and staff at the Ohio State University’s (OSU) Department of Theatre, Department of Design and Advanced Computing Center for the Arts and Design (ACCAD) joined their creative energies to devise the play “There is No Silence” based on the life and works of the iconic French mime Marcel Marceau. Marceau’s history of being the first performance artist motion captured at ACCAD in 2001 afforded the group artistic and technological opportunities to integrate digital animation and performance of real-time virtual avatars into their work. The process of devising revealed parallels between the practices of mime art and performing with virtual environments and offered new insights for devising with media.Em 2014, um grupo de estudantes, professores e funcionários do Departamento de Teatro, Departamento de Design e do Centro de Computação Avançada para Artes e Design (ACCAD) da Ohio StateUniversity (OSU) se uniram para elaborar e criar a peça “Thereis no silence” baseada na vida e obra do importante mímico francês Marcel Marceau. Em 2001, a possibilidade de realizar, pela primeira vez na história, uma performance de Marceau, por meio de captura de movimento feito pelo ACCAD, proporcionou ao grupo a oportunidade artística e tecnológica de integrar animação digital e performance de avatares virtuais em tempo real em seu trabalho. O processo de elaboração revelou semelhanças entre a prática damímica e a atuação em ambientes virtuais, oferecendo assim, novas possibilidades criação com novas mídias

“It’s the Secret to the Universe”: The Communicative Constitution and Routinization of a Dominant Authoritative Text within a UK Cosmetics Company

A gap in Organization and Management Theory exists regarding how, as a relational phenomenon, authority routinely makes a difference to the daily functioning of organization. A ‘Communication as Constitutive of Organization’ (CCO; e.g. Cooren et al., 2011) view of text (e.g. Taylor et al., 1996) is identified as holding unrealized potential to address this omission. A nine-month ethnography of a UK cosmetics company, followed by an abductive analysis (Alvesson and Kärreman, 2007, 2011) of fieldwork material focusing on ventriloquism (e.g. Cooren, 2012), aesthetics (e.g. Hancock, 2005) and practice theory (e.g. Schatzki, 2006), provides original insight into how authority routinely acts. The thesis’s main contribution to knowledge is the crafting of ‘dominant text’ which is defined as; a series of orchestrated texts which simultaneously exercise authority by routinizing the daily workings of organization. To elaborate, actors are instructed and taught to make sure a ventriloqual text routinely directs clients’ attention toward a particular course of action. At the same time, interventions are made to ensure aesthetic and practice texts routinely remind actors to represent a collective identity and disciplines how they act. While CCO studies show how texts periodically exercise authority (Fauré et al., 2010; Güney and Creswell, 2012; Holm and Fairhurst, 2017; Jordan et al., 2013; Koschmann, 2012; Spee and Jarzabkowski, 2011), a dominant text enhances knowledge about how authority routinely organizes activities which constitute and characterize organization. Theoretical insights are also generated that extend the CCO project of developing a communicational interpretation of organizing and organization

HPAC-Offload: Accelerating HPC Applications with Portable Approximate Computing on the GPU

The end of Dennard scaling and the slowdown of Moore's law led to a shift in technology trends toward parallel architectures, particularly in HPC systems. To continue providing performance benefits, HPC should embrace Approximate Computing (AC), which trades application quality loss for improved performance. However, existing AC techniques have not been extensively applied and evaluated in state-of-the-art hardware architectures such as GPUs, the primary execution vehicle for HPC applications today. This paper presents HPAC-Offload, a pragma-based programming model that extends OpenMP offload applications to support AC techniques, allowing portable approximations across different GPU architectures. We conduct a comprehensive performance analysis of HPAC-Offload across GPU-accelerated HPC applications, revealing that AC techniques can significantly accelerate HPC applications (1.64x LULESH on AMD, 1.57x NVIDIA) with minimal quality loss (0.1%). Our analysis offers deep insights into the performance of GPU-based AC that guide the future development of AC algorithms and systems for these architectures.Comment: 12 pages, 12 pages. Accepted at SC2

Washington University Record, March 12, 1998

https://digitalcommons.wustl.edu/record/1786/thumbnail.jp

Playing Beowulf 1: Ludic Rhapsodies

I've chosen Chapter 7 as a sample because it gives something of an overview of projects run by myself and colleagues in young people's game designs based, in this case, on Beowulf. It draws heavily on my colleagues' published work, while also offering an in-depth analysis of one game made by a 10 year-old boy in the workshop we ran at the National Videogame Arcade in Nottingham. The chapter refers back to some of the arguments I've made in previous chapters about the playful disposition of literature in general, the cellular nature of game narrative in particular, the multimodal qualities of videogames, and the kinds of literacies that game play and game design involve. It anticipates further chapters which go on to explore videogame transformations of Beowulf by graduate students of Anglo-Saxon, and game designs of Macbeth by secondary students in Cambridge, Yorkshire and London. I hope readers may find this sample a sufficiently interesting taster to lead them to the whole book, which represents at least ten years of applied and theoretical research, as well as a hinterland of experience in classrooms, which honed my sense of the literature game and what young people make of it

Music video's performing bodies: Floria Sigismondi as gestural animator and puppeteer

Auteur music video director Floria Sigismondi has a reputation for creating beautifully macabre imagery that has been described as surreal and uncanny. Less obvious is the way in which she uses animation and gesture to estrange the movement of performing bodies. While pixilation and stop motion animation are used together to invert the agency of humans and objects, Sigismondi’s use of gesture extends this manipulation of agency beyond technical processes. This dialectic of cinematic agency is discussed through an examination of three music videos directed by Sigismondi: End of the World (2004) for The Cure, Montauk Fling (2013) for Lawrence Rothman and The Stars (Are Out Tonight) (2013) for David Bowie. Considering these videos in relation to puppet animation, live-action film and the cultural and historical migration of gesture, the author argues that Sigismondi puppetises humans and animates gesture as a means of transgression