Computer-aided design of an ergonomic computer mouse

The primary purpose of this thesis is to explain a device which could be used as an alternative for a computer mouse. Instead of using a regular roller found in an ordinary mouse, the device uses a pressure sensitive sensor to control the computer cursor on the monitor. The device is developed mainly for a personal computer with Universal Serial Bus (USB) capability. The computer should have an operating system of Microsoft Windows 98 or newer. The device does not need any additional driver, and it has a USB hot-plug-and-play feature. It uses a Human Interface Device (HID) driver provided by Windows. The device mainly has two buttons (right and left) and is approximately 4 by 3 by 2 in size. Users can press their fingers on to the device to control the cursor. The device will be small enough to be fit inside a person\u27s palm. The area has four pressure sensors used to move the cursor to the left, right, upward and downward. The user can control some parameters, such as cursor movement rate, by just controlling the amount of force pressed on that area. The device will be made from a soft material with a hard box inside. All the necessary components will be placed inside the box. Only the sensors are outside the box, so that the user can control the sensors by squeezing the device. This would make it comfortable for users to operate the device

Novel applications of nanogratings for high resolution microscopy

This dissertation leverages the recent advances in fabricating nanogratings with highly tunable birefringent properties to address some important challenges in high resolution microscopy. Out-of-focus features of a sample cause blurring in wide-field microscopes. Polarized illumination coded Structured Illumination Microscopy (picoSIM) addresses this problem by performing optical sectioning, that too in a single exposure. Using nanogratings improves the light efficiency of picoSIM by 70%, while simultaneously making the setup compact. It also extends picoSIM to reflective microscopy applications by allowing the use of incoherent light. The first practical implementation of picoSIM for material imaging with a field-of-view of 100 µm x 128 µm at a fast acquisition rate of 154 fps is demonstrated. Reliably visualizing three-dimensional biological structures requires an extended depth-of-field (EDF). However, the axial elongation of focus is accompanied by loss of lateral resolution. To address this challenge, a beam shaping device called Hybrid filter based on nanogratings is proposed. This device combines radial polarization with a binary phase filter for pupil modulation to achieve EDF at high numerical aperture. Two designs of this device obtained by different methodologies are fabricated and compared. Axial elongation of 1.69 and 2.66 and lateral resolution improvement of 17.8% and 22.7% compared to a Gaussian focus is demonstrated. Aligning a STimulated Emission Depletion (STED) microscope can be challenging due to the phase mask needed to generate the depletion beam. A nanogratings based Quadrant Retarder Plate has been proposed in this work to reduce the manufacturing complexity. This wavelength-selective device can potentially simplify a STED microscope by combining the paths of the excitation and depletion beams. Preliminary results obtained with a prototype of this device are presented and suggestions to improve its performance are discussed

Skyler and Bliss

Hong Kong remains the backdrop to the science fiction movies of my youth. The city reminds me of my former training in the financial sector. It is a city in which I could have succeeded in finance, but as far as art goes it is a young city, and I am a young artist. A frustration emerges; much like the mould, the artist also had to develop new skills by killing off his former desires and manipulating technology. My new series entitled HONG KONG surface project shows a new direction in my artistic research in which my technique becomes ever simpler, reducing the traces of pixelation until objects appear almost as they were found and photographed. Skyler and Bliss presents tectonic plates based on satellite images of the Arctic. Working in a hot and humid Hong Kong where mushrooms grow ferociously, a city artificially refrigerated by climate control, this series provides a conceptual image of a imaginary typographic map for survival. (Laurent Segretier

Computer Science & Technology Series : XVIII Argentine Congress of Computer Science. Selected papers

CACIC’12 was the eighteenth Congress in the CACIC series. It was organized by the School of Computer Science and Engineering at the Universidad Nacional del Sur. The Congress included 13 Workshops with 178 accepted papers, 5 Conferences, 2 invited tutorials, different meetings related with Computer Science Education (Professors, PhD students, Curricula) and an International School with 5 courses. CACIC 2012 was organized following the traditional Congress format, with 13 Workshops covering a diversity of dimensions of Computer Science Research. Each topic was supervised by a committee of 3-5 chairs of different Universities. The call for papers attracted a total of 302 submissions. An average of 2.5 review reports were collected for each paper, for a grand total of 752 review reports that involved about 410 different reviewers. A total of 178 full papers, involving 496 authors and 83 Universities, were accepted and 27 of them were selected for this book.Red de Universidades con Carreras en Informática (RedUNCI

EUROSENSORS XVII : book of abstracts

Fundação Calouste Gulbenkien (FCG).Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT)

Proceedings of the 19th Sound and Music Computing Conference

Proceedings of the 19th Sound and Music Computing Conference - June 5-12, 2022 - Saint-Étienne (France). https://smc22.grame.f

Housing quality and lost (public) space in Croatia

IN ENGLISH: In the post-socialist period and within the current social transition context, urban and rural Croatia has, just like other transition countries, experienced many changes in the social structure and space. One example is the housing quality which is a replica of the situation in the Croatian society and has also undergone some major changes. Socially oriented housing construction co-financed by the state and the cities is in an unfavourable position compared to private housing construction. In the last twenty years the amount of the social housing construction has been only a minor part of the total contruction work in the country. For instance, out of nine newly planned residential housing developments in Zagreb, the capital city, only three have been completed and the work on the rest of them has stopped and is unlikely to continue. Private construction work prevails especially on the edge of the city and is characterised by high density housing. This type of housing construction doesn't benefit the majority of citizens in search of accommodation (price per square meter is too high, low-quality building). There is also a big problem of the community facilities (primary and secondary infrastructure, schools, kindergartens, playgrounds, green areas, sidewalks, public transport etc.). The existing globalisation-transition circumstances of the Croatian society corroborate the fact which experts of various profiles often point out: ignoring the process of (urban) planning will irreparably damage the space. The city transformation shows the absence of comprehensive urban planning which results in an ever increasing number of random buildings which do not fit in the surroundings. This leads up to yet another important issue – the shrinking and, in some cases, disappearance of public space which becomes the “lost space“. In recent years there has been a lot of building in the city core and on the edge which does not quite fit in the existing urban structure, image or the skyline of the city. The current situation in the process of planning can be characterized as a conflict and imbalance between the powerful actors (mostly political and economic) and less powerful actors (mostly professional and civil). The actors who have the political power and influence and the ones who possess the capital are forming an “alliance” between two important layers of the social structure. The lack of civil and professional actors, “lost spatial actors”, and therefore of civic aggregation is also present and that is also the cause of public space “disappearance” and undermined process of public participation. --------------- IN CROATIAN: U postsocijalističkom razdoblju i trenutnom tranzicijskom kontekstu urbana i ruralna Hrvatska su, kao i ostale tranzicijske zemlje, doživjele mnoge promjene u društvenoj strukturi i samom prostoru. Na primjeru kvalitete stanovanja kao replike stanja u hrvatskom društvu mogu se vidjeti značajne promjene. Društveno usmjerena stambena izgradnja sufinancirana od strane države i gradova je stoga rjeđa i u nepovoljnijoj je situaciji prema privatnoj stanogradnji. Zadnjih dvadeset godina udjel socijalne stambene gradnje je zanemariv u ukupnoj izgradnji na razini zemlje. Primjerice, od devet planiranih stambenih naselja izgrađenih po modelu POS-a u Zagrebu samo su tri i završena. Na ostalima je proces gradnje zastao i ne čini se da će se privesti kraju. Privatna je gradnje prisutnija, posebno na rubovima grada, a obilježava je visoka gustoća gradnje. Ovakav tip gradnje ne odgovara većini stanovnika koji su u procesu potražnje stambene nekretnine (visoka cijena kvadratnog metra, a slaba kvaliteta gradnje). Postoji također i problem nedostatne opremljenosti susjedstva (primarna i sekundarna infrastruktura, škole, vrtići, igrališta, zelene površine, pješačke staze, javni transport itd.). Navedene globalizacijsko-tranzicijske okolnosti hrvatskog društva potvrđuju ono što eksperti različitih profila ističu, a to je da će ignoriranje procesa (urbanog) planiranja nepovratno uništiti prostor gradova. Ovakve transformacije pokazuju nedostatak sustavnog urbanog planiranja što rezultira sve većim brojem zgrada koje se ne uklapaju u neposrednu okolinu. To nadalje dovodi do drugog važnog aspekta – smanjivanja i u nekim slučajevima, nestanka javnog prostora koji postaje „izgubljeni prostor“. Posljednjih je godina izgrađen velik broj zgrada, i u središtu i na rubovima grada, koje se ne uklapaju u postojeću urbanu strukturu, izgled ili vizuru grada. Ovakvu situaciju obilježavaju sukob i neravnoteža između moćnijih društvenih aktera (većinom političkih i ekonomskih) i onih manje moćnih (većinom profesionalnih i civilnih). Politički i ekonomski akteri se često povezuju u „savez“ dvaju najjačih u društvenoj strukturi. S druge strane nedostatak utjecaja civilnih i profesionalnih aktera kao „izgubljenih prostornih aktera“ dovodi do „nestanka“ javnih prostora te smanjenja važnosti procesa participacije (sudjelovanja javnosti)