The Translocal Event and the Polyrhythmic Diagram

This thesis identifies and analyses the key creative protocols in translocal performance practice, and ends with suggestions for new forms of transversal live and mediated performance practice, informed by theory. It argues that ontologies of emergence in dynamic systems nourish contemporary practice in the digital arts. Feedback in self-organised, recursive systems and organisms elicit change, and change transforms. The arguments trace concepts from chaos and complexity theory to virtual multiplicity, relationality, intuition and individuation (in the work of Bergson, Deleuze, Guattari, Simondon, Massumi, and other process theorists). It then examines the intersection of methodologies in philosophy, science and art and the radical contingencies implicit in the technicity of real-time, collaborative composition. Simultaneous forces or tendencies such as perception/memory, content/ expression and instinct/intellect produce composites (experience, meaning, and intuition- respectively) that affect the sensation of interplay. The translocal event is itself a diagram - an interstice between the forces of the local and the global, between the tendencies of the individual and the collective. The translocal is a point of reference for exploring the distribution of affect, parameters of control and emergent aesthetics. Translocal interplay, enabled by digital technologies and network protocols, is ontogenetic and autopoietic; diagrammatic and synaesthetic; intuitive and transductive. KeyWorx is a software application developed for realtime, distributed, multimodal media processing. As a technological tool created by artists, KeyWorx supports this intuitive type of creative experience: a real-time, translocal “jamming” that transduces the lived experience of a “biogram,” a synaesthetic hinge-dimension. The emerging aesthetics are processual – intuitive, diagrammatic and transversal

Visual Question Answering: A Survey of Methods and Datasets

Visual Question Answering (VQA) is a challenging task that has received increasing attention from both the computer vision and the natural language processing communities. Given an image and a question in natural language, it requires reasoning over visual elements of the image and general knowledge to infer the correct answer. In the first part of this survey, we examine the state of the art by comparing modern approaches to the problem. We classify methods by their mechanism to connect the visual and textual modalities. In particular, we examine the common approach of combining convolutional and recurrent neural networks to map images and questions to a common feature space. We also discuss memory-augmented and modular architectures that interface with structured knowledge bases. In the second part of this survey, we review the datasets available for training and evaluating VQA systems. The various datatsets contain questions at different levels of complexity, which require different capabilities and types of reasoning. We examine in depth the question/answer pairs from the Visual Genome project, and evaluate the relevance of the structured annotations of images with scene graphs for VQA. Finally, we discuss promising future directions for the field, in particular the connection to structured knowledge bases and the use of natural language processing models.Comment: 25 page

A weakness measure for GR(1) formulae

In spite of the theoretical and algorithmic developments for system synthesis in recent years, little effort has been dedicated to quantifying the quality of the specifications used for synthesis. When dealing with unrealizable specifications, finding the weakest environment assumptions that would ensure realizability is typically a desirable property; in such context the weakness of the assumptions is a major quality parameter. The question of whether one assumption is weaker than another is commonly interpreted using implication or, equivalently, language inclusion. However, this interpretation does not provide any further insight into the weakness of assumptions when implication does not hold. To our knowledge, the only measure that is capable of comparing two formulae in this case is entropy, but even it fails to provide a sufficiently refined notion of weakness in case of GR(1) formulae, a subset of linear temporal logic formulae which is of particular interest in controller synthesis. In this paper we propose a more refined measure of weakness based on the Hausdorff dimension, a concept that captures the notion of size of the omega-language satisfying a linear temporal logic formula. We identify the conditions under which this measure is guaranteed to distinguish between weaker and stronger GR(1) formulae. We evaluate our proposed weakness measure in the context of computing GR(1) assumptions refinements

Delay Performance and Cybersecurity of Smart Grid Infrastructure

To address major challenges to conventional electric grids (e.g., generation diversification and optimal deployment of expensive assets), full visibility and pervasive control over utilities\u27 assets and services are being realized through the integratio

Specification-driven design of custom hardware in HOP

technical reportWe present a language "Hardware viewed as Objects and Processes" (HOP) for specifying the structure, behavior, and timing of hardware systems. HOP embodies a simple process model for lock-step synchronous processes. Processes may be described both as a black-box and as a collection of interacting sub-processes. The latter can be statically simplified using an algorithm 'PARCOMP'. PARCOMP symbolically simulates a collection of interacting processes. The advantages claimed for HOP include simple semantics, intuitiveness, high expressive power, and numerous provisions to support easily verifiable designs all the way to VLSI layout. After introducing HOP, and presenting some of the results obtained from experimenting with the HOP design system, we present the design of a large hardware system (the "Utah Simulation Engine") currently being developed to speed-up distributed discrete event simulation using Time Warp. Issues in the specification driven design of this system are discussed and illustrated using HOP