High-Dimensional Random Fields and Random Matrix Theory

Our goal is to discuss in detail the calculation of the mean number of stationary points and minima for random isotropic Gaussian fields on a sphere as well as for stationary Gaussian random fields in a background parabolic confinement. After developing the general formalism based on the high-dimensional Kac-Rice formulae we combine it with the Random Matrix Theory (RMT) techniques to perform analysis of the random energy landscape of $p-$spin spherical spinglasses and a related glass model, both displaying a zero-temperature one-step replica symmetry breaking glass transition as a function of control parameters (e.g. a magnetic field or curvature of the confining potential). A particular emphasis of the presented analysis is on understanding in detail the picture of "topology trivialization" (in the sense of drastic reduction of the number of stationary points) of the landscape which takes place in the vicinity of the zero-temperature glass transition in both models. We will reveal the important role of the GOE "edge scaling" spectral region and the Tracy-Widom distribution of the maximal eigenvalue of GOE matrices for providing an accurate quantitative description of the universal features of the topology trivialization scenario.Comment: 40 pages; 2 figures; In this version the original lecture notes are converted to an article format, new Eqs. (82)-(85) and Appendix about anisotropic fields added, noticed misprints corrected, references updated. references update

Will the humble inherit the Earth? Towards a realistic politics of habitation

The related notions of habitation and habitability offer a very promising way for framing the conversation about the issues around which environmental political theory has gravitated from its inception: sustainability, environmental justice, preservation. However, the connection between the two must probably be revised in order to produce an ideal of habitation that is useful in the current sociopolitical context. This paper seeks to clarify their mutual relations and explores the way for the politicization of habitation. Underlining the role of nonintentional actions in the past history of habitation, it will argue that, in order to politicize habitation, the latter must be made salient -so that citizens realize that the socionatural relation is not that 'natural'. Ernesto Laclau's notion of the political as an uncovering of contingencies may be useful, while the Lacanian notion of fantasy may be used to explain the gap between current (instrumental) modes of habitation and pervasive (Arcadian) ideals of it. As to how can the relation between habitation and habitability be effectively politicized, this paper will argue that it is the political, rather than politics, what offers a most promising path for re-imagining habitation in our complex and ambivalent societies. Ecological citizenship and newly created spaces for nature are sketched as strategies for politicizing habitation. Bioregionalism is recovered as a radical politics of habitation whose flaws must be avoided if habitation is to be reframed in a mostly urban, hypertechnological world. In this regard, the paper also develops a particular narrative for a reframed habitation, a 'clever adaptation' understood as a regulatory ideal towards which different actions and discourses can be directed.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tec

Exploring Image Virality in Google Plus

Reactions to posts in an online social network show different dynamics depending on several textual features of the corresponding content. Do similar dynamics exist when images are posted? Exploiting a novel dataset of posts, gathered from the most popular Google+ users, we try to give an answer to such a question. We describe several virality phenomena that emerge when taking into account visual characteristics of images (such as orientation, mean saturation, etc.). We also provide hypotheses and potential explanations for the dynamics behind them, and include cases for which common-sense expectations do not hold true in our experiments.Comment: 8 pages, 8 figures. IEEE/ASE SocialCom 201

Towards Governance or the Management of Cultural Landscapes

Many (World Heritage) cultural landscapes are a living environment for thousands of inhabitants, visitors, entrepreneurs, farmers and other land users. In order to manage such landscapes we have to consider the legal framework and the reality of the regional planning culture. The ‘landscape of regional players’ consists of a wide range of stakeholders. How should regions tackle natural and cultural heritage as an integrated part of regional development? The discussion of Austria’s Hallstatt-Dachstein / Salzkammergut World Heritage region involves vertical and horizontal dimensions of governance, including politics, administration, private businesses and civil society

Diverse perceptions of smart spaces

This is the era of smart technology and of ‘smart’ as a meme, so we have run three workshops to examine the ‘smart’ meme and the exploitation of smart environments. The literature relating to smart spaces focuses primarily on technologies and their capabilities. Our three workshops demonstrated that we require a stronger user focus if we are advantageously to exploit spaces ascribed as smart: we examined the concept of smartness from a variety of perspectives, in collaboration with a broad range of contributors. We have prepared this monograph mainly to report on the third workshop, held at Bournemouth University in April 2012, but do also consider the lessons learned from all three. We conclude with a roadmap for a fourth (and final) workshop, which is intended to emphasise the overarching importance of the humans using the spac

Smartphone picture organization: a hierarchical approach

We live in a society where the large majority of the population has a camera-equipped smartphone. In addition, hard drives and cloud storage are getting cheaper and cheaper, leading to a tremendous growth in stored personal photos. Unlike photo collections captured by a digital camera, which typically are pre-processed by the user who organizes them into event-related folders, smartphone pictures are automatically stored in the cloud. As a consequence, photo collections captured by a smartphone are highly unstructured and because smartphones are ubiquitous, they present a larger variability compared to pictures captured by a digital camera. To solve the need of organizing large smartphone photo collections automatically, we propose here a new methodology for hierarchical photo organization into topics and topic-related categories. Our approach successfully estimates latent topics in the pictures by applying probabilistic Latent Semantic Analysis, and automatically assigns a name to each topic by relying on a lexical database. Topic-related categories are then estimated by using a set of topic-specific Convolutional Neuronal Networks. To validate our approach, we ensemble and make public a large dataset of more than 8,000 smartphone pictures from 40 persons. Experimental results demonstrate major user satisfaction with respect to state of the art solutions in terms of organization.Peer ReviewedPreprin