The internet of ontological things: On symmetries between ubiquitous problems and their computational solutions in the age of smart objects

This dissertation is about an abstract form of computer network that has recently earned a new physical incarnation called “the Internet of Things.” It surveys the ontological transformations that have occurred over recent decades to the computational components of this network, objects—initially designed as abstract algorithmic agents in a source code of computer programming but now transplanted into real-world objects. Embodying the ideal of modularity, objects have provided computer programmers with more intuitive means to construct a software application with lots of simple and reusable functional building blocks. Their capability of being reassembled into many different networks for a variety of applications has also embodied another ideal of computing machines, namely general-purposiveness. In the algorithmic cultures of the past century, these objects existed as mere abstractions to help humans to understand electromagnetic signals that had infiltrated every corner of automatized spaces from private to public. As an instrumental means to domesticate these elusive signals into programmable architectures according to the goals imposed by professional programmers and amateur end-users, objects promised a universal language for any computable human activities. This utopian vision for the object-oriented domestication of the digital has had enough traction for the growth of the software industry as it has provided an alibi to hide another process of colonization occurring on the flipside of their interfacing between humans and machines: making programmable the highest number of online and offline human activities possible. A more recent media age, which this dissertation calls the age of the Internet of Things, refers to the second phase of this colonization of human cultures by the algorithmic objects, no longer trapped in the hard-wired circuit boards of personal computer, but now residing in real-life objects with new wireless communicability. Chapters of this dissertation examine each different computer application—a navigation system in a smart car, smart home, open-world video games, and neuro-prosthetics—as each particular case of this object-oriented redefinition of human cultures

Improving I/O Resource Sharing of Linux Cgroup for NVMe SSDs on Multi-core Systems

Abstract In container-based virtualization where multiple isolated containers share I/O resources on top of a single operating system, efficient and proportional I/O resource sharing is an important system requirement. Motivated by a lack of adequate support for I/O resource sharing in Linux Cgroup for high-performance NVMe SSDs, we developed a new weight-based dynamic throttling technique which can provide proportional I/O sharing for container-based virtualization solutions running on NUMA multi-core systems with NVMe SSDs. By intelligently predicting the future I/O bandwidth requirement of containers based on past I/O service rates of I/O-active containers, and modifying the current Linux Cgroup implementation for better NUMAscalable performance, our scheme achieves highly accurate I/O resource sharing while reducing wasted I/O bandwidth. Based on a Linux kernel 4.0.4 implementation running on a 4-node NUMA multi-core systems with NVMe SSDs, our experimental results show that the proposed technique can efficiently share the I/O bandwidth of NVMe SSDs among multiple containers according to given I/O weights

Development of Compact and High-efficient Scroll Compressor with Novel Bearing Structure

High-Side Shell(HSS) scroll compressors have been widely used for Variable Refrigerant Flow(VRF) system which is a powerful solution for the cooling and heating of commercial buildings. In order to improve the characteristics of the VRF system, a new HSS scroll compressor has been developed with a novel bearing structure. The core elements of the novel bearing structure are an outer-type bearing mounted on an orbiting scroll and a female-type eccentric journal inside of a shaft. The outer-type bush bearing which is made of engineering plastic without a back steel layer has been newly developed. The new HSS scroll compressor employing the novel bearing structure has a compact size, high efficiency, and low noise level compared to a conventional HSS scroll compressor. In order to confirm the advantages of the new HSS scroll compressor, basic tests and theoretical analysis have been performed in this study

From theater to laboratory: two regimes of apparatus in the material assemblages of media culture

This research examines the apparatus concepts in the last decades of film studies, from the apparatus theory in the 1970s to the revisionist historiography of the early cinema and new media theory after the 1980s. Diagrammatizing the operation of a cinematographic apparatus as a process to make a fold between its machinic sensor and motor embedded in the material assemblages of media culture, it suggests two prototypes of apparatus, namely theater and laboratory, defined respectively by their different ways of enfolding an inside, problematizing the outside, and reassembling them to each other. Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s ethnographic experiment in Mysterious Object at Noon provides an example of the laboratorial apparatus that transforms its operational environments into the assemblages of singular problems, never representable, but only concretize-able by the apparatus’s function to network them