Theory, Post-theory, Neo-theories: Changes in Discourses, Changes in Objects

Over the past ten years, film theory has been openly challenged by the tenets of film history, cultural studies, aesthetics and philosophy. The decline of so called “Grand Theory” has made possible the emergence of a new paradigm. This relative eclipsing of film theory is the sign of a three-fold problem within cinema studies. First, film in its new formats and with its new supports is no longer a unique and consistent object which can be subjected to specific forms of research. Film theory’s weakness is thus a sign that “film,” as an object, is now dispersed. Second, cinema has always been at the crossroads of a great number of different fields. Its history is an amalgam of the history of media, the performing arts, visual perception, modern forms of subjectivity, etc. Film theory’s weakness is symptomatic of the urgent need to rethink a history that was never unique or unified. Third, in our post-modern era any recourse to rationality seems to be a trap, the object of study itself being refractory to any kind of schematization. Film theory’s weakness is indicative of the need to maintain an open approach to the subject. Through these three issues, we are witnessing the emergence of a new theory, both informal and dispersed, which is manifested in a variety of discourses that are content to gloss the phenomenon in order better to understand the cinema and facilitate its social recognition.Au cours de la dernière décennie, les tenants de l’histoire du cinéma, des « cultural studies », de l’esthétique et de la philosophie ont ouvertement mis en question la théorie du cinéma. Le déclin de ce que l’on a appelé la Grand Theory a permis l’émergence d’un nouveau paradigme. Cette relative éclipse de la théorie du cinéma est l’indice d’un triple problème au sein des études cinématographiques. Premièrement, le film, qui se manifeste désormais par l’entremise de nouvelles modalités et de nouveaux supports, n’apparaît plus comme un objet unique et consistant, susceptible de se prêter à des recherches spécifiques. La faiblesse de la théorie du cinéma indique donc que l’objet « film » est maintenant une entité dispersée. Deuxièmement, le cinéma a toujours été, au fil du temps, au croisement d’une grande variété de domaines et son histoire est un amalgame d’histoire des médias, du spectacle, de la vision, des formes modernes de subjectivité, etc. La faiblesse de la théorie du cinéma est symptomatique d’un besoin pressant de repenser une histoire qui n’a jamais été unique, ni unifiée. Troisièmement, en cette ère postmoderne, tout recours à la rationalité apparaît comme un piège, l’objet de recherche lui-même étant réfractaire à toute forme de schématisation. La faiblesse de la théorie du cinéma témoigne, en fait, de la nécessité de maintenir une approche ouverte du sujet. À travers ces trois problématiques, c’est à l’émergence d’une nouvelle théorie que nous assistons, une théorie à la fois informelle et dispersée, qui se manifeste par l’entremise d’une variété de discours se contentant de gloser sur le phénomène, en vue de mieux comprendre le cinéma et de faciliter sa reconnaissance sociale

Optimal Content Downloading in Vehicular Networks

We consider a system where users aboard communication-enabled vehicles are interested in downloading different contents from Internet-based servers. This scenario captures many of the infotainment services that vehicular communication is envisioned to enable, including news reporting, navigation maps and software updating, or multimedia file downloading. In this paper, we outline the performance limits of such a vehicular content downloading system by modelling the downloading process as an optimization problem, and maximizing the overall system throughput. Our approach allows us to investigate the impact of different factors, such as the roadside infrastructure deployment, the vehicle-to-vehicle relaying, and the penetration rate of the communication technology, even in presence of large instances of the problem. Results highlight the existence of two operational regimes at different penetration rates and the importance of an efficient, yet 2-hop constrained, vehicle-to-vehicle relaying

Planning UAV Activities for Efficient User Coverage in Disaster Areas

Climate changes brought about by global warming as well as man-made environmental changes are often the cause of sever natural disasters. ICT, which is itself responsible for global warming due to its high carbon footprint, can play a role in alleviating the consequences of such hazards by providing reliable, resilient means of communication during a disaster crisis. In this paper, we explore the provision of wireless coverage through UAVs (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles) to complement, or replace, the traditional communication infrastructure. The use of UAVs is indeed crucial in emergency scenarios, as they allow for the quick and easy deployment of micro and pico cellular base stations where needed. We characterize the movements of UAVs and define an optimization problem to determine the best UAV coverage that maximizes the user throughput, while maintaining fairness across the different parts of the geographical area that has been affected by the disaster. To evaluate our strategy, we simulate a flooding in San Francisco and the car traffic resulting from people seeking safety on higher ground

Demo: Open source testbed for vehicular communication

The challenge of enabling the communications between the vehicle and its surroundings is being faced by the entire automotive industry, while the main standardization bod- ies are undergoing a huge effort to propose new solutions and improve the existing ones. The lack of open source solu- tions for vehicular communications penalizes the technology advances, and for this reason we present an open source plat- form based on PC Engines’ boards and Unex’s WNICs for the testing of V2X (vehicle-to-everything) applications. Our platform enables the connectivity over a 802.11p channel between two boards that can be deployed as wireless don- gles, so it can be used to extend the network capabilities of any kind of computing system. The testbed has been setup to work with several applications: from video streaming, to online gaming, to a containerized version of a latency tester, called LaTe

Virtualization-based evaluation of backhaul performance in vehicular applications

Next-generation networks, based on SDN and NFV, are expected to support a wide array of services, including vehicular safety applications. Theseservices come with strict delay constraints, and our goal in this paper is to ascertain to which extent SDN/NFV-based networks are able to meetthem. To this end, we build and emulate a vehicular collision detection system, using the popular Mininet and Docker tools,on a real-world topology with mobility information. Using different core network topologies and open- source SDN controllers, we measure (i) thedelay with which vehicle beacons are processed and (ii) the associated overhead and energy consumption. We find that we can indeed meet thelatency constraints associated with vehicular safety applications, and that SDN controllers represent a moderate contribution to the overall energyconsumption but a significant source of additional delay.This work was partially supported by the European Commission through the H2020 5G-TRANSFORMER project (Project ID 761536)

Mobile RF Scenario Design for Massive-Scale Wireless Channel Emulators

Large-scale wireless emulation is gaining momentum nowadays, thanks to its potential in the development and deployment of advanced use cases for next-generation wireless networks. Several novel use cases are indeed emerging, including massive MIMO, millimeter wave beamforming and AI-based Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) optimized communication. The development and testing of a wireless application, especially at a large scale and when dealing with mobile nodes, faces several challenges that cannot be solved by simulation frameworks alone. Thus, massive-scale channel emulators are emerging, enabling the emulation of realistic scenarios which leverage real hardware and radio signals. However, this is a complex task due to the lack of realistic scenarios based on real datasets. We thus propose a novel framework for the design and generation of channel emulation scenarios starting from real mobility traces, either generated by means of dedicated tools, or collected on the field. Our framework provides a practical way of generating mobility scenarios with vehicles, pedestrians, drones and other mobile entities. We detail all the steps foreseen by our framework, from the provision of the traces and radio parameters, to the generation of a matrix describing the delay and IQ samples for each time instant and node in the scenario. We also showcase the potentiality of our proposal by designing and creating a vehicular 5G scenario with 13 vehicles, starting from a recently-disclosed open dataset. This scenario is then validated on the Colosseum channel emulator, proving how our framework can provide an effective tool for large-scale wireless networking evaluation