Form and Data - from linear Calculus to cybernetic Computation and Interaction

Digital architecture developed in the 1960s and, supported by CAAD the 1990s, has created the path towards an architecture produced by computer and architect in a mutual relationship. The evolution of architecture since the 1970s led to the beginning of the first digital turn in the 1990s, and subsequently to the emergence of new typologies of buildings, architects and design tools; atom-based, bit-based (virtual) [1], and cyber-physical as a combination of both. The paper provides an insight into historical foundations of CAAD insofar as it engages with complexity in mechanics, geometry, and space between the 1600s and 1950s. I will address a selection of principles discovered, and mechanisms invented before computer-aided-architectural-design; those include the typewriter, the Cartesian grid and a pre-cyber-physical system by Hermann von Helmholtz. The paper concludes with a summary and an outlook to the future of CAAD challenged by the variety of correlations of disparate data sets

Semi-flexible Additive Manufacturing Materials for Modularization Purposes - A modular assembly proposal for a foam edge-based spatial framework

This paper introduces a series of design and fabrication tests directed towards the use of bendable 3D printing materials in order to simplify a foam bubble-based geometry as a frame structure for modular assembly. The aspiration to reference a spittlebug's bubble cocoon in nature for a light installation in the urban context was integrated into a computational workflow conditioning light-weight, material-, and cost savings along with assembly-simplicity. Firstly, before elaborating on the project motivation and background in foam structures and applications of 3D-printed thermoplastic polyurethane (TPU) material, this paper describes the physical nature of bubble foams in its relevant aspects. Subsequently this is implemented into the parametric design process for an optimized foam structure with Grasshopper clarifying the need for flexible materials to enhance modular feasibility. Following, the additive manufacturing iterations of the digitally designed node components with TPU are presented and evaluated. Finally, after the test assembly of both components is depicted, this paper assesses the divergence between natural foams and the case study structure with respect to self-organizing behavior

Fit to Electroweak Precision Data

A brief review of electroweak precision data from LEP, SLC, the Tevatron, and low energies is presented. The global fit to all data including the most recent results on the masses of the top quark and the W boson reinforces the preference for a relatively light Higgs boson. I will also give an outlook on future developments at the Tevatron Run II, CEBAF, the LHC, and the ILC.Comment: 4 pages, presented at the 2006 Conference on the Intersections of Particle and Nuclear Physics (CIPANP 2006), Rio Grande, Puerto Rico, May 30 -- June 3, 200

Attacks against a Simplified Experimentally Feasible Semiquantum Key Distribution Protocol

A semiquantum key distribution (SQKD) protocol makes it possible for a quantum party and a classical party to generate a secret shared key. However, many existing SQKD protocols are not experimentally feasible in a secure way using current technology. An experimentally feasible SQKD protocol, "classical Alice with a controllable mirror" (the "Mirror protocol"), has recently been presented and proved completely robust, but it is more complicated than other SQKD protocols. Here we prove a simpler variant of the Mirror protocol (the "simplified Mirror protocol") to be completely non-robust by presenting two possible attacks against it. Our results show that the complexity of the Mirror protocol is at least partly necessary for achieving robustness.Comment: 9 page

Investigating the Effects of Word Substitution Errors on Sentence Embeddings

A key initial step in several natural language processing (NLP) tasks involves embedding phrases of text to vectors of real numbers that preserve semantic meaning. To that end, several methods have been recently proposed with impressive results on semantic similarity tasks. However, all of these approaches assume that perfect transcripts are available when generating the embeddings. While this is a reasonable assumption for analysis of written text, it is limiting for analysis of transcribed text. In this paper we investigate the effects of word substitution errors, such as those coming from automatic speech recognition errors (ASR), on several state-of-the-art sentence embedding methods. To do this, we propose a new simulator that allows the experimenter to induce ASR-plausible word substitution errors in a corpus at a desired word error rate. We use this simulator to evaluate the robustness of several sentence embedding methods. Our results show that pre-trained neural sentence encoders are both robust to ASR errors and perform well on textual similarity tasks after errors are introduced. Meanwhile, unweighted averages of word vectors perform well with perfect transcriptions, but their performance degrades rapidly on textual similarity tasks for text with word substitution errors.Comment: 4 Pages, 2 figures. Copyright IEEE 2019. Accepted and to appear in the Proceedings of the 44th International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing 2019 (IEEE-ICASSP-2019), May 12-17 in Brighton, U.K. Personal use of this material is permitted. However, permission to reprint/republish this material must be obtained from the IEE