Chapter Tadao Ando: Minimal art y humanidad

The 43rd UID conference, held in Genova, takes up the theme of ‘Dialogues’ as practice and debate on many fundamental topics in our social life, especially in these complex and not yet resolved times. The city of Genova offers the opportunity to ponder on the value of comparison and on the possibilities for the community, naturally focused on the aspects that concern us, as professors, researchers, disseminators of knowledge, or on all the possibile meanings of the discipline of representation and its dialogue with ‘others’, which we have broadly catalogued in three macro areas: History, Semiotics, Science / Technology. Therefore, “dialogue” as a profitable exchange based on a common language, without which it is impossible to comprehend and understand one another; and the graphic sign that connotes the conference is the precise transcription of this concept: the title ‘translated’ into signs, derived from the visual alphabet designed for the visual identity of the UID since 2017. There are many topics which refer to three macro sessions: - Witnessing (signs and history) - Communicating (signs and semiotics) - Experimenting (signs and sciences) Thanks to the different points of view, an exceptional resource of our disciplinary area, we want to try to outline the prevailing theoretical-operational synergies, the collaborative lines of an instrumental nature, the recent updates of the repertoires of images that attest and nourish the relations among representation, history, semiotics, sciences

Sequential non-rigid structure from motion using physical priors

© 20xx IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.We propose a new approach to simultaneously recover camera pose and 3D shape of non-rigid and potentially extensible surfaces from a monocular image sequence. For this purpose, we make use of the Extended Kalman Filter based Simultaneous Localization And Mapping (EKF-SLAM) formulation, a Bayesian optimization framework traditionally used in mobile robotics for estimating camera pose and reconstructing rigid scenarios. In order to extend the problem to a deformable domain we represent the object's surface mechanics by means of Navier's equations, which are solved using a Finite Element Method (FEM). With these main ingredients, we can further model the material's stretching, allowing us to go a step further than most of current techniques, typically constrained to surfaces undergoing isometric deformations. We extensively validate our approach in both real and synthetic experiments, and demonstrate its advantages with respect to competing methods. More specifically, we show that besides simultaneously retrieving camera pose and non-rigid shape, our approach is adequate for both isometric and extensible surfaces, does not require neither batch processing all the frames nor tracking points over the whole sequence and runs at several frames per second.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Real-time 3D reconstruction of non-rigid shapes with a single moving camera

© . This manuscript version is made available under the CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 license http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/This paper describes a real-time sequential method to simultaneously recover the camera motion and the 3D shape of deformable objects from a calibrated monocular video. For this purpose, we consider the Navier-Cauchy equations used in 3D linear elasticity and solved by finite elements, to model the time-varying shape per frame. These equations are embedded in an extended Kalman filter, resulting in sequential Bayesian estimation approach. We represent the shape, with unknown material properties, as a combination of elastic elements whose nodal points correspond to salient points in the image. The global rigidity of the shape is encoded by a stiffness matrix, computed after assembling each of these elements. With this piecewise model, we can linearly relate the 3D displacements with the 3D acting forces that cause the object deformation, assumed to be normally distributed. While standard finite-element-method techniques require imposing boundary conditions to solve the resulting linear system, in this work we eliminate this requirement by modeling the compliance matrix with a generalized pseudoinverse that enforces a pre-fixed rank. Our framework also ensures surface continuity without the need for a post-processing step to stitch all the piecewise reconstructions into a global smooth shape. We present experimental results using both synthetic and real videos for different scenarios ranging from isometric to elastic deformations. We also show the consistency of the estimation with respect to 3D ground truth data, include several experiments assessing robustness against artifacts and finally, provide an experimental validation of our performance in real time at frame rate for small mapsPeer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Antibiòtics aminoglicòsids

Els aminoglicòsids són antibiòtics que varen ésser introduïts en la pràctica clínica a mitjan anys quaranta, en els albors de l'era antibiòtica. Actuen sobre els ribosomes i són actius enfront d'un gran nombre de patògens. Actualment es coneixen diferents mecanismes de resistència i, sense cap mena de dubte, la modificació i desactivació dels antibiòtics és el més important.Aminoglycosides were introduced in clinical training in the middle of the forties, in the beginning of the antibiotic era. Those agents act in ribosomes, and are active against a great number of pathogens. Currently different resistance mechanisms are known, being, surely, antibiotics modification and inactivation the most important of all

La intervención de la DGEMN en las iglesias altomedievales de Portugal. Arqueología de la arquitectura y reconstrucción

Throughout the 20th century, the Direcção Geral dos Edifícios e Monumentos Nacionais was the institution in charge of leading and undertaking almost 200 conservation and restoration projects in the Portuguese built heritage. Written and graphic records generated by those interventions have been and are still a valuable source of information to research the restoration history in Portugal for that period. This paper aims to complete that visionby taking as basis the results obtained by the archaeological analysis of some early medieval buildings restored by the DGEMN in the second quarter of the 20th century, namely the churches of São Pedro de Lourosa and São Pedro de Vera Cruz de Marmelar. It is thereby intended to show the material reality of those projects and their impact on constructions that were formerly mainly unknown by the research, and also to reflect on the loss of historic information that they meant, as itis demonstrated by their archaeological analysis.A lo largo de gran parte del siglo XX, la Direcção Geral dos Edifícios e Monumentos Nacionais fue la institución encargada de dirigir y ejecutar casi 200 proyectos de conservación y restauración en el patrimonio edificado portugués. La documentación escrita y gráfica generada por estas actuaciones ha sido y es hoy una valiosa fuente de información para la investigación de la historia de la restauración en Portugal en el periodo indicado. El objetivo de este artículo es completar esta visión, partiendo de los resultados obtenidos en el análisis arqueológico de algunos ejemplos de arquitectura altomedieval intervenidos por la DGEMN en el segundo cuarto del siglo XX, concretamente las iglesias de São Pedro de Lourosa y de São Pedro de Verz Cruz de Marmelar. Se pretende así explicar la realidad material de estas intervenciones y el impacto que tuvieron en unos conjuntos en gran parte desconocidos por la investigación de la época, así como reflexionar sobre la pérdida de información histórica que supusieron, tal como evidencia su análisis arqueológico

Modal space: a physics-based model for sequential estimation of time-varying shape from monocular video

The final publication is available at link.springer.comThis paper describes two sequential methods for recovering the camera pose together with the 3D shape of highly deformable surfaces from a monocular video. The nonrigid 3D shape is modeled as a linear combination of mode shapes with time-varying weights that define the shape at each frame and are estimated on-the-fly. The low-rank constraint is combined with standard smoothness priors to optimize the model parameters over a sliding window of image frames. We propose to obtain a physics-based shape basis using the initial frames on the video to code the time-varying shape along the sequence, reducing the problem from trilinear to bilinear. To this end, the 3D shape is discretized by means of a soup of elastic triangular finite elements where we apply a force balance equation. This equation is solved using modal analysis via a simple eigenvalue problem to obtain a shape basis that encodes the modes of deformation. Even though this strategy can be applied in a wide variety of scenarios, when the observations are denser, the solution can become prohibitive in terms of computational load. We avoid this limitation by proposing two efficient coarse-to-fine approaches that allow us to easily deal with dense 3D surfaces. This results in a scalable solution that estimates a small number of parameters per frame and could potentially run in real time. We show results on both synthetic and real videos with ground truth 3D data, while robustly dealing with artifacts such as noise and missing data.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Tasks in english in ordinary L1 modules as an inclusive and viable alternative to traditional EMI

The present paper starts from the premise that, despite the fact that EMI has experienced an exponential growth in the last 15 years (Dearden, 2014; Fenton-Smith et al., 2017; Macaro et al., 2018), there are still a number of compelling arguments that stand against providing all instruction in English in higher education. Among those, insufficient teacher preparation (Drljača Margić & Vodopija-Krstanović, 2018; Kling, 2017) or the fear of negative influence on disciplinary content and discourse learning (Jiménez-Muñoz, 2014) are two of the most frequently mentioned. Bearing these issues in mind, an interdisciplinary group of lecturers from the University of Málaga (Spain) are currently developing an innovation project where a task-based approach is used to deliver content in English in ordinary modules delivered in Spanish (Barrios et al., 2020). The paper presents information about the pedagogical foundations of the intervention and examples of tasks that have been implemented, and the participants’ perceptions about the innovation and their own learning of subject matter content through the medium of English. The paper concludes with some reflections on how this alternative to traditional EMI could contribute towards enhancing university students’ proficiency in academic and professional English while avoiding the understandable reservations that EMI currently faces

Webrooming or showrooming, that is the question: explaining omnichannel behavioural intention through the technology acceptance model and exploratory behaviour

Purpose: This paper evaluates how the intention to develop webrooming or showrooming behaviour is affected by both the perceived usefulness and the perceived ease-of-use, as well as by the consumer's personal predisposition to exploratory information seeking and acquisition. Design/methodology/approach: The fashion retailing environment is more omni-channel than ever before. The two predominant omni-channel behaviours are webrooming and showrooming. Taking as its basis the technology acceptance model (TAM) and the concept of exploratory consumer behaviour. Findings: The results obtained from a sample of 847 apparel shoppers (462 webroomers and 385 showroomers) show that the higher perception of the usefulness and ease-of-use of omni-channel buying processes, the higher the intention to develop both webrooming and showrooming behaviours. Additionally, the perceived ease-of-use exerts an additional indirect effect on the intention of developing these omni-channel behaviours through perceived usefulness. Finally, exploratory information seeking and acquisition have a relevant influence on webrooming intentions, but not on showrooming. Originality/value: The authors' research contributes to the literature on consumer behaviour in the fashion sector by testing a model to explain the intentions of individuals to adopt webrooming and showrooming, incorporating different psychographic variables linked to the use of ICT and the development of an exploratory consumer behaviour

Normativa y arquitectura tradicional

Los conceptos de popular, tradicional, vernáculo aplicados a la arquitectura no conforman en realidad una categoría específica, sino que son imprecisas valoraciones que, a la hora de la verdad, son difíciles de formalizar en los planes de protección y actuación urbanística. Por otra parte, esta arquitectura está sometida en nuestros días a unas circunstancias que inciden gravemente sobre ella: una jerarquía de rangos como reconocimiento patrimonial respecto a la arquitectura monumentalista que condiciona en la práctica su preservación al papel que desempeña como contextualizadora de aquella; su condición de patrimonio en uso que supone un constante conflicto para su preservación con los intereses de sus moradores; o bien, en sentido contrario, la pérdida de funcionalidad (tecnoeconómica, pero también habitacional) de buena parte de esta arquitectura, que hace muy difícil su preservación