The Future\u27s Lookin\u27 Good

In lieu of an abstract, below is the essay\u27s first paragraph. On my 21st birthday I looked back on my adolescent years and wondered what my future held. What would I have to look forward to

How Old Are You Now?

In lieu of an abstract, below is the essay\u27s first paragraph. She struggled to her feet, mind clouded with bewilderment. It was nothing new to her. Same scene every morning or day, what ever time it was when she came to. It became her routine- at night fade to unconsciousness feeling found, in the morning wake to the sting of reality feeling terribly lost. Today was different. Today the sting hurt more, today she needed a change. It is her birthday

Critique and the Idea of Translation

This issue of de genere invites us to reflect on the following question: How can translation contribute to the pursuit of a more inclusive culture that is invested in undoing hierarchies and favoring plurality? My article considers the metaphorical potential of translation for critique. It discusses the notion of translation as a movement of ideas across disciplinary borders, using as a case study the border between philosophy and theory as it is interrogated in the work and career of Fredric Jameson

Between Suspicion and Love: Reality, Postcritique and Euro-American Modernization (An Introduction to the Debate)

The essay introduces major tenets in the current debate on postcritique, focusing especially on the widespread rejection of symptomatic reading in literary studies and on the rejection of rupture as both a modernist and theoretical model for the conception of the new. Further, it presents theory as a phase of Euro-American modernization. The aim of the article is to outline a wider, more dynamic concept of critique, understood as a movement of intellectual—and geographical—displacements

Data Augmentation for Manipulation

The success of deep learning depends heavily on the availability of large datasets, but in robotic manipulation there are many learning problems for which such datasets do not exist. Collecting these datasets is time-consuming and expensive, and therefore learning from small datasets is an important open problem. Within computer vision, a common approach to a lack of data is data augmentation. Data augmentation is the process of creating additional training examples by modifying existing ones. However, because the types of tasks and data differ, the methods used in computer vision cannot be easily adapted to manipulation. Therefore, we propose a data augmentation method for robotic manipulation. We argue that augmentations should be valid, relevant, and diverse. We use these principles to formalize augmentation as an optimization problem, with the objective function derived from physics and knowledge of the manipulation domain. This method applies rigid body transformations to trajectories of geometric state and action data. We test our method in two scenarios: 1) learning the dynamics of planar pushing of rigid cylinders, and 2) learning a constraint checker for rope manipulation. These two scenarios have different data and label types, yet in both scenarios, training on our augmented data significantly improves performance on downstream tasks. We also show how our augmentation method can be used on real-robot data to enable more data-efficient online learning.Comment: Robotics Science and Systems (RSS) 2022 Project Website: https://sites.google.com/view/data-augmentation4manipulatio

Anisotropic compression in the high pressure regime of pure and Cr-doped vanadium dioxide

We present structural studies of V$_{1-x}$Cr$_x$O$_2$ (pure, 0.7% and 2.5% Cr doped) compounds at room temperature in a diamond anvil cell for pressures up to 20 GPa using synchrotron x-ray powder diffraction. All the samples studied show a persistence of the monoclinic $M_1$ symmetry between 4 and 12 GPa. Above 12 GPa, the monoclinic $M_1$ symmetry changes to isostructural $M_x$ phase (space group $P2_1/c$) with a significant anisotropy in lattice compression of the $b$-$c$ plane of the $M_{1}$ phase. This behavior can be reconciled invoking the pressure induced charge-delocalization