From outside to inside: Changing strategies and practices of institutional critique 1960-2014

Established accounts of institutional critique either turn it into an art historical genre that is past and finished, or suggest that it is pointless because it is always co-opted by the institution. This thesis contests the canonisation of institutional critique by positing that there has been a change in the agents of critique from the academic critic, to the artist, to the curator. The research also argues against the supposed futility of institutional critique by drawing on Foucault to consider critique in particular instances rather than in general. Thus each case study considers whether or not a particular artwork or project was understood as critical at the time and, if so, in what capacity. In the course of examining the shifts in the critical agent from artist to curator, I also identify a sequence of correlative changes. First there is an expansion in the location of critique from mainstream USA museums to a wide range of art institutions globally, including biennials. Second there is a change of focus in the objects of critique, from the physical attributes of the exhibition spaces to modes of display, museum processes, and the politicisation of content. Third there are different strategies of critique, as artists and curators variously pursue mimetic, subversive and symbolic strategies in their institutional investigations, and develop new ones. Overall, the research demonstrates that institutional critique moves progressively inside the institution, and becomes an embedded activity, particularly when independent curators take up positions as directors of experimental institutions. The thesis concludes that institutional critique has become more politicised and more complex and that some of its strategies and practices have helped to re-function institutions

From outside to inside: Changing strategies and practices of institutional critique 1960-2014

Established accounts of institutional critique either turn it into an art historical genre that is past and finished, or suggest that it is pointless because it is always co-opted by the institution. This thesis contests the canonisation of institutional critique by positing that there has been a change in the agents of critique from the academic critic, to the artist, to the curator. The research also argues against the supposed futility of institutional critique by drawing on Foucault to consider critique in particular instances rather than in general. Thus each case study considers whether or not a particular artwork or project was understood as critical at the time and, if so, in what capacity. In the course of examining the shifts in the critical agent from artist to curator, I also identify a sequence of correlative changes. First there is an expansion in the location of critique from mainstream USA museums to a wide range of art institutions globally, including biennials. Second there is a change of focus in the objects of critique, from the physical attributes of the exhibition spaces to modes of display, museum processes, and the politicisation of content. Third there are different strategies of critique, as artists and curators variously pursue mimetic, subversive and symbolic strategies in their institutional investigations, and develop new ones. Overall, the research demonstrates that institutional critique moves progressively inside the institution, and becomes an embedded activity, particularly when independent curators take up positions as directors of experimental institutions. The thesis concludes that institutional critique has become more politicised and more complex and that some of its strategies and practices have helped to re-function institutions

Adaptive sampling of transient environmental phenomena with autonomous mobile platforms

Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science in Aeronautics and Astronautics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution September 2019.In the environmental and earth sciences, hypotheses about transient phenomena have been universally investigated by collecting physical sample materials and performing ex situ analysis. Although the gold standard, logistical challenges limit the overall efficacy: the number of samples are limited to what can be stored and transported, human experts must be able to safely access or directly observe the target site, and time in the field and subsequently the laboratory, increases overall campaign expense. As a result, the temporal detail and spatial diversity in the samples may fail to capture insightful structure of the phenomenon of interest. The development of in situ instrumentation allows for near real-time analysis of physical phenomenon through observational strategies (e.g., optical), and in combination with unmanned mobile platforms, has considerably impacted field operations in the sciences. In practice, mobile platforms are either remotely operated or perform guided, supervised autonomous missions specified as navigation between humanselected waypoints. Missions like these are useful for gaining insight about a particular target site, but can be sample-sparse in scientifically valuable regions, particularly in complex or transient distributions. A skilled human expert and pilot can dynamically adjust mission trajectories based on sensor information. Encoding their insight onto a vehicle to enable adaptive sampling behaviors can broadly increase the utility of mobile platforms in the sciences. This thesis presents three field campaigns conducted with a human-piloted marine surface vehicle, the ChemYak, to study the greenhouse gases methane (CH4) and carbon dioxide (CO2) in estuaries, rivers, and the open ocean. These studies illustrate the utility of mobile surface platforms for environmental research, and highlight key challenges of studying transient phenomenon. This thesis then formalizes the maximum seek-and-sample (MSS) adaptive sampling problem, which requires a mobile vehicle to efficiently find and densely sample from the most scientifically valuable region in an a priori unknown, dynamic environment. The PLUMES algorithm — Plume Localization under Uncertainty using Maximum-ValuE information and Search—is subsequently presented, which addresses the MSS problem and overcomes key technical challenges with planning in natural environments. Theoretical performance guarantees are derived for PLUMES, and empirical performance is demonstrated against canonical uniform search and state-of-the-art baselines in simulation and field trials. Ultimately, this thesis examines the challenges of autonomous informative sampling in the environmental and earth sciences. In order to create useful systems that perform diverse scientific objectives in natural environments, approaches from robotics planning, field design, Bayesian optimization, machine learning, and the sciences must be drawn together. PLUMES captures the breadth and depth required to solve a specific objective within adaptive sampling, and this work as a whole highlights the potential for mobile technologies to perform intelligent autonomous science in the future

Enabling Topological Planning with Monocular Vision

Topological strategies for navigation meaningfully reduce the space of possible actions available to a robot, allowing use of heuristic priors or learning to enable computationally efficient, intelligent planning. The challenges in estimating structure with monocular SLAM in low texture or highly cluttered environments have precluded its use for topological planning in the past. We propose a robust sparse map representation that can be built with monocular vision and overcomes these shortcomings. Using a learned sensor, we estimate high-level structure of an environment from streaming images by detecting sparse vertices (e.g., boundaries of walls) and reasoning about the structure between them. We also estimate the known free space in our map, a necessary feature for planning through previously unknown environments. We show that our mapping technique can be used on real data and is sufficient for planning and exploration in simulated multi-agent search and learned subgoal planning applications.Comment: 7 pages (6 for content + 1 for references), 5 figures. Accepted to the 2020 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automatio

Observations of shallow methane bubble emissions from Cascadia Margin

© The Author(s), 2021. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License. The definitive version was published in Michel, A. P. M., Preston, V. L., Fauria, K. E., & Nicholson, D. P. Observations of shallow methane bubble emissions from Cascadia Margin. Frontiers in Earth Science, 9, (2021): 613234, https://doi.org/10.3389/feart.2021.613234.Open questions exist about whether methane emitted from active seafloor seeps reaches the surface ocean to be subsequently ventilated to the atmosphere. Water depth variability, coupled with the transient nature of methane bubble plumes, adds complexity to examining these questions. Little data exist which trace methane transport from release at a seep into the water column. Here, we demonstrate a coupled technological approach for examining methane transport, combining multibeam sonar, a field-portable laser-based spectrometer, and the ChemYak, a robotic surface kayak, at two shallow (<75 m depth) seep sites on the Cascadia Margin. We demonstrate the presence of elevated methane (above the methane equilibration concentration with the atmosphere) throughout the water column. We observe areas of elevated dissolved methane at the surface, suggesting that at these shallow seep sites, methane is reaching the air-sea interface and is being emitted to the atmosphere.Funding for VP was provided by an NDSEG Fellowship. Funding for KF was provided by a WHOI Postdoctoral Scholar Fellowship. Ship time on the R/V Falkor was provided by the Schmidt Ocean Institute (FK180824)

A European arena for joint innovation in healthcare: The Platform for Innovation of Procurement and Procurement of Innovation (PiPPi)

Digital health; Health innovation; University hospitalSalut digital; Innovació sanitària; Hospital universitariSalud digital; Innovación en salud; Hospital universitarioBy 2000 the European Union (EU) had recognized that its innovation capacity was underperforming in comparison to similar competitors and trading partners. Although the EU has made an effort to stimulate public research and development (R&D) through policy tools like Pre-Commercial Procurement (PCP) and Public Procurement of Innovation (PPI), starting with the 2000 Lisbon strategy and continuing through the 2021 updated Guidance on Innovation Procurement, there has remained a gap in knowledge of and use of these tools, in particular within healthcare. The past decades have seen an explosion in the number and use of digital technologies across the entire spectrum of healthcare. Demand-driven R&D has lagged here, while new digital health R&D has largely been driven by the supply side in a linear fashion, which can have disappointing results. PCP and PPI could have big impacts on the development and uptake of innovative health technology. The Platform for Innovation of Procurement and Procurement of Innovation (PiPPi) project was a Horizon 2020-funded project that ran from December 2018 to May 2022 with a consortium including seven of Europe's premier research hospitals and the Catalan Agency for Health Information. To promote PCP and PPI, PiPPi established a virtual Community of Practice (CoP) that brings together all stakeholder groups to share and innovate around unmet healthcare needs. This perspective presents a brief history of PCP and PPI in Europe with a focus on digital innovation in healthcare before introducing the PiPPi project and its value proposition.This project received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme under Grant Agreement No. 826157

Practical Considerations in Cloud Utilization for the Science Gateway nanoHUB.org

nanoHUB.org is arguably the largest online nanotechnology user facility in the world. Just between July 2010 and June 2011 it served 177,823 users. 10,477 users ran 393,648 simulation jobs on a variety of computational resources ranging from HUBzero-based virtual execution hosts for rapid, interactive runs as well as grid-based resources for computationally-intense runs. We believe that as such our users experience a fully operational scientific “cloud”-based infrastructure even though it is not using “standard” computational cloud infrastructures such as EC2. In this paper we explore the use of standard computational cloud-based resources to determine whether they can deliver satisfactory outcomes for our users without requiring high personnel costs for configuration. In a science gateway environment, the assignment of jobs to the appropriate computational resource is not trivial. Resource availability, wait time, time to completion, and likelihood of job success must all be considered in order to transparently deliver an acceptable level of service to our users. In this paper, we present preliminary results examining the benefits and drawbacks of utilizing standard computational cloud resources as one potential venue for nanoHUB computational runs. In summary we find that cloud resources performed competitively with other grid resources in terms of wait time, CPU usage, and success in a multiple job submission strategy

The effects of high HIV prevalence on orphanhood and living arrangements of children in Malawi, Tanzania, and South Africa

Using longitudinal data from three demographic surveillance systems (DSS) and a retrospective cohort study, we estimate levels and trends in the prevalence and incidence of orphanhood in South Africa, Tanzania, and Malawi in the period 1988–2004. The prevalence of maternal, paternal, and double orphans rose in all three populations. In South Africa—where the HIV epidemic started later, has been very severe, and has not yet stabilized—the incidence of orphanhood among children is double that of the other populations. The living arrangements of children vary considerably between the populations, particularly in relation to fathers. Patterns of marriage, migration, and adult mortality influence the living and care arrangements of orphans and non-orphans. DSS data provide new insights into the impact of adult mortality on children, challenging several widely held assumptions. For example, we find no evidence that the prevalence of child-headed households is significant or has increased in the three study areas

Autonomous Application of Quantitative PCR in the Deep Sea: In Situ Surveys of Aerobic Methanotrophs Using the Deep-Sea Environmental Sample Processor

Recent advances in ocean observing systems and genomic technologies have led to the development of the deep-sea environmental sample processor (D-ESP). The DESP filters particulates from seawater at depths up to 4000 m and applies a variety of molecular assays to the particulates, including quantitative PCR (qPCR), to identify particular organisms and genes in situ. Preserved samples enable laboratory-based validation of in situ results and expanded studies of genomic diversity and gene expression. Tests of the D-ESP at a methane-rich mound in the Santa Monica Basin centered on detection of 16S rRNA and particulate methane monooxygenase (pmoA) genes for two putative aerobic methanotrophs. Comparison of in situ qPCR results with laboratory-based assays of preserved samples demonstrates the D-ESP generated high-quality qPCR data while operating autonomously on the seafloor. Levels of 16S rRNA and pmoA cDNA detected in preserved samples are consistent with an active community of aerobic methanotrophs near the methane-rich mound. These findings are substantiated at low methane sites off Point Conception and in Monterey Bay where target genes are at or below detection limits. Successful deployment of the D-ESP is a major step toward developing autonomous systems to facilitate a wide range of marine microbiological investigations