Recent Developments in Representational Painting

Continuing since its eminence in the High Renaissance during the Fifteenth Century in Europe, representation had been the predominant mode of painting until the early decades of the Twentieth Century. This form also has firm foundations in America\u27s artistic heritage. The progress and momentum of realistic painting, however, was to a large extent eclipsed during the late 1940\u27s and 1950\u27s by non-objective painting, particularly Abstract Expressionism. Unexpectedly the recent decade has seen numerous artists who have shown a renewed interest in representation as a basis for painting. This study surveys the productions of these painters, probinR into their artistic ambitions, theories, as well as their methods of painting. It appears that these representationalists can be stylistically categorized but they are not held together by any awareness of being a unified or organized artistic movement. In two categories I have placed painters who may be seen as being influenced by ambitions of other more predominant art movements, during the fifties by Abstract Expressionism, more recently by post-painterly abstraction and Pop art. Another contemporary group of artists are striving for a return to direct representation devoid of much modern rhetoric and methods. These artists are largely antagonistic to contemporary trends in art, and until recently have worked in relative independence and obscurity. In my conclusion I could not safely state that the representationalists in any of the categories formulated are creating highly significant statements about modern life or art on an individual basis. But the recent high degree of productivity and notoriety of these painters seems at least to be placing a renewed awareness on the possibilities available to representational art. The extreme polarities found in realism--now very much separated by ideological differences--for me, may breed a form of representational painting that may be vital and contemporary

The determinants of pluralism in religious education

This study into the nature of pluralism aims to discern the possible determinants of pluralism in RE, and to test this hypothesis against the current practice of a sample of primary and secondary schools in rural, semi-rural and urban areas. After noting the implicit pluralism of the 1944 Education Act, an analysis is made of the explicit pluralism of contemporary society, as brought into focus by industrialisation, science, the media and youth. A comparable analysis is then made of some aspects of educational pluralism, as brought to light by heurism, integrated studies, comprehensivisation and moral education. The implications for RE of each of these eight areas are discussed. It is suggested that, as both society and education favour diversity but reject anarchy, the search for a framework for pluralism becomes an important consideration. The discussion indicates some major social and educational reference-points for RE, which might go towards providing a basis for the recognition of determinants. Religious reference-points are discussed here and later. An examination of the Humanist critique of RE follows, leading into the heart of the argument, namely, that the nature of society, education and religion makes RE indispensable in the school-curriculum. It is submitted that a situation of pluralism strengthens this argument. The findings of the research-scheme are then reported, with tabulation and comment, particular reference being made to those points of statistical significance. The findings are also related to the foregoing theoretical issues. The study then concludes with a resume", which traces the course of the argument, and which summarises the correspondence between the research-project and the previous sections of the thesis

Self-Organized Model Predictive Control for Air Traffic Management

In this paper a distributed model predictive control has been proposed for air traffic management problem in which aircraft use optimization to determine their own flight trajectories. The coordination approach of Self-organized Time Division Multiple Access is used to ensure no two aircraft re-plan their trajectories simultaneously. Unlike existing distributed predictive control, which needs a pre-organized optimizing sequence, this new approach requires no central coordination. By also terminating every trajectory with a loitering circle, recursive feasibility and constraint satisfaction, especially separation, can be guaranteed

Modelling Agent Policies with Interpretable Imitation Learning

As we deploy autonomous agents in safety-critical domains, it becomes important to develop an understanding of their internal mechanisms and representations. We outline an approach to imitation learning for reverse-engineering black box agent policies in MDP environments, yielding simplified, interpretable models in the form of decision trees. As part of this process, we explicitly model and learn agents' latent state representations by selecting from a large space of candidate features constructed from the Markov state. We present initial promising results from an implementation in a multi-agent traffic environment.Comment: 6 pages, 3 figures; under review for the 1st TAILOR Workshop, due to take place 29-30 August 2020 in Santiago de Compostel

Summarising and Comparing Agent Dynamics with Contrastive Spatiotemporal Abstraction

We introduce a data-driven, model-agnostic technique for generating a human-interpretable summary of the salient points of contrast within an evolving dynamical system, such as the learning process of a control agent. It involves the aggregation of transition data along both spatial and temporal dimensions according to an information-theoretic divergence measure. A practical algorithm is outlined for continuous state spaces, and deployed to summarise the learning histories of deep reinforcement learning agents with the aid of graphical and textual communication methods. We expect our method to be complementary to existing techniques in the realm of agent interpretability