Dis/re-orienting design through norm-critical gender lenses: an educational case in Turkey

Design, as a practice of developing solutions beyond products, and increasingly services and policies, inevitably poses an impact on gender (in)equality which remains largely unrecognized by design practitioners. This paper advocates the urgent need for adopting gender lenses in design education for sustainable cultural transformation through proper recognition of the complexity of any societal and cultural issue, power relations and inequalities, and introduces an initial attempt through a graduate-level educational design project. Throughout the project, students critically reflected on existing orientations in designing to develop norm-critical gender lenses, contained the resultant disorientation emerging from the contrast between their critical approaches and local contexts, and explored novel directions as reorientation to address four different societal and cultural issues and develop 11 design outcomes aiming at gender equality, social justice-oriented empowerment, and cultural transformation. The authors analyzed the design processes and outcomes to reveal opportunities and challenges for developing and deploying norm-critical gender lenses in tackling complex, intersecting socio-cultural and political issues, under three themes: gender stereotypes, norms, expectations, and roles; intersectional power relations and inequalities embedded in the social structure; and social justice-oriented empowerment beyond the market-oriented individualistic neoliberal order. A shift in the perceptions of the role of designers, from creator/problem-solver to facilitator/participant, and design outcomes, from absolute solutions to intermediaries of sociological and political imaginations, is found crucial in this endeavor, which requires safe spaces for future designers to reflect on existing orientations, contain disorientation with negative capability, and explore novel ways through reorientation

A Machine Learning Approach for Wind Speed Forecasting in Microgrids

International audienc

Improper Gaussian signaling for the K-user SISO interference channel

10.1109/ICC.2013.6655414IEEE International Conference on Communications5219-522

Static and dynamic behaviours of multivortex states in a superconducting sample with mesoscopic pinning sites

This preliminary work has focused on the static transitions between the multivortex states interacting with square arrays of the mesoscopic pinning sites in superconducting samples. Our results were obtained from an extensive series of numerical simulations as functions of the magnetic field, pinning radius, and sample size. We have presented a wide range of multivortex configurations from commensurate dimer states to more concentric vortex shells at the matching fields. The stability of these states was also studied by means of the current-voltage V(I) curves which illustrate dynamic phase transitions as a function of applied driving force. These transitions manifested themselves as either a sudden jump in velocity or a nonlinear increase with velocity fluctuations in V(I) curves. We have investigated whether that the phase transitions between the pinned regime and the elastic flow regime are indicative of the stability of the initial vortex states. The variety of intermediate flow phases is attributed to large pinning size (reentrant behavior), strong commensurability and caging effects. In particular, three-shell vortex structures were obtained in the presence of larger pinning sites at adequate matching magnetic fields

NOMA: An Information-Theoretic Perspective

Non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) is a potential enabler for the development of 5G and beyond wireless networks. By allowing multiple users to share the same resource (time/frequency/code/space), NOMA can scale up the number of served users, increase the spectral efficiency, and improve user-fairness compared to existing orthogonal multiple access (OMA) techniques. The basic premise behind NOMA in a single-cell network is to reap the benefits promised by information theory for the downlink and uplink transmission of wireless systems, modeled respectively by the broadcast channel (BC) and multiple access channel (MAC). The capacity regions of the BC and MAC have been established several decades ago, and concurrent non-orthogonal transmission is the optimal transmission strategy in both cases. Unlike the single-cell setting, the capacity region of multi-cell wireless networks, commonly modeled by the interference channel (IC), is in general unknown. However, it is known that OMA is suboptimal. This chapter reviews what information theory promises and proposes for NOMA in single- and multi-cell networks with both single- and multi-antenna nodes. Furthermore, relevant physical layer security channel models are proposed and discussed