Representation Politics

In this paper we extend on previous work in order to address the problem of multimedia personalization at a semantic level. In different previous works we have developed algorithms to address computationally efficient handling of large but sparse fuzzy relations, and theory to address knowledge representation, thematic categorization and user modeling. In this work we take two further steps: i) we integrate ontologies in our original knowledge modeling approach and ii) we explain how these diverse algorithms and methodologies can be combined in order to approach a greater goal, that of semantic multimedia personalization.

Este estudo teve como objetivo investigar as representações sociais de psicólogos que trabalham no Poder Judiciário de Pernambuco, acerca da psicologia jurídica. Dele participaram 56 psicólogos. Utilizou-se um questionário, com uma fase de associação livre ao termo indutor psicologia jurídica. As informações daí advindas foram tratadas com o programa de computador de análise de evocações EVOC. Os resultados demonstraram que a psicologia jurídica é representada por estes profissionais como campo de aplicação dos conhecimentos psicológicos e de atuação profissional que está se constituindo e diz respeito às questões legais, sendo um espaço marcadamente de interface. Os dados demonstram também que neste espaço convivem o conhecimento científico e o conhecimento comum. Conclui-se que reconhecer as tensões e conflitos deste campo, assim como as representações paralelas à reformulação teórica e técnica, pode subsidiar o processo crítico de transformações na atuação profissional. Palavras-chave: Psicologia Jurídica, Atuação profissional, Representação social.

Selective attention to 1 of 2 overlapping objects was assessed in a cuing paradigm. Participants detected or identified targets that appeared in 1 of 6 possible target locations (3 on each object). Significant cuing effects for the simple detection of such targets using both reaction time and sensitivity measures of performance were found. Cuing effects were consistently greater when the participants were required to identify some aspect of the target even when the tasks (detection vs. identification) were equated for overall performance level. These differences in cuing effects between tasks were much reduced if the target locations were no longer grouped into 2 objects. It is suggested that identical stimuli can elicit differing attentional mechanisms depending on task type (rather than task difficulty) and that these mechanisms differ in the nature of the representation of the visual world. A flash of lightning by night, the report of a firearm, the sudden prick of a knife, or a violent internal pain, all these for the moment so occupy our notice that everything else becomes feeble or is banished. (Bradley, 1886, p. 306) Bradley's (1886) quote summarizes people's introspection that when they are attending to one thing, they become less aware of other things. Modern experimental psychologists have devoted much work to defining the details of this general statement. However, there are still fundamental issues that have yet to be resolved. In this article we attempt to address some of them: What constitutes the "thing" of people's attention (an area of space or an object)? Are all tasks affected by attention, and, if so, are they affected equally? Are there differences in attending to something by a deliberate act of will versus when this something automatically draws attention to itself?. To what extent does the difficulty of the task act to determine the effects of attention? Such questions have importance not only in producing theoretical accounts of attentional processes but also for their practical implications. For instance, there is an increasing use of head-up displays (HUDs) in both aviation and driving situations . HUDs attempt to overlay information relevant to the user onto the image received from the outside world. The hope is that the two images will fall onto the same parts of the retina and thus time might be saved in switching gaze and accommodation between the two images. However, it might be that

Human-robot interaction is an important component for robots operating in human environments and verbal interaction is in many cases the most intuitive and effective solution for humans. Managing dialogues between physical agents interacting in a physical environment brings additional challenges to virtual dialogue systems (eg. Siri or Google Now). More channels of information are available, as gaze or hands movements, which can modify or support verbal information. Also exophoric references to different parts of the environment can occur along the conversation. In this article we focus on the problem of extending the representation of the dialogue context to a physical environment and using this representation for resolving exophoric references. We also describe an architecture for integrating an open source dialogue manager in a service robot. In this architecture, the aforementioned representation is jointly built by different modules and it's used by the dialogue manager to ground utterances happening in the conversation. Finally we describe several experiments performed for assessing the utility of this architecture with actual robots in physical scenarios.

Multimodal image registration is a difficult task, due to the significant intensity variations between the images. A common approach is to use sophisticated similarity measures, such as mutual information, that are robust to those intensity variations. However, these similarity measures are computationally expensive and, moreover, often fail to capture the geometry and the associated dynamics linked with the images. Another approach is the transformation of the images into a common space where modalities can be directly compared. Within this approach, we propose to register multimodal images by using diffusion maps to describe the geometric and spectral properties of the data. Through diffusion maps, the multimodal data is transformed into a new set of canonical coordinates that reflect its geometry uniformly across modalities, so that meaningful correspondences can be established between them. Images in this new representation can then be registered using a simple Euclidean distanc...

In this work, we introduce the Global Planar Convolution module as a building-block for fully-convolutional networks that aggregates global information and, therefore, enhances the context perception capabilities of segmentation networks in the context of brain tumor segmentation. We implement two baseline architectures (3D UNet and a residual version of 3D UNet, ResUNet) and present a novel architecture based on these two architectures, ContextNet, that includes the proposed Global Planar Convolution module. We show that the addition of such module eliminates the need of building networks with several representation levels, which tend to be over-parametrized and to showcase slow rates of convergence. Furthermore, we provide a visual demonstration of the behavior of GPC modules via visualization of intermediate representations. We finally participate in the 2018 edition of the BraTS challenge with our best performing models, that are based on ContextNet, and report the evaluation scores on the validation and the test sets of the challenge.

Alternative stress echocardiography protocols such as handgrip exercise are potentially more favorable towards large-scale screening scenarios than those currently adopted in clinical practice. However, these are still underexplored because the maximal exercise levels are not easily quantified and regulated, requiring the analysis of the complete data sequences (thousands of images), which represents a challenging task for the clinician. We propose a framework for the analysis of these complex datasets, and illustrate it on a handgrip exercise dataset including complete acquisitions of 10 healthy controls and 5 ANT1 mutation patients (1377 cardiac cycles). The framework is based on an unsupervised formulation of multiple kernel learning, which is used to integrate information coming from myocardial velocity traces and heart rate to obtain a lower-dimensional representation of the data. Such simplified representation is then explored to discriminate groups of response and understand the underlying pathophysiological mechanisms. The analysis pipeline involves the reconstruction of population-specific signatures using multiscale kernel regression, and the clustering of subjects based on the trajectories defined by their projected sequences. The results confirm that the proposed framework is able to detect distinctive clusters of response and to provide insight regarding the underlying pathophysiology.

The characterization of neurodevelopment is challenging due to the complex structural changes of the brain in early childhood. To analyze the changes in a population across time and to relate them with clinical information, manifold learning techniques can be applied. The neighborhood definition used for constructing manifold representations of the population is crucial for preserving the similarity structure in the embedding and highly application dependent. It has been shown that the combination of several notions of similarity and features can improve the new representation. However, how to combine and weight different similarites and features is non-trivial. In this work, we propose to learn the neighborhood structure and similarity measure used for manifold learning through Neighborhood Approximation Forests (NAFs). The recently proposed NAFs learn a neighborhood structure in a dataset based on a user-defined distance. A characterization of image similarity using NAFs enables us to construct manifold representations based on a previously defined criterion to improve predictions regarding structural and clinical information. In particular, NAFs can be used naturally to combine the affinities learned from multiple distances in a joint manifold towards a more meaningful representation and an improved characterization of the resulting embedding. We demonstrate the utility of NAFs in manifold learning on a population of preterm and in term neonates for classification regarding structural volume and clinical information.

Multimodal image registration is a difficult task, due to the significant intensity variations between the images. A common approach is to use sophisticated similarity measures, such as mutual information, that are robust to those intensity variations. However, these similarity measures are computationally expensive and, moreover, often fail to capture the geometry and the associated dynamics linked with the images. Another approach is the transformation of the images into a common space where modalities can be directly compared. Within this approach, we propose to register multimodal images by using diffusion maps to describe the geometric and spectral properties of the data. Through diffusion maps, the multimodal data is transformed into a new set of canonical coordinates that reflect its geometry uniformly across modalities, so that meaningful correspondences can be established between them. Images in this new representation can then be registered using a simple Euclidean distance as a similarity measure. Registration accuracy was evaluated on both real and simulated brain images with known ground-truth for both rigid and non-rigid registration. Results showed that the proposed approach achieved higher accuracy than the conventional approach using mutual information.

Este artigo olha para a descrição da viagem entre Lisboa e São Tomé, conhecida por "relato do piloto anónimo", procurando refletir sobre a representação do espaço que o marinheiro atravessa e conta no séc. XVI. Pelas informações incluídas no texto -as latitudes, distâncias e rumos, regimes de ventos e correntes, conhecimento dos fundos, dos peixes e do céu -pode afirmar-se que este relato é um roteiro de navegação, convicção reforçada pela exatidão das coordenadas do piloto quando projetadas numa carta atlântica contemporânea. Mas o documento inclui muita informação desnecessária à arte de marear, pelo que a dimensão histórica se torna fundamental na leitura desta viagem.

Classical wisdom remains an essential source of inspiration for our world and a resource for thinking through contemporary global challenges. It does so not only by providing seminal texts that seeded our cultural and scientific traditions, but also by modeling forms of agency, dialogue, and cooperation that reach across borders. The classical world-Greek, Latin, and Chinese-helps us shift our governing paradigms away from short-termism to a macro-historical perspective: one that embraces the rich heritage of thousands of years and the enduring values of order, culture, and historical continuity. The Second World Conference of Classics held in Greece is a landmark event in the study of ancient heritage and its importance for our modern world. The conference with the theme "Dialogue between Ancient and Modern: Contemporary Inspirations from Classical Wisdom," brings together leading scholars in classical studies, history, and archaeology from China, Greece, and many other countries. The conference is jointly organized by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS), China's Ministry of Education, China's Ministry of Culture and Tourism, Greece's Ministry of Culture and the Academy of Athens.

Pesquisa no âmbito da Organização e Representação do Conhecimento de Imagens em Movimento que tem como proposta analisar e sistematizar um universo de conteúdos provenientes de filmes cinematográficos e, em consequência, da indústria audiovisual a partir da teoria analítico-sintética, ou seja, da teoria facetada, somando-se a isso a discussão de princípios da análise fílmica e a testagem da proposta na esfera da recepção, mediante experimento realizado com alunos de pós-graduação em Ciência da Informação de duas universidades (brasileira e americana). A partir do quadro teórico-conceitual aprofundado no estudo, foi realizada a pesquisa empírica, cuja testagem procurou detectar trajetórias de pensamento na leitura/análise dos filmes pelos participantes, considerando o ambiente digital de informação, além de verificar a propriedade da recepção e das singularidades cognitivas e culturais que permearam a análise/leitura dos filmes dos segmentos participantes. Teoria analítico-sintética facetada. Análise de facetas. Análise fílmica. Indexação de filmes. Indexação de imagens em movimento. Indústria audiovisual. Este artigo tem por objetivo evidenciar parte da pesquisa que esta sendo realizada no âmbito da Organização e Representação do Conhecimento de Conteúdos de Imagens em Movimento (filmes), e acentuar a dimensão conceitual que é inerente a esse contexto. A nossa pesquisa tem como proposta geral analisar e sistematizar um universo de conteúdos provenientes de imagens em movimento (filmes) e, em consequência, da

RESUMEN. Este artículo se refiere a una investigación cuyo tema es la relación entre los medios de representación, principalmente los bocetos a mano alzada, y, la conciencia crítica urbana o arquitectónica del espacio. Hoy en día, las computadoras y los medios de comunicación se ha mejorado constantemente, y, además de esta evolución, también los medios de representación se ven influidos por las mejoras tecnológicas. Teniendo en cuenta estas innovaciones, este artículo tiene como objetivo reanudar el debate sobre el papel del dibujo a mano alzada en el caso del proceso arquitectónico proyectivo y también para sugerir un acercamiento con el dibujo realizado por los experimentos en el área de representación digital. Esta investigación es apoyada por los resultados de una enseñanza interdisciplinaria de las prácticas desarrolladas en el primer año del Curso de Arquitectura y Urbanismo

While the construction sector embraces digitalization, new technologies related to it are spreading benefits. The need of creating a 3D model of a building, a digital copy of something existing, is not new. Mediated by the advent of photographic and laser instrumentation, the construction of a digital model has crossed the fields of surveying with increasing accuracy and precision, imposing standards of capturing the existing first and modelling then ever higher. But while the Building Information Modelling allows a virtual representation of the existing asset enriching its geometry with precious and significant information related to its properties, advanced survey has always faced the impossibility to break the surface of the building, surveying what is inside walls, thus excluding what necessary should be contained within a BIM model. Also, BIM models do not consider the real-time component and do not report the real-time behaviour of the building. In this chapter we will investi...

This paper is related to the field of digital-informed modelling of heritage assets (HBIM). The scientific literature has been addressing this topic for years with many different facets: focusing digitalization on the analysis and modelling of heritage asset geometries, construction, development over time, or the representation of materials and degradations. This research aims not only to optimize the common digital workflows but also to demonstrate the effectiveness of digitalization and virtual reality applications in preserving the memory of places. Furthermore, a strategy for the maintenance of cultural heritage through virtual reality in a participatory process is proposed. The applied method develops appropriate new workflows and tools to enable enjoyment of monuments of the developed case study remotely; moreover, it allows the creation of content from ordinary users that can be incorporated into the digital models over time. Therefore, virtual and augmented reality environme...

This paper aims to study how women is portrayed in Brandy Melville's advertisements, and what messages about women are given to the audience through advertisements. Brandy Melville is a Italy clothing brand featured to create "sweet and cool American girl" by Silvio Marsan and his son Stephan Marsan in 1970. The marketing strategies of "one size fits all" and "no advertisements" has raised controversy in the society. In 2019, Brandy Melville officially entered Chinese market and have quickly become popular on Chinese social media through the recommendation of many actresses and internet celebrities. Its "short, tight and revealing" style has also become a highly discussed dressing style, namely, the "BM style". While BM becomes a trend in China, the concept of "one size fits most" and its too-small sizing has also sparked discussions about body standards among women. This paper specifically focuses on, in a time where post-feminist sentiment and consumerism both raised, how BM avoids its criticism of male gaze and body anxiety. The study selected 200 images posted on the Little Redbook by the BM account. Through a quantitative analysis of advertising images from May 2020 to July 2021, the study explores the brand's representation of women. This study found that, compared to the straightforward display of feminine body lines in the early 20th century, the style of advertisements now tends to be more like street photography -emphasizing on everyday movements. The models highlight their body curves and reflect their personality through autonomous daily movements, instead of showing their female curves through revealing clothes and impersonal sexy movements. Thus avoiding the suspicion of female objectification. At the same time, in order to avoid the suspicion of excessive sexual innuendo, the brand's advertisements diminished the audience gaze, and use the camera language such as group power to enhance the status of the characters. In the past two years, the Brandy Melville brand has been rapidly gaining popularity in the Chinese market. Brandy Melville was founded in Italy in 1970 and entered the United States market in 2009, and was named as the most popular girls' clothing brand within five years. Similarly, after Brandy Melville entered Chinese market in 2019, it soon became one of the trendy clothing brands in China. On Little Redbook, there are 70,000+ posts about BM, and BM official account has 363,000 fans. In addition, besides the online sales channel, Brandy Melville has opened stores in Hong Kong, Shanghai and Beijing one after another, becoming a popular "spotting place" where young generation in China gather. Domestic celebrities such as Yang Mi, Ouyang Nana, Song Yanfei and Yu Shuxin, as well as the Korean girl group Blackpink have expressed their love for BM clothing in street photos, selfies and stage performances. In addition to the brand itself, Brandy Melville has driven a dressing style in China, that is, the "short, tight, exposed" design with simple checkered and floral elements, and the clothing style with such characteristics is referred as "BM" style. Taobao data show that in March 2020, BM sales increased 71 times and the sales volume has reached of nearly 40 million. In March 2021, BM sales reached 28.4 billion yuan.

No Child Left Behind (NCLB) aims to improve US education system. Every student in the US must have the same rights to get a quality education. The state is responsible for providing fair, equitable and quality educational facilities to the community. In reality, however, the NCLB was not entirely successful. While the law stipulates equality for underprivileged students, in reality, the richer students get better facilities and the best teachers. In addition, not all school teachers meet the standards. Based on these problems, this study aims to examine the challenges NCLB faced. It also intends to investigate the ideal implementation of NCLB and its effectiveness for students in the United States. This research also explores minority groups, like Hispanics. They are the largest minorities in the US. This research seeks to answer (1) How is the NCLB implementation reported in the media? and (2) What are the impacts of the NCLB implementation on Hispanic students?. This study uses the theory of Critical Discourse analysis from Norman Fairclough and Jager with news articles as data sources. The news articles were taken from the New York Times, usnews.com, dailynews.com, fivethirtyeight.com, and CBS News. The results found that the NCLB is still problematic that still there are achievement gaps, protests, and low performance. In addition, there are still wrong beliefs, discrimination, and dishonesty regarding the implementation of NCLB. Through some possible ways to solve the problem, like supervising and revising NCLB.

No Child Left Behind (NCLB) aims to improve US education system. Every student in the US must have the same rights to get a quality education. The state is responsible for providing fair, equitable and quality educational facilities to the community. In reality, however, the NCLB was not entirely successful. While the law stipulates equality for underprivileged students, in reality, the richer students get better facilities and the best teachers. In addition, not all school teachers meet the standards. Based on these problems, this study aims to examine the challenges NCLB faced. It also intends to investigate the ideal implementation of NCLB and its effectiveness for students in the United States. This research also explores minority groups, like Hispanics. They are the largest minorities in the US. This research seeks to answer (1) How is the NCLB implementation reported in the media? and (2) What are the impacts of the NCLB implementation on Hispanic students?. This study uses th...

Transfer is the ability to employ knowledge acquired in one task to improve performance in another. We study transfer in the context of the ICARUS cognitive architec-ture, which supplies diverse capabilities for execution, inference, planning, and learning. We report on an ...

El ensayo de Salvador Razo  explora la tensión entre el "método" de lectura académica —entendido como un conjunto de estrategias técnicas como la paráfrasis, la inferencia y el análisis para reconstruir la tesis y problemática de un texto— y la dimensión hermenéutica, que concibe la comprensión como un proceso dialógico influido por la historicidad y el capital cultural del lector. El autor sostiene que la lectura no es una extracción pasiva de información, sino una construcción activa de sentido donde el conocimiento previo del intérprete no opera de forma neutra, sino que entra en tensión con el texto y se transforma durante el proceso. Para evitar tanto la pretensión de una lectura única como el relativismo absoluto, propone adoptar la hermenéutica analógica de Mauricio Beuchot, la cual busca un equilibrio interpretativo que permita alcanzar acuerdos fundamentados y provisionales mediante una "prudencia" que valide la interpretación frente al texto y el debate académico. En última instancia, las estrategias de lectura se redefinen como acciones hermenéuticas y puntos de partida para desarrollar un pensamiento crítico y autónomo, transformando la comprensión en una dinámica de tipo mayéutico donde el sentido se construye y se pone a prueba en la discusión

Automatically computing a cinematographic consistent sequence of shots over a set of actions occurring in a 3D world is a complex task which requires not only the computation of appropriate shots (viewpoints) and appropriate transitions between shots (cuts), but the ability to encode and reproduce elements of cinematographic style. Models proposed in the literature, generally based on finite state machine or idiom-based representations, provide limited functionalities to build sequences of shots. These approaches are not designed in mind to easily learn elements of cinematographic style, nor do they allow to perform significant variations in style over the same sequence of actions. In this paper, we propose a model for automated cinematography that can compute significant variations in terms of cinematographic style, with the ability to control the duration of shots and the possibility to add specific constraints to the desired sequence. The model is parameterized in a way that facilitates the application of learning techniques. By using a Hidden Markov Model representation of the editing process, we demonstrate the possibility of easily reproducing elements of style extracted from real movies. Results comparing our model with state-of-the-art first order Markovian representations illustrate these features, and robustness of the learning technique is demonstrated through cross-validation.

Automatically computing a cinematographically consistent sequence of shots over a set of actions occurring in a 3D world is a complex task that requires not only the computation of appropriate shots (viewpoints) and appropriate transitions between shots (cuts), but more importantly the ability to encode and reproduce elements of cinematographic style that exist in real movies. In this paper, we propose an expressive automated cinematography model that learns some elements of style from real movies and reproduces them in synthetic movies. The model relies on a Hidden Markov Model representation of the editing process. The proposed model is more general than existing representations that encode cinematographic idioms and proves to be more expressive in the possible variations of style it offers.

The aim of this text is to show how, using the achievements of modern computer science, psychology and neurobiology, we can search for an answer to the question about the a priori mechanisms of shaping a phenomenal image of reality given by experience. This phenomenalism statement is very close to, so called, Bayesian model of mind by Karl Friesen. The author asks how in massive scale to reach the cognitive processes taking place without representation, outside the field of consciousness, which influence the formation of this model of the world. The result of the consideration is to be a neuromachine project whose task will be to automate and mass research of hidden cognitive attitudes. Its activity is to become a real alternative to opinion polls performed in the paradigm of the so-called declarative sociology, which do not provide results significantly reducing the risk of decision-making in management.

Companion text to solo art exhibition, Hariet, by Boz Deseo Garden for Bodenradar, Chicago. In lieu of an abstract will be the description of the exhibit, provided by the gallery:

In May of 1851, a legal injunction temporarily prevented Kentucky planter James Martin from selling his slave, Harriet. The injunction was filed by two other planters, Jesse Baker and G.W. Dozier. The case survives only as a single document in the Chicago History Museum’s archive from the Julius Frankel collection: a bond, scanned as two separate files of its recto and its verso.This bond is evidence of a court ruling that determined the injunction was wrongfully issued. Ergo, Baker and Dozier agreed to pay Martin $800 as compensation for the damages caused by the halted sale.

The exhibition, however, bypasses the legal discourses implied by the bond and turns to its archival digitization, to the moment where it was physically turned over to scan—and split into two files—both recto and verso. This mundane act is magnified and recast as the primal scene of an archival scopic drive: the unrelenting desire to see the object from all sides. But what does the bond allowus to see? The document produces more confusion than clarity. Why did Baker and Dozier intervene? What was Harriet to them? Was she payment for a debt Martin owed? Did they mean to buy her freedom? Or was she coveted for reasons the bond does not specify? Answers to these questions are left to speculation but three things remain apodeictic about the story: first is that Harriet would remain for sale, second, that this trace of Harriet may be the only one left, and third, that we have no way of confirming which Harriet this document could refer to. “This” Harriet thus appears to us as a vast ensemble, the crystallization of all possible enslaved Harriets.

The movement from recto to verso and back, extends the scene described by the bond where Harriet is twice turned over (to the market). But, to be sure, the protagonist of the exhibition is not Harriet, but the inseparability of Harriet and the bond. The bond becomes the necessary lens that coterminously permits and prohibits Harriet’s (troubled) visibility. Her appearance in the document is identical to her disappearance by the document.

Garden combines a Hartmanian ethics of the periphery (that refuses the brute depiction of slavery) more explicitly with Baroque optics that brings vision itself into view. The exhibition doubles as a negative portrait of the bond (qua Harriet) and an experimentation with the partial or full rotation of that negativity. Beyond merely not seeing (the bond), the work iterates on precisely how not to see. Within each work, the bond or the event of its rotation is reproduced or elaborated upon. The exhibition then contends with this paradox of demonstrating how not to see precisely by offering more to see. Surfaces are rotated, stretched, seen from above, and invented. The etched crystal works rotate the signature on the bond’s verso in ten movements until a full 180º turn is complete, inventing a verso of the verso; the wall work transforms the H of Harriet’s written name on the document’s recto into an anamorphic distortion such that the viewer can only see its “non-distorted” form from a 180º angle in relation to the work; the floor work divides the space, a producing a 90º angle in tandem with the pole at the center of the gallery to demarcate the 360º path of the viewer around the gallery; and the 1 hour video work, scored by a field recording of a thunderstorm in Kentucky, depicts a 180º turn in the rotating lounge at the Westin Bonaventure Hotel in Los Angeles. Though with each Baroque turn, we are no closer to the document nor to Harriet.

Harriet is then the fundamental problem of vision and its vestibule. To amend Christine Buci-Glucksmann’s writing on the Baroque, the exhibition posits that “[a]nimated by all or nothing,” the scopic regime of slavery “possesses a conatus, an energetic of expression...which allows it to [be] engage[d] [from] all possible points of view,” to be exhibited, to be concealed and to “self-destruct” (Madness, 14). However, for Garden, the combination of these infinite views, of all possible angles, does not grant the slave a continuous, representable form nor intellgible interior. Rather, the slave is, to borrow from Rizvana Bradley, a structural dehiscence, the “phantasmatic presencing of an absence, of the corporeality which is phenomenology’s constitutive negation” (Anteaesthetics, 59). The structural and infinite violability of Black feminine flesh is articulated in the exhibition as the scopic technology required—à la Emanuele Tesauro’s “la forma informe” (the informing form)—to see (in) the modern world at all. Or, to borrow from Benjamin’s meditation on panopticism, through the slave “not only does one see everything, but sees it in all ways.” (Arcades, 531).

In modern technical and engineering pedagogical environments, undergraduate students are subjected to intense cognitive demands, particularly concentrated within brief mid-semester and end-semester evaluation cycles. 1 A primary structural deficiency contributing to academic performance degradation, cognitive overload, and elevated anxiety is the profound reliance on highly fragmented, unstructured learning materials. Within the traditional university ecosystem, students aggregate information from disparate and disconnected avenues: unstructured lecture audio, incomplete or low-resolution presentation slide sheets distributed across disjointed messaging platforms, and highly heterogeneous, overlapping handwritten peer notes. 1 Standard digital educational infrastructures, such as enterprise Learning Management Systems (LMS) like Canvas, Blackboard, or Moodle, or consumer cloud storage solutions like Google Drive and Microsoft OneDrive, function strictly as static, passive data repositories. 1 These systems provide secure file hosting and role-based access but possess absolutely no content-level comprehension or orchestration capabilities. They cannot read, contextualize, deduplicate, or synthesize the binary assets they store. 1 Consequently, students squander critical cognitive resources and study hours on administrative file organization and manual cross-referencing rather than deep conceptual mastery. When multiple students upload their individual lecture notes for a specific syllabus module, the resulting repository is riddled with informational redundancies, contradictory formatting, and structural gaps. 1 Manually comparing these distinct vectors of the exact same lecture content is an unscalable burden. To resolve this friction, "SCHOLAR" (developed under the internal project moniker "AlgoQuest") was engineered as a centralized, collaborative platform that functions as an advanced orchestration engine for academic synthesis.[1, 1] SCHOLAR leverages state-of-the-art Natural Language Processing (NLP), Large Language Models (LLMs), and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) to autonomously ingest heterogeneous documents, execute high-dimensional semantic deduplication, and compile an authoritative, syllabus-aligned "Perfect Note," while simultaneously providing an interactive AI tutoring interface. [1, 1] This report provides an exhaustive, peer-level technical dissection of the publishing status and architectural mechanisms underlying the SCHOLAR platform, bridging the theoretical developments in machine learning-such as Transformer architectures 2 and LayoutLM spatial analysis 3 -with practical deployment in an educational technology ecosystem. The transition from isolated learning paradigms to Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL) has been heavily scrutinized in educational technology research. Collaborative note-taking is a critical instructional strategy that distributes the cognitive load of recording information across a group, allowing individual learners to focus on synthesis, active listening, and comprehension. 4 Traditionally, this is executed via rotational note-taking, where a different student acts as the designated scribe each session, or role-based note-taking, where students divide conceptual coverage. 4 However, human-driven collaborative note-taking often results in chaotic, centralized documents that require extensive manual editing to become viable study guides. The integration of artificial intelligence into CSCL environments fundamentally alters this dynamic. AI agents can act as knowledgeable learning peers or centralized "director agents," continuously monitoring the dialogue and shared documents to extract salient points, enforce pedagogical strategies, and ensure equitable knowledge distribution. Through cluster analysis and epistemic network analysis of CSCL environments, researchers have identified distinct learner typologies, such as "active questioners" who engage in cognitive negotiation, and "responsive navigators" who guide collaborative flow. Platforms like CollaClassroom 8 have demonstrated that LLMs can act as personal and group assistants grounded on shared session documents, supporting fluid transitions between solo and group sensemaking. 8 SCHOLAR operationalizes these advanced pedagogical theories by removing the burden of manual document merging from the student cohort entirely. By allowing all students to asynchronously upload their individual interpretations and notes of a lecture, the system captures a wide diversity of cognitive perspectives. The underlying AI pipeline then takes on the role of the director agent, synthesizing these perspectives into a singular, highly coherent educational asset that benefits the entire collective without requiring synchronous, real-time manual editing.

Diversity of membership on boards and governance bodies in a range of sectors have been shown to be a key element in successful boards and effectively lead, monitor and advise their executive. Much progress has been made on improving gender balance on boards, including in universities and higher education institutions (HEI). However, the (scant) literature on HEI boards highlights that higher education or university boards in the UK need to do more to tackle all the other forms of under-representation where limited progress has been made on diversity, other than gender. This paper thus has two main aims, the first to locate the work on developing the diversity of UK university boards within the wider (corporate) theory and literature in this field. This is because the literature in the corporate sector is better established and therefore there is something to learn from practice in this area. The second aim is to develop a practical toolkit to expedite board diversity in higher educ...

The aim with this paper is to investigate how the Social Democratic Party (SAP) deals with the question of economic migrants, or more specifically how the problem is represented by the Social Democratic Party, and how this representation has developed over time. The SAP's theory became recently contested by a competing theory that was caused by the predicted future demographic development in Sweden, combined with the EU's eastern expansion. The first factor contributed to the re-write of the theory, to a theory that saw economic migrants as a solution instead of a problem, in direct contrast to SAP's theory. The second factor was a direct threat to SAP's labour immigration policy. This leads to my second question, how did SAP respond to this pressure? The answers to these questions are achieved by using discourse analysis by applying a problem oriented theory on empirical material, constituting propositions, articles in mass media and parliamentary debates. This means that I de-construct the representation which enables me to show the hidden power structures behind the problem representation. The results suggest the SAP's problem representation through the decades constitutes of a theme where economic migrants are represented as a threat and a strain on the national resources, a representation that legitimizes a control and restrictive policy. SAP re-evoke this theme in order to defend there policy and the Union's power position.

The aim with this paper is to investigate how the Social Democratic Party (SAP) deals with the question of economic migrants, or more specifically how the problem is represented by the Social Democratic Party, and how this representation has developed over time. The SAP's theory became recently contested by a competing theory that was caused by the predicted future demographic development in Sweden, combined with the EU's eastern expansion. The first factor contributed to the re-write of the theory, to a theory that saw economic migrants as a solution instead of a problem, in direct contrast to SAP's theory. The second factor was a direct threat to SAP's labour immigration policy. This leads to my second question, how did SAP respond to this pressure? The answers to these questions are achieved by using discourse analysis by applying a problem oriented theory on empirical material, constituting propositions, articles in mass media and parliamentary debates. This means that I de-construct the representation which enables me to show the hidden power structures behind the problem representation. The results suggest the SAP's problem representation through the decades constitutes of a theme where economic migrants are represented as a threat and a strain on the national resources, a representation that legitimizes a control and restrictive policy. SAP re-evoke this theme in order to defend there policy and the Union's power position.

Although relatively underresearched, cartographic design and art, particularly semiotics of maps within the broader category of aforementioned design, can offer an abundant field for a survey of presentation, representation and identity. The pursuit of the manifestations of the Other on old maps may reflect on views and perspectives of the early modern cartographers, mirrored in their images of the distant and fairly unknown lands and people. Regarding maps as a communication channel or a tool, this paper tends to offer a transdisciplinary (geographic, historic, literary, artistic) but also transgenre (including several sorts of both graphic and narrative sources); diachronic as well assynchronic insight into the content of early modern nautical charts. Apart from their controversially utilitarian purpose, they also served as graphic conceptions or imagery of the early modern Eastern Adriatic area and cartographic reflections on its people (inhabitants) . After its long-lasting ancient and medieval belonging to the western (Roman and Christian) civilization and way of life, and due to its geostrategic position on the political and cultural frontiers of "Europe", Croatian eastern Adriatic shores endured the Ottoman penetration starting from the 16th century onward. Besides being on the Bulwark of Christendom (Antemurale Christianitatis), and experiencing various political subjections during the times of conflict between the Christian West and the Muslim East, this borderland area was also a conflict zone of various influences, including cartographic ones. Therefore, this qualitative comparative analysis of the selected maps (nautical charts in particular) and the corresponding narrative sources (like travelogues) aims to contextualize such physical and ideological bordering experience with several symbolic iconographic map elements that communicated the identity of the land and its population mostly from the perspective of foreign mapmakers. Since the selected sources are primarily nautical charts of the time, the importance of supplementary decorative images to these navigation tools is to be revealed. Considering these nautical charts as communication tools but also as instruments for learning about geography, as well as means of modifying perception, the European understanding of these seas and lands depended significantly on such sources. Regardless of their artistic value, the very content of analysed decorations as supplement artistic images on nautical charts is compared within the theoretical approach of "Neo-imagology" (Leerseen, 2009; and the concept of the Other. While cartographic representations of the Other can testify to the transcultural (or intercultural) migration of ideas and identify communication channels, the authors follow the prevalence of particular identities of these territories /inhabitants as a specific rendition of image of the Other ascribed to them by the foreign mapmakers in the process of expressing their self-consciousness. Among some other early modern cartographic decorative and imagological elements on nautical charts which could also carry ideological/political/cultural or any other symbolic messages, like compass roses, correlated rhumbs, scale-bars or images of patron saints, the focus of this research is on graphic descriptions of local lands (terrestrial landscape markers), landscape designs, botanic and zoological composition, and representation of people. Although unnecessary for practical navigation and orientation, these artistic graphic elements could bring out certain stereotypes but can usually describe the Other even better. Varying from partly or fully geographically accurate, to historically misinterpreted, modified by prejudices of various sources or completely inaccurate if not wrongly attributed, these characteristic have been reflected in the artistic features of Adriatic nautical chart of various origin. Either from the Venetian perspective of isolario-makers, Ottoman work of Piri Reis, or even through the eyes of French or other Western European nautical chart makers (e.g. Vallard's atlas made by unknown author from 1547), the charts of the Adriatic were richly and vividly illustrated and decorated. A variety of comprehensive sailing or general maritime information testify to the Adriatic's position of a picturesque cultural crossroad between the East and the West, with various influences within the framework of the early modern transcultural relations, exchange of ideas, and cultural networking. Representations reflect various influences and levels of understanding of the south-eastern European area and cognition of its people since for some authors (those more distant or unfamiliar with the area) this was to a certain extent an "orientalised" and/or "idealised" Terra Incognita. In

The material study of ancient Egyptian paintings began with the advent of Egyptology during the 19th century. By the 1930s, a lot had already been sampled and described. The limited palette for example has been analysed from actual painted surfaces but also from pigments and painting tools retrieved on site. However, most of these studies took place in museums while the painted surfaces, preserved in funerary chapels and temples, remained somewhat estranged from this primary physical understanding. The artistic process has been also reconstructed, mainly from the information presented by unfinished monuments, showing surfaces at different stages of completion. A lot of this modern and theoretical reconstruction is, however, based on the usual archaeological guessing game that aims at filling the remaining blanks. Our interdisciplinary project has decided to experiment on-site with state-of-the-art portable analysis tools, avoiding any physical sampling, to see if our knowledge of th...

Novel approach to the analytical design of asteroidally shaped two-dimensional FIR filters with arbitrary orientation of the frequency response in the frequency plane is presented. The design consists of two steps. In the first step, the asteroidal 2-D FIR filter in the basic position along the frequency coordinates is designed. The design is based on the analytical contour approximation using the parametric representation of the contour. Closed form formulas for the approximation of the contour with asteroidal shape were derived. In the second step, the asteroidally shaped FIR filter is rotated by the desired angle in the frequency plane. Closed form formulas for the calculation of the impulse response of the filter are presented. One example demonstrates both steps of the design procedure.

Lightning strikes are a serious risk for high-risk facilities like oil and gas plants, mines, explosive storage, and data centers. These places hold the sensitive equipment and dangerous materials, and a lightning strike can cause major damage, leading to expensive downtime or even disastrous events such as fires or explosions. That's why having a strong lightning protection system is not just a matter of following rules, but it is crucial for protecting both people and property. The complete lightning protection solutions designed to meet the specific needs of these critical industries. The services include lightning simulations and both isolated and attached lightning protection systems. This study investigates the real-time installation and testing of advanced lightning protection systems across highrisk industries like oil and gas plants, mines, explosive storage, and data centers. This ensures that the facility stays safe and continues to operate, even during severe weather. By investing in an effective lightning protection system, you can help secure your assets and keep everyone safe, focusing on what really matters in your industry.

Solar cell technology has advanced rapidly in efficiency and material innovation. As a renewable energy source, solar cells help mitigate the global energy crisis. Perovskite-based solar cells have recently achieved efficiencies above 25%, surpassing conventional silicon cells. Among emerging materials, chalcogenide perovskites show great promise due to their superior stability compared to halide perovskites. However, they remain in the exploration stage, making accurate predictions of their electrical properties, especially bandgap, essential for assessing potential in solar cell applications. This study predicts bandgap values using computational methods, emphasizing efficiency and cost reduction compared to experimental approaches. Key features derived from collected data include oxidation state, electronegativity, coordination number, ionic radius, and density. Several machine learning (ML) algorithms: AdaBoost Regressor, gradient boosting regressor, support vector regressor, CatBoost Regressor, and k-neighbor regressor, were implemented using Python. The research process involved data collection, preprocessing (feature scaling, fusion, reduction, and selection), model training and testing with 5-fold cross-validation, and hyperparameter optimization to achieve optimal results. Among the tested models, CatBoost Regressor yielded the best performance, achieving a coefficient of determination (R²) of 69.34%, a mean absolute error (MAE) of 23.1%, and root-mean-square error (RMSE) of 29.49%, demonstrating its effectiveness in predicting chalcogenide perovskite bandgaps.

The research explores how food advertisements are displayed on billboards in Lahore to convey meaning. The researchers used Roland Barthes' theory of semiotics to understand the importance of semiotics and how billboards are used for advertising. The theory analyzes the three dimensions, i.e., connotation, denotation, and myths. The study shows how the companies use different slogans, celebrities, color schemes, and symbols accordingly, depending on the product and target audience in a way that conveys their message and advertises their product so that it leaves a lasting impression and influences the audience. Using Roland Barthes's theory of semiotics, researchers collected three images from different locations in Lahore and analyzed the data, including all the visual elements in the billboards. The research has shown that all the elements, including language, slogans, colors, images, and art, play an important role in conveying a more substantial and impactful message because some verbal and non-verbal symbols and language are used in a way that act as a hook to attract viewers, while other elements contribute to massage delivery and help influencing and leaving an enjoyable massage in viewer's mind. From colors to symbols, everything is specifically selected and represented to leave an impact on the viewer's mind.

Ought: The Journal of Autistic Culture is a peer-reviewed, biannual journal that publishes scholarly and creative works examining and exploring autistic culture. Ought is dedicated to amplifying autistic voices and centering autistic creativity, while including contributions from allistic caregivers, educators, and allies. We strive to create a community that mentors early career researchers, poets, and artists, as well as showcasing the work of leading scholars​ in the field. Ought is committed to celebrating autistic joy and artistry while offering honest and authentic explorations of difficulty and challenge. In blending creative and critical works about autism, Ought also seeks to break down barriers between academic disciplines, between genres of artistic expression, and finally, between autistics and allistics. Ought is the conversation about autism as it ought to be.

The aim of this project is to compare two attention mechanisms-base attention and multimodal attention-for similarity learning in a Siamese neural network. We conducted two training experiments to evaluate whether explicit cross-modal interaction improves similarity learning. In the first setup, the base attention mechanism applies self-attention independently within each modality, encoding image and text embeddings without cross-modal interaction. In the second setup, the multimodal attention mechanism jointly models text and image representations, enabling cross-modal interaction prior to generating the final Siamese embeddings. Both models are trained using contrastive loss to learn a shared embedding space for predicting whether an image and its caption describe the same entity. Results show that the multimodal attention mechanism improves similarity learning performance, achieving 86.22% accuracy, 86.85% precision, 86.31% recall, 86.58% F1 score, and 91.81% AUC. Compared to the base attention model, multimodal attention achieves 2.73 percentage points higher accuracy, 4.05 p.p. higher precision, 0.77 p.p. higher recall, 2.43 p.p. higher F1 score, and 1.09 p.p. higher AUC. These improvements indicate that joint multimodal attention better captures cross-modal entity semantics, while reaffirming that the model functions as a similarity component, not a full entity-linking or entity-localization system.

Teaching descriptive geometry, in the context of this study, is characterized by the continuous investment in recognizing digital representation technologies which can enhance the didactic activities in architectural training. This study describes this trajectory which includes the use of virtual reality, augmented reality and parametric modelling, as well as freehand drawing and the production of physical models both by automating the unfolding process and by digital fabrication processes of 3D printing and laser cutting. In addition to questioning the relevance and sustainability of the infrastructure needed to ensure the continuation of this trajectory, the potentialities identified in each of the learning activities that have been structure, are shown. Although these potentialities are specific to this context, it is considered that this type of record contributes to understand the issues being faced in teaching practices.

The main focus of interest in the paper is the attitude of Western and Eastern stems of Christianity towards religious painting with reference to the problem of equality of word and image as far as the Church teaching is concerned. The roots and basic notions of Christian anthropology as well as positions revealed by both Churches during the discussions in 7-8th centuries are regarded as foundations for noticeable differences in interpretations of meanings, means, artistic principles, reality representations, ways of passing on the truth on man in Orthodox icons and Western religious paintings either. Taking in to account the relationship between object and its representation the paper develops the idea of metonymical principle being crucial for Western religious paintings and symbolic connection between signans belonging to the earthly reality and signatum pointing out to transcendent realm in Orthodox icon painting.

We demonstrate a relationships between the representation theory of Borel subgroups and parabolic subgroups of general linear groups. In particular, we show that the representations of Borel subgroups could be computed from representations of certain maximal parabolic subgroups.

In this thesis I have examined the life stories of three victims of forced removals. It is based on an understanding that there is much that we can learn from the lives of 'ordinary people' and that the oral medium is a rich source of understanding other aspects of society. Chapter 1 sketches the background of this study, and the socio-political context within which it has grown. In the main theory section (chapter 2), I provide a general overview of the tools of narrative-based discourse analysis which I have used for my work and lead into a consideration of theories of memory and time. I focus particularly on aspects of representation of time in narrative and explore the nature of traumatic memory in relation to this. I am especially thankful to my supervisor Kay McCormick for her endless patience and guidance.

Recent hardware advances in quantum and quantum-inspired annealers promise substantial speed up for solving NP-hard combinatorial optimization problems compared to general purpose computers. These special purpose hardware are built for solving hard instances of Quadratic Unconstrained Binary Optimization (QUBO) problems. In terms of number of variables and precision these hardware are usually resource constrained and they work either in Ising space {-1, 1} or in Boolean space {0, 1}. Many naturally occurring problem instances are higher order in nature. The known method to reduce the degree of a higher order optimization problem uses Rosenberg's polynomial. The method works in Boolean space by reducing degree of one term by introducing one extra variable. In this work, we prove that in Ising space the degree reduction of one term requires introduction of two variables. Our proposed method of degree reduction works directly in Ising space, as opposed to converting an Ising polynomial to Boolean space and applying previously known Rosenberg's polynomial. For sparse higher order Ising problems, this results in more compact representation of the resultant QUBO problem, which is crucial for utilizing resource constrained QUBO solvers.

Motivation  Quantum Annealers and other quantum-inspired hardware optimizers take Quadratic Unconstrained Binary Optimization (QUBO) problem as input  QUBO minimization captures all problems in NP  However, some naturally occurring problems are higher order  Examples are molecule synthesis and SAT formulations of some optimization problems