Simulating Business Processes of Manufacturing SMEs on the Cloud

Simulating the efficiency of business processes could reveal crucial bottlenecks for manufacturing companies and could lead to significant optimizations resulting in decreased time to market, more efficient resource utilization, and larger profit. While such business optimization software is widely utilized by larger companies, SMEs typically do not have the required expertise and resources to efficiently exploit these advantages. The aim of this work is to explore how simulation software vendors and consultancies can extend their portfolio to SMEs by providing business process optimization based on a cloud computing platform. By executing simulation runs on the cloud, software vendors and associated business consultancies can get access to large computing power and data storage capacity on demand, run large simulation scenarios on behalf of their clients, analyze simulation results, and advise their clients regarding process optimization. The solution is mutually beneficial for both vendor/consultant and the end-user SME. End-user companies will only pay for the service without requiring large upfront costs for software licenses and expensive hardware. Software vendors can extend their business towards the SME market with potentially huge benefits.

Notation timelines and the aesthetics of disappearance

Contemporary cities are frequently surrounded by transitional landscapes: ambiguous lands, non-places on the urban edge, commonly experienced under the condition of speed. Although variously shaped by processes of urbanisation, logistics of road engineering, safety and ownership, and local people's lives, for travellers such landscapes are usually perceived in a state of disappearance. This condition presents a major challenge for the traditional methods used in architecture and urban design. For designers interested in the organisation and design of such mobility routes for the engagement of the traveller, a method of scripting based on notation timelines would provide a helpful supplement to traditional master plans. This paper explores the development of such a method and its roots in time-based arts, such as dance, music and film, as well as in the recent history of architecture and urban design. It does so through the presentation of an experimental study based on a real route, the train journey from London to Stansted airport.

Reading Maud’s remains: Tennyson, geological processes, and palaeontological reconstructions

As Tennyson's “little Hamlet ,” Maud (1855) posits a speaker who, like Hamlet, confronts the ignominious fate of dead remains. Maud's speaker contemplates such remains as bone, hair, shell, and he experiences his world as one composed of hard inorganic matter, such things as rocks, gems, flint, stone, coal, and gold. While Maud's imagery of “stones, and hard substances” has been read as signifying the speaker's desire “unnaturally to harden himself into insensibility” (Killham 231, 235), I argue that these substances benefit from being read in the context of Tennyson's wider understanding of geological processes. Along with highlighting these materials, the text's imagery focuses on processes of fossilisation, while Maud's characters appear to be in the grip of an insidious petrification. Despite the preoccupation with geological materials and processes, the poem has received little critical attention in these terms. Dennis R. Dean, for example, whose Tennyson and Geology (1985) is still the most rigorous study of the sources of Tennyson's knowledge of geology, does not detect a geological register in the poem, arguing that by the time Tennyson began to write Maud, he was “relatively at ease with the geological world” (Dean 21). I argue, however, that Maud reveals that Tennyson was anything but “at ease” with geology. While In Memoriam (1851) wrestles with religious doubt that is both initiated, and, to some extent, alleviated by geological theories, it finally affirms the transcendence of spirit over matter. Maud, conversely, gravitates towards the ground, concerning itself with the corporal remains of life and with the agents of change that operate on all matter. Influenced by his reading of geology, and particularly Charles Lyell's provocative writings on the embedding and fossilisation of organic material in strata in his Principles of Geology (1830–33) volume 2, Tennyson's poem probes the taphonomic processes that result in the incorporation of dead remains and even living flesh into the geological system.

Embracing difference and the deferral of self-government: a critical analysis of the framing and practice of contemporary peace building

This thesis analyses how dominant policy approaches to peacebuilding have moved away from a single and universalised understanding of peace to be achieved through a top-down strategy of democratisation and economic liberalisation, prevalent at the beginning of 1990s. Instead, throughout the 2000s, peacebuilders have increasingly adopted a commitment to cultivating a bottom-up and hybrid peace building process that is context-sensitive and intended to be more respectful of the needs and values of post-war societies. The projects of statebuilding in Kosovo and, to a lesser extent, in Bosnia are examined to illustrate the shift. By capturing this shift, I seek to argue that contemporary practitioners of peace are sharing the sensibility of the theoretical critics of liberalism. These critics have long contended that post-war societies cannot be governed from ‘above’ and have advocated the adoption of a bottom-up approach to peacebuilding. Now, both peace practitioners and their critics share the tendency to embrace difference in peacebuilding operations, but this shift has failed to address meaningfully the problems and concerns of post-conflict societies. The conclusion of this research is that, drawing on the assumption that these societies are not capable of undertaking sovereign acts because of their problematic inter-subjective frames, the discourses of peacebuilding (in policy-making and academic critique) have increasingly legitimised an open-ended role of interference by external agencies, which now operate from ‘below’. Peacebuilding has turned into a long-term process, in which international and local actors engage relationally in the search for ever-more emancipatory hybrid outcomes, but in which self-government and self-determination are constantly deferred. Processes of emphasising difference have thus denied the political autonomy of post-war societies and have continuously questioned the political and human equality of these populations in a hierarchically divided world.

Landscapes of the invisible: sounds, cosmologies and poetics of space

In this PhD by Publication I revisit and contextualize art works and essays I have collaboratively created under the name Flow Motion between 2004-13, in order to generate new insights on the contributions they have made to diverse and emerging fields of contemporary arts practice/research, including digital, virtual, sonic and interdisciplinary art. The works discussed comprise the digital multimedia installation and sound art performance Astro Black Morphologies/Astro Dub Morphologies (2004-5), the sound installation and performance Invisible (2006-7), the web art archive and performance presentation project promised lands (2008-10), and two related texts, Astro Black Morphologies: Music and Science Lovers (2004) and Music and Migration (2013). I show how these works map new thematic constellations around questions of space and diaspora, music and cosmology, invisibility and spectrality, the body and perception. I also show how the works generate new connections between and across contemporary avant-garde, experimental and popular music, and visual art and cinema traditions. I describe the methodological design, approaches and processes through which the works were produced, with an emphasis on transversality, deconstruction and contemporary black music forms as key tools in my collaborative artistic and textual practice. I discuss how, through the development of methods of data translation and transformation, and distinctive visual approaches for the re-elaboration of archival material, the works produced multiple readings of scientific narratives, digital X-ray data derived from astronomical research on black holes and dark energy, and musical, photographic and textual material related to historical and contemporary accounts of migration. I also elaborate on the relation between difference and repetition, the concepts of multiplicity and translation, and the processes of collective creation which characterize my/Flow Motion’s work. The art works and essays I engage with in this commentary produce an idea of contemporary art as the result of a fluid, open and mutating assemblage of diverse and hybrid methods and mediums, and as an embodiment of a cross-cultural, transversal and transdisciplinary knowledge shaped by research, process, creative dialogues, collaborative practice and collective signature.