Design process

Christina Waterson interviews Queensland interior designer Marisha McAuliffe about her PhD research into process, and why some people are drawn to create.

Curtains and the Soft Architecture of the American Postwar Domestic Environment

This article investigates the role of “soft architecture” and interior effects—including window treatments, textiles, and electric lighting—in the physcial and social construction of the postwar domestic environment in the USA. In this period the American home became an increasingly visual and visible space, defined more by the view out and the view in than by traditional conditions of domestic enclosure. Popular how-to columns and home decoration articles offered homemakers a variety of mechanisms for sustaining the appearance and psychological comfort of the modern domestic setting. Examining a range of popular decorative strategies used to mediate residential picture windows and window walls, this study challenges the deep-seated cultural and disciplinary biases associated with both the design and study of domestic architecture and interiors. Drawing upon historical documents and contemporary theorizations of the interior, this paper argues for the agency of “soft architecture” in the domestication of modern residential architecture.

Numerical study on the surface depression of the concrete runway pavement under impact load

Airport runway pavement always subjected to huge impact loading due to the hard landing of aircraft on the pavement surface. Therefore runway pavements should have sufficient impact resistance capability to avoid damage causing by hard impact like surface deflection in downward or penetration since the repair works is cumbersome within the operating condition of airport and also increases the service life cost of the pavement structure. Several research works have been carried out on airport runway pavement to measure the present condition of pavement and also to predict future performance of it. However, most of the works are confined by pavement response under moving aircraft loading. Nevertheless, no comprehensive research work is yet conducted to identify the controlling factors which might have significant effect in changing the common pavements damage like surface penetration depth under impact of aircraft. Therefore, a 3D FE study is conducted to determine some effective factors in controlling the top surface penetration depth of runway pavement. Among the exterior factors, mass of the impactor, velocity of the impactor, impact angle and boundary conditions are selected and as interior factors, thickness of the runway pavement, compressive strength and density of materials used in the runway pavement are selected.

An efficient and light-weight multi-tasking model to achieve Intra-Agent concurrency for SAGE

Multi-agent systems implicate a high degree of concurrency at both the Inter- and Intra-Agent levels. Scalable, fault tolerant, Agent Grooming Environment (SAGE), the second generation, FIPA compliant MAS requires a built in mechanism to achieve both the Inter- and Intra-Agent concurrency. This paper dilates upon an attempt to provide a reliable, efficient and light-weight solution to provide intra-agent concurrency with-in the internal agent architecture of SAGE. It addresses the issues related to using the JAVA threading model to provide this level of concurrency to the agent and provides an alternative approach that is based on an eventdriven, concurrent and user-scalable multi-tasking model for the agent's internal model. The findings of this paper show that our proposed approach is suitable for providing an efficient and lightweight concurrent task model for SA GE and considerably outweighs the performance of multithreaded tasking model based on JAVA in terms of throughput and efficiency. This has been illustrated using the practical implementation and evaluation of both models. © 2004 IEEE.

Negotiation schemes for multi-agent cooperative search

Because of limited sensor and communication ranges, designing efficient mechanisms for cooperative tasks is difficult. In this article, several negotiation schemes for multiple agents performing a cooperative task are presented. The negotiation schemes provide suboptimal solutions, but have attractive features of fast decision-making, and scalability to large number of agents without increasing the complexity of the algorithm. A software agent architecture of the decision-making process is also presented. The effect of the magnitude of information flow during the negotiation process is studied by using different models of the negotiation scheme. The performance of the various negotiation schemes, using different information structures, is studied based on the uncertainty reduction achieved for a specified number of search steps. The negotiation schemes perform comparable to that of optimal strategy in terms of uncertainty reduction and also require very low computational time, similar to 7 per cent to that of optimal strategy. Finally, analysis on computational and communication requirement for the negotiation schemes is carried out.

Scalable fault tolerant agent grooming environment-SAGE

Multi-agent systems (MAS) advocate an agent-based approach to software engineering based on decomposing problems in terms of decentralized, autonomous agents that can engage in flexible, high-level interactions. This chapter introduces scalable fault tolerant agent grooming environment (SAGE), a second-generation Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agents (FIPA)-compliant multi-agent system developed at NIIT-Comtec, which provides an environment for creating distributed, intelligent, and autonomous entities that are encapsulated as agents. The chapter focuses on the highlight of SAGE, which is its decentralized fault-tolerant architecture that can be used to develop applications in a number of areas such as e-health, e-government, and e-science. In addition, SAGE architecture provides tools for runtime agent management, directory facilitation, monitoring, and editing messages exchange between agents. SAGE also provides a built-in mechanism to program agent behavior and their capabilities with the help of its autonomous agent architecture, which is the other major highlight of this chapter. The authors believe that the market for agent-based applications is growing rapidly, and SAGE can play a crucial role for future intelligent applications development. © 2007, IGI Global.

Scopophobia/Scopophilia: electric light and the anxiety of the gaze in postwar American architecture

In the years of reconstruction and economic boom that followed the Second World War, the domestic sphere encountered new expectations regarding social behaviour, modes of living, and forms of dwelling. This book brings together an international group of scholars from architecture, design, urban planning, and interior design to reappraise mid-twentieth century modern life, offering a timely reassessment of culture and the economic and political effects on civilian life. This collection contains essays that examine the material of art, objects, and spaces in the context of practices of dwelling over the long span of the postwar period. It asks what role material objects, interior spaces, and architecture played in quelling or fanning the anxieties of modernism’s ordinary denizens, and how this role informs their legacy today. Table of Contents [Book] Introduction Robin Schuldenfrei Part 1: Psychological Constructions: Anxiety of Isolation and Exposure 1. Taking Comfort in the Age of Anxiety: Eero Saarinen’s Womb Chair Cammie McAtee 2. The Future is Possibly Past: The Anxious Spaces of Gaetano Pesce Jane Pavitt 3. Scopophobia/Scopophilia: Electric Light and the Anxiety of the Gaze in American Postwar Domestic Architecture Margaret Petty Part 2: Ideological Objects: Design and Representation 4. The Allegory of the Socialist Lifestyle: The Czechoslovak Pavilion at the Brussels Expo, its Gold Medal and the Politburo Ana Miljacki 5. Assimilating Unease: Moholy-Nagy and the Wartime-Postwar Bauhaus in Chicago Robin Schuldenfrei 6. The Anxieties of Autonomy: Peter Eisenman from Cambridge to House VI Sean Keller Part 3: Societies of Consumers: Materialist Ideologies and Postwar Goods 7. "But a home is not a laboratory": The Anxieties of Designing for the Socialist Home in the German Democratic Republic 1950—1965 Katharina Pfützner 8. Architect-designed Interiors for a Culturally Progressive Upper-Middle Class: The Implicit Political Presence of Knoll International in Belgium Fredie Floré 9. Domestic Environment: Italian Neo-Avant-Garde Design and the Politics of Post-Materialism Mary Louise Lobsinger Part 4: Class Concerns and Conflict: Dwelling and Politics 10. Dirt and Disorder: Taste and Anxiety in the Working Class Home Christine Atha 11. Upper West Side Stories: Race, Liberalism, and Narratives of Urban Renewal in Postwar New York Jennifer Hock 12. Pawns or Prophets? Postwar Architects and Utopian Designs for Southern Italy Anne Parmly Toxey. Coda: From Homelessness to Homelessness David Crowley

Eye-hand coordination during a double-step task: evidence for a common stochastic accumulator

Many studies of reaching and pointing have shown significant spatial and temporal correlations between eye and hand movements. Nevertheless, it remains unclear whether these correlations are incidental, arising from common inputs (independent model); whether these correlations represent an interaction between otherwise independent eye and hand systems (interactive model); or whether these correlations arise from a single dedicated eye-hand system (common command model). Subjects were instructed to redirect gaze and pointing movements in a double-step task in an attempt to decouple eye-hand movements and causally distinguish between the three architectures. We used a drift-diffusion framework in the context of a race model, which has been previously used to explain redirect behavior for eye and hand movements separately, to predict the pattern of eye-hand decoupling. We found that the common command architecture could best explain the observed frequency of different eye and hand response patterns to the target step. A common stochastic accumulator for eye-hand coordination also predicts comparable variances, despite significant difference in the means of the eye and hand reaction time (RT) distributions, which we tested. Consistent with this prediction, we observed that the variances of the eye and hand RTs were similar, despite much larger hand RTs (similar to 90 ms). Moreover, changes in mean eye RTs, which also increased eye RT variance, produced a similar increase in mean and variance of the associated hand RT. Taken together, these data suggest that a dedicated circuit underlies coordinated eye-hand planning.

The silicon backplane design for an LCOS polarization-insensitive phase hologram SLM

Polarization-insensitivity is achieved in a reflective spatial light modulator by laying a quarter-wave plate (QWP) at the incident wavelength directly over the mirror pixels of a silicon backplane, and forming a nematle Fréedrickcz cell over the QWP to modulate the reflected phase. To achieve the highest drive voltage from the available silicon process, a switched voltage common front electrode design is described, with variable amplitude square wave drive to the pixels to maintain constant root-mean-square drive and minimize phase fluctuations during the dc balance refresh cycle. The silicon has been fabricated and liquid-crystal-on-silicon cells both with and without the QWP assembled; applications include optically transparent switches for optical networks, beam steering for add-drop multiplexers for wavelength-division- multiplexing telecommunications, television multicast, and holographic projection.

分布式密码计算平台的架构设计及其实现

分析了常见的密码算法对于分布式计算平台的需求,定义了通用的任务表示格式,使用DCOM技术设计了一个针对密码计算的分布式通用平台及其外挂算法模块;并实现了两种常见的密码攻击算法,给出了测试结果.

Towards a Unified Theory of Neocortex: Laminar Cortical Circuits for Vision and Cognition

A key goal of computational neuroscience is to link brain mechanisms to behavioral functions. The present article describes recent progress towards explaining how laminar neocortical circuits give rise to biological intelligence. These circuits embody two new and revolutionary computational paradigms: Complementary Computing and Laminar Computing. Circuit properties include a novel synthesis of feedforward and feedback processing, of digital and analog processing, and of pre-attentive and attentive processing. This synthesis clarifies the appeal of Bayesian approaches but has a far greater predictive range that naturally extends to self-organizing processes. Examples from vision and cognition are summarized. A LAMINART architecture unifies properties of visual development, learning, perceptual grouping, attention, and 3D vision. A key modeling theme is that the mechanisms which enable development and learning to occur in a stable way imply properties of adult behavior. It is noted how higher-order attentional constraints can influence multiple cortical regions, and how spatial and object attention work together to learn view-invariant object categories. In particular, a form-fitting spatial attentional shroud can allow an emerging view-invariant object category to remain active while multiple view categories are associated with it during sequences of saccadic eye movements. Finally, the chapter summarizes recent work on the LIST PARSE model of cognitive information processing by the laminar circuits of prefrontal cortex. LIST PARSE models the short-term storage of event sequences in working memory, their unitization through learning into sequence, or list, chunks, and their read-out in planned sequential performance that is under volitional control. LIST PARSE provides a laminar embodiment of Item and Order working memories, also called Competitive Queuing models, that have been supported by both psychophysical and neurobiological data. These examples show how variations of a common laminar cortical design can embody properties of visual and cognitive intelligence that seem, at least on the surface, to be mechanistically unrelated.

Special issue on design and programming of signal processors for multimedia communication:Special issue on design and programming of signal processors for multimedia communication

The technical challenges in the design and programming of signal processors for multimedia communication are discussed. The development of terminal equipment to meet such demand presents a significant technical challenge, considering that it is highly desirable that the equipment be cost effective, power efficient, versatile, and extensible for future upgrades. The main challenges in the design and programming of signal processors for multimedia communication are, general-purpose signal processor design, application-specific signal processor design, operating systems and programming support and application programming. The size of FFT is programmable so that it can be used for various OFDM-based communication systems, such as digital audio broadcasting (DAB), digital video broadcasting-terrestrial (DVB-T) and digital video broadcasting-handheld (DVB-H). The clustered architecture design and distributed ping-pong register files in the PAC DSP raise new challenges of code generation.

Process variation tolerant low power DCT architecture

2-D Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) is widely used as the core of digital image and video compression. In this paper, we present a novel DCT architecture that allows aggressive voltage scaling by exploiting the fact that not all intermediate computations are equally important in a DCT system to obtain "good" image quality with Peak Signal to Noise Ratio(PSNR) > 30 dB. This observation has led us to propose a DCT architecture where the signal paths that are less contributive to PSNR improvement are designed to be longer than the paths that are more contributive to PSNR improvement. It should also be noted that robustness with respect to parameter variations and low power operation typically impose contradictory requirements in terms of architecture design. However, the proposed architecture lends itself to aggressive voltage scaling for low-power dissipation even under process parameter variations. Under a scaled supply voltage and/or variations in process parameters, any possible delay errors would only appear from the long paths that are less contributive towards PSNR improvement, providing large improvement in power dissipation with small PSNR degradation. Results show that even under large process variation and supply voltage scaling (0.8V), there is a gradual degradation of image quality with considerable power savings (62.8%) for the proposed architecture when compared to existing implementations in 70 nm process technology.