The construction of the museological object

Exhibiting is or should be to work against ignorance, especially against the most refractory of all ignorance: the pre-conceived idea of stereo typed culture. To exhibit is to take a calculated risk of disorientation - in the etymological sense: (to lose your bearings), disturbs the harmony, the evident , and the consensus, that constitutes the common place (the banal). Needless to say however it is obvious that an exhibition that deliberately tries to scandalise will create an inverted perversion which results in an obscurantist pseudo-luxury - culture ... between demagogy and provocation, one has to find visual communication's subtle itinerary. Even though an intermediary route is not so stimulating: as Gaston Bachelard said "All the roads lead to Rome, except the roads of compromise." It is becoming ever more evident that museums have undergone changes that are noticeable in numerous areas. As well as the traditional functions of collecting, conserving and exhibiting objects. museums have tried to become a means of communication, open and aware of the worries of modern society. In order to do this , it has started to utilise modern technology now available and lead by the hand of "marketing" and modern business management.

Estudio de los beneficios de la implementación del modelo de gestión cloud computing en comparación al modelo de gestión tradicional. Caso de estudio: Corporación ADC-HAS Management Ecuador S.A.

El desarrollo eficiente y oportuno de las actividades propias de las empresas exige una constante renovación en su infraestructura, capacitación permanente de su staff, investigar nuevas tecnológicas y la asignación cada vez mayor del presupuesto para su área de TIC. Varios modelos de gestión han intentado suplir estas necesidades, entre los que se puede mencionar a: hosting, outsourcing, leasing, servicios profesionales, asesorías especializadas, entre otros. El modelo de gestión cloud computing y sus diversas opciones se está posicionando últimamente como la solución más viable y rápida de implementar. De ahí que, este proyecto se enfoca en el estudio de este modelo como una alternativa al modelo de gestión tradicional de servicios TIC, y toma como referencia para el desarrollo de esta tesis la situación actual de la infraestructura tecnológica de la Corporación ADC&HAS Management Ecuador S.A. No se pretende justificar al cloud como una solución definitiva, sino plantear este modelo como una alternativa útil a la realidad tecnológica de la Corporación, y en base a sus propiedades concluir que fue el modelo que mejor se ajustó a la estrategia institucional en términos: organizacionales, tecnológicos y financieros, por lo menos para los próximos cinco años. En los dos primeros capítulos se referencian algunos elementos conceptuales en los que se fundamenta las TIC y se mencionan ciertos parámetros que intervinieron en su evolución. El tercer capítulo describe a la Corporación; y en el capítulo cuarto se aplican los conceptos de los primeros capítulos reforzados con las experiencias publicadas en la revista Computerworld (2010 hasta la presente) y que permitieron evaluar los beneficios de los dos modelos de gestión y las razones para implementarlos o mantenerlos.

Análisis del modelo de negocio del cloud computing. Caso: empresa de desarrollo DevTeam

Hoy en día el uso de las TIC en una empresa se ha convertido en indispensable sin importar su tamaño o industria a tal punto que ya no es una ventaja competitiva el simple hecho de usarla sino que la clave es determinar cuál es la mejor para la empresa. Existen en el mercado servicios en-línea que igualan o sobrepasan los estándares de tecnologías pagadas que incluso deben ser instaladas dentro de la empresa consumiendo recursos y en algunos casos subutilizándolos, los servicios del cloud computing poseen la flexibilidad y capacidad que la empresa requiere de acuerdo a sus necesidades de crecimiento y de cambio continuo que el mercado exige en la actualidad. Algunas empresas no invierten en dichas tecnologías porque no saben que pueden accederlas a costos bajos e incluso en algunos casos sin pagar un solo centavo y pierden competitividad y productividad por simple desconocimiento. El uso de servicios SaaS e IaaS afecta al flujo de caja de manera positiva comparada con una inversión en infraestructura propia, sobre todo en empresas que están empezando a funcionar o en aquellas que están en proceso de renovación tecnológica. Después de realizada esta investigación se recomienda el uso de los servicios de cloud computing, pero es evidente que no son útiles para todas las empresas y la utilidad depende de la criticidad de las aplicaciones o infraestructuras, el momento por el que pasa la compañía, tamaño de la empresa, ¿Cloud pública o Cloud privada?, en ocasiones, virtualizar también es racionalizar y la visión integral de la seguridad. Por otro lado, después de tabular los datos obtenidos en la encuesta número 2 se evidenció que el lanzamiento del Servicio en la nube de EcuFlow incrementó la demanda de esta herramienta en el mercado.

Visual Object Recognition Using Deformable Models of Vehicles

This workshop paper reports recent developments to a vision system for traffic interpretation which relies extensively on the use of geometrical and scene context. Firstly, a new approach to pose refinement is reported, based on forces derived from prominent image derivatives found close to an initial hypothesis. Secondly, a parameterised vehicle model is reported, able to represent different vehicle classes. This general vehicle model has been fitted to sample data, and subjected to a Principal Component Analysis to create a deformable model of common car types having 6 parameters. We show that the new pose recovery technique is also able to operate on the PCA model, to allow the structure of an initial vehicle hypothesis to be adapted to fit the prevailing context. We report initial experiments with the model, which demonstrate significant improvements to pose recovery.

Use of fused airborne scanning laser altimetry and digital map data for urban flood modelling

Flood modelling of urban areas is still at an early stage, partly because until recently topographic data of sufficiently high resolution and accuracy have been lacking in urban areas. However, Digital Surface Models (DSMs) generated from airborne scanning laser altimetry (LiDAR) having sub-metre spatial resolution have now become available, and these are able to represent the complexities of urban topography. The paper describes the development of a LiDAR post-processor for urban flood modelling based on the fusion of LiDAR and digital map data. The map data are used in conjunction with LiDAR data to identify different object types in urban areas, though pattern recognition techniques are also employed. Post-processing produces a Digital Terrain Model (DTM) for use as model bathymetry, and also a friction parameter map for use in estimating spatially-distributed friction coefficients. In vegetated areas, friction is estimated from LiDAR-derived vegetation height, and (unlike most vegetation removal software) the method copes with short vegetation less than ~1m high, which may occupy a substantial fraction of even an urban floodplain. The DTM and friction parameter map may also be used to help to generate an unstructured mesh of a vegetated urban floodplain for use by a 2D finite element model. The mesh is decomposed to reflect floodplain features having different frictional properties to their surroundings, including urban features such as buildings and roads as well as taller vegetation features such as trees and hedges. This allows a more accurate estimation of local friction. The method produces a substantial node density due to the small dimensions of many urban features.

Biologically motivated model for object detection and identification in real-world scenes

The classical computer vision methods can only weakly emulate some of the multi-level parallelisms in signal processing and information sharing that takes place in different parts of the primates’ visual system thus enabling it to accomplish many diverse functions of visual perception. One of the main functions of the primates’ vision is to detect and recognise objects in natural scenes despite all the linear and non-linear variations of the objects and their environment. The superior performance of the primates’ visual system compared to what machine vision systems have been able to achieve to date, motivates scientists and researchers to further explore this area in pursuit of more efficient vision systems inspired by natural models. In this paper building blocks for a hierarchical efficient object recognition model are proposed. Incorporating the attention-based processing would lead to a system that will process the visual data in a non-linear way focusing only on the regions of interest and hence reducing the time to achieve real-time performance. Further, it is suggested to modify the visual cortex model for recognizing objects by adding non-linearities in the ventral path consistent with earlier discoveries as reported by researchers in the neuro-physiology of vision.

Dynamic load balancing for the distributed mining of molecular structures

In molecular biology, it is often desirable to find common properties in large numbers of drug candidates. One family of methods stems from the data mining community, where algorithms to find frequent graphs have received increasing attention over the past years. However, the computational complexity of the underlying problem and the large amount of data to be explored essentially render sequential algorithms useless. In this paper, we present a distributed approach to the frequent subgraph mining problem to discover interesting patterns in molecular compounds. This problem is characterized by a highly irregular search tree, whereby no reliable workload prediction is available. We describe the three main aspects of the proposed distributed algorithm, namely, a dynamic partitioning of the search space, a distribution process based on a peer-to-peer communication framework, and a novel receiverinitiated load balancing algorithm. The effectiveness of the distributed method has been evaluated on the well-known National Cancer Institute’s HIV-screening data set, where we were able to show close-to linear speedup in a network of workstations. The proposed approach also allows for dynamic resource aggregation in a non dedicated computational environment. These features make it suitable for large-scale, multi-domain, heterogeneous environments, such as computational grids.

A reconfigurable neural environment on active networks

This paper proposes the deployment of a neural network computing environment on Active Networks. Active Networks are packet-switched computer networks in which packets can contain code fragments that are executed on the intermediate nodes. This feature allows the injection of small pieces of codes to deal with computer network problems directly into the network core, and the adoption of new computing techniques to solve networking problems. The goal of our project is the adoption of a distributed neural network for approaching tasks which are specific of the computer network environment. Dynamically reconfigurable neural networks are spread on an experimental wide area backbone of active nodes (ABone) to show the feasibility of the proposed approach.

Decentralized load balancing for highly irregular search problems

In this paper, we present a distributed computing framework for problems characterized by a highly irregular search tree, whereby no reliable workload prediction is available. The framework is based on a peer-to-peer computing environment and dynamic load balancing. The system allows for dynamic resource aggregation, does not depend on any specific meta-computing middleware and is suitable for large-scale, multi-domain, heterogeneous environments, such as computational Grids. Dynamic load balancing policies based on global statistics are known to provide optimal load balancing performance, while randomized techniques provide high scalability. The proposed method combines both advantages and adopts distributed job-pools and a randomized polling technique. The framework has been successfully adopted in a parallel search algorithm for subgraph mining and evaluated on a molecular compounds dataset. The parallel application has shown good calability and close-to linear speedup in a distributed network of workstations.

Object displays and control of dynamic systems

Recent work has suggested that for some tasks, graphical displays which visually integrate information from more than one source offer an advantage over more traditional displays which present the same information in a separated format. Three experiments are described which investigate this claim using a task which requires subjects to control a dynamic system. In the first experiment, the integrated display is compared to two separated displays, one an animated mimic diagram, the other an alphanumeric display. The integrated display is shown to support better performance in a control task, but experiment 2 shows that part of this advantage may be due to its analogue nature. Experiment 3 considers performance on a fault detection task, and shows no difference between the integrated and separated displays. The paper concludes that previous claims made for integrated displays may not generalize from monitoring to control tasks.

PRISM and ENES: a European approach to Earth system modelling

Europe's widely distributed climate modelling expertise, now organized in the European Network for Earth System Modelling (ENES), is both a strength and a challenge. Recognizing this, the European Union's Program for Integrated Earth System Modelling (PRISM) infrastructure project aims at designing a flexible and friendly user environment to assemble, run and post-process Earth System models. PRISM was started in December 2001 with a duration of three years. This paper presents the major stages of PRISM, including: (1) the definition and promotion of scientific and technical standards to increase component modularity; (2) the development of an end-to-end software environment (graphical user interface, coupling and I/O system, diagnostics, visualization) to launch, monitor and analyse complex Earth system models built around state-of-art community component models (atmosphere, ocean, atmospheric chemistry, ocean bio-chemistry, sea-ice, land-surface); and (3) testing and quality standards to ensure high-performance computing performance on a variety of platforms. PRISM is emerging as a core strategic software infrastructure for building the European research area in Earth system sciences. Copyright (c) 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.