153 research outputs found
Incontri inaspettati: Pietro Vecchia nella "Bottega dell'antiquario" di Oreste Da Molin
No full textThis paper presents a new painting by Pietro Vecchia (1602 c.-1678), probably dating to the sixth decade of the Seventeenth century and representative of his most classical style, formerly deposited in the Museum of Arad (Romania) with an attribution to Carlo Caliari. The work displays an interesting iconography, Saturn who kidnaps Cupid from Venus: a depiction of the purest Baroque spirit, aimed to represent that Time ta- kes away Love. We do not know the original location of the canvas, or who commissioned it, but it is of great interest that we can recognize it – albeit with some variations – within a painting by Oreste Da Molin recently rediscovered, dated 1880, depicting an antique shop. Among the paintings on display in this shop there is also a David and Goliath, which can be recognized with another work – by an anonymous author – presented here with a discussion of its possible paternity
Le metamorfosi di Bonifacio: ombre e furori nel Candelaio di Giordano Bruno
No full textMy thesis is a comparative reading of two major works by the Italian philosopher Giordano Bruno: Il Candelaio (The Candle Bearer) and De Umbris Idearum (The Shadows of Ideas). The two texts were published in the lapse of three years and scholarship has for the major part interpreted the Candle Bearer, which is a comedy, in light of the philosophy of images exposed by Bruno in The Shadows of Ideas. IN this view, the literary work was an expansion of the philosophical discourse. In my thesis I counter this reading reverting the approach: I thus read the philosophical work in light of the images built by Bruno in his literary text. The goal of my analysis is to show how Bruno introduced into the philosophical discourse strategies belonging to the dynamics of literature and how these strategies modify the epistemological foundations of the philosophical discourse itself. My analysis is based on the comparison of those images in the two texts which reciprocally complete each other and at the same time undermine their epistemological validity. I explore how The Shadows of Ideas is constructed according to a model of which The Candle Bearer is the original mold and thus how Bruno turns the philosophical discourse into a process of interpretation of figures of speeches, images, and rhetorical devices. This reading of these two early Bruno’s works proposes to illustrate how, on the level of the production of speech and writing, at the end of the 16th century the philosophical speculation becomes progressively a matter of self-reflection on the epistemological foundation trough which philosophy strives to represent its object. In conclusion of my thesis, I argue how literature represents for philosophy the gateway to a new nuanced and mystifying language which blurs the borders between words and images, speech and writing. In the last instance, Bruno’s works are an ideal bridge that joins the pinnacle of the Renaissance to the upcoming age of Baroque.M.A.Includes bibliographical referencesby Alessio Lerr
Insulator-to-metal transition at oxide interfaces induced by WO3 overlayers
No full textInterfaces between complex oxides constitute a unique playground for two-dimensional electron systems (2DESs), where superconductivity and magnetism can arise from combinations of bulk insulators. The 2DES at the LaAlO3/SrTiO3interface is one of the most studied in this regard, and its origin is determined by the polar field in LaAlO3as well as by the presence of point defects, like oxygen vacancies and intermixed cations. These defects usually reside in the conduction channel and are responsible for a decrease of the electronic mobility. In this work, we use an amorphous WO3overlayer to obtain a high-mobility 2DES in WO3/LaAlO3/SrTiO3heterostructures. The studied system shows a sharp insulator-to-metal transition as a function of both LaAlO3and WO3layer thickness. Low-temperature magnetotransport reveals a strong magnetoresistance reaching 900% at 10 T and 1.5 K, the presence of multiple conduction channels with carrier mobility up to 80 000 cm2V-1s-1, and quantum oscillations of conductance
Author-Driven Approaches to Computational Narrative Design for Games
No full textAccessible Head Mounted Displays (HMD) have provided mass access to Extended Reality (XR) content as never before. One of the key complaints from HMD owners, however, is the lack of substantial high-quality content (Moore 2017). Coupled with the domain-specific topic of presence, which describes a state beyond the concept of immersion instead with the user feeling part of the virtual world. Utilizing traditional production techniques cost and the duration of the resultant product are inextricably linked, although some progress reducing manual hours has been made with the introduction of Procedural Content Generation (PCG); the focus of this shift has been on asset creation rather than narratives (Kapadia et al. 2017). While PCG can reduce the cost of production it does not however directly increase the duration of the game. The current solution from developers has been to implement game mechanics to increase the duration of the game, leading to a rise in arcade-style wave shooters (Anon 2018), however, this solution is not applicable to long-form content such as narrative-based Role Playing Games (RPG), story-based first-person action games and interactive narratives. The intended contribution of this paper is both to describe the challenges to the academic knowledge in procedurally generated content and computational narratives but is also about studying how those approaches can be democratized, enabling wider adoption within the content creation community, with a view to their eventual use within non-entertainment sectors
Socio-cultural hybrid spaces and the Smart Villages methodology: the case study of LAG Escartons and Valli Valdesi.
No full textreservedThe present thesis deals with the issue of peripheral areas development: being commonly represented as sub-urban territorial appendices, their endogenous capital has been long underrated. The over-valorization of urban centers as the political, social, cultural, and economic hubs has led to a progressive overshadowing of peripheral areas, which have been increasingly abandoned by their inhabitants and felt as scarcely attractive to potential new settlers. The present analysis attempt to present an alternative paradigm for the development of peripheral areas in Italy: if it’s true that we as author deeply believe in the necessity of a new enhancement of areas considered marginal if compared to urban centers, we also hardly believe that a top-down policy approach might be beneficial to this process. For this reason, we aim to propose the European LEADER approach as an alternative policy operational paradigm for program development in rural areas: we firmly believe that only by engaging with the local communities it would be possible to transform the macro-level objective identified by the PAC into operative and effective programs. And even beyond this, we sustain that the ultimate key to sustainable, long-lasting, and holistic rural development is the empowerment of local communities. We conceive European institutions as enablers of the local inhabitants of each country: rather than centralized power structures with rigid administrative procedures, we’d like to present the European bodies as not only legal institutions but as social and relational capital builder opportunities. In this sense we aim at humanizing the European Common Agricultural Policy (PAC), demonstrating the European Union has provided within it a broad set of tools to translate their policy objective into community-led local development initiatives.
The area chosen for the analysis is the Western part of the Piedmont region, with its different landscapes, resources, and opportunities. However, we have gradually witnessed the progressive abandonment of the rural areas of the region and its contemporary gentrification of an urban center, mainly the city of Turin. Only during the pandemic this tendency has slightly reduced: the experience of COVID-19 has in fact given us the opportunity to completely rethink our way of life, both in the working and non-working domain. Our primary desire is thus to present how it is possible to invert the current tendency concerning the Piedmont peripheral areas by riding the wave of one of the main effects of the pandemic, being the shift from office-based work to remote-working modality. We believe that this might be a great redemption opportunity for rural areas, to both reassert their intrinsic value and to overcome their development issues. We furthermore aim to do it by empowering the local Piedmont rural communities, which is why we have chosen the LAG Escartons & Valli Valdesi project.
By starting from the European Smart Villages methodology, the LAG EVV is in the process of realizing a network of co-working spaces in its territory: these co-working spaces are aimed to be set up in strict collaboration with the local communities. The local inhabitants are expected to be the ones realizing, managing, and animating these co-working spaces. Furthermore, their possible elevated social impact on the area makes them the perfect opportunity for the LAG EVV to conceive these co-working spaces as hybrid spaces from the very beginning: coherently with the Smart Village framework, the co-working spaces are expected to become social innovation hubs, local antennas for both the LAG EVV and local inhabitants to increase their social, cultural, professional, political and even economic capital. Said this, the project proposed by the LAG EVV is the best synthesis of all the relevant topics that will be treated in the present analysis
What to bid and when to stop
No full textNegotiation is an important activity in human society, and is studied by various disciplines, ranging from economics and game theory, to electronic commerce, social psychology, and artificial intelligence. Traditionally, negotiation is a necessary, but also time-consuming and expensive activity. Therefore, in the last decades there has been a large interest in the automation of negotiation, for example in the setting of e-commerce. This interest is fueled by the promise of automated agents eventually being able to negotiate on behalf of human negotiators.Every year, automated negotiation agents are improving in various ways, and there is now a large body of negotiation strategies available, all with their unique strengths and weaknesses. For example, some agents are able to predict the opponent's preferences very well, while others focus more on having a sophisticated bidding strategy. The problem however, is that there is little incremental improvement in agent design, as the agents are tested in varying negotiation settings, using a diverse set of performance measures. This makes it very difficult to meaningfully compare the agents, let alone their underlying techniques. As a result, we lack a reliable way to pinpoint the most effective components in a negotiating agent.There are two major advantages of distinguishing between the different components of a negotiating agent's strategy: first, it allows the study of the behavior and performance of the components in isolation. For example, it becomes possible to compare the preference learning component of all agents, and to identify the best among them. Second, we can proceed to mix and match different components to create new negotiation strategies., e.g.: replacing the preference learning technique of an agent and then examining whether this makes a difference. Such a procedure enables us to combine the individual components to systematically explore the space of possible negotiation strategies.To develop a compositional approach to evaluate and combine the components, we identify structure in most agent designs by introducing the BOA architecture, in which we can develop and integrate the different components of a negotiating agent. We identify three main components of a general negotiation strategy; namely a bidding strategy (B), possibly an opponent model (O), and an acceptance strategy (A). The bidding strategy considers what concessions it deems appropriate given its own preferences, and takes the opponent into account by using an opponent model. The acceptance strategy decides whether offers proposed by the opponent should be accepted.The BOA architecture is integrated into a generic negotiation environment called Genius, which is a software environment for designing and evaluating negotiation strategies. To explore the negotiation strategy space of the negotiation research community, we amend the Genius repository with various existing agents and scenarios from literature. Additionally, we organize a yearly international negotiation competition (ANAC) to harvest even more strategies and scenarios. ANAC also acts as an evaluation tool for negotiation strategies, and encourages the design of negotiation strategies and scenarios.We re-implement agents from literature and ANAC and decouple them to fit into the BOA architecture without introducing any changes in their behavior. For each of the three components, we manage to find and analyze the best ones for specific cases, as described below. We show that the BOA framework leads to significant improvements in agent design by wining ANAC 2013, which had 19 participating teams from 8 international institutions, with an agent that is designed using the BOA framework and is informed by a preliminary analysis of the different components.In every negotiation, one of the negotiating parties must accept an offer to reach an agreement. Therefore, it is important that a negotiator employs a proficient mechanism to decide under which conditions to accept. When contemplating whether to accept an offer, the agent is faced with the acceptance dilemma: accepting the offer may be suboptimal, as better offers may still be presented before time runs out. On the other hand, accepting too late may prevent an agreement from being reached, resulting in a break off with no gain for either party. We classify and compare state-of-the-art generic acceptance conditions. We propose new acceptance strategies and we demonstrate that they outperform the other conditions. We also provide insight into why some conditions work better than others and investigate correlations between the properties of the negotiation scenario and the efficacy of acceptance conditions.Later, we adopt a more principled approach by applying optimal stopping theory to calculate the optimal decision on the acceptance of an offer. We approach the decision of whether to accept as a sequential decision problem, by modeling the bids received as a stochastic process. We determine the optimal acceptance policies for particular opponent classes and we present an approach to estimate the expected range of offers when the type of opponent is unknown. We show that the proposed approach is able to find the optimal time to accept, and improves upon all existing acceptance strategies.Another principal component of a negotiating agent's strategy is its ability to take the opponent's preferences into account. The quality of an opponent model can be measured in two different ways. One is to use the agent's performance as a benchmark for the model's quality. We evaluate and compare the performance of a selection of state-of-the-art opponent modeling techniques in negotiation. We provide an overview of the factors influencing the quality of a model and we analyze how the performance of opponent models depends on the negotiation setting. We identify a class of simple and surprisingly effective opponent modeling techniques that did not receive much previous attention in literature.The other way to measure the quality of an opponent model is to directly evaluate its accuracy by using similarity measures. We review all methods to measure the accuracy of an opponent model and we then analyze how changes in accuracy translate into performance differences. Moreover, we pinpoint the best predictors for good performance. This leads to new insights concerning how to construct an opponent model, and what we need to measure when optimizing performance.Finally, we take two different approaches to gain more insight into effective bidding strategies. We present a new classification method for negotiation strategies, based on their pattern of concession making against different kinds of opponents. We apply this technique to classify some well-known negotiating strategies, and we formulate guidelines on how agents should bid in order to be successful, which gives insight into the bidding strategy space of negotiating agents. Furthermore, we apply optimal stopping theory again, this time to find the concessions that maximize utility for the bidder against particular opponents. We show there is an interesting connection between optimal bidding and optimal acceptance strategies, in the sense that they are mirrored versions of each other.Lastly, after analyzing all components separately, we put the pieces back together again. We take all BOA components accumulated so far, including the best ones, and combine them all together to explore the space of negotiation strategies.We compute the contribution of each component to the overall negotiation result, and we study the interaction between components. We find that combining the best agent components indeed makes the strongest agents. This shows that the component-based view of the BOA architecture not only provides a useful basis for developing negotiating agents but also provides a useful analytical tool. By varying the BOA components we are able to demonstrate the contribution of each component to the negotiation result, and thus analyze the significance of each. The bidding strategy is by far the most important to consider, followed by the acceptance conditions and finally followed by the opponent model.Our results validate the analytical approach of the BOA framework to first optimize the individual components, and then to recombine them into a negotiating agent
European Avant-Garde: Art, Borders and Culture in Relationship to Mainstream Cinema and New Media
No full textThis research analyses the impact of transformation and hybridization processes at the intersection of art, science and technology. These forms of transformation and hybridization are the result of contemporary interactions between classic and digital media.
It discusses the concept of 'remediation' presented by Bolter and proposes the concept of 'digital ekphrasis,' which is based on Manovich' s analyses of the interactions between classic and digital media. This is a model which, borrowed from semiotic structures, encompasses the technical as well as aesthetic and philosophical transformations of contemporary media.
The thesis rejects Baudrillard's and Virilio's proposed concepts of 'digital black hole' as the only possible form of evolution of contemporary digital media. It proposes a different concept for the evolutionary model of contemporary hybridization processes based on contemporary forms of hybridizations that are rooted in aesthetic, philosophical and technological developments. This concept is argued as emancipated from the 'religious' idea of a 'divine originated' perfect image that Baudrillard and Virilio consider to be deteriorated from contemporary hybridization experimentation.
The thesis proposes, through historical examples in the fine arts, the importance of transmedia migrations and experimentations as the framework for a philosophical, aesthetic and technological evolutionary concept of humanity freed from the restrictions of religious imperatives
Is there a role of percutaneous drainage in non-parasitic splenic cysts? Case report
No full textPathogenesis, classification and treatment of non-parasitic splenic cysts (NPSCs) are controversial.
The utility of percutaneous aspiration of the cyst is not well understood. We report a case of a 32 year-old woman with a symptomatic giant epidermoid cyst of the spleen treated with laparoscopic splenectomy. A percutaneous transcatheter drainage was performed under ultrasound guidance before surgical procedure in order to classify the type of cyst and to choose the best treatment
Filmic machines and animated monsters: retelling Frankenstein in the digital age
No full textFrankensteinian monsters have appeared on our screens since the early days of cinema. Indeed, across the history of film we see Mary Shelley’s “hideous progeny” rewritten as alchemical creations, animated corpses, lumbering fiends, robots, cyborgs, replicants, dinosaurs, artificial intelligences and digital constructions. In particular, Shelley’s text shares its speculative depiction of a posthuman future with fantastic and science-fictional cinema of the digital age. At the same time, posthuman bodies are being created by filmmakers. New possibilities in the digital imaging of human presence – from the replacement of actors with computer-generated imagery to the quest for photorealism in digital animation – themselves evoke the Frankenstein tale and consequently make interesting contributions to the evolving Frankenstein myth.
This thesis investigates the retelling of Frankenstein in popular cinema of the digital age. Through close analysis of a series of chosen texts, I examine the figure of the Frankensteinian monster and his/her/its equivalents in today’s popular culture: posthuman figures who negotiate uneasily with the organic world, boundary creatures who both define and unsettle our understandings of human being. I consider the way the tale, its themes and characters have both endured and evolved over time. I also examine the way these new filmic “machines” and animated “monsters” embody crucial problems associated with the technologies that screen them and the media that contain them.
My concern in this project is twofold. Firstly, I seek to map the (changing) relationship between Frankenstein and film. Since the early 1900s, cinema has provided a fertile ground for the retelling of Shelley’s tale. At the same time, cinema itself has always been a sort of Frankensteinian experiment: a means of breathing life into stillness, of constructing and re-constructing human presence, of stitching together fragmented moments to create a semblance of wholeness. In the digital age, this experiment grows and changes: new modes of production are continually being trialled, allowing us to re-create and re-present human presence in new and often bizarre ways. The figure of the Frankensteinian monster confronts and responds to these concerns, embodying and performing the uncanny, spectacular, mechanical, or organic-mechanical nature of screen presence.
Secondly, this thesis reads the Frankensteinian monster as a mythic figure for the digital age. I move towards the assertion that Frankenstein is a tale about the artificial body and its negotiation with a lost or disrupted origin in the organic world, and that this particular problem reverberates strongly in an age of digital representation. The analyses that constitute this thesis contribute to the argument that each time the Frankenstein tale is retold, re-technologised, and re-imagined using new filmic techniques, the problem of the screen body and its troubled origin stories is revisited and complicated
A new multi-method decision framework for anchor selection and tenant mix allocation optimisation in shopping malls
No full textThe increasing urbanisation and fast-paced lifestyle have heightened the importance of shopping malls in retail industry, altering traditional shopping patterns by designing efficient space and optimise time of shoppers. Due to this newly-acquired importance, these malls have become critical players in the retail industry sector. Despite their significance, current research lacks comprehensive scientific methods in two critical aspects: the classification of anchors (or magnet shops) and regular tenants, and the detailed analysis of interrelations among anchors and tenants within the shopping malls. Both aspects are heavily related to the strategic allocation of shops position within malls. For addressing these gaps, this paper introduces a multi-method framework expert system to classify anchors and tenants and to optimise their positions in the shopping mall, considering their categories and existing product relationships. This framework comprises a new sorting method, a modified ranking method, a product correlation technique based on implementing ecological dynamics, an ecological interrelation index, and a metaheuristic allocation algorithm. The practical application of this framework is demonstrated through a real-world case study, highlighting its potential to significantly improve shopping mall management and retail efficiency. The effect of the proposed framework is subject to empirical tests and comparison between layout modifications.The first author acknowledges support from the Spanish Ministry of Education, Culture and Sports [grant number FPU18/01471]. The fourth author wish to recognise the support from the Serra Hunter programme. Finally, this work was supported by the Catalan agency AGAUR through its research group support program (2021SGR00341).Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version
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