In the 21st century, public museums who are collecting contemporary art has simultaneously begun to reframe the role of museums in society. Two museums – the Moderna Museet of Stockholm and M+ of Hong Kong that have completely different historic and geographic backgrounds, as well as operating models are now working closely with their acquisitions and collections to draw audience of old and new closer to them. These two museums that are located in the center of two well-defined cultures – geographically representing the west and the east, play vital roles in their respected social and cultural spheres. In view of how these two museums are responding to the present time by deploying art that are seemingly different in terms of theme and discipline, the immediate distinction that this study aims to frame is how the Moderna Museet, established in the 20th century and still prevailing in the present differ from M+ that comes from a younger generation of museums who proclaims itself as a museum of visual culture, and not art. Instead of analyzing their exhibitions, this study focuses on their policies of acquisitions, thus offering a perspective including many varying actors and networks. Hence Bruno Latour’s actor-network theories have been introduced to unfold the highly entangled networks of these two museums. Two important actants, the so-called acquisition policy and the institutional curators are taken into consideration in order to outline what constitute as acquisition policies of these two museums and investigate if the benchmarking of contemporary art, and in addition, if the notion of contemporaneity can be identified from written documents. Furthermore, this study is based on interviews with curators employed at the two museums to find out how the professionals have understood these policies and used them accordingly to justify their practices while fulfilling the museums’ missions. This study has found out there are many crucial relationships between these actants and that they are constantly interacting with each other. The strength and interaction of these relationships fostered the positioning for these two museums today and also determined how the knowledge of art can be shaped and dispensed to the public. Looking from the point of view of the history of museums, practices of donation and acquisition, late- capitalism, cultural differences between the west and east, this study provides a pragmatic explanation of how collections may transform the landscape of a museum, and in turn how a museum may perhaps alter the meaning of art.

Philosophiae Doctor - PhD / The rationale for the topic flows out of education policy and societal pressures worldwide which are calling for an ever greater responsiveness from higher education to the workplace in the twenty-first century. Responsiveness to Work (i.e. the world of work) requires collaborative and integrative work between communities of academic and non-academic practitioners. Differences between knowledge and practices at Work and within the academy are broadly acknowledged in the literature, yet the ensuing nature and complexity of interactions between these two communities in curriculum design 'on the ground' is poorly understood. A key point is to recognize that integration as such cannot be the goal: the differences remain, but have to be turned into productive collaboration and joint development, for example, of a curriculum. Productivity here is not used in the sense of the ratio between output achieved and inputs needed, but rather refers to the activity theorists' concept of zones of potential development between two different, interacting activity systems (their way of conceptualizing communities of practice). Productivity is then a measure of the extent to which new hybrid knowledge emerges in the interactive zone with positive outcomes for both systems. Ideally, the integrated curriculum elements look to both Work and academic knowledge. Such productivity involves the acknowledgement of pre-existing boundaries and differences between types of knowledge and the subsequent actions of actors in crossing these boundaries. After sketching the policy backdrop to the issues of responsiveness to Work "on the ground", the first part of the thesis discusses theories of curriculum development, and of boundaries, differences, boundary crossing and maintenance. Inspired by the work of Nooteboom, a model is outlined for optimal difference allowing for innovative and productive curriculum development. The processes and patterns of responsiveness of higher education to the needs of 2 re studied empirically at two interconnected levels: The meso-level of the design of curriculum units; and the micro-level of face-to-face interactions between representatives from Work and the academy as they negotiate how to implement responsiveness. The curriculum units examined are those in which universities have attempted to design units which include aspects of Work. The face-to-face interactions are those between lecturers and Work representatives as they attempt to negotiate what sort of knowledge should be taught in the academy to meet both Work needs and those of the academics. At the meso-level, different cases (in different countries) were studied which together spanned the spectrum of differences between academic knowledge and workplace knowledge. At the micro-level, the focus was on the actual boundary work, and how it might set productive developments in motion. The processes involved are those of the mutual presentation of knowledge difference between work and the academy followed by knowledge transformations. These transformations are in tum enabled by the representatives' actions and their mobilisation of structures to enable bridging between the different types of knowledge. Difference between work and academic knowledge matters. Firstly, difference needs to be recognised and identified, not as a stumbling block to further developments, but as a resource. Secondly, an optimal degree of initial difference, rather than no difference at all, is an enabling factor, in concert with actor strategies, in the development of hybrid work/academic curriculum objects. The insights in micro-interactions can be combined with the analysis of meso-level curriculum development to create a model for productive work towards integration of Work and higher education. This model is supported by the literature discussed in the first part of the thesis, and can actually be used more broadly, for example for productive development and implementation of policy (in this case, for responsiveness to Work).

This thesis deals with robot path planning by means of ant colony optimization algorithms. The theoretical part of this thesis introduces basics of path planning problematics. The theoretical part either deals with ant algorithms as optimization and path planning tools. The practical part deals with design and implementation of path planning by means of ant algorithms in Java language.

MEnvSC / Department of Zoology

Abstract The research utilizes 'actor-network' theory to analyze debates in the media on the socio-technical controversy on the topic of the amount of coal in the Nástup Tušimice mines. Theoretical part describes its own place in the sociological tradition and theoretical presuppositions of actor-network theory. My conclusion is that, the controversy is being developed alongside several lines, which remain relatively autonomous. Empirical part of this study analyzes dynamics of the conflict and the strategies employed by both sides in the argument over seemingly unequivocal fact. The conclusion focuses on questionable areas of ANT; especially on it's application in research of conflicts in public space which is different from its use in sociology of science where ANT originated. Problematic point seems to be utilization of management of transparency, which is employed by the alliance of companies to sustain their version of reality. Emphasis of ANT on observable aspects of controversies seems to be obstacle for fruitful use of ANT, because it probably misses the crucial areas where the controversies are being developed.

Airport security represents a crucial part of civil aviation worldwide. Due to its substantial impact upon millions of passengers daily, it is bound to provoke questions about proportionality and sufficiency. Drawing on the insights from Actor-network Theory (ANT) and a medium- term field research at Václav Havel Airport Prague, which entailed a mix of qualitative-oriented research methods from participant observation to interviews, this thesis examines the nature and production of airport security as a network of chains of translation. These chains turn or translate according to their own logics of veridiction of all incoming actants, both human and non-human, from an insecure status to a secure one. In their translation, they are guided by three respective logics of division, movement and visibility, which have already been identified in previous studies of airport security. Going beyond the existing state of the art, this thesis specifically inquires into the components of chains of translation, particularly the airport security technologies and their interactions with humans, and focuses on instances where either of these logics or the veridiction logics, intersect, thus disclosing their own nature and presence. Furthermore, this thesis identifies spatiality and identity as two complementary...

In multi colony ant algorithms several colonies of ants cooperate in finding good solutions for an optimization problem. At certain time steps the colonies exchange information about good solutions. If the amount of exchanged information is not too large multi colony ant algorithms can be easily parallelized in a natural way by placing the colonies on different processors. In this paper we study the behaviour of multi colony ant algorithms with different kinds of information exchange between the colonies. Moreover we compare the behaviour of different numbers of colonies with a multi start single colony ant algorithm. As test problems we use the Traveling Salesperson problem and the Quadratic Assignment problem.

An ant colony optimization (ACO) approach for the resource-constrained project scheduling problem (RCPSP) is presented. Several new features that are interesting for ACO in general are proposed and evaluated. In particular, the use of a combination of two pheromone evaluation methods by the ants to find new solutions, a change of the influence of the heuristic on the decisions of the ants during the run of the algorithm, and the option that an elitist ant forgets the best-found solution are studied. We tested the ACO algorithm on a set of large benchmark problems from the Project Scheduling Library. Compared to several other heuristics for the RCPSP, including genetic algorithms, simulated annealing, tabu search, and different sampling methods, our algorithm performed best on average. For nearly one-third of all benchmark problems, which were not known to be solved optimally before, the algorithm was able to find new best solutions.

Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) is a metaheuristic used to solve combinatorial optimization problems. As with other metaheuristics, like evolutionary methods, ACO algorithms often show good optimization behavior but are slow when compared to classical heuristics. Hence, there is a need to find fast implementations for ACO algorithms. In order to allow a fast parallel implementation, we propose several changes to a standard form of ACO algorithms. The main new features are the non-generational approach and the use of a threshold based decision function for the ants. We show that the new algorithm has a good optimization behavior and also allows a fast implementation on reconfigurable processor arrays. This is the first implementation of the ACO approach on a reconfigurable architecture. The running time of the algorithm is quasi-linear in the problem size n and the number of ants on a reconfigurable mesh with n2 processors, each provided with only a constant number of memory words.

A new approach for solving permutation scheduling problems with ant colony optimization (ACO) is proposed in this paper. The approach assumes that no precedence constraints between the jobs have to be fulfilled. It is tested with an ACO algorithm for the single-machine total weighted deviation problem. In the new approach the ants allocate the places in the schedule not sequentially, as in the standard approach, but in random order. This leads to a better utilization of the pheromone information. It is shown by experiments that adequate combinations between the standard approach which can profit from list scheduling heuristics and the new approach perform particularly well.