The aim of this thesis is to extend the social identity model of crowd behaviour (Reicher, 1984, 1987, 1996) by exploring the experience of collective participation, with an emphasis upon quality of within-crowd social relations (‘relatedness') and collective emotionality. A multi-method research strategy is employed to study these topics at a variety of crowd events. Studies 1 and 2 use ethnography and retrospective interviews at a student protest and public screenings of football matches to generate hypotheses for subsequent testing. Study 3 then tests these hypotheses by means of questionnaire data collected during Study 2. Using an experimental ‘visualisation' paradigm, Study 4 demonstrates the role of shared identity (and not simply self-categorization) in generating relatedness. Studies 5 and 6 present evidence that groups of high relatedness participants experience identity-relevant stimuli as more emotionally intense than low relatedness groups. Study 7 concludes the empirical work by using questionnaire data collected at political protests to test a model of collective experience based upon the findings of the previous studies. The thesis argues that a perception of shared identity with co-present others can positively transform social relations towards relatedness (connectedness, validation and recognition). Relatedness may then be experienced emotionally, and facilitate the realisation of group goals which may also have emotional consequences. Strength of social identity is also noted as an antecedent to group-based emotion. In this way the analysis offers three ways in which social identity may lead to emotionality of collective experience, contradicting ‘classic' crowd psychology in which crowd emotion was rooted in a loss of identity. Preliminary evidence is also presented suggesting that the experience of collective participation may have a role to play in determining future social identification and participation in co-action.

This thesis explores state death and the possibilities to escape death that comes with the digitalising of the state. The analysis, built on earlier theorising of how we could understand what the state is, explicate the connection between the narrative of the identity, or “collective self”, and the survival of the state through a repository of its key information, which in turn could be viewed as an asset in terms of recognition. Hence we could envision the possibility for the state to possess identity repositories where certain information becomes the bearer of identity, which ensures the survival of the narrative of the collective self, after invasion and territorial conquest. This is also put in relation to statehood and its intimate connection to the contemporary notion of spatial domain and how it might be affected by digitalisation.

Thesis advisor: Ali Banuazizi / This project involves the examination of Kurdish nationalism in regard to the formation, transmission, and materialization of political memory. Focusing on developments of the 20th and 21st century, this analysis contextualizes the mobilization of Kurdish political consciousness within the modern forces of globalization, digital technology, mass media, and international governance. Substantial attention is paid to the role of radio, TV, and the Internet in the processes of national imagining and political discourse. NGOs and superstate institutions like the UN are also examined, as they play a fundamental role in integrating human rights language and sub-national movements like the Kurds. Additionally, the ways in which these developments are manifested through public spaces of memory provide insight into the parameters and aspirations undergirding Kurdish national identity. This project seeks to claim that traditional definitions and typologies of nationalism are insufficient, and that the nation, seen as a community of memory, provides better access points to understand how nations are created in the modern age. / Thesis (BA) — Boston College, 2018. / Submitted to: Boston College. College of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Scholar of the College. / Discipline: Political Science.

Cells live in inherently noisy environments. The machinery that cells use to sense their environment is also noisy. Yet, cells are exquisite environmental sensors, often approaching the limits of what is physically possible. This thesis investigates how the precision of environmental sensing is improved when cells behave collectively. We derive physical limits to cells' ability to collectively sense and respond to chemical concentrations and gradients. For concentration sensing, we find that when cell populations become sufficiently large, long-range communication can provide higher sensory precision than short-range communication, and that the optimal cell-cell separation in such a system can be large, due to a tradeoff between maintaining communication strength and reducing signal cross-correlations. We also show that concentration profiles formed diffusively are more precise for large profile lengths while those formed via directed transport are more precise for short profile lengths. These effects are due to increased molecule refresh rate and mean concentration respectively. For gradient sensing, we derive the sensory precision of the well-known the local excitation-global inhibition (LEGI) model and the more recently proposed regional excitation-global inhibition (REGI) model for two and three dimensional cell cluster geometries. We find that REGI systems achieve higher levels of precision than LEGI systems and give rise to optimally sensing geometries that are consistent with the shapes of naturally occurring gradient-sensing cell populations. Lastly, we analyze the precision with which migrating cell clusters can track a chemical gradient via an individual-based and emergent method. We show that one and two dimensional clusters utilizing the emergent chemotactic method have improved scaling with population size due to differences in the scaling properties of the variance in the total polarization. By completing these studies we aim to understand the limits and precise roles of collective behavior in environmental sensing.

<div> <div> <div> <p>A strongly interacting Quark Gluon Plasma (QGP) is created in relativistic heavy ion collisions at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC). Owning to their large mass, charm quarks are produced by initial parton-parton hard scatterings and experience the entire evolution of the QGP medium created in heavy ion collisions. They can therefore be a valuable tool to study the early time dynamics and the properties of the QGP. Many experimental observables are exploited to extract the information of QGP. This thesis analyzes the directed flow (v1) and the elliptic flow (v2) of D0 mesons (carrying a charm quark) using data collected by the Heavy Flavor Tracker in the STAR experiment in 2014 and 2016 RHIC runs. The v1 and v2 are measured by the first and second order Fourier coefficients of the D0 azimuthal distribution relative to the reaction plane. The measurements help constrain the parameters in theoretical models to describe heavy quark dynamics in the QGP. The measurements are compared to the v1(2) of light flavors to shed additional insights on the QGP. </p> </div> </div> </div>

Written with a contemporary European context of economic, social and reproductive crisis in mind, this thesis presents research about, from and for social movements that struggle against precarity, austerity and capitalist accumulation. Based on accounts and analyses of feminist-autonomist militant practice and networks, this research project revolves around two terms: care and creativity. It maps out a historical-genealogical shift from a paradigm of creativity (reflected in neoliberal governance as well as in social movements of the decades before and after the millenium) to one oriented around care (reflected in the neo-communitarian policy as well as practices of commoning that arise with social and economic crisis in Europe). Structured into three broad sections on work, organisation and governance, the questions at stake here revolve around the possibilities and imaginaries of politics that affirm care and creativity in relation to one another. On the level of work, this means struggles within and against precarity, reproductive and illegalized work; on the level of organisation, it means relating the figure of the network to that of the care chain and the family, confronting new transnational forms of alliance and care; and on the level of governance, it is the relation between neoliberalism and its new communitarian forms that is in question. What the collectives, campaigns and networks constituting the ‘field’ of this research have in common is that they re-think the contemporary relations between autonomy and heteronomy, the global and the situated, as well as macro- and micropolitics. Dwelling on collective experiences and knowledges, this investigation takes care to articulate the dimensions of subjectivity, relation and association with those of economy and governance. Concerned and engaged with contexts of struggle and commoning in the face of crisis politics, precarity and dispersed sociality, a methodology of militant participatory-action research serves to map out contexts of practice in Spain, the UK and Argentina as of 2010-2013.

Inspired by nature, swarm robotics aims to increase system robustness while utilizing simple agents. In this work, we present a novel approach to achieve decentralized coordination of forces during collective manipulation tasks resulting in a highly scalable, versatile, and robust solution. In this approach, each robot involved in the collective object manipulation task relies on the behavior of a cooperative ``virtual teammate' in a fully decentralized architecture, regardless of the size and configuration of the real team. By regulating their actions with their corresponding virtual counterparts, robots achieve continuous pose control of the manipulated object, while eliminating the need for inter-agent communication or a leader-follower architecture. To experimentally study the scalability, versatility, and robustness of the proposed collective object manipulation algorithm, a new swarm agent, Δρ is introduced which is able to apply linear forces in any planar direction. Efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed decentralized algorithm are investigated by quantitative performance metrics of settling time, steady-state error, path efficiency, and object velocity profiles in comparison with a force-optimal centralized version that requires complete information. Employing impedance control during manipulation of an object provides a mean to control its dynamic interactions with the environment. The proposed decentralized algorithm is extended to achieve a desired multi-dimensional impedance behavior of the object during a collective manipulation without inter-agent communication. The proposed algorithm extension is built upon the concept of ``virtual coordination' which demands every agent to locally coordinate with one virtual teammate. Since the real population of the team is unknown to the agents, the resultant force applied to the manipulated object would be directly scaled with the team population. Although this scaling effect proves useful during position control of the object, it leads to a deviation from the desired dynamic response when employed in an impedance control scheme. To minimize such deviations, a gradient descent algorithm is implemented to determine a scaling parameter defined on the control action. The simulation results of a multi-robot system with different populations and formations verify the effectiveness of the proposed method in both generating the desired impedance response and estimating the population of the group. Eventually, as two case studies, the introduced algorithm is used in robotic collective manipulation and human- assistance scenarios. Simulation and experimental results indicate that the proposed decentralized communication- free algorithm successfully performs collective manipulation in all tested scenarios, and matches the performance of the centralized controller for increasing number of agents, demonstrating its utility in communication- limited systems, remote environments, and access-limited objects.

As the twentieth century unfolded, American writers, critics, and boosters presented a narrative of the arid Southwest as an exotic place blessed with a romantic history that could inspire, captivate and renew the many new white citizens flocking to rapidly growing cities. The history of Spanish colonialism in the area became a precious and exclusive cultural and economic resource. This dissertation tells the story of the commemoration of the Spanish past from 1848 to 1940 in three Spanish towns that grew into prominent American cities: Tucson, Arizona; Albuquerque, New Mexico; and San Antonio, Texas. In chapters centered on space, historic preservation, Mexican folk ritual, and pageants, this work examines the stories told about the Spanish past in these cities and reveals how people of differing classes and ethnicities gave meaning to the places they lived and to the process of American annexation of the region. That meaning shaped individual and social identities as well as the flow of power between them.

In capital-intensive organizations formed to plan new infrastructure development projects, the promoter of the project (as a single organization or as part of a coalition) rarely controls all of the critical resources required to achieve the system-level goal. Instead, the direct control of interdependent resources is diffused across multiple legally independent stakeholders (Lundrigan, Gil and Puranam, 2015). As such, the core structure in these so-called 'megaproject' meta-organizations is a classic empirical instantiation of a pluralistic setting (Denis, Langley and Rouleau, 2007). In pluralistic settings, the authority to make strategic decisions is diffused across actors with heterogeneous objectives, interests, values and expertise. Hence, to achieve the goal, the promoter needs to cooperate with multiple stakeholders. Since some critical resources are not transactional or measurable, the cooperation problem is not a 'buy' problem. Instead, resolving the cooperation problem necessitates a search for mutually consensual solutions that reconcile conflicting interests. Moreover, this search unfolds without recourse to top-down authority characteristic of unitary organizations. Therefore, the promoter has to play a coordinating role that traverses organizational boundaries to coalesce competing preferences into a one-off plan. Against this backdrop, this doctoral research investigates how designed rules and structures influence consensus-building during the collective development process. We conduct the research by drawing on two cognitive lenses consolidated in two vast bodies of literature that have remained largely disparate: organization design (Puranam, Alexy and Reitzig, 2014; Burton & Obel, 1984; Lawrence & Lorsch, 1967; March & Simon, 1958; Mintzberg, 1979) and collective action (Ostrom 1990, 2005). Combining these two research streams allows us to investigate how to resolve the coordination and cooperation problems inherent in pluralistic settings. Our research method is a single case study with embedded units of analysis. This method allows us to probe deeply into operational details while maintaining the holistic features of the focal phenomena (Yin, 2009; Yin, 2013; Siggelkow, 2007; Eisenhardt & Graebner, 2007). Our focal case is the planning stage of High Speed 2 (HS2), a new multi-billion-pound cross-country railway project in the UK. The scheme is promoted by the UK Government. However, the planning effort has required that the Government share local decision rights for planning choices related to the stations along the route with multiple local authorities. These local authorities are independent, resource-rich stakeholders who are impacted by local choices, and they have deep knowledge of local needs and constraints. Thus, in the HS2 case, organizing for collective action is a prerequisite for achieving the system-goal. Our research presents two major theoretical contributions. First, we contribute to organizational design literature by advancing our knowledge of how organizations can be designed to achieve system-level goals when decision-making authority is diffused across multiple organizational boundaries. Specifically, we advance our conceptual understanding of polycentric systems--a form of organizing that distributes decision-making authority across multiple local groups of independent stakeholders. As such, we illuminate the designed processes and structures that enable the core actors in a polycentric system to integrate effort and reconcile their differences over time. Organization design choices are about designing governance structures that enable and constrain collective action. Hence, we also contribute to the project management literature with insights on the governance of the planning stage of megaprojects. Specifically, we offer a deeper understanding of how to organize an inter-organizational setting to make planning decisions and manage interdependencies with the environment. Furthermore, we reveal that ambiguous evaluations of megaproject performance are rooted in collective efforts to resolve coordination and cooperation problems. Our research is grounded in the planning effort for the HS2 project and thus embedded in the UK context. We, therefore, encourage future studies to investigate the generalizability of our claims on organizing for collective action in other institutional contexts.

群體行為分析是一個跨學科的研究課題.理解群體協作行為的形成機制，是社會科學和自然科學的根本問題之一.群體行為分析的研究可以為很多關鍵的工程應用提供支持和解決方案，比如智能視頻監控系統，人群異常檢測和公共設施優化.在這篇論文中，說們通過研究和分析真實場景中採集的視頻數據，對群體行為提出了有效的計算框架和算法，來分析這視頻中出現的動態群體模式和行為. / 在第一個章節中，我們提出了一個基於馬爾科夫隨機場的圖模型框架，來分析場景中與群體行為相閥的語羲區域. 這個模型利用馬爾科夫隨機場來聯繫行人軌跡的時空關係，可以從高度分散的行人軌跡中進行數據挖掘，以形成完整的群體行為語義區域.其得到的這些語義區域完整地反映出了不同群體行為的進行模式，具有良好的準確性. 這項研究工作已經在IEEE 計算機視覺和模式識別會議(CVPR)2011 發表. / 為了探索語義區域形成的行為學機制，在第二個章節中，我們提出了一個新穎的動態行人代理人混合模型，來分析擁擠場景中出現的人群動態協作行為.每一種行人協作行為模式被建模成一個線性動態系統，行人在場景中的起始和結束位置放建模成這個動態系統的起始和結束狀態. 這個模型可以從高端分散的行人軌跡中分析出共有的協作行為模式。通過模擬行人的行動決策過程，該模型不僅可以分類不同的群體行為，還可以模擬和預測行人的未來可能路徑和目的地.這項研究工作已經在IEEE 計算機視覺和模式織別會議(CVPR) 2012 作為口頭報告發表. / 在第三個章節中，我們首先在協作動態運動中發現了一個先驗定律: 協作領域關係不變性.根據這個先驗定律，我們提出了一個簡單有效的動態聚類技術，稱為協作濾波器.這個動態聚類技術可以運用在多種動態系統中，並且在高密度噪聲下具有很強的魯棒性.在不同視頻中的實驗證明了協作領域關係不變性的存在以及協作濾波器的有效性.這項研究工作已經投稿歐洲計算機視覺會議(ECCV) 2012. / Crowd behavior analysis is an interdisciplinary topic. Understanding the collective crowd behaviors is one of the fundamental problems both in social science and natural science. Research of crowd behavior analysis can lead to a lot of critical applications, such as intelligent video surveillance, crowd abnormal detection, and public facility optimization. In this thesis, we study the crowd behaviors in the real scene videos, propose computational frameworks and techniques to analyze these dynamic patterns of the crowd, and apply them for a lot of visual surveillance applications. / Firstly we proposed Random Field Topic model for learning semantic regions of crowded scenes from highly fragmented trajectories. This model uses the Markov Random Field prior to capture the spatial and temporal dependency between tracklets and uses the source-sink prior to guide the learning of semantic regions. The learned semantic regions well capture the global structures of the scenes in long range with clear semantic interpretation. They are also able to separate different paths at fine scales with good accuracy. This work has been published in IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and PatternRecognition (CVPR) 2011 [70]. / To further explore the behavioral origin of semantic regions in crowded scenes, we proposed Mixture model of Dynamic Pedestrian-Agents to learn the collective dynamics from video sequences in crowded scenes. The collective dynamics of pedestrians are modeled as linear dynamic systems to capture long range moving patterns. Through modeling the beliefs of pedestrians and the missing states of observations, it can be well learned from highly fragmented trajectories caused by frequent tracking failures. By modeling the process of pedestrians making decisions on actions, it can not only classify collective behaviors, but also simulate and predict collective crowd behaviors. This work has been published in IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) 2012 as Oral [71]. The journal version of this work has been submitted to IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (PAMI). / Moreover, based on a prior defined as Coherent Neighbor Invariance for coherent motions, we proposed a simple and effective dynamic clustering technique called Coherent Filtering for coherent motion detection. This generic technique could be used in various dynamic systems and work robustly under high-density noises. Experiments on different videos shows the existence of Coherent Neighbor Invariance and the effectiveness of our coherent motion detection technique. This work has been published in European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV) 2012. / Detailed summary in vernacular field only. / Detailed summary in vernacular field only. / Detailed summary in vernacular field only. / Detailed summary in vernacular field only. / Zhou, Bolei. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2012. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 67-73). / Abstracts also in Chinese. / Chapter 1 --- Introduction --- p.1 / Chapter 1.1 --- Background of Crowd Behavior Analysis --- p.1 / Chapter 1.2 --- Previous Approaches and Related Works --- p.2 / Chapter 1.2.1 --- Modeling Collective Motion --- p.2 / Chapter 1.2.2 --- Semantic Region Analysis --- p.3 / Chapter 1.2.3 --- Coherent Motion Detection --- p.5 / Chapter 1.3 --- Our Works for Crowd Behavior Analysis --- p.6 / Chapter 2 --- Semantic Region Analysis in Crowded Scenes --- p.9 / Chapter 2.1 --- Introduction of Semantic Regions --- p.9 / Chapter 2.1.1 --- Our approach --- p.11 / Chapter 2.2 --- Random Field Topic Model --- p.12 / Chapter 2.2.1 --- Pairwise MRF --- p.14 / Chapter 2.2.2 --- Forest of randomly spanning trees --- p.15 / Chapter 2.2.3 --- Inference --- p.16 / Chapter 2.2.4 --- Online tracklet prediction --- p.18 / Chapter 2.3 --- Experimental Results --- p.18 / Chapter 2.3.1 --- Learning semantic regions --- p.21 / Chapter 2.3.2 --- Tracklet clustering based on semantic regions --- p.22 / Chapter 2.4 --- Discussion and Summary --- p.24 / Chapter 3 --- Learning Collective Crowd Behaviors in Video --- p.26 / Chapter 3.1 --- Understand Collective Crowd Behaviors --- p.26 / Chapter 3.2 --- Mixture Model of Dynamic Pedestrian-Agents --- p.30 / Chapter 3.2.1 --- Modeling Pedestrian Dynamics --- p.30 / Chapter 3.2.2 --- Modeling Pedestrian Beliefs --- p.31 / Chapter 3.2.3 --- Mixture Model --- p.32 / Chapter 3.2.4 --- Model Learning and Inference --- p.32 / Chapter 3.2.5 --- Algorithms for Model Fitting and Sampling --- p.35 / Chapter 3.3 --- Modeling Pedestrian Timing of Emerging --- p.36 / Chapter 3.4 --- Experiments and Applications --- p.37 / Chapter 3.4.1 --- Model Learning --- p.37 / Chapter 3.4.2 --- Collective Crowd Behavior Simulation --- p.39 / Chapter 3.4.3 --- Collective Behavior Classification --- p.42 / Chapter 3.4.4 --- Behavior Prediction --- p.43 / Chapter 3.5 --- Discussion and Summary --- p.43 / Chapter 4 --- Detecting Coherent Motions from Clutters --- p.45 / Chapter 4.1 --- Coherent Motions in Nature --- p.45 / Chapter 4.2 --- A Prior of Coherent Motion --- p.46 / Chapter 4.2.1 --- Random Dot Kinematogram --- p.47 / Chapter 4.2.2 --- Invariance of Spatiotemporal Relationships --- p.49 / Chapter 4.2.3 --- Invariance of Velocity Correlations --- p.51 / Chapter 4.3 --- A Technique for Coherent Motion Detection --- p.52 / Chapter 4.3.1 --- Algorithm for detecting coherent motions --- p.53 / Chapter 4.3.2 --- Algorithm for associating continuous coherent motion --- p.53 / Chapter 4.4 --- Experimental Results --- p.54 / Chapter 4.4.1 --- Coherent Motion in Synthetic Data --- p.55 / Chapter 4.4.2 --- 3D Motion Segmentation --- p.57 / Chapter 4.4.3 --- Coherent Motions in Crowded Scenes --- p.60 / Chapter 4.4.4 --- Further Analysis of the Algorithm --- p.61 / Chapter 4.5 --- Discussion and Summary --- p.62 / Chapter 5 --- Conclusions --- p.65 / Chapter 5.1 --- Future Works --- p.66