Submitted by Franciele Moreira (francielemoreyra@gmail.com) on 2017-09-05T16:00:05Z No. of bitstreams: 2 Dissertação - Roberto Rodrigues - 2017.pdf: 3782552 bytes, checksum: 6d0a5b8c84a470fbbff115d04112ba3e (MD5) license_rdf: 0 bytes, checksum: d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by Luciana Ferreira (lucgeral@gmail.com) on 2017-09-15T15:03:46Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 2 Dissertação - Roberto Rodrigues - 2017.pdf: 3782552 bytes, checksum: 6d0a5b8c84a470fbbff115d04112ba3e (MD5) license_rdf: 0 bytes, checksum: d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2017-09-15T15:03:46Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 2 Dissertação - Roberto Rodrigues - 2017.pdf: 3782552 bytes, checksum: 6d0a5b8c84a470fbbff115d04112ba3e (MD5) license_rdf: 0 bytes, checksum: d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e (MD5) Previous issue date: 2017-04-07 / The present study aims to map the lifestyles in the gay part of Goiânia. These lifestyles are created and devised from the politics of the queer crowds, outlined by the following issues: the being together, relationships between men and friendships as lifestyles that can give rise to a gay culture, ethics and aesthetics. In so far as they point to the contestation of logocentrism, they highlight the traits, flows, changes and desires that intersect and affirm themselves in the festive homosocialitiesand in the assemblages of masculinities that territorialize, deterritorialize and reterritorialize processes of subjectivation of the minorities, the abject beings. From the party planners' meetings we can reflect on the constitution of ways of life that pass between gender issues and the flows and overflows of the party itself. The festive territories are made up of multiple and Dionysian landscapes where joy is constituted as a superior way of life. However, the tragic aspect of the party makes the risks, instabilities and dangers also present in the composition of its landscapes. / A presente pesquisa busca cartografar os modos de vida no pedaço gay em Goiânia. Esses modos de vida são criados e inventados a partir das políticas das multidões queer, contornadas pelas seguintes questões: o estar-junto, as relações entre homens, as amizades como modos de vidas que podem dar lugar a uma cultura, uma ética e uma estética gay. Na medida em que apontam para a contestação do logocentrismo, colocam em evidência os traços, fluxos, devires, desejos que se cruzam e se afirmam nas homossocialidades festivas e nos agenciamentos das masculinidades que territorializam, desterritorializam e reterritorializam processos de subjetivação das minorias, dos seres abjetos. A partir dos agenciamentos dos festeiros podemos refletir sobre a constituição de modos de vida que transitam entre as questões de gênero e os fluxos e transbordamentos da própria festa. Os territórios festivos compõem-se de paisagens múltiplas e dionisíacas onde a alegria se constitui como um modo superior de vida. No entanto, o aspecto trágico da festa faz com que os riscos, as instabilidades e os perigos também estejam presentes na composição dessas suas paisagens.

Na Ilíada, a multidão exerce um papel fundamental para a contrução da trama. Ela ajuda a ambientar a epopéia em um cenário de guerra épica, além de ser necessária na própria definição daqueles que são as figuras centrais do poema: os heróis. Nesse sentido, procurou-se discutir justamente a função da multidão, massa, ou coletividade, em um poema em que o enfoque recai em outro elemento. Para tal, foi preciso estabelecer os aspectos próprios que caracterizam a multidão, além de apresentar de que forma ela garante que o herói seja mostrado de maneira épica. Em primeiro lugar foi proposta uma discussão acerca das fontes. Discutiu-se a questão da oralidade nos poemas homéricos e suas implicações para o estudo da História, com ênfase especial para a tradição. Questionou-se a validade do uso de tais poemas para o estudo da História. A sugestão proposta é considerar os textos como veículos de uma tradição que tem uma validade histórica por transmitir valores ideais. A partir de tal concepção refletiu-se, no presente trabalho, acerca das características próprias da coletividade, massa ou multidão, começando pela quantidade, o elemento mais básico e necessário para a própria existência de tais manifestações. A partir dela, outras características foram observadas. O anonimato reina entre seus integrantes. Para fazer parte de uma massa ou multidão, os indivíduos não podem ser nomeados no momento da reunião, pois do contrário não funcionam como coletividade, mas como indivíduos. Dessa forma, a multidão passa a ser lida como uma unidade, como um corpo único, que apresenta também unidade de ação, opinião e sentimento. A despeito do foco central, observou-se que o herói é definido por oposição à multidão. O herói é aquele que se destaca da coletividade, sendo nomeado e tendo sua ação notada justamente pelo fato de sua ação ser individual. Além disso, os feitos que garantem que um herói seja destacado devem ser realizados em público, carecendo de uma multidão observadora que funciona como platéia e juíza. Conclui-se portanto que a multidão ambienta, define e fiscaliza, sendo um elemento essencial para a compreensão da Ilíada. / In the Iliad, the crowd plays a fundamental role in the construction of the poem. It helps to set the story in an epic war stage, besides being necessary to define the poems key figures: the heroes. A discussion of the function of the crowd, mass, mob or collectivity was presented, regarding a poem in which the main focus lays in another element. It was necessary, at first, to establish the aspects that characterize the crowd, and to present the manner in which the crowd ensures that the hero is portrayed in an epic fashion. First, a discussion regarding the sources was proposed. The matter of orality in the Homeric poems and its implication to the study of History, with special emphasis to tradition was discussed. The validity of the use of such poems to the study of History was questioned. The proposed solution is to consider the texts as vehicles of a tradition that has historical validity for transmitting ideal values. From this notion the characteristics of the collectivity, mass or crowd was studied, starting from the idea of quantity as the most basic and necessary element for the very existence of such phenomena. The next important notion is the anonymity, which reigns among the men in the crowd. To be a part of a mob or a crowd, the participants cannot be named in the moments of reunion. Otherwise they do not work as a collectivity, but as individuals. The crowd is understood as a unity of body, action, opinion and humor. Finally, regardless of the main focus of the poem, the hero can be defined as opposed to the crowd. The hero is the character that is separated from the collectivity, being named and noticed for having individual action. Besides, the great deeds that ensure the heroes prestige must be performed in public, therefore needing an observing crowd which acts as audience and judge. The conclusion is that the crowd sets the stage, defines the hero and acts as fiscal, being an essential element to the understanding of the Iliad.

M.Sc. (Information Technology) / The purpose of the research is to investigate agent-based approaches to virtual crowd simulation. Crowds are ubiquitous and are becoming an increasingly common phenomena in modern society, particularly in urban settings. As such, crowd simulation systems are becoming increasingly popular in training simulations, pedestrian modelling, emergency simulations, and multimedia. One of the primary challenges in crowd simulation is the ability to model realistic, large-scale crowd behaviours in real time. This is a challenging problem, as the size, visual fidelity, and complex behaviour models of the crowd all have an impact on the available computational resources. In the last few years, the graphics processing unit (GPU) has presented itself as a viable computational resource for general purpose computation. Traditionally, GPUs were used solely for their ability to efficiently compute operations related to graphics applications. However, the modern GPU is a highly parallel programmable processor, with substantially higher peak arithmetic and memory bandwidth than its central processing unit (CPU) counterpart. The GPU’s architecture makes it a suitable processing resource for computations that are parallel or distributed in nature. One attribute of multi-agent systems (MASs) is that they are inherently decentralised. As such, a MAS that leverages advancements in GPU computing may provide a solution for crowd simulation. The research investigates techniques and methods for general purpose crowd simulation, including topics in agent behavioural modes, pathplanning, collision avoidance and agent steering. The research also investigates how GPU computing has been utilised to address these computationally intensive problem domains. Based on the outcomes of the research, an agent-based model, Massively Parallel Crowds (MPCrowds), is proposed to address virtual crowd simulation, using the GPU as an additional resource for agent computation.

It has been shown that nearly one quarter of a population is affected by a disability which influences their interaction with the built environments, other individuals, and evacuation policies inhibiting their exit ability during an emergency evacuation. It is predicted that the number of individuals with a disability is on the rise. In the 21st century alone, there have been hundreds of events attributed to stampede or crowd crush, natural disaster, political revolt, terrorism, and other related emergencies. With an increase in the world's population, understanding emergency evacuations and how to best apply them is of growing importance. While research has investigated how crowds interact and evacuate, very little has been investigated in the impacts of how the disabled change an evacuation. While there are some beginnings to affect modeling with heterogeneous behaviors of disabled, little has been known in the analysis of crowds involving individuals with disabilities. There is a need to understand and model such interaction and how it impacts crowd movement. This dissertation implements and develops a novel video tracking system to study heterogeneous crowds with individuals with disabilities towards conducting a large-scale crowd experiment. A large-scale crowd experiment is conducted and the results are analyzed through a developed analysis graphical user interface for use with crowd dynamics experts. Preliminary results of the large-scale crowd experiment demonstrate differences in the velocities and overtaking perception of various groups with disabilities composed of the visually impaired, individuals with motorized and non-motorized wheelchairs, individuals with roller walkers, and individuals with canes or other stamina impairments. This dissertation uses these results to present a hybrid Social Force model that can capture the overall overtake behavior of the empirical data from our crowd experiments. Finally, future research goals are discussed in the eventual development of a Mass Pedestrian Evacuation system for crowds with individuals with disabilities. Lessons from this dissertation are discussed towards goals of crowd control.

To simulate crowds of people is of great social interest and is also believed to be useful when analyzing situations involving denser crowds. Many simulators seen over the years have however been struggling with simulating larger number of people, often due to a computationally expensive collision avoidance step. Furthermore, many simulators seems to forget the fact that people tend to stick together in smaller social groups rather than walking alone. A simulator for high density crowds has nevertheless been implemented through modeling crowds as a unilateral incompressible fluid. Together with an integration of groups onto this approach, the obtained solution allows for real time simulation of up to 3000 virtual people. The impact of having groups in simulations has furthermore been set as the overall goal of the thesis and has been analyzed through observing the effects of groups in various scenarios. A smaller user study has also been conducted in order to gain perceptual insights of groups in various crowd densities. These have shown that groups have a smaller impact on the crowd flow, and do not put a larger strain on the performance of the simulation. Groups are further proved to be perceived differently in different densities, with a possible difficulty for scenarios in higher density. / Att simulera folkmassor är av stort socialt intresse och tros även vara till nytta när man analyserar situationer som berör mer kompaktare folkmassor. Många tidigare simulationer har dock kämpat med att simulera större folkmassor, oftast på grund av höga beräkningskostnader mot förhindrandet av att två eller fler virtuella människor kolliderar in i varandra. Dessutom verkar många simulationer glömma bort att människor oftast går i mindre sociala grupper snarare än att gå var och för sig hela tiden. En simulering har trots detta gjorts genom att modellera folkmassor som en unilateral inkompressibel vätska. Tillsammans med en integration av grupper på detta tillvägagångssätt har lösningen visat sig alltsomallt ge simulation i realtid för uppemot 3000 virtuella människor. Effekten av att ha grupper i simulationer har vidare analyserats i en rad olika scenarion. En mindre användarstudie har också gett insikter i hur grupper uppfattas i olika kompakta folkmassor. Resultat har visat att grupper har en mindre effekt på folkmassor i det stora hela, och lägger inte en alltför stor påfrestning på simulationers prestanda. Det har också bevisats att grupper uppfattas annorlunda i olika kompakta folkmassor, med en viss möjlighet till svårare uppfattning i högre, mer kompakta folkmassor.

Visual analysis of dense crowds is particularly challenging due to large number of individuals, occlusions, clutter, and fewer pixels per person which rarely occur in ordinary surveillance scenarios. This dissertation aims to address these challenges in images and videos of extremely dense crowds containing hundreds to thousands of humans. The goal is to tackle the fundamental problems of counting, detecting and tracking people in such images and videos using visual and contextual cues that are automatically derived from the crowded scenes. For counting in an image of extremely dense crowd, we propose to leverage multiple sources of information to compute an estimate of the number of individuals present in the image. Our approach relies on sources such as low confidence head detections, repetition of texture elements (using SIFT), and frequency-domain analysis to estimate counts, along with confidence associated with observing individuals, in an image region. Furthermore, we employ a global consistency constraint on counts using Markov Random Field which caters for disparity in counts in local neighborhoods and across scales. We tested this approach on crowd images with the head counts ranging from 94 to 4543 and obtained encouraging results. Through this approach, we are able to count people in images of high-density crowds unlike previous methods which are only applicable to videos of low to medium density crowded scenes. However, the counting procedure just outputs a single number for a large patch or an entire image. With just the counts, it becomes difficult to measure the counting error for a query image with unknown number of people. For this, we propose to localize humans by finding repetitive patterns in the crowd image. Starting with detections from an underlying head detector, we correlate them within the image after their selection through several criteria: in a pre-defined grid, locally, or at multiple scales by automatically finding the patches that are most representative of recurring patterns in the crowd image. Finally, the set of generated hypotheses is selected using binary integer quadratic programming with Special Ordered Set (SOS) Type 1 constraints. Human Detection is another important problem in the analysis of crowded scenes where the goal is to place a bounding box on visible parts of individuals. Primarily applicable to images depicting medium to high density crowds containing several hundred humans, it is a crucial pre-requisite for many other visual tasks, such as tracking, action recognition or detection of anomalous behaviors, exhibited by individuals in a dense crowd. For detecting humans, we explore context in dense crowds in the form of locally-consistent scale prior which captures the similarity in scale in local neighborhoods with smooth variation over the image. Using the scale and confidence of detections obtained from an underlying human detector, we infer scale and confidence priors using Markov Random Field. In an iterative mechanism, the confidences of detections are modified to reflect consistency with the inferred priors, and the priors are updated based on the new detections. The final set of detections obtained are then reasoned for occlusion using Binary Integer Programming where overlaps and relations between parts of individuals are encoded as linear constraints. Both human detection and occlusion reasoning in this approach are solved with local neighbor-dependent constraints, thereby respecting the inter-dependence between individuals characteristic to dense crowd analysis. In addition, we propose a mechanism to detect different combinations of body parts without requiring annotations for individual combinations. Once human detection and localization is performed, we then use it for tracking people in dense crowds. Similar to the use of context as scale prior for human detection, we exploit it in the form of motion concurrence for tracking individuals in dense crowds. The proposed method for tracking provides an alternative and complementary approach to methods that require modeling of crowd flow. Simultaneously, it is less likely to fail in the case of dynamic crowd flows and anomalies by minimally relying on previous frames. The approach begins with the automatic identification of prominent individuals from the crowd that are easy to track. Then, we use Neighborhood Motion Concurrence to model the behavior of individuals in a dense crowd, this predicts the position of an individual based on the motion of its neighbors. When the individual moves with the crowd flow, we use Neighborhood Motion Concurrence to predict motion while leveraging five-frame instantaneous flow in case of dynamically changing flow and anomalies. All these aspects are then embedded in a framework which imposes hierarchy on the order in which positions of individuals are updated. The results are reported on eight sequences of medium to high density crowds and our approach performs on par with existing approaches without learning or modeling patterns of crowd flow. We experimentally demonstrate the efficacy and reliability of our algorithms by quantifying the performance of counting, localization, as well as human detection and tracking on new and challenging datasets containing hundreds to thousands of humans in a given scene.

The need exists for finding a quantitative method for validating crowd simulations. One approach is to use optical flow of videos of real crowds to obtain velocities that can be used for comparison to simulations. Optical flow, in turn, needs to be calibrated to be useful. It is essential to show that optical flow velocities obtained from crowd videos can be mapped into the spatially averaged velocities of the observed trajectories of crowd members, and to quantify the extent of the correlation of the results. This research investigates methods to uncover the best conditions for a good correlation between optical flow and the average motion of individuals in crowd videos, with the aim that this will help in the quantitative validation of simulations. The first approach was to use a simple linear proportionality relation, with a single coefficient, alpha, between velocity vector of the optical flow and observed velocity of crowd members in a video or simulation. Since there are many variables that affect alpha, an attempt was made to find the best possible conditions for determining alpha, by varying experimental and optical flow settings. The measure of a good alpha was chosen to be that alpha does not vary excessively over a number of video frames. Best conditions of low coefficient of variation of alpha using the Lucas-Kanade optical flow algorithm were found to be when a larger aperture of 15x15 pixels was used, combined with a smaller threshold. Adequate results were found at cell size 40x40 pixels; the improvement in detecting details when smaller cells are used did not reduce the variability of alpha, and required much more computing power. Reduction iii in variability of alpha can be obtained by spreading the tracked location of a crowd member from a pixel into a rectangle. The Particle Image Velocimetry optical flow algorithm had better correspondence with the velocity vectors of manually tracked crowd members than results obtained using the Lukas-Kanade method. Here, also, it was found that 40x40 pixel cells were better than 15x15. A second attempt at quantifying the correlation between optical flow and actual crowd member velocities was studied using simulations. Two processes were researched, which utilized geometrical correction of the perspective distortion of the crowd videos. One process geometrically corrects the video, and then obtains optical flow data. The other obtains optical flow data from video, and then geometrically corrects the data. The results indicate that the first process worked better. Correlation was calculated between sets of data obtained from the average of twenty frames. This was found to be higher than calculating correlations between the velocities of cells in each pair of frames. An experiment was carried out to predict crowd tracks using optical flow and a calculated parameter, beta, seems to give promising results.

No description available.

Battle of the Corner: Urban Policing and Rioting in the United States, 1943-1971 provides a national history of police reform and police-citizen conflicts in marginalized urban neighborhoods in the three decades after World War II. Examining more than a dozen cities, the dissertation shows how big-city police brass and downtown-friendly municipal elites in the late 1940s and 1950s attempted to professionalize urban law enforcement and regulate rank-and-file discretion through Police-Community Relations programs and novel stop-and-frisk preventive patrol schemes. These efforts ultimately failed to produce diligent yet impartial street policing. Beginning in the late 1950s, and increasing in severity and frequency until the early 1960s, young black and Latino working-class urban residents surrounded, taunted, and attacked police officers making routine arrests. These crowd rescues garnered national attention and prepared the ground for the urban rebellions of 1964 to 1968, many of which began with a controversial police incident on a crowded street corner. While telling a national story, Battle of the Corner provides deeper local context for postwar changes to street policing through detailed case studies highlighting the various stakeholders in reform efforts. In the 1950s and 1960s, African-American activists, block clubs, residents, and politicians pressured police for effective but fair and accountable tactical policing to check rising criminal violence and street disorder in neighborhoods increasingly blighted by urban renewal. Rank-and-file police unions fought civilian review boards and used new collective bargaining rights to stage job actions to obtain higher wages. They also obtained “bill of rights” contract provisions to shield members from misconduct investigations. Police management took advantage of newly-available federal and local resources after the riots to reorganize their departments into top-down bureaucratic organizations capable of conducting stop-and-frisk on a more systematic scale. By the early 1970s, a rising generation of urban black politicians confronted skyrocketing rates of criminal violence, armed militants intent on waging war on the police, and a politically-empowered rank-and-file angry and combative over the more intense threats and pressures they faced on the job. Battle of the Corner breaks ground in telling a national story of policing that juxtaposes elite decision-making and street confrontations and that analyzes a wide range of actors who held a stake in securing order and justice in urban neighborhoods. In chronicling how urban police departments emerged from the profound institutional crisis of the 1960s with greater power, resources, and authority, Battle of the Corner provides a history and a frame for understanding policing controversies today. / History

This thesis explores the crowds that attended London's executions, pillories and public whippings during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It aims to reappraise a literature describing the carnivalesque and voyeuristic nature of popular behaviour, and to trace a continuum in the public's active engagement with the criminal justice system between 1783 and 1868. By employing a range of little used sources to examine the biographical, geographical and social texture of punishment audiences, it details the lives and motivations of the men, women and children who assembled to watch these often brutal events. In the process, this thesis significantly revises our received understanding of the troublesome punishment 'mob', the unruliness and low character of which has been frequently assumed on the basis of uncritical reading of contemporary sources inveighing against plebeian behaviour. It reveals a more stable picture of public participation, and argues that this experience was characterized by the remarkable social diversity and relative good order of the crowd. This study in consequence problematizes teleological narratives of social 'improvement' and a putative 'civilizing process', which have traditionally described the fall of public punishments as a product of changing urban sensitivities. In analysing the crowd's structure and responses to public punishments over time, the thesis demonstrates how popular expectations surrounding older forms of public justice remained essentially unchanged, and continued to speak forcefully to the metropolitan conscience. To explain the undoubted changes in punishment policy in the period, in the absence of a clear teleological narrative of attitudes towards public punishment, the thesis in turn argues that the decline of the pillory, whippings and public executions in London was driven by elite fears regarding mass behaviour, particularly in the wake of the Gordon Riots of 1780, and suggests that public punishments disappeared not because of their dwindling moral relevance or failing penal utility, but as a result of the middle class's increasingly nervous perceptions of urban mass phenomena. The thesis argues that the decline of public punishment did not result from 'squeamishness' about judicial murder and corporal punishment, but from anxiety about the authority and power of the crowd.