O presente trabalho trata do processo contemporâneo de reprodução do espaço urbano que inclui a construção de linhas de transporte de alta e média capacidade e envolve intervenções urbanas cujas estratégias articulam a atuação do Estado, de diferentes ramos do capital e de instituições internacionais. Tal processo foi apreendido a partir da análise, por um lado, da construção do primeiro trecho da Linha 15-Prata da Cia do Metrô de São Paulo que transformou a dinâmica socioespacial do bairro de Vila Prudente e, por outro, da investigação dos planos de transportes urbanos do Governo do Estado de São Paulo e de sua Secretaria de Transportes Metropolitanos que, ao longo das últimas duas décadas, sujeitaram-se aos projetos de instituições internacionais, como o Banco Mundial. Tais instituições impõe formas específicas de planejamento ou de uma governança metropolitana para promover intervenções e requalificações urbanas que acompanham o ritmo das reestruturações técnico-produtivas do capital e, no caso de São Paulo, tentam manter a hegemonia da maior metrópole brasileira na divisão territorial do trabalho (como centro de gestão e comando). Resulta dessa estratégia e prática a reinserção de antigos terrenos industriais, vazios urbanos e centralidades espaciais constituídas historicamente no tecido metropolitano e tidos, hoje, como obsoletos, na dinâmica dos mercados imobiliário e financeiro através da construção de infraestrutura. Isso revela que a produção contemporânea do espaço, subordinado à um urbanismo metropolitano e de mercado, objetiva-se, também, na construção de infraestrutura de transportes, reafirmando as relações sociais de produção e suas contradições que vão da superexploração do trabalho e da segregação socioespacial à obsolescência precoce do espaço para atender aos processos de valorização do capital. / The present work is related to the contemporary process of reproduction of the urban space, which includes the construction of high and medium capacity transport lines and involves urban interventions, whose strategies articulate the actions of the State, from different branches of the financing and international institutions. Such process was apprehended from the analyses, in one hand. by the construction of the first patch of the Line 15-Silver by the São Paulo Metropolitan Company, which has transformed the social-spacial dynamics of Vila Prudente District. In the other hand, from the investigation of urban transportation plans by the São Paulo state government and its Metropolitan Transport Secretary, that along the last two decades, subjected themselves to the project of International institutions, such as The World Bank, specific ways of planning or a Metropolitan Governancy to promote urban interventions and requalifications, follow the speed of technical-productives restructuring of capital investments in a peripheral country and keep the hegemony of the greatest Brazilian metropolis in the territorial sharing of work as a center of command and management. As result of this strategy and practice we see the reintegration of ancient industrial lots, urban empties and central spaces formed historically in the metropolitan tissues and considered nowadays as obsoletes in the analyses of Finanacial and Real Estate markets, through the construction of infrastructure. This shows up that the space contemporary production, dependent of a metropolitan and Market urbanism, has also as an objective, the building of a transportation infrastructure, assuring the social relationships of production and its contradictions that starts in the superexploitation of work force and socialspacial segregation to the precocious obsolescence of the urban space to favor the capital improvement process.

[pt] As obras de Piet Mondrian e Richard Serra possuem profunda relação com a metrópole. Seus trabalhos abrangeram distintas temporalidades urbanas no decorrer do século XX, e foram permeados direta e indiretamente pela música e pela dança, artes temporais igualmente circunscritas ao fenômeno urbano. Mondrian identifica no ambiente moderno, dinâmico e veloz, da Paris da primeira metade do século XX, as premissas de sua teoria oplástica do equilíbrio universal. Procurava realizar sua teoria em outras artes além da pintura, de modo que ao integrar-se à vida, a arte desapareceria. Sua chegada a América coincide com a transferência do centro artístico mundial de Paris para Nova York. No rico embate entre Europa e América, percebemos as diferenças entre a monumental escala do Novo Continente e a permanente atividade de seu povo, em contraposição às dimensões tímidas e o temperamento contemplativo do homem do Velho Continente. Hoje, a mecanização das metrópoles já não é mais polêmica ou fascinante, mas responsável pela monótona e repetitiva vida urbana da qual partiu a obra dos Pós-Minimalistas, entre os quais, Richard Serra. O caráter utópico da intura de Mondrian, cuja virtualidade se queria transformadora da realidade, visando a sociedade madura exemplificada pela América, está ausente na arte do pós- guerra. Os planos inseridos por Serra no tecido urbano não querem su-cumbir ao colapso do grid cubista, buscam o embate literal entre o habitante da metrópole e as coisas que o cercam, num mundo já muito pouco palpável. / [en] The works of Piet Mondrian and Richard Serra are profoundly related to the metropolis. Their works embrace different urban temporalities elapsed in the twentieth century. They were directly and indirectly influenced by music and dance, temporal arts equally confined to the urban phenomenon. Mondrian identifies the universal balance premises of his neoplastic theory in the modern, dynamic and fast Parisian environment of the first half of the twentieth century. He tries to accomplish his theory in other arts besides painting, so that by integrating art in life, the former would disappear. His arrival in America coincides with the artistic world center move from Paris to New York. In the cultural clash between Europe and America, one realizes the differences between the New World`s monumental scale and its dynamic people, against the shy dimensions and contemplative nature of the men in the Old Continent. The metropolis` mechanization is no longer polemic or fascinating, but responsible for the monotonous and repetitive urban life, from which the Post-Minimalists emerged, among them Serra. The utopian character of Mondrian`s painting, whose virtuality intended to transform reality, like America`s ripe society example, is absent in post-war art. The planes inserted by Serra in the urban fabric don`t intend to succumb to the cubist grid`s collapse. They seek the literal clash between the metropolis citizen and what surrounds him, in a very little tangible world.

Cognitive radio (CR) is often described as a context-intelligent radio, capable of changing the transmit parameters dynamically based on the interaction with the environment it operates. The work in this thesis explores the problem of using received signal strength (RSS) measurements taken by a network of CR nodes to generate an interference map of a given geographical area and estimate the locations of multiple primary transmitters that operate simultaneously in the area. A probabilistic model of the problem is developed, and algorithms to address location estimation challenges are proposed. Three approaches are proposed to solve the localization problem. The first approach is based on estimating the locations from the generated interference map when no information about the propagation model or any of its parameters is present. The second approach is based on approximating the maximum likelihood (ML) estimate of the transmitter locations with the grid search method when the model is known and its parameters are available. The third approach also requires the knowledge of model parameters but it is actually based on generating samples from the joint posterior of the unknown location parameter with Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods, as an alternative for the highly computationally complex grid search approach. For RF cartography generation problem, we study global and local interpolation techniques, specifically the Delaunay triangulation based techniques as the use of existing triangulation provides a computationally attractive solution. We present a comparative performance evaluation of these interpolation techniques in terms of RF field strength estimation and emitter localization. Even though the estimates obtained from the generated interference maps are less accurate compared to the ML estimator, the rough estimates are utilized to initialize a more accurate algorithm such as the MCMC technique to reduce the complexity of the algorithm. The complexity issues of ML estimators based on full grid search are also addressed by various types of iterative grid search methods. One challenge to apply the ML estimation algorithm to multiple emitter localization problem is that, it requires a pdf approximation to summands of log-normal random variables for likelihood calculations at each grid location. This inspires our investigations on sum of log-normal approximations studied in literature for selecting the appropriate approximation to our model assumptions. As a final extension of this work, we propose our own approximation based on distribution fitting to a set of simulated data and compare our approach with Fenton-Wilkinson's well-known approximation which is a simple and computational efficient approach that fits a log-normal distribution to sum of log-normals by matching the first and second central moments of random variables. We demonstrate that the location estimation accuracy of the grid search technique obtained with our proposed approximation is higher than the one obtained with Fenton-Wilkinson's in many different case scenarios.

Dès la conquête de la Cochinchine en 1862, l’Administration coloniale et des particuliers français exploitèrent l’agriculture locale et y développèrent l’économie. Ils tentèrent de faire l’essai et d’introduire diverses cultures, en particulier des arbres à caoutchouc. L’année 1897 marqua le début de l’hévéaculture de Cochinchine, lorsqu’on planta avec succès près de deux mille hévéas brasiliensis. La superficie de l’hévéaculture en Cochinchine se développait prodigieusement, allant de cent hectares à la fin du XIXème siècle à près de cent mille hectares au début des années trente, grâce d’une part à des capitaux provenant de la Métropole et, d’autre part à des mesures d’encouragement du Gouvernement colonial. Les plantations d’hévéa attirèrent les travailleurs locaux, surtout en provenance du Tonkin et de l’Annam, à raison d’une dizaine de mille, parfois une vingtaine de mille par an.Parallèlement à l’extension des superficies plantées, la production du caoutchouc de la colonie s’accrut rapidement, allant d’un peu plus d’une tonne en 1908 à plus de soixante mille tonnes en 1939. Les plantations d’hévéa devinrent l’une des cultures les plus importantes de Cochinchine à l’époque coloniale française. Non seulement elles apportèrent la fortune aux planteurs de la colonie, mais elles assurèrent une partie, et depuis 1938, la totalité des besoins de caoutchouc de l’industrie métropolitaine. Les plantations d’hévéa de Cochinchine représentaient un symbole de la colonisation agricole française, mais aussi hélas l’une des pages noires de l’histoire du colonialisme français au Vietnam par l’exploitation brutale des planteurs envers les travailleurs vietnamiens. / As early as the conquest of Cochinchina in 1862, the colonial administration and French individuals exploited the local agriculture and developed the economy there. They tried to experiment and introduce various crops, especially rubber trees. The year of 1897 marked the beginning of the rubber plantation of Cochinchina, when two thousand rubber trees brasiliensis were successfully planted. The area of rubber tree plantation in Cochinchina grew tremendously, ranging from one hundred hectares at the end of the 19th century to nearly one hundred thousand hectares in the early 1930s, because of, on the one hand, the capital invested from the metropolis, and, on the other hand, the measures of encouragement taken by the colonial Government. The rubber plantations attracted local workers, mainly from Tonkin and Annam, at a rate of about 10.000, sometimes 20.000 persons a year. In parallel with the extension of the area of rubber plantation, the colonial rubber production rapidly increased from just over one tonne in 1908 to more than 60.000 tons in 1939.The rubber tree plantation became one of the most important crops of Cochinchina during the French colonial era. Not only they brought fortune to the planters of the colony, but they secured a part, and since 1938, the whole of the rubber demands of the metropolitan industries. The Cochinchina rubber plantations represented a symbol of French agricultural colonization and, unfortunately, one of the black pages of the history of French colonialism in Vietnam by the brutal exploitation of Vietnamese workers by rubber planters.

In this thesis random walks similar to the Metropolis algorithm are investigated. Special emphasis is laid on different types of acceptance probabilities, namely Metropolis, Tsallis and Threshold Accepting. Equilibrium and relaxation properties as well as performance aspects in stochastic optimization are investigated. Analytical investigation of a simple system mimicking an harmonic oscillator yields that a variety of acceptance probabilities, including the abovementioned, result in an equilibrium distribution that is widely dominated by an exponential function. In the last chapter an optimal optimization schedule for the Tsallis acceptance probability for the idealized barrier is investigated. / In dieser Dissertation werden Random Walks ähnlich dem Metropolis Algorithmus untersucht. Es werden verschiedene Akzeptanzwahrscheinlichkeiten untersucht, dabei werden Metropolis, Tsallis und Threshold Accepting besonders betrachtet. Gleichgewichts- und Relaxationseigenschaften sowie Performanceaspekte im Bereich der stochastischen Optimierung werden untersucht. Die Analytische Betrachtung eines simplen, dem harmonischen Oszillator ähnlichen Systems zeigt, dass eine Reihe von Akzeptanzwahrscheinlichkeiten, eingeschlossen die oben Erwähnten, eine Gleichgewichtsverteilung ausbilden, die von einer Exponentialfunktion dominiert wird. Im letzten Kapitel wird der optimale Schedule für die Tsallis Akzeptanzwahrscheinlichkeit für eine idealisierte Barriere untersucht.

<p>The recent groundbreaking demonstrations of quantum supremacy in noisy intermediate scale quantum (NISQ) computing era has triggered an intense activity in establishing finer boundaries between classical and quantum computing. In this dissertation, we use established techniques based on quantum Monte Carlo (QMC) to map quantum problems into probabilistic networks where the fundamental unit of computation, p-bit, is inherently probabilistic and can be tuned to fluctuate between ‘0’ and ‘1’ with desired probability. We can view this mapped network as a Boltzmann machine whose states each represent a Feynman path leading from an initial configuration of q-bits to a final configuration. Each such path, in general, has a complex amplitude, ψ which can be associated with a complex energy. The real part of this energy can be used to generate samples of Feynman paths in the usual way, while the imaginary part is accounted for by treating the samples as complex entities, unlike ordinary Boltzmann machines where samples are positive. This mapping of a quantum circuit onto a Boltzmann machine with complex energies should be particularly useful in view of the advent of special-purpose hardware accelerators known as Ising Machines which can obtain a very large number of samples per second through massively parallel operation. We also demonstrate this acceleration using a recently used quantum problem and speeding its QMC simulation by a factor of ∼ 1000× compared to a highly optimized CPU program. Although this speed-up has been demonstrated using a graph colored architecture in FPGA, we project another ∼ 100× improvement with an architecture that utilizes clockless analog circuits. We believe that this will contribute significantly to the growing efforts to push the boundaries of the simulability of quantum circuits with classical/probabilistic resources and comparing them with NISQ-era quantum computers. </p>

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Ce mémoire a pour objet d'étude la ville et l'architecture dans les films d'anticipation. Le cinéma y est pris dans sa dimension critique, c'est-à-dire dans sa capacité de formuler des discours sur la ville et l'architecture. Ces discours se comprennent par la mise en relief des conditions d'émergence des films et par extension, celle de leurs décors. L'idée que l'on se fait de la ville du futur dépend donc de facteurs contemporains à chaque film : le contexte socio-politique, économique et culturel dans lequel un film a été produit, les théories et pratiques de l'architecture à la même époque ainsi que l'histoire que raconte le film sont quelques-uns de ces facteurs. Cette étude présente donc l'analyse de quelques films d'anticipation sélectionnés à travers toute l'histoire du cinéma. Metropolis de Fritz Lang, Just Imagine de David Butler, Alphaville de Jean-Luc Godard, la trilogie Star Wars de George Lucas et Blade Runner de Ridley Scott sont les sujets principaux de ce mémoire. / Québec Université Laval, Bibliothèque 2014

Text in Afrikaans / This dissertation is focused on questions on how the metropolitan municipalities, with specific reference to the City of Tshwane Metropolitan Municipality (CTMM), originated and developed. Against this background, the study consists of a theoretical exploration of the nature of the metropolis as a feature, as well as specific concepts related to it, an investigation into the most important metropolitan problems and an outline of the historical complications regarding the origin of metropolitan municipalities. In addition to this, personnel matters, financial relations and systems, the integrated development plans, ward committees and the role of councillors within the context of the CTMM were also investigated. / Public Administration / M.P.A.

This dissertation focuses on utopian versus dystopian perceptions of rural indigenous African societies with regard to the modern metropolis. Since the evolution of the modern metropolis, rural African societies have undergone significant and complex cultural changes that have dislodged rural cultures from being perceived in terms of the traditional notion of fixity. This has lead to the modern city being seen as either utopian or dystopian by rural African societies. The dissertation questions the “utopianess” of the modern metropolis with a special focus on its central idea of “progress”. Special attention is given to artists who explore this cultural phenomenon in the utopian–dystopian paradigm. The dissertation goes further to address the cultural impact of recent technological developments on rural and urban societies, the researcher’s perceptions of this impact and how this has contributed to the dynamics that characterise the cultures of contemporary rural and urban migrants / Art History, Visual Arts & Musicology / M.A. (Visual Arts)