The thesis begins an exploration of the way in which Japanese visual semiotics works. In this it focuses on the formal representations of visual elements: visual syntax. Specifically, this thesis examines the way in which visual representations are realisations of three types of semiotic metafunctions: the Ideational, Textual and Interpersonal. In order to gain a clear idea about Japanese visual semiotics, I compare them with British counterparts in a relatively minor way. There is some consideration of Japanese and British cultural value systems as revealed through an analysis of the visual. It is widely accepted that language is rule-governed, and that the rules of this system are closely related to the social and cultural environment in which they are produced. This is the basis of most work in sociolinguistics, of a very wide variety. The same assumption, however, is not normally made of other semiotic modes such as the visual. This study uses advertisements as the data; and it is through that data that the issue of visual semiotics is considered. Advertisements are examples par excellence of the connection of cultural values and visual semiotics; they are also a rich source for the study of visual communication, and are widely available and comparable across Japanese and British cultures. To some small extent it shows how similarly and differently they are manifested in Japanese and British examples. The findings of the thesis point to quite specific organizations of visual representations in Japanese culture, and to differences between the two cultures. Such differences give rise to different kinds of reading with different meanings, and are therefore of great significance in a cross-cultural semiotic environment.

Submitted by Patricia Figuti Venturini (pfiguti@anhembi.br) on 2018-10-17T13:32:22Z No. of bitstreams: 1 Vivian Suarez Martins.pdf: 27080829 bytes, checksum: a7072b20a987601d1d3e46657b00d1af (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by Patricia Figuti Venturini (pfiguti@anhembi.br) on 2018-10-17T18:51:37Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 1 Vivian Suarez Martins.pdf: 27080829 bytes, checksum: a7072b20a987601d1d3e46657b00d1af (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by Patricia Figuti Venturini (pfiguti@anhembi.br) on 2018-10-17T18:54:15Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 1 Vivian Suarez Martins.pdf: 27080829 bytes, checksum: a7072b20a987601d1d3e46657b00d1af (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2018-10-17T18:54:32Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Vivian Suarez Martins.pdf: 27080829 bytes, checksum: a7072b20a987601d1d3e46657b00d1af (MD5) Previous issue date: 2015-03-30 / Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior - CAPES / The realization of urban interventions increased considerably in Brazil in the end of the 90’s, mainly due to the emergence of artistic collectives that emerged in several cities. This research aims to present concepts related to the fields of socially oriented graphic design and urban art, as well investigate a potential approach and analyze a series of graphic interventions protest-related; the work pieces treated in this research are lambe-lambe posters, stickers, digital memes, yarn bombings and projections, applied in various media formats. The research aims to find parameters to identify possible categorizations within the larger scope of graphic language and types of solution found by street artists activists, who act in physical and digital urban environment; for this analysis, some visual settings were analyzed from the point of view of the graphical language, result of the assemblage of visual-graphic elements, seen in the light of technical skills and methods, visual syntax, styling, materiality, location and rhetoric. For the case study in the third and final part, the Pimp my Carroça 2014 event will be presented and its approach to the fields of graphic design and urban art will be listed and analyzed. / A realização de intervenções urbanas aumentou consideravelmente no Brasil a partir do final da década de 1990, principalmente em decorrência do surgimento de coletivos artísticos que se formaram em diversas cidades do país. Essa investigação propõe apresentar conceitos relacionados aos campos do design gráfico socialmente orientado e da arte urbana, pesquisar suas potenciais aproximações, bem como analisar uma série de intervenções gráficas com o específico cunho de protesto; as peças tratadas nesta pesquisa são cartazes lambe-lambe, adesivos (stickers), memes digitais, obras em crochê e projeções, aplicadas em suportes diversos. A pesquisa tem como principal objetivo o de buscar parâmetros para identificar possíveis categorizações dentro do escopo maior da linguagem gráfica e tipos de solução encontrados pelos interventores ativistas, atuantes no ambiente urbano, físico e digital; para tal análise, foram selecionadas algumas configurações visuais, analisadas sob o ponto de vista da linguagem gráfica, observando, deste modo, as resultantes do agenciamento entre os elementos gráfico-visuais, observados à luz dos itens técnica, sintaxe visual, estilo, materialidade, localização e a retórica. Para o estudo de caso da terceira e última parte, o evento Pimp my Carroça 2014 será apresentado e sua aproximação com os campos do design gráfico e arte urbana serão elencadas e analisadas.

<p dir="ltr">Today’s deep neural networks (DNNs) have achieved tremendous performance in various domains such as computer vision, natural language processing, robotics, generative tasks etc. However, these high-performing DNNs require enormous amounts of compute, resulting in significant power consumption. Moreover, these often struggle in terms of visual understanding capabilities. To that effect, this thesis focuses on two aspects - enhancing efficiency of neural networks and improving their visual understanding. On the efficiency front, we leverage brain-inspired Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs), which offer a promising alternative to traditional deep learning. We first perform a comparative analysis between models with and without leak, revealing that leaky-integrate-and-fire (LIF) model provides improved robustness and better generalization compared to integrate-and-fire (IF). However, leak decreases the sparsity of computation. In the second work, by introducing a Discrete Cosine Transform-based novel spike encoding scheme (DCT-SNN), we demonstrate significant performance improvements, achieving 2-14X reduction in latency compared to state-of-the-art SNNs. Next, a novel temporal pruning method is proposed, which dynamically reduces the number of timesteps during training, enabling SNN inference with just one timestep while maintaining high accuracy. The second focus of the thesis is on improving the visual understanding aspect of DNNs. The first work along this direction introduces a framework for visual syntactic understanding, drawing parallels between linguistic syntax and visual components of an image. By manipulating images to create syntactically incorrect examples and using a BERT-like autoencoder for reconstruction, the study significantly enhances the visual syntactic recognition capabilities of DNNs, evidenced by substantial improvements in classification accuracies on the CelebA and AFHQ datasets. Further, the thesis tackles unsupervised procedure learning from videos, given multiple videos of the same underlying task. Employing optimal transport (OT) and introducing novel regularization strategies, we develop the ‘OPEL’ framework, which substantially outperforms existing methods (27-46% average enhancement in F1-score) on both egocentric and third-person benchmarks. Overall, the dissertation advances the field by proposing brain-inspired models and novel learning frameworks that significantly enhance the efficiency and visual understanding capabilities of deep learning systems, making them more suitable for real-world applications.</p>

Aujourd’hui, les ordinateurs et l’Internet sont partout dans le monde : dans chaque maison, domaine et plateforme. Dans ce contexte, le standard XML s’est établi comme un moyen insigne pour la représentation et l’échange efficaces des données. Les communications et les échanges d’informations entre utilisateurs, applications et systèmes d’information hétérogènes sont désormais réalisés moyennant XML afin de garantir l’interopérabilité des données. Le codage simple et robuste de XML, à base de données textuelles semi-structurées, a fait que ce standard a rapidement envahi les communications medias. Ces communications sont devenues inter-domaines, partant de l’informatique et s’intégrant dans les domaines médical, commercial, et social, etc. Par conséquent, et au vu du niveau croissant des données XML flottantes entre des utilisateurs non-experts (employés, scientifiques, etc.), que ce soit sur les messageries instantanées, réseaux sociaux, stockage de données ou autres, il devient incontournable de permettre aux utilisateurs non-experts de manipuler et contrôler leurs données (e.g., des parents qui souhaitent appliquer du contrôle parental sur les messageries instantanées de leur maison, un journaliste qui désire regrouper et filtrer des informations provenant de différents flux RSS, etc.). L'objectif principal de cette thèse est l'étude des manipulations des données XML par des utilisateurs non-experts. Quatre principales catégories ont été identifiées dans la littérature : i) les langages visuels orientés XML, ii) les Mashups, iii) les techniques de manipulation des données XML, et iv) les DFVPL (langages de programmation visuel à base de Dataflow), couvrant différentes pistes. Cependant, aucune d’entre elles ne fournit une solution complète. Dans ce travail de recherche, nous avons formellement défini un Framework de manipulation XML, intitulé XA2C (XML-oriented mAnipulAtion Compositions). XA2C représente un environnement de programmation visuel (e.g., Visual-Studio) pour un DFVPL orienté XML, intitulé XCDL (XML-oriented Composition Definition Language) qui constitue la contribution majeure de cette thèse. XCDL, basé sur les réseaux de Pétri colorés, permet aux non-experts de définir, d’arranger et de composer des opérations de manipulation orientées XML. Ces opérations peuvent être des simples sélections/projections de données, ainsi que des opérations plus complexes de modifications de données (insertion, suppression, tatouage, etc.). Le langage proposé traite les données XML à base de documents ou de fragments. En plus de la définition formelle (syntaxique et sémantique) du langage XCDL, XA2C introduit une architecture complète à base d’un compilateur et un environnement d'exécution dédiés. Afin de tester et d’évaluer notre approche théorique, nous avons développé un prototype, intitulé X-Man, avec un Framework d’évaluation pour les langages et outils visuels de programmation orientés XML. Une série d'études de cas et d’expérimentations a été réalisée afin d'évaluer la qualité d'usage de notre langage, et de le comparer aux solutions existantes. Les résultats obtenus soulignent la supériorité de note approche, notamment en termes de qualité d’interaction, de visualisation, et d’utilisation. Plusieurs pistes sont en cours d’exploration, telles que l'intégration des opérations plus complexes (opérateurs de contrôle, boucles, etc.), les compositions automatiques, et l’extension du langage pour gérer la spécificité des formats dérivés du standard XML (flux RSS, RDF, SMIL, etc.) / Computers and the Internet are everywhere nowadays, in every home, domain and field. Communications between users, applications and heterogeneous information systems are mainly done via XML structured data. XML, based on simple textual data and not requiring any specific platform or environment, has invaded and governed the communication Medias. In the 21stcentury, these communications are now inter-domain and have stepped outside the scope of computer science into other areas (i.e., medical, commerce, social, etc.). As a consequence, and due to the increasing amount of XML data floating between non-expert users (programmers, scientists, etc.), whether on instant messaging, social networks, data storage and others, it is becoming crucial and imperative to allow non-experts to be able to manipulate and control their data (e.g.,parents who want to apply parental control over instant messaging tools in their house, a journalist who wants to gather information from different RSS feeds and filter them out, etc.). The main objective of this work is the study of XML manipulations by non-expert users. Four main related categories have been identified in the literature: XML-oriented visual languages, Mashups, XML manipulation by security and adaptation techniques, and Dataflow visual programming languages. However, none of them provides a full-fledged solution for appropriate XML data manipulation. In our research, we formally defined an XML manipulation framework, entitled XA2C (XML Alteration/Adaptation Composition Framework). XA2C represents a visual studio for an XML-oriented DFVPL (Dataflow Visual Programming Language), called XCDL (XML-oriented Composition Definition Language) which constitutes the major contribution of this study. XCDL is based on Colored Petri Nets allowing non-expert users to compose manipulation operations. The XML manipulations range from simple data selection/projection to data modification (insertion, removal, obfuscation, etc.). The language is oriented to deal with XML data (XML documents and fragments), providing users with means to compose XML oriented operations. Complementary to the language syntax and semantics, XA2C formally defines also the compiler and runtime environment of XCDL. In addition to the theoretical contribution, we developed a prototype, called X-Man, and formally defined an evaluation framework for XML-oriented visual languages and tools that was used in a set of case studies and experiments to evaluate the quality of use of our language and compare it to existing approaches. The obtained assessments and results were positive and show that our approach outperforms existing ones. Several future tracks are being studied such as integration of more complex operations (control operators, loops, etc.), automated compositions, and language derivation to define specific languages oriented towards different XML-based standards (e.g., RSS, RDF, SMIL, etc.)