Residual Residence is an account of my process and how it is shaped and informed by the language of architecture and abstraction. It pinpoints shifts from a predominately drawing-based practice to one sensitive to the possibilities of drawing within physical space. Formal gestures of erasing, overlapping, layering and stacking are employed to play with relationships of space. For my thesis work, Residual Residence, I use the visual language of architecture and the literal physicality of building materials to create collaged drawings and site-specific installations.

No description available.

Abstraction concepts based on process groups have largely dominated the design and implementation of communication patterns in message passing systems. Although such an approach seems pragmatic—given that participating processes form a ‘group’—in this dissertation, we discuss subtle issues that affect the qualitative and quantitative aspects of this approach. To address these issues, we introduce the concept of a ‘communication structure,’ which defines a communication pattern as an implicit runtime composition of localised patterns, known as ‘roles.’ During application development, communication structures are derived from the algorithm being implemented. These are then translated to an executable form by defining process specific data structures, known as ‘branching channels.’ The qualitative advantages of the communication structure approach are that the resulting programming model is non-ambiguous, uniform, expressive, and extensible. To use a pattern is to access the corresponding branching channels; to define a new pattern is simply to combine appropriate roles. The communication structure approach therefore allows immediate implementation of ad hoc patterns. Furthermore, it is guaranteed that every newly added role interfaces correctly with all of the existing roles, therefore scaling the benefit of every new addition. Quantitatively, branching channels improve performance by automatically overlapping computations and communications. The runtime system uses a receiver initiated communication protocol that allows senders to continue immediately without waiting for the receivers to respond. The advantage is that, unlike split-phase asynchronous communications, senders need not check whether the send operations were successful. Another property of branching channels is that they allow communications to be grouped, identified, and referenced. Communication structure specific parameters, such as message buffering, can therefore be specified immediately. Furthermore, a ‘commit’ based interface optimisation for send-and-forget type communications—where senders do not reuse sent data—is presented. This uses the referencing property of branching channels, allowing message buffering without incurring performance degradation due to intermediate memory copy.

This thesis presents the design and implementation of Abstractocyte, a system for the visual analysis of astrocytes, and their relation to neurons, in nanoscale volumes of brain tissue. Astrocytes are glial cells, i.e., non-neuronal cells that support neurons and the nervous system. Even though glial cells make up around 50 percent of all cells in the mammalian brain, so far they have been far less studied than neurons. Nevertheless, the study of astrocytes has immense potential for understanding brain function. However, the complex and widely-branching structure of astrocytes requires high-resolution electron microscopy imaging and makes visualization and analysis challenging. Using Abstractocyte, biologists can explore the morphology of astrocytes at various visual abstraction levels, while simultaneously analyzing neighboring neurons and their connectivity. We define a novel, conceptual 2D abstraction space for jointly visualizing astrocytes and neurons. Neuroscientists can choose a joint visualization as a specific point in that 2D abstraction space. Dragging this point allows them to smoothly transition between different abstraction levels in an intuitive manner. We describe the design of Abstractocyte, and present three case studies in which neuroscientists have successfully used our system to assess astrocytic coverage of synapses, glycogen distribution in relation to synapses, and astrocytic-mitochondria coverage.

Cette étude aborde l’activité d’un cercle artistique hongrois d’avant-garde nommé Cercle de Zugló, composé de jeunes peintres et sculpteurs abstraits. Cette formation informelle et autodidacte regroupait les artistes Imre Bak, Tibor Csiky, Sándor Csutoros, Pál Deim, János Fajó, Tamás Hencze, Endre Hortobágyi, Sándor Molnár et István Nádler, et exista de 1958 à 1968, durant la période communiste en Hongrie. Par l’examen de ses antécédents théoriques et stylistiques remontant à l’Ecole Européenne et au Groupe des artistes abstraits (1945-1948), jusqu’à sa résonance dans le retour à peinture des années quatre-vingt nommé Nouvelle Sensibilité (1978-1990), l’auteur tente de déterminer l’importance et la valeur éthique de la production abstraite du Cercle de Zugló dans le paysage artistique hongrois, isolé des actualités internationales et dominé par l’idéologie politique culturelle du réalisme socialiste.La mise en perspective théorique et stylistique permet d’une part de définir à quel point la démarche des jeunes artistes se veut être l’héritière intellectuelle et artistique de la génération plus âgée de l’avant-garde hongroise, d’orientation constructiviste. D’autre part, elle s’efforce de mettre en lumière à quel point le Cercle de Zugló se différencie de ses pères spirituels, par l’introduction et l’adoption de l’abstraction lyrique française, puis de la nouvelle abstraction géométrique américaine. Elle traduit également la volonté de redéfinir une identité artistique hongroise et de la réinsérer dans le contexte et le flux internationaux. / This study examines the activity of a Hungarian avant-garde artistic circle named Zugló Circle, formed by young abstract painters and sculptors. Working in a self-taught way, this informal group gathered the artists Imre Bak, Tibor Csiky, Sándor Csutoros, Pál Deim, János Fajó, Tamás Hencze, Endre Hortobágyi, Sándor Molnár and István Nádler, and existed from 1958 to 1968, during the communist period in Hungary. Through the analysis of its theoretical and stylistic antecedents going back the European School and the Group of abstract artists (1945-1948) until its resonance in the new painterly wave of the eighties named New Sensitivity, the author determines the importance, the ethical value of the abstract production of the Zugló Circle in the Hungarian artistic landscape, which at the time was isolated and dominated by the cultural politics ideology of socialist realism.Putting the young artists’ approach in a theoretical and stylistic perspective, the author defines on one hand to which extent it wished to be the intellectual and artistic heir of the older generation of the Hungarian avant-garde, of constructivist orientation. On the other hand, this perspective also sheds light on how the Zugló Circle differentiates from its spiritual fathers, through the introduction and adoption of the French lyrical abstraction and later the American geometrical abstraction. It also reveals the will to redefine a Hungarian artistic identity and to reinsert it in an international context and stream.

My work in painting and sculpture is an ongoing problem-solving activity in which the issues of how to present images or objects, and how to make a compelling piece of art, frequently clash. By combining a sense of earnestness in the means in which my work is made with self-conscious and deliberately awkward choices, my work occupies a place between pleasureful, visual abandon and the calculated, humorously abject. Through combinations of disparate elements, formal choices, and attitudes towards subject matter, I am making work that seeks to create new images within contradictions.

CTRL+V is an investigation of one folklore jacket in many pieces, aiming to find out what that jacket is all about. / Program: Modedesignutbildningen

We explore visualization and abstraction approaches to represent neuronal data. Neuroscientists acquire electron microscopy volumes to reconstruct a complete wiring diagram of the neurons in the brain, called the connectome. This will be crucial to understanding brains and their development. However, the resulting data is complex and large, posing a big challenge to existing visualization techniques in terms of clarity and scalability. We describe solutions to tackle the problems of scalability and cluttered presentation. We first show how a query-guided interactive approach to visual exploration can reduce the clutter and help neuroscientists explore their data dynamically. We use a knowledge-based query algebra that facilitates the interactive creation of queries. This allows neuroscientists to pose domain-specific questions related to their research. Simple queries can be combined to form complex queries to answer more sophisticated questions. We then show how visual abstractions from 3D to 2D can significantly reduce the visual clutter and add clarity to the visualization so that scientists can focus more on the analysis. We abstract the topology of 3D neurons into a multi-scale, relative distance-preserving subway map visualization that allows scientists to interactively explore the morphological and connectivity features of neuronal cells. We then focus on the process of acquisition, where neuroscientists segment electron microscopy images to reconstruct neurons. The segmentation process of such data is tedious, time-intensive, and usually performed using a diverse set of tools. We present a novel web-based visualization system for tracking the state, progress, and evolution of segmentation data in neuroscience. Our multi-user system seamlessly integrates a diverse set of tools. Our system provides support for the management, provenance, accountability, and auditing of large-scale segmentations. Finally, we present a novel architecture to render very large volumes interactively. We focus on two aspects: (1) Segmented objects are often toggled on and off by an interactive query, which makes it unfeasible to pre-compute a well-adapted space subdivision. (2) To scale to large data, culling and empty-space skipping must scale with the output size instead of the input volume. Our approach combines the advantages of object- and image-order stages of the empty-space skipping process.

No description available.

Doctor of Philisophy (PhD) / Despite their early discovery, relatively few classes of ruthenium dinitrogen complexes are known. This work describes the successful coordination of dinitrogen to the electron-rich alkylphosphine cores [RuCl(dmpe)2]+ and [RuCl(depe)2]+ by chloride abstraction from both the cis and trans dichloro derivatives. One such complex, trans-[RuCl(N2)(dmpe)2](BArF24), possesses the most activated ruthenium νNN reported to date. A variety of chloride abstraction agents were tested on the cis and trans isomers of [RuCl2(P-P)2] (P-P = dmpe, depe) with the choice of abstracting agent, anion and solvent all found to significantly affect the outcome. Reaction with silver triflate and trimethylsilyl triflate was found to give dichlororuthenium(III) products, which could be readily reduced to the ruthenium(II) starting materials with common reducing agents, as well as by alcohols and hydrazine. The use of thallium triflate avoided oxidation and led to the formation of the crystallographically characterised polymeric incorporation product, [{trans-[RuCl2(dmpe)2]•Tl(OTf)}n] from trans-[RuCl2(dmpe)2] and the interesting chloride-bridged ruthenium dimer cis-[{Ru(depe)2}2(μ-Cl)2](OTf)2 from trans-[RuCl2(depe)2]. Anion exchange of the complex [{trans-[RuCl2(dmpe)2]•Tl(OTf)}n] with the non-coordinating anion tetrakis(3,5-bis(trifluoromethyl)phenyl)borate resulted in removal of thallium from the system and coordination of dinitrogen to give trans-[RuCl(N2)(dmpe)2](BArF24). Cis-[{Ru(depe)2}2(μ-Cl)2](OTf)2 was found to readily react with a variety of small ligands and gave products such as cis-[RuCl(CO)(depe)2](OTf), cis-[RuCl(NCMe)(depe)2](OTf), cis-[RuCl(CNtBu)(depe)2](OTf), cis-[RuCl(NH3)(depe)2](OTf), cis-[RuCl(N3)(depe)2], and trans-[RuCl(η2-H2)(depe)2](OTf). A preliminary X-ray single crystal structure analysis was conducted on the complex cis-[RuCl(CNtBu)(depe)2](OTf). The thallium(I) salt Tl(BArF24) was found to be an efficient chloride abstraction agent under mild conditions. Reactions with cis- and trans-[RuCl2(depe)2] and cis-[RuCl2(dmpe)2] furnished dinitrogen complexes of the form cis-[{RuCl(P-P)2}2(μ-N2)](BArF24)2, whilst reaction of trans-[RuCl2(dmpe)2] with Tl(BArF24) led to the stable five-coordinate complex trans-[RuCl(dmpe)2](BArF24). Vapour diffusion techniques applied to a solution of cis-[{RuCl(depe)2}2(μ-N2)](BArF24)2 gave rise to crystals of trans-[RuCl(N2)(depe)2](BArF24), on which preliminary X-ray molecular structure analysis was performed. Reactions of both cis-[{Ru(depe)2}2(μ-Cl)2](OTf)2 and trans-[RuCl2(dmpe)2] with high pressure (140 psi) dinitrogen at 140 150°C in methanol or tetrahydrofuran resulted in solvent carbonyl abstraction to afford trans-[RuCl(CO)(depe)2](OTf) and trans-[RuCl(CO)(dmpe)2](Cl) from the depe and dmpe complexes respectively. The molecular structure of trans-[RuCl(CO)(dmpe)2](Cl) was determined via single crystal X-ray structure analysis.