In this project I explore visual representation, abstraction, and the interpretation of violence as transformed aesthetic forms. Through drawing and film, I develop a visual language to interpret the subject of war, to allow my audience to experience the dynamics of conflict and to reflect upon the devastating toll that war takes on humanity.

With painting I find myself asking a lot of questions and finding very few answers, but I think it is a healthy and necessary process. This constant questioning parallels life outside of art for that reason. Life is full of unanswerable questions, and that is part of the reason why I make paintings. It is a strange way of accepting and dealing with the unknown. In this thesis I explain my relationship to the practice of painting. I reveal the actual processes I go through when making a painting, and investigate the content, or lack thereof, in my abstract paintings.

Television static represents the absence of a legible image and the presence of something iconic and disturbing - a sinister abstraction. These repeating rhythms also occur in the Hail Mary prayer, in the houses in my neighborhood, in large crowds, and in my mother's crotchet patterns. The unsettling aspect of repetitive mark making in my drawings mirrors in part my psychotherapy, in which the past is revived over and over, as well as the idea of penance absorbed through my Catholic background.Since moving away from Mexico I have been using imagery related to the United States: rivers, mountains, and landscapes. But in the final drawings this subject matter remains distant to me; I connect to the work only through making marks on paper. On one level, specificity is important: which river? or which mountain?, but another kind of connection is made when the images cease to be legible. As information accumulates on the surface, I am interested in a purely visual and phenomenological effect that briefly defies the emotional nature of my source material.

This dissertation documents two contributions to automating the formal verification of hardware – particularly memory-intensive circuits – by Symbolic Trajectory Evaluation (STE), a model checking technique based on symbolic simulation over abstract sets of states. The contributions focus on improvements to the use of BDD-based STE, which uses binary decision diagrams internally. We introduce a solution to one of the major hurdles in using STE: finding suitable abstractions. Our work has produced the first known algorithm that addresses this problem by automatically discovering good, non-trivial abstractions. These abstractions are computed from the specification, and essentially encode partial input combinations sufficient for determining the specification’s output value. They can then be used to verify whether the hardware model meets its specification using a technique based on and significantly extending previous work by Melham and Jones [2]. Moreover, we prove that our algorithm delivers correct results by construction. We demonstrate that the abstractions received by our algorithm can greatly reduce verification costs with three example hardware designs, typical of the kind of problems faced by the semiconductor design industry. We further propose a refinement method for abstraction schemes when over- abstraction occurs, i.e., when the abstraction hides too much information of the original design to determine whether it meets its specification. The refinement algorithm we present is based on previous work by Chockler et al. [3], which selects refinement candidates by approximating which abstracted input is likely the biggest cause of the abstraction being unsuitable. We extend this work substantially, concentrating on three aspects. First, we suggest how the approach can also work for much more general abstraction schemes. This enables refining any abstraction allowed in STE, rather than just a subset. Second, Chockler et al. describe how to refine an abstraction once a refinement candidate has been identified. We present three additional variants of refining the abstraction. Third, the refinement at its core depends on evaluating circuit logic gates. The previous work offered solutions for NOT- and AND-gates. We propose a general approach to evaluating arbitrary logic gates, which improves the selection process of refinement candidates. We show the effectiveness of our work by automatically refining an abstraction for a content-addressable memory that exhibits over-abstraction, and by evaluating some common logic gates. These two contributions can be used independently to help automate the hard- ware verification by STE, but they also complement each other. To show this, we combine both algorithms to create a fully automatic abstraction discovery and refinement loop. The only inputs required are the hardware design and the specification, which the design should meet. While only small circuits could be verified completely automatically, it clearly shows that our two contributions allow the construction of a verification framework that does not require any user interaction.

The Medieval English dream vision evidence influences from a variety of earlier vision literature, notably the apocalyptic vision and narrative dream. Philosophical visions by Plato, Cicero and Boethius, and Christian revelations of John and Paul contain traits that found their way into the dream poems by Langland, the Pearl poet and Chaucer. The Norwegian ballad Draumkvedet exhibits features that mirror these English visions. Notable characteristics pertaining to the character of the dreamer, the interplay between dreamer and dream, imagery of the vision, and structure, point to a common set of generic influences. Comparing Draumkvedet with its English counterparts demonstrates that they stem from the same tradition. Draumkvedet bares special resemblance to the Dream of the Rood, Piers Plowman and Pearl in its exploration of Christian doctrine and its appeal to the audience.

Video games have suffered a negative reputation regarding their influence on children and adolescents, in comparison to its “well-behaved” counterpart, books. Nevertheless, the world of video games is much more diverse than imaginable – from fantasy to reality – and it is possible that different types of video games have different effects on human cognition and behavior. To fill a gap in research, fantasy and non-fantasy genres were the focal point of the correlational study. In this study, we analyze how video game playing habits, video game genre preference, book reading habits and book reading preferences are correlated with creative thinking. Construal level theory explains the importance of psychological distances in enhancing creativity. Fantasy and fiction content, as well as role play, are theorized to be part of creativity due to generation of distance and abstract thinking. Creativity was measured by insight problems and a categorization task. Abstract thinking was also measured by the Behavioral Identification Form. The questionnaire was given out to 154 students during lunch hours at a university in Sweden, throughout the period of March 2019. The results indicated that preference in a genre, whether gaming or literature, did not indicate significant differences in creative thinking. However, the consumption and habit of playing role-play games showed a significant correlation to creativity in comparison to its “rival” – action games. Results showed the same effects for fiction literature versus non-fiction. Theoretical and practical implications for organizations and the workplace are discussed, as well as limitations of the study.

Por meio da organização e análise da crítica dispersa de Lourival Gomes Machado, textos em sua maioria pertencentes ao acervo do crítico, esta tese parte do pressuposto de que, para Gomes Machado, há uma arte brasileira autêntica, que se forma no século XVIII, sob o signo do barroco, e se estende até início de 1960, com a abstração expressiva, apresentando um interrompimento devido à implantação da Academia de Belas Artes, durante o século XIX. Nos anos 1940, apesar das preocupações do crítico envolverem sobretudo o modernismo brasileiro e a abstração aparecer apenas timidamente, no período de sua crítica madura, entre 1950 e início de 1960, passa a dedicar mais atenção à arte abstrata chegando, no fim desse período, a entender a abstração expressiva como vertente mais significativa, tanto da produção brasileira como internacional. Mário de Andrade era referência intelectual de destaque para Gomes Machado e ambos estavam em busca do que entendiam ser a configuração de uma arte propriamente brasileira. Para Andrade, a arte brasileira deveria carregar índices da natureza humana brasileira. Na crítica de Gomes Machado, a relação entre forma e lugar torna-se mais complexa, fazendo com que aquilo que antes transparecia na arte figurativa de deformação expressiva, relativa ao olhar de Andrade, passe a habitar a abstração não-geométrica, ou seja, a \"arte brasileira\" passa a ser caracterizada por formas, e não assuntos, que dizem respeito à mentalidade brasileira. Diante disso, optou-se por uma interpretação do pensamento crítico de Gomes Machado a partir de três momentos fundamentais de sua produção - modernismo, barroco e abstração expressiva -, cujos artigos revelam os contornos expressivos de sua concepção de \"arte brasileira\". / Through the organization and analysis of Lourival Gomes Machado\'s dispersed critical production, texts mostly belonging to the critic\'s personal archive, this thesis understands that, to Gomes Machado, there is an authentic Brazilian art, formed in the eighteenth century, under the sign of the Baroque, and which extends itself until early 1960, with informalism, presenting an interruption due to the implementation of the Academy of Fine Arts, during the nineteenth century. In the 1940s, despite the critic being mainly involved with Brazilian modernism and having abstraction appear only timidly, in the period of his mature critique between 1950 and early 1960, he devotes more attention to abstract art, understanding expressive abstraction as the most significant aspect of both Brazilian and international production. Mário de Andrade was an important intellectual reference to Gomes Machado and both sought to understand the configuration of an authentic Brazilian art. To Andrade, Brazilian art should carry aspects of Brazilian human nature. In Gomes Machado\'s critique, the relationship between form and space becomes more complex, so that what appeared in figurative art of expressive deformation - characteristic of Andrade\'s vision -, continues to inhabit non-geometric abstraction. In other words, \"Brazilian art\" becomes characterized by forms, and not themes that concern Brazilian mentality. Therefore, Gomes Machado\'s critical thinking was analyzed from three key moments of his production - modernism, baroque and expressive abstraction. His articles reveal the contours of his expressive conception of \"Brazilian art\".

A maioria das propostas de planejamento de rotas para robôs móveis não leva em conta a existência de soluções para problemas similares ao aprender a política para resolver um novo problema; e devido a isto, o problema de navegação corrente deve ser resolvido a partir do zero, o que pode ser excessivamente custoso em relação ao tempo. Neste trabalho é realizado o acoplamento do conhecimento prévio obtido de soluções similares, representado por uma política abstrata, a um processo de aprendizado por reforço. Além disto, este trabalho apresenta uma arquitetura para o aprendizado por reforço simultâneo, de nome ASAR, onde a política abstrata auxilia na inicialização da política para o problema concreto, e ambas as políticas são refinadas através da exploração. A fim de reduzir a perda de informação na construção da política abstrata é proposto um algoritmo, nomeado X-TILDE, que constrói uma política abstrata estocástica. A arquitetura proposta é comparada com um algoritmo de aprendizado padrão e os resultados demonstram que ela é eficaz em acelerar a construção da política para problemas práticos. / Most work in path-planning approaches for mobile robots does not take into account existing solutions to similar problems when learning a policy to solve a new problem, and consequently solves the current navigation problem from scratch, what can be very time consuming. In this work we couple a prior knowledge obtained from a similar solution to a reinforcement learning process. The prior knowledge is represented by an abstract policy. In addition, this work presents a framework for simultaneous reinforcement learning called ASAR, where the abstract policy helps start up the policy for the concrete problem, and both policies are refined through exploration. For the construction of the abstract policy we propose an algorithm called X-TILDE, that builds a stochastic abstract policy, in order to reduce the loss of information. The proposed framework is compared with a default learning algorithm and the results show that it is effective in speeding up policy construction for practical problems.

Agentes que utilizam técnicas de Aprendizado por Reforço (AR) buscam resolver problemas que envolvem decisões sequenciais em ambientes estocásticos sem conhecimento a priori. O processo de aprendizado desenvolvido pelo agente em geral é lento, visto que se concretiza por tentativa e erro e exige repetidas interações com cada estado do ambiente e como o estado do ambiente é representado por vários fatores, a quantidade de estados cresce exponencialmente de acordo com o número de variáveis de estado. Uma das técnicas para acelerar o processo de aprendizado é a generalização de conhecimento, que visa melhorar o processo de aprendizado, seja no mesmo problema por meio da abstração, ao explorar a similaridade entre estados semelhantes ou em diferentes problemas, ao transferir o conhecimento adquirido de um problema fonte para acelerar a aprendizagem em um problema alvo. Uma abstração considera partes do estado e, ainda que uma única não seja suficiente, é necessário descobrir qual combinação de abstrações pode atingir bons resultados. Nesta dissertação é proposto um método para seleção de abstração, considerando o processo de avaliação da aprendizagem durante o aprendizado. A contribuição é formalizada pela apresentação do algoritmo REPO, utilizado para selecionar e avaliar subconjuntos de abstrações. O algoritmo é iterativo e a cada rodada avalia novos subconjuntos de abstrações, conferindo uma pontuação para cada uma das abstrações existentes no subconjunto e por fim, retorna o subconjunto com as abstrações melhores pontuadas. Experimentos com o simulador de futebol mostram que esse método é efetivo e consegue encontrar um subconjunto com uma quantidade menor de abstrações que represente o problema original, proporcionando melhoria em relação ao desempenho do agente em seu aprendizado / Agents that use Reinforcement Learning (RL) techniques seek to solve problems that involve sequential decisions in stochastic environments without a priori knowledge. The learning process developed by the agent in general is slow, since it is done by trial and error and requires repeated iterations with each state of the environment and because the state of the environment is represented by several factors, the number of states grows exponentially according to the number of state variables. One of the techniques to accelerate the learning process is the generalization of knowledge, which aims to improve the learning process, be the same problem through abstraction, explore the similarity between similar states or different problems, transferring the knowledge acquired from A source problem to accelerate learning in a target problem. An abstraction considers parts of the state, and although a single one is not sufficient, it is necessary to find out which combination of abstractions can achieve good results. In this work, a method for abstraction selection is proposed, considering the evaluation process of learning during learning. The contribution is formalized by the presentation of the REPO algorithm, used to select and evaluate subsets of features. The algorithm is iterative and each round evaluates new subsets of features, giving a score for each of the features in the subset, and finally, returns the subset with the most highly punctuated features. Experiments with the soccer simulator show that this method is effective and can find a subset with a smaller number of features that represents the original problem, providing improvement in relation to the performance of the agent in its learning

Henrique de Gand pode ser considerado um dos mais importantes mestres em atividade na Universidade de Paris do último quarto do século XIII. Em sua volumosa obra composta, principalmente, por sua Suma de questões ordinárias e por 15 conjuntos de Questões quodlibetais , Henrique disserta frequentemente acerca do conhecimento humano. Em particular, ele dedica amplo espaço em seus textos [1] à caracterização do homem como ser capaz de obter conhecimento e [2] à discussão sobre o modo como, uma vez afetado pelos objetos de conhecimento, o homem age (por suas potências cognoscitivas) para produzir tal conhecimento. Esse conhecimento simples, obtido por abstração dos sentidos, será a base para o conhecimento proposicional posterior. Entretanto, é patente uma fundamental dificuldade na filosofia de Henrique: tanto [1] a potência humana para o conhecimento como [2] a atividade humana para tal conhecimento são insuficientes para a produção de um conhecimento estritamente verdadeiro. Sendo assim, a doutrina da intelecção de Henrique, muito embora admita a ocorrência de um conhecimento intelectual por abstração a partir dos sentidos, igualmente aponta para a necessidade de uma ação divina, para além da abstração e da própria alma humana, que permita um conhecimento estritamente verdadeiro. O presente trabalho se concentra na descrição da noção de conhecimento abstrativo em Henrique de Gand para, ao final, apontar a problemática necessidade, sublinhada por nosso autor, de um ultrapassamento desse conhecimento proveniente dos sentidos. / Henry of Ghent can be considered as one of the most important masters at the University of Paris in the last quarter of the 13th century. In his voluminous work composed mainly by his Summa of Ordinary Questions and 15 sets of Quodlibetal Questions , Henry often discusses human knowledge. Specially, he gives ample room in his texts [1] to the caracterization of man as a being capable of acquiring knowledge and [2] to the discussion about the way in which man acts (through his cognitive potencies) to produce such knowledge once affected by the objects of knowledge. This simple knowledge, acquired through abstraction from the senses, will be the basis for the posterior propositional knowledge. Nevertheless, a fundamental difficulty is clear in Henrys philosophy: both [1] human potency for knowledge and [2] human activity toward knowledge are insufficient for the production of strictly true knowledge. Thus, although Henrys doctrine of knowledge accepts the occurrence of intellectual knowledge through abstraction from the senses, it also points to the necessity of some divine action beyond abstraction and the human soul itself which allows for strictly true knowledge. The present study concentrates on the description of Henry of Ghents conception of abstractive knowledge pointing at the end to the problematic necessity highlighted by our author of surpassing this knowledge acquired through senses.