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This thesis explores the potential of broadening the scope of social movements for sustainability. The implicit assumptions of the causal mechanisms for strategic social change propose limits to what transformative social action can be, and risk overlooking untapped resources for change. To address these limitations I use Habermas’ critical social theories on public engagement, systemic rationalit
We report on an investigation into the nature of the experience that developers have with the spaces in which they work and live based on the reflections of the authors. We describe a few aspects of the structure of developers' experience around the malleability, ownership and control of the spaces and the emotions they induce, and consider what this may mean for future research.
When designing a hardware architecture, a designer needs to be confident that their design will meet performance requirements before moving on to the next stage in the design process. The mapping between application and architecture can have a large impact on the system performance. In this work we target early-stage system design of hardware architectures required to run a streaming application.
Understanding mitochondrial biology and pathology is key to understanding the evolution of animal form and function. However, mitochondrial measurement often involves invasive, or even terminal, sampling, which can be difficult to reconcile in wild models or longitudinal studies. Non-mammal vertebrates contain mitochondria in their red blood cells, which can be exploited for minimally invasive mit
To avoid being detected by radar, it is necessary to reduce stealthy military platforms' radar cross section (RCS). The operation of overlaying the metasurface (MS) on the targets is a good solution. A simple chessboard MS structure that can achieve low RCS over a large bandwidth is proposed. Only one unit cell is used to construct the MS. First, the unit cell working in 0.5 and 1−λ modes is desig
Acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) is a life-threatening condition with mortality rates between 30-50%. Although in vitro models replicate some aspects of ARDS, small and large animal models remain the primary research tools due to the multifactorial nature of the disease. When using these animal models, histology serves as the gold standard method to confirm lung injury and exclude other
Alpha masked geometry such as foliage has long been one of the trickier things to render efficiently, both for rasterization based approaches and for hardware accelerated ray-tracing. Recently, a new type of primitive was introduced to the Vulkan® and DirectX® ray-tracing APIs that promises to alleviate this issue: Opacity Micromaps, a structure that uses a bit of extra memory as hints to the pipe
Proof logging in constraint programming is an approach to certifying a conclusion reached by a solver. To allow for this, different propagators must be augmented to produce justifications for any inferences they make, so that an independent proof checker can certify correctness. The Circuit constraint is used to enforce a Hamiltonian cycle on a set of vertices, e.g. for vehicle routing. Maintainin
It is well known that reformulating the original problem can be crucial for the performance of mixed-integer programming (MIP) solvers. To ensure correctness, all transformations must preserve the feasibility status and optimal value of the problem, but there is currently no established methodology to express and verify the equivalence of two mixed-integer programs. In this work, we take a first s
Building on the progress in Boolean satisfiability (SAT) solving over the last decades, maximum satisfiability (MaxSAT) has become a viable approach for solving NP-hard optimization problems. However, ensuring correctness of MaxSAT solvers has remained a considerable concern. For SAT, this is largely a solved problem thanks to the use of proof logging, meaning that solvers emit machine-verifiable
Proof logging has long been the established method to certify correctness of Boolean satisfiability (SAT) solvers, but has only recently been introduced for SAT-based optimization (MaxSAT). The focus of this paper is solution-improving search (SIS), in which a SAT solver is iteratively queried for increasingly better solutions until an optimal one is found. A challenging aspect of modern SIS solv
Pseudo-Boolean proof logging has been used successfully to provide certificates of optimality from a variety of constraint- and satisifability-style solvers that combine reasoning with a backtracking or clause-learning search. Another paradigm, occurring in dynamic programming and decision diagram solving, instead reasons about partial states and possible transitions between them. We describe a fr
Normalizing flows (NFs) have been shown to be advantageous in modeling complex distributions and improving sampling efficiency for unbiased sampling. In this work, we propose a new class of continuous NFs, ascent continuous normalizing flows (ACNFs), that makes a base distribution converge faster to a target distribution. As solving such a flow is non-trivial and barely possible, we propose a prac
An extension of the feedline is often needed when an antenna is integrated with the roof glass of a car. How much the extension affects the antenna performance depends on the type of antenna and feedline used. This paper studies the effects of coplanar waveguide feedline extension on the performance of a circularly-polarized square slot antenna. Simulation results show a general decrease in the an
It is intuitive and well known, that if agents in a multi-agent system iteratively update their states in the Euclidean space as convex combinations of neighbors’ states, all states eventually converge to the same value (consensus), provided the interaction graph is sufficiently connected. However, this seems to be also true in practice if the convex combinations of states are mapped or radially p
Reconfigurable surface (RS) has been shown to be an effective solution for improving wireless communication links in general multi-user multiple-input multiple-output (MU-MIMO) setting. Current research efforts have been largely directed towards the study of reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS), which corresponds to an RS made of passive reconfigurable elements with only phase shifting capabil
In this paper, we investigate the problem of decoder error propagation for spatially coupled low-density parity-check (SC-LDPC) codes with sliding window decoding (SWD). This problem typically manifests itself at signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs) close to capacity under low-latency operating conditions. In this case, infrequent but severe decoder error propagation can sometimes occur. To help understa
Objective: To investigate (i) to what extent physiotherapists (PTs) working in stroke rehabilitation in various parts of the stroke care chain have implemented interventions according to the national guidelines for stroke (NGS), (ii) facilita-ting and hindering factors for the implementation, and (iii) differences between various care settings. Design: A cross-sectional study. Subjects: 148 PTs wo
In this paper, a wideband circularly polarized antenna is designed for integration into the glass roof of a modern car for GNSS positioning applications. Characteristic mode analysis is used to obtain more physical insight into the problem and hence satisfy the polarization and bandwidth requirements. The antenna has a low profile and uses a single coplanar waveguide feed to cover all GNSS bands.
