E-ARK: Harmony of Social/Cultural Records Across Europe

E-ARK (European Archiving of Records and Knowledge Preservation) is currently introducing standardization, new tools, and infrastructure into pan-European digital archival systems. The results of this pilot project can be applied to higher education where research data centers are required to preserve data for re-use in accordance with new open policies.

We elucidate how the E-ARK best practice survey has informed the development of new information packages for ingest, preservation, and re-use, and show how these can be applied to the Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences with practical exemplars such as census data.     

VILO: a rapid learning nearest-neighbor classifier for malware triage

VILO is a lazy learner system designed for malware classification and triage. It implements a nearest neighbor (NN) algorithm with similarities computed over Term Frequency $\times $ Inverse Document Frequency (TFIDF) weighted opcode mnemonic permutation features (N-perms). Being an NN-classifier, VILO makes minimal structural assumptions about class boundaries, and thus is well suited for the constantly changing malware population. This paper presents an extensive study of application of VILO in malware analysis. Our experiments demonstrate that (a) VILO is a rapid learner of malware families, i.e., VILO’s learning curve stabilizes at high accuracies quickly (training on less than 20 variants per family is sufficient); (b) similarity scores derived from TDIDF weighted features should primarily be treated as ordinal measurements; and (c) VILO with N-perm feature vectors outperforms traditional N-gram feature vectors when used to classify real-world malware into their respective families.     

Optics clustered to output unique solutions: a multi-laser facility for combined single molecule and ensemble microscopy

Optics clustered to output unique solutions (OCTOPUS) is a microscopy platform that combines single molecule and ensemble imaging methodologies. A novel aspect of OCTOPUS is its laser excitation system, which consists of a central core of interlocked continuous wave and pulsed laser sources, launched into optical fibres and linked via laser combiners. Fibres are plugged into wall-mounted patch panels that reach microscopy end-stations in adjacent rooms. This allows multiple tailor-made combinations of laser colours and time characteristics to be shared by different end-stations minimising the need for laser duplications. This setup brings significant benefits in terms of cost effectiveness, ease of operation, and user safety. The modular nature of OCTOPUS also facilitates the addition of new techniques as required, allowing the use of existing lasers in new microscopes while retaining the ability to run the established parts of the facility. To date, techniques interlinked are multi-photon/multicolour confocal fluorescence lifetime imaging for several modalities of fluorescence resonance energy transfer (FRET) and time-resolved anisotropy, total internal reflection fluorescence, single molecule imaging of single pair FRET, single molecule fluorescence polarisation, particle tracking, and optical tweezers. Here, we use a well-studied system, the epidermal growth factor receptor network, to illustrate how OCTOPUS can aid in the investigation of complex biological phenomena.     

Bright-field scanning confocal electron microscopy using a double aberration-corrected transmission electron microscope

Scanning confocal electron microscopy (SCEM) offers a mechanism for three-dimensional imaging of materials, which makes use of the reduced depth of field in an aberration-corrected transmission electron microscope. The simplest configuration of SCEM is the bright-field mode. In this paper we present experimental data and simulations showing the form of bright-field SCEM images. We show that the depth dependence of the three-dimensional image can be explained in terms of two-dimensional images formed in the detector plane. For a crystalline sample, this so-called probe image is shown to be similar to a conventional diffraction pattern. Experimental results and simulations show how the diffracted probes in this image are elongated in thicker crystals and the use of this elongation to estimate sample thickness is explored.     

OXPath: A language for scalable data extraction, automation, and crawling on the deep web

The evolution of the web has outpaced itself: A growing wealth of information and increasingly sophisticated interfaces necessitate automated processing, yet existing automation and data extraction technologies have been overwhelmed by this very growth. To address this trend, we identify four key requirements for web data extraction, automation, and (focused) web crawling: (1) interact with sophisticated web application interfaces, (2) precisely capture the relevant data to be extracted, (3) scale with the number of visited pages, and (4) readily embed into existing web technologies. We introduce OXPath as an extension of XPath for interacting with web applications and extracting data thus revealed—matching all the above requirements. OXPath’s page-at-a-time evaluation guarantees memory use independent of the number of visited pages, yet remains polynomial in time. We experimentally validate the theoretical complexity and demonstrate that OXPath’s resource consumption is dominated by page rendering in the underlying browser. With an extensive study of sublanguages and properties of OXPath, we pinpoint the effect of specific features on evaluation performance. Our experiments show that OXPath outperforms existing commercial and academic data extraction tools by a wide margin.     

Disquiet in the plasma

The metaphor of plasma is taken up to present and discuss movement and engagement by participants in mixed reality installation arts. Two works involving full body video portraits exhibited through large plasma screens in a variety of public settings are covered. Machinic mediations of video realism are considered in terms of embodied interaction in which viewer-participants contribute to the ‘disquiet’ of gendered figuring. Processural, proximal and personal aspects of responsive engagement are discussed. This is extended to performativity that may lead us to critical reflection of our own actions and responses in mixed reality arts.     

Innovative potential of 3D software applications in fashion and textile design

Advanced cloth simulation plug-in tools are increasingly being used by designers in movies, television, advertising and computer games, to take the strain out of creating and simulating realistic cloth effects for dressing virtual characters. This paper describes experiments into designing textiles and clothing using 3D graphics software and a digital cloth dynamics plug-in, which are an integral part of PhD research in progress. The methods used in testing the 3D software and the cloth dynamics plug-in illustrate the experiences of a designer/learner. The results identify designer/learner needs and expectations for the further educational development of the research and use of cloth simulation tools in textiles/fashion design in the near future.     

Digital creativity and transdisciplinarity at postgraduate level: the design and implementation of a transdisciplinary masters programme and its implications for creative practice

This article investigates how transdisciplinary approaches to curriculum design on a taught masters programme in creative technologies enhance digital creativity in students. Drawing on the experience of developing and running the Masters in Creative Technologies (MA/MSc) at the Institute of Creative Technologies at De Montfort University, Leicester, we explore a number of areas relating to transdisciplinary teaching and learning in higher education, including: how digital technologies enable students to work in a transdisciplinary manner; how working creatively with technology enables transdisciplinary modes of working; and the ways in which transdisciplinarity, enabled by digital technologies, has affected the creative practice of learners. The article discusses how the programme has developed a climate for creativity, and outlines how the knowledge and skills gained during a creative technologies-related transdisciplinary programme meet the needs of a changing workplace.     

The pataphysics of creativity: developing a tool for creative search

We introduce the idea of a new kind of web search tool that uses the literary and philosophical idea of pataphysics as a conceptual framework in order to return creative results. Pataphysics, the science of exceptions and imaginary solutions, can be directly linked to creativity and is therefore very suitable to guide the transformation from relevant into creative search results. To enable pataphysical algorithms within our system we propose the need for a new type of system architecture. We discuss a component-based software architecture that would allow the flexible integration of the new algorithms at any stage or location and the need for an index suitable to handle patadata, data which have been transformed pataphysically. This tool aims to generate surprising, novel and provocative search results rather than relevant ones, in order to inspire a more creative interaction that has applications in both creative work and learning contexts.