VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Symmetric objects in multiple affine views
Keywords: computer vision
multiple view relations
3D bilateral symmetry detection
affine geometry
multiple view geometry

This thesis is concerned with the utilization of object symmety as a cue for segmentation and object recognition. In particular it investigates the problem of detecting 3D bilaterally symmetric objects from affine views.
The first part of the thesis investigates the problem of detecting 3D bilateral symmetry within a scene from known point correspondences across two or more affine views. We begin by extending the notion of skewed symmetry to three dimensions, and give a definition in terms of degenerate structure that applies equally to an affine 3D structure or to point correspondences across two or more affine views. We then consider the effects of measurement errors on symmetry detection, and derive an optimal statistical test of degenerate structure, and thereby of 3D-skewed symmetry. We then move on to the problem of searching for 3D skewed symmetric sets within a larger scene. We discuss two approaches to the problem, both of which we have implemented, and we demonstrate fully automatic detection of 3D skewed symmetry on images of uncluttered scenes. We conclude the first part by investing means of verifying the presence of bilateral rather than skewed symmetry in the Euclidean space, by enforcing mutual consistency between multiple skewed symmetric sets, and by drawing on partial knowledge about the camera calibration.
The second part of the thesis is concerned with the problem of obtaining feature correspondences across multiple affine views, as required for the detection of symmetry. In particular we investigate the geometric matching constraints that exist between affine views. We start by specilizing the four projective multifocal tensors to the affine case, and use these to carry the bulk of all known projective multi-view matching relations to affine views, unearthing some new relations in the process. Having done that, we address the problem of estimating the affine tensors. We provide a minimal set of constraints on the affine trifocal tensor, and search for ways of estimating the affine tensors from point and line correspondences.
Freedom and the body: Sartre and Beauvoir on embodied consciousness
Keywords: body
Existentialism
mind-body problem

Jean-Paul Sartre is not traditionally thought of as a philosopher of the body and, until very recently, little critical attention has been paid to this aspect of his work. Nevertheless, since 2005 a number of articles have begun to appear which suggest that Sartre‘s account of the body in L’Être et le Néant may be worthy of more consideration than it has thus far received – perhaps most notably Joseph Catalano‘s 2005 article suggesting that the chapter on the body is central to a proper understanding of Sartre‘s philosophy. Simone de Beauvoir is often criticised for her writing on the body in Le Deuxième Sexe, with much of the criticism suggesting that Beauvoir‘s use of existential philosophy is to blame for her failings. Yet Toril Moi argues that Beauvoir‘s claim that the body is a situation, a claim that arises from existential philosophy, is a valuable contribution to feminism. In light of these developments, it seems pertinent to look again at Sartre‘s chapter on the body in L’Être et le Néant and at Beauvoir‘s work to try to understand exactly what is meant by the body as a situation and how this concept relates to Sartre and Beauvoir‘s well-known ideas on freedom and responsibility. The aim of this thesis is to examine the importance of the chapter on the body in L’Être et le Néant and to demonstrate its relevance to Sartre‘s philosophy as a whole, to look at how Beauvoir has used Sartre‘s philosophy in her own writing and to consider the relevance of that philosophy to more contemporary writing on the body. The thesis will focus on L’Être et le Néant, Le Deuxième Sexe, and La Vieillesse with references also made to both authors‘ fictional works, to Beauvoir‘s autobiographical writings, and to more contemporary work on the body.
Time in the book of Qohelet
Keywords: time in the Hebrew Bible
Ecclesiastes
time in Ecclesiastes
time in 1 Enoch

This thesis explores the theme of time in the book of Qohelet. Throughout his work Qohelet depicts the temporal reality as intensely problematic for human attempts to fashion a meaningful existence, even in the present. A tension is established in the book between the temporal realities of the world and human time-experience. This tension becomes especially apparent in relation to the field of human cognition: our ability to understand and respond properly to our temporal conditions is drawn fundamentally into doubt by Qohelet. The lacking correspondence between temporal reality and human experience of time affects every temporal area in our existence. Qohelet does not allow the human being any meaningful access to either past or future because of the reality of oblivion. Unable to appeal to a meaningful human continuity, individual human beings are unable to make sense of their present existence too.
In addition to analysing Qohelet’s conception of time, the thesis investigates the consequences which this time-conception has for the author’s own philosophical endeavour. Significantly, Qohelet aims to describe an area of reality which he considers fundamentally inaccessible to the human mind. This results in an ongoing tension between statements of knowledge and statements of ignorance; between wanting to investigate human life in time and being unable to do so. This dichotomy is especially apparent in Qohelet’s discussion of the lost temporal horizons of past and future. Past and future cannot be approached directly, but must either be discussed through an examination of their influence on the present or established negatively, simply by stating their inaccessibility. Qohelet’s three main narrative texts demonstrate this particularly clearly. A final chapter uses the analysis of Qohelet’s time conception to undertake a comparative analysis of Qohelet and early layers of 1 Enoch.
Integration, ambivalence, and mental conflict 
Keywords: Value
Emotion
Ethics
Organisation
Ambivalence
Integration
Desire
Klein
Conflict
Psychoanalysis
Action

In my DPhil thesis I critique a philosophical ideal of mental organization: that one’s mind ought to be integrated, that is, lack conflicts or ambivalence between mental states, because disintegration is argued to impair one’s agency and undermine one’s well-being. My argument has three parts. In part one, I describe Plato’s maximalist version of the ideal where, if ideally organized, one’s psyche lacks conflicts because one’s rational faculty, aware of what is valuable, harmonises one’s motivational and affective states. I also argue that any dispute about integration is orthogonal to the dispute between value monists and value pluralists. In part two, I contest the integration ideal by criticizing three manifestations of it in contemporary philosophy. I focus on the organization of desire, and on deliberative and affective ambivalence. My arguments have a similar structure. First, I challenge the link between the integrated mind and the purported benefits of unimpaired agency and well-being. On investigation, this apparent connection is largely contingent. Not all conflicts or ambivalence are harmful, and other social or psychological factors are relevant in case where they really are damaging. Secondly, I argue that there are contexts where integration is a form of mental rigidity or harmful impoverishment. Thirdly, I argue that being disintegrated seems morally good in some situations where one manifests fitting states of mind, particularly emotions. In part three, I ask whether integration can be reinterpreted to salvage an alternative ideal. After rejecting a promising candidate found in Kleinian psychoanalytic theory, I offer my own account of integration as a two-part capacity to tolerate difficult mental states (not necessarily bad mental states - excitement can be hard to tolerate), and to avoid being reflectively passive as one’s mental organization changes. This capacity has rational and non-rational elements. Finally, I consider how this reinterpreted capacity relates to the practice of virtue. I conclude that integration is not a virtue, and may be compatible with some viciousness, but it enables one to be virtuous in situations where there are pressures towards being insensitively singleminded.
Foundations and applications of knowledge representation for structured entities
Keywords: cheminformatics
computational complexity
Artificial intelligence
decidability
classification
semantic technologies
ontology
Knowledge representation and reasoning
logic

Description Logics form a family of powerful ontology languages widely used by academics and industry experts to capture and intelligently manage knowledge about the world. A key advantage of Description Logics is their amenability to automated reasoning that enables the deduction of knowledge that has not been explicitly stated. However, in order to ensure decidability of automated reasoning algorithms, suitable restrictions are usually enforced on the shape of structures that are expressible using Description Logics. As a consequence, Description Logics fall short of expressive power when it comes to representing cyclic structures, which abound in life sciences and other disciplines.
The objective of this thesis is to explore ontology languages that are better suited for the representation of structured objects. It is suggested that an alternative approach which relies on nonmonotonic existential rules can provide a promising candidate for modelling such domains.
To this end, we have built a comprehensive theoretical and practical framework for the representation of structured entities along with a surface syntax designed to allow the creation of ontological descriptions in an intuitive way. Our formalism is based on nonmonotonic existential rules and exhibits a favourable balance between expressive power and computational as well as empirical tractability. In order to ensure decidability of reasoning, we introduce a number of acyclicity criteria that strictly generalise many of the existing ones. We also present a novel stratification condition that properly extends `classical' stratification and allows for capturing both definitional and conditional aspects of complex structures. The applicability of our formalism is supported by a prototypical implementation, which is based on an off-the-shelf answer set solver and is tested over a realistic knowledge base. Our experimental results demonstrate improvement of up to three orders of magnitude in comparison with previous evaluation efforts and also expose numerous modelling errors of a manually curated biochemical knowledge base.
Overall, we believe that our work lays the practical and theoretical foundations of an ontology language that is well-suited for the representation of structured objects. From a modelling point of view, our approach could stimulate the adoption of a different and expressive reasoning paradigm for which robustly engineered mature reasoners are available; it could thus pave the way for the representation of a broader spectrum of knowledge. At the same time, our theoretical contributions reveal useful insights into logic-based knowledge representation and reasoning. Therefore, our results should be of value to ontology engineers and knowledge representation researchers alike.
Phylogenetic interpretations of macroevolution in deep-time
Keywords: evolution
palaeobiology
fossil
Sauropterygia
phylogenetic comparative methods

The fossil record yields information on macroevolutionary patterns that remains inaccessible from the study of extant organisms alone, presenting a natural laboratory for us to test hypotheses about the long-term drivers and processes of evolution. Fossil data are therefore increasingly incorporated into evolutionary analyses, both on their own and in combination with neontological data. Phylogeny (an explicit hypothesis of the evolutionary relationships between taxa) can be used as a framework to enable direct comparison of results of comparative methods across many different timescales and taxa, and is now commonly used in investigations of fossil data. This represents an important step towards a unified approach, however, it is not yet fully understood what the effect of using fossil data is on the results of downstream phylogenetic comparative methods, which were originally developed with only living taxa in mind. In this thesis I explore the validity of phylogenetic interpretations of fossil record data. I begin with only taxonomic classification and show that this can in some cases substitute for a cladistically inferred phylogeny in phylogenetic comparative methods, without biasing results. Moving on to scenarios where a timescaled phylogeny is available I investigate the relationship between phylogeny and extinction in the geological past, show that phylogenetic clustering of extinction was common in tetrapods, and present a summary of the ways in which fossil data biases this measurement. Finally, with timescaled phylogenies and a detailed continuous trait dataset available, I interrogate the fossil record of Sauropterygia to uncover the processes of evolutionary change in this highly labile clade. By comparing the results of a suite of phylogenetic comparative methods I demonstrate that neck length evolved through changing vertebral counts rather than somite growth; that the clade experienced a release in evolutionary constraint at the Triassic-Jurassic boundary; and that evidence does not support evolution towards a stationary adaptive peak as a suitable model for phenotypic change in the clade.
Elegaic materialism: the poetry and art of Susan Howe
Keywords: minimal art
nominalism
Susan Howe
History of the Book
poetics
materialism
minimalism

The American poet Susan Howe (1937-present) began her career as a visual artist, but owing to a dearth of information about her early collages it has been difficult to say anything substantive about how they might have shaped her poetic practice. In 2010, she placed her collages on archive. Along with a number of personal interviews with Howe, this heretofore unavailable material has enabled me to consider Howe's subsequent work in a new light and to establish significant links between her early visual aesthetics and the poetics of bibliography, historiography, and elegy for which she is now known.
Howe's collages, like her poetry, focus on details that are at risk of vanishing from cultural memory and printed record. For this reason, I argue that her work evinces an 'elegaic materialism', or a way of reading, viewing, and thinking about texts that is attuned to loss. If “history is the record of the winners,” as Howe says, then one way of rescuing marginalized perspectives is by regarding manuscripts as drawings, thereby rescuing the concrete particulars deemed irrelevant by editors and historians. As Howe's late work turned increasingly toward elegy, her early aesthetic contributed to a nuanced poetics of personal loss and to a series of astonishing new formal tropes.
The Introduction to this thesis discusses Howe's materialism in the context of current literary theory and textual scholarship. Chapter 1 concerns itself with Howe's art historical context. Chapter 2 analyses a selection of her word-drawings. Chapter 3 considers Howe's transition to poetry. Chapter 4 addresses her turn to archival documents in her middle period. Chapter 5 looks at the influence on Howe of documentary film, especially in connection with the task of representing a lost loved one, and Chapter 6 discusses her two most recent elegies, The Midnight and THAT THIS. A Coda completes the circle by once more considering Howe in the context of the visual arts at the moment she was selected to exhibit at the 2014 Whitney Biennial.
Bayesian methods for the construction of robust chronologies
Keywords: Chronology building
Trapezoid
Archaeology
Bayesian modelling
Model averaging

Bayesian modelling is a widely used, powerful approach for reducing absolute dating uncertainties in archaeological research. It is important that the methods used in chronology building are robust and reflect substantial prior knowledge. This thesis focuses on the development and evaluation of two novel, prior models: the trapezoidal phase model; and the Poisson process deposition model. Firstly, the limitations of the trapezoidal phase model were investigated by testing the model assumptions using simulations. It was found that a simple trapezoidal phase model does not reflect substantial prior knowledge and the addition of a non-informative element to the prior was proposed. An alternative parameterisation was also presented, to extend its use to a contiguous phase scenario. This method transforms the commonly-used abrupt transition model to allow for gradual changes. The second phase of this research evaluates the use of Bayesian model averaging in the Poisson process deposition model. The use of model averaging extends the application of the Poisson process model to remove the subjectivity involved in model selection. The last part of this thesis applies these models to different case studies, including attempts at resolving the Iron Age chronological debate in Israel, at determining the age of an important Quaternary tephra, at refining a cave chronology, and at more accurately modelling the mid-Holocene elm decline in the British Isles. The Bayesian methods discussed in this thesis are widely applicable in modelling situations where the associated prior assumptions are appropriate. Therefore, they are not limited to the case studies addressed in this thesis, nor are they limited to analysing radiocarbon chronologies.
Petrarch in English:
Keywords: Surrey
Petrarch
Amoretti
Trionfi
Astrophil and Stella
Canzoniere
Triumphi
RVF
Reception of Petrarch
Spenser
William Fowler
Triumphs
Synge
Sidney
Petrarca
Chaucer
sonnet sequence
Henry Parker
Epithalamion
sonnet
Lord Morley
Italian influence on English literature
translation of Petrarch
Wyatt

This thesis is concerned with one key aspect of the reception of the vernacular poetry of Francesco Petrarca (Petrarch), namely translations and imitations of the Rerum vulgarium fragmenta (Rvf) and Triumphi in English. It aims to provide a more comprehensive survey of the vernacular Petrarch’s legacy to English literature than is currently available, with a particular focus on some hitherto critically neglected texts and authors. It also seeks to ascertain to what degree the socio-historical phenomena of religion, politics, and culture have influenced the translations and imitations in question. The approach has been both chronological and comparative. This strategy will demonstrate with greater clarity the monumental effect of the Elizabethan Reformation on the English reception of Petrarch. It proposes a solution to the problem of the long gap between Geoffrey Chaucer’s re-writing of Rvf 132 and the imitations of Wyatt and Surrey framed in the context of Chaucer’s sophisticated imitative strategy (Chapter I). A fresh reading of Sir Philip Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella is offered which highlights the author’s misgivings about the dangers of textual misinterpretation, a concern he shared with Petrarch (Chapter II). The analysis of Edmund Spenser’s Amoretti and Epithalamion in the same chapter reveals a hitherto undetected Ovidian subtext to Petrarch’s Rvf 190. Chapter III deals with two English versions of the Triumphi: I propose a date for Lord Morley’s translation which suggests it may be the first post- Chaucerian English engagement with Petrarch; new evidence is brought to light which identifies the edition of Petrarch used by William Fowler as the source text for his Triumphs of Petrarcke. The fourth chapter constitutes the most extensive investigation to date of J. M. Synge’s engagement with the Rvf, and deals with the question of translation as subversion. On the theoretical front, it demonstrates how Synge’s use of “folk-speech” challenges Venuti’s binary foreignising/domesticating system of translation categorisation.
Theories of national identity in early medieval Ireland
Keywords: Gaelic identity
national identity
ethnogenesis
medieval Ireland

Despite the political disunity of early Irish society, theories and expressions of national identity abounded in the work of the learned classes of clerics, genealogists, poets and lawyers. This thesis examines texts from two crucial periods in the evolution of these theories.
Focusing initially on the seventh and eighth centuries, the first part of the thesis argues that Irish national identity was created as part of a campaign to assert the joint authority of the Uí Néill kings of Tara and their ecclesiastical allies in Armagh. Drawing inspiration from biblical and patristic sources, and possibly also from contemporary developments elsewhere in Europe, these ecclesiastico-political allies asserted the national unity of the Irish in linguistic, genetic and territorial terms in pursuit of their own particular objectives.
The influence of biblical and patristic beliefs on many of these early expressions of Irish identity highlights the outward-looking nature of the Irish scholarly tradition. During the eleventh and twelfth centuries, this international dimension intensified as the histories and identities of foreign peoples became subjects of study in Ireland, and new source materials filtered into the country from overseas. With reference to two texts composed during this period, the Irish Sex Aetates Mundi and a poem on national characteristics beginning Cumtach na nIudaide n-ard – the second part of this thesis discusses the influence of newly acquired sources on contemporary Irish scholarship. It also examines how the information contained in these sources was adapted and rationalised to conform to the basic assumptions of Irish society.