Architecture

ROTCH Preface We shall not cease from exploration and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time. In my application to DUSP, I posed these questions: How does knowing a neighborhood's story influence individual decisions to vote, join civic associations, or lead community change efforts? How can residents' understanding of their local community's history and current issues impact attitudes and ultimately inspire choices to participate in their community? How can we build on the sense of pride that comes from knowing about one's community to develop grassroots leadership? How can communities use this information to engage newcomers and immigrants? My curiosity was sparked by my own experiences in helping young people learn and teach the stories of their families and their neighborhoods. Stories and images of local activism in the South End, Jamaica Plain, Chinatown, Roxbury and other neighborhoods inspired me....

One major challenge of implementing a metacognitive architecture lies in its scalability and flexibility. We postulate that the difference between a reasoner and a metareasoner need not extend beyond what inputs they take, and we envision a network made of many instances of a few types of simple but powerful reasoning units to serve both roles. In this paper, we present a vision and motivation for such a framework with reusable, robust, and scalable components. This framework, called Scruffy Metacognition, is built on a symbolic representation that lends itself to processing using dimensionality reduction and principal component analysis. We discuss the components of such as system and how they work together for metacognitive reasoning. Additionally, we discuss evaluative tasks for our system focusing on social agent role-playing and object classification.

A century ago, Nahr Beirut was a riparian river which flowed from a mountainous valley to a coastal plain, the Beirut Peninsula, before entering the Mediterranean Sea. After being for centuries the distant edge of Beirut, Nahr Beirut today is the central spine of the Metropolitan Area, coinciding with a major transport corridor linking the coast with the hinterland. In 1968, the river was converted from a riparian river to a concrete canal and eventually, it mutated into an open sewer. The highway built on its right bank completed this conversion into an infrastructural conduit of sewage and transport. Informed by the notions of infrastructural landscape, the thesis investigates Nahr Beirut through an urban and ecological analysis, and proposes measures for restoring the river, creating public space and enhancing the quality and management of water. In doing so, Nahr Beirut acts as a cultural catalyst which addresses citywide concerns of water supply, urban fragmentation and lack of public space. An overall plan addresses the ecological continuity of the river, flood mitigation, water management and treatment cycles. The plan proposes new navigational paths along the restored corridor, and sequences of public instances which respond to specific physical, infrastructural and urban conditions. Smaller scale proposals include public nodes and a series of land formation strategies that respond to the environmental and infrastructural situations. Advancing that rivers as infrastructural landscapes can become urban, social and ecological structures which sustain amid political and aesthetic fluctuations, the thesis posits Nahr Beirut as a new cultural and ecological spine in the city, which mediates its infrastructural functions with its civic and environmental roles.