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How do musical practices move? Though technology increasingly plays a great part in establishing different degrees of spatial proximity, music making still seems to be tied to specific geographical locations, cultures or communities. The identity of musical traditions, in particular, is often demarcated by a presumed degree of uniformity amongst its practitioners. Musical Mobilities analyses how a musical tradition moves literally and metaphorically: the ways in which people, objects and information travel across geographical locations, just as practices as recognisable entities circulate along with meanings, competencies and embodied dispositions. This unique ethnography focuses on son jarocho, a musical practice originating in southeast Mexico that is currently reproduced through transnational connections, particularly in the United States. Paradoxically, the transformation of son jarocho has been a noticeable outcome of its recuperation and preservation. Thus, in describing the moves of this musical tradition, this book provides a theoretical and empirical perspective on the dissonances between cultural continuity and change. The first ethnographic work to explicitly address the continuity and transformation of a musical practice through the analysis of multiple forms of mobility and fixity, Musical Mobilities will appeal to undergraduate and postgraduate students and postdoctoral researchers interested in fields such as Latin American & Hispanic Studies, South American Music, Ethnomusicology, Cultural Studies and Sociology of Culture.

This thesis explores the (dis)encounters between youths' lived experiences and understandings of conflict and violence and the curricular intentions and practices in their schools. Participating youth attend two schools in marginalized urban areas of Colombia that are differently affected by violence and the armed conflict. One school is located in a municipality directly affected by armed conflict violence. The other is in a traditional neighborhood in a large city, affected by insecurity and urban criminality but located away from the direct effects of the armed conflict. Soon after the 2016 peace agreement between the Colombian state and the largest guerrilla organization, I conducted three months of participant observations, focus groups with youth from grades 8 to 10, interviews with teachers, and follow-up visits in each field site. I show that, despite young people's different locations in relation to war, intimate expressions of direct violence-interpersonal, criminal, domestic, and drug-related-were prominent in students' narratives about the social conflicts affecting their lives in both field sites. These concerns overrode both the visibility of armed conflict and indirect socio-cultural and structural forms of violence in their understandings of social conflict. I also show how the prevalent practices embedded in these schools' curriculum, based on convivencia [peaceful coexistence] and (global) citizenship education discourses and guidelines, emphasized a similarly individualized, depoliticized, and ahistorical framing of violence and conflict. I argue that school life is a symbolic device that contributes to the normalization of violence in the everyday life of these (school) communities. While it provides a space for stability, inclusion, and young people's personal visions of their future paths, it also undermines their ability to understand the Colombian conflict as a social process, with causes, actors, and a history. By contrasting youths' and schools' conceptions and practices of conflict and violence in two different geographies, this dissertation shows how predominant approaches to convivencia as securitization and order, conceptions of citizenship that blame others for violence, and skepticism towards peace (building) and collective action hinder youth-oriented peacebuilding pedagogies efforts for conflict transformation and reconciliation during Colombia's transition from war to post-conflict.

"Many different techniques have been used for parameter estimation in cardiac electrophysiology models, from optimization algorithms to heuristic and frequentist statistical methods. However, the fixed parameter values obtained from such approaches cannot provide a complete description of variability within an individual or across a population. To overcome this shortcoming, in this work we adopt a Bayesian approach by applying the Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) algorithm to cardiac electrophysiology models and data for the first time through three studies. (i) Using HMC, we fit synthetic and experimental cardiac voltage data from different pacing rates and find the probability distributions of the parameters of two relatively low-dimensional models, the Mitchell-Schaeffer (MS) and Fenton-Karma (FK) models. We successfully fit synthetic and experimental voltage traces and build populations of action potentials with the posterior probability distributions of the parameters. (ii) We compare the performance of HMC with that of the main Bayesian approach used previously for similar applications, the Approximate Bayesian Computation Sequential Monte Carlo (ABC SMC) algorithm. Both techniques are able to describe the dynamics of synthetic and experimental voltage data using the MS and FK models, with HMC more consistent and ABC SMC more versatile and easier to implement. (iii) We study the variability of cardiac action potentials in space within an individual. We use HMC and a novel approach employing a Gaussian process prior for one spatially varying MS model parameter along with a hierarchical model for the remaining parameters, considered spatially invariant. Using this approach, we do inference and prediction on synthetic cardiac voltage data, exploiting the spatial correlations in cardiac tissue that arise from cellular coupling to use voltage information from a small number of sites to predict parameter value distributions and families of voltage data in other locations. Together these three studies show the potential of Bayesian inference and prediction in providing a framework to represent variability within cardiac electrophysiology modeling."--Abstract.

Vision plays a fundamental role for living beings by allowing them to interact with the environment in an effective and efficient way. The ultimate goal of Machine Vision is to endow artificial systems with adequate capabilities to cope with not a priori predetermined situations. To this end, we have to take into account the computing constraints of the hosting architectures and the specifications of the tasks to be accomplished, to continuously adapt and optimize the visual processing techniques. Nevertheless, by exploiting the low?cost computational power of off?the?shell computing devices, Machine Vision is not limited any more to industrial environments, where situations and tasks are simplified and very specific, but it is now pervasive to support system solutions of everyday life problems.

There are six sections in this book. The first section presents basic image processing techniques, such as image acquisition, storage, retrieval, transformation, filtering, and parallel computing. Then, some applications, such as road sign recognition, air quality monitoring, remote sensed image analysis, and diagnosis of industrial parts are considered. Subsequently, the application of image processing for the special eye examination and a newly three-dimensional digital camera are introduced. On the other hand, the section of medical imaging will show the applications of nuclear imaging, ultrasound imaging, and biology. The section of neural fuzzy presents the topics of image recognition, self-learning, image restoration, as well as evolutionary. The final section will show how to implement the hardware design based on the SoC or FPGA to accelerate image processing.

This book lays out a framework for understanding connections between home and mobility, and situates this within a multidisciplinary field of social research. The authors show how the idea of home offers a privileged entry point into forced migration, diversity and inequality. Using original fieldwork, they adopt an encompassing lens on labour, family and refugee flows, with cases of migrants from Latin America, Africa and the Indian subcontinent. With the book structured around these key topics, the authors look at how practices of home and mobility emerge along with emotions and manifold social processes. In doing so, their scope shifts from the household to streets, neighbourhoods, cities and even nations. Yet, the meaning of 'home' as a lived experience goes beyond place; the authors analyse literature on migration and mobility to reveal how the past and future are equally projected into imaginings of home.