We are all migrants

Migration is the basis for development—economic, social, and psychological. In this paper I will examine borders on migration that entail the ambivalent relating by the societal context of migration to the act of movement of the people who become migrants, and their counterparts (“counter-migrants”) who do not. My focus on the issue stems from my theory of Cultural Psychology of Semiotic Dynamics that can deal with the process of becoming, being, and feeling as “migrant” or “counter-migrant”. A societal rule system is fortified by the system of social representations of the people who—by the act of moving from one place to another—are designated to become migrants by the rule systems of the non-migrants. Cultural psychology contributes to the study of the emerging prejudices and ways of their overcoming by the non-migrant local recipients as well as to the ambivalences of the persons who move to the relating with the social role “migrant” and its overcoming. Historically speaking—we as the species of Homo sapiens are all migrants—only at differing times and circumstances.

Novosibirsk Contemporary Art in 2009-2019

The work examines the contemporary art scene of Novosibirsk from 2009–2019. In the first part of the article we carry out a sociological analysis of the artistic life of the city and highlight such features as: the prevalence of self-organized forms of art presentation over institutional forms, non-publicity and “diffusivity” of a significant part of art practices. We also analyse the influence of these factors on the perception of art and discuss what kinds of methodological challenges they provoke. Further we give a brief overview of some significant exhibitions of the past decade (such as “Siberian Underground. 20 Years Later”, “Repetition of the Untrodden” etc.), examine artistic circles of the city and their transformation from 1990 to our time, discuss principles of their formation and the nature of interactions among them. We also propose a schematic representation of the artistic circles under consideration, their interactions and attractions from a historical point of view. The second part of the article examines the aesthetic features of contemporary art in Novosibirsk from 2009-2019. The transition from the art of the 00s and early 10s to the art of younger generations of the late 10s is characterized by a change in the emotional tonality: from vitality and expressivity to fragile and melancholic sensitivity, from political irony and grotesque to ethical complexity and vulnerability. When considering art of individual artists of the specified period we outline two possible ways of their analysis based on the allocation of a common motive: neo-expressionist and post-conceptual. The first of these is united by the motive of “toys” as a way of working with corporeality and doubleness (for example, in the works of Konstantin Skotnikov, the Cosmonauts art group, Denis Efremov, Alexei Grishchenko, Mayana Nasybullova, etc.). The post-conceptual line is presented through the works of such artists as: Alexander Limarev, Mikhail Karlov, the BERTOLLO art group, Irca Solza. Here we propose a unifying motive of “a game” as a dichotomy of rule systems and their failure that is viewed as an opportunity to conceive another world. In the conclusion of the article, we suggest that such an integrated approach to the analysis of regional art of the last decade is promising.

Towards language-to-language transformation

This paper proposes a simplicity-oriented approach and framework for language-to-language transformation of, in particular, graphical languages. Key to simplicity is the decomposition of the transformation specification into sub-rule systems that separately specify purpose-specific aspects. We illustrate this approach by employing a variation of Plotkin’s Structural Operational Semantics (SOS) for pattern-based transformations of typed graphs in order to address the aspect ‘computation’ in a graph rewriting fashion. Key to our approach are two generalizations of Plotkin’s structural rules: the use of graph patterns as the matching concept in the rules, and the introduction of node and edge types. Types do not only allow one to easily distinguish between different kinds of dependencies, like control, data, and priority, but may also be used to define a hierarchical layering structure. The resulting Type-based Structural Operational Semantics (TSOS) supports a well-structured and intuitive specification and realization of semantically involved language-to-language transformations adequate for the generation of purpose-specific views or input formats for certain tools, like, e.g., model checkers. A comparison with the general-purpose transformation frameworks ATL and Groove, illustrates along the educational setting of our graphical WebStory language that TSOS provides quite a flexible format for the definition of a family of purpose-specific transformation languages that are easy to use and come with clear guarantees.

Struggling with Simulations: Decoding the Neoliberal Politics of Digital Games

As a creative industry currently rivalling film and television, digital games are filled with a variety of political tensions that exist both between and within particular works. Unfortunately, internal discrepancies are often dismissed as indicators of political ambivalence, or treated as formal flaws that need to be overcome. To address this gap, this dissertation draws from game studies, media studies, and political economics to investigate the contradictory relationships between popular games and neoliberalism, specifically in relation to playful forms of resistance and critique that emerge during gameplay. Part I develops this study’s methodology by drawing from corresponding uses of assemblage theory, specifically articulated in Ong (2006, 2007), Lazzarato (2012, 2015), and Gilbert’s (2013) control society approaches to neoliberalism and Taylor (2009), Pearce and Artemesia’s (2009) digital ethnographic approaches to play. Derived from the French agencement, assemblage theory emphasizes heterogeneous relations in constant states of becoming that are understood as being real. Part II implements the aforementioned methodology by examining some of the most popular gaming franchises produced to date, with each demonstrating emergent political correlations and dissonances springing from relationships between different ludic and narrative components. BioShock (2007–2013) and Red Dead Redemption (2011) are narratively structured by neoliberal discourse, yet each storyline fails to correspond with the resistant political logic embedded in their respective rule systems. Conversely, Call of Duty (2004 – present) attains a high level of political cohesion that does not result in a better playing experience, as much as it contributes to conflicts amongst publishers, developers, and fans. Finally, Minecraft (2009–present) provides a fascinating example of a game that representationally reinforces neoliberalism while simultaneously affording the creation of new digital objects, including objects that give players the opportunity to understand and appreciate the computational infrastructures that a neoliberal emphasis on source code takes for granted. This dissertation, as a result, charts the growing connections between emergent gameplay and new forms of resistance and critique—connections that contribute not only to game studies, but also to the study of digital media and the interdisciplinary study of neoliberalism.

Struggling with Simulations: Decoding the Neoliberal Politics of Digital Games

As a creative industry currently rivalling film and television, digital games are filled with a variety of political tensions that exist both between and within particular works. Unfortunately, internal discrepancies are often dismissed as indicators of political ambivalence, or treated as formal flaws that need to be overcome. To address this gap, this dissertation draws from game studies, media studies, and political economics to investigate the contradictory relationships between popular games and neoliberalism, specifically in relation to playful forms of resistance and critique that emerge during gameplay. Part I develops this study’s methodology by drawing from corresponding uses of assemblage theory, specifically articulated in Ong (2006, 2007), Lazzarato (2012, 2015), and Gilbert’s (2013) control society approaches to neoliberalism and Taylor (2009), Pearce and Artemesia’s (2009) digital ethnographic approaches to play. Derived from the French agencement, assemblage theory emphasizes heterogeneous relations in constant states of becoming that are understood as being real. Part II implements the aforementioned methodology by examining some of the most popular gaming franchises produced to date, with each demonstrating emergent political correlations and dissonances springing from relationships between different ludic and narrative components. BioShock (2007–2013) and Red Dead Redemption (2011) are narratively structured by neoliberal discourse, yet each storyline fails to correspond with the resistant political logic embedded in their respective rule systems. Conversely, Call of Duty (2004 – present) attains a high level of political cohesion that does not result in a better playing experience, as much as it contributes to conflicts amongst publishers, developers, and fans. Finally, Minecraft (2009–present) provides a fascinating example of a game that representationally reinforces neoliberalism while simultaneously affording the creation of new digital objects, including objects that give players the opportunity to understand and appreciate the computational infrastructures that a neoliberal emphasis on source code takes for granted. This dissertation, as a result, charts the growing connections between emergent gameplay and new forms of resistance and critique—connections that contribute not only to game studies, but also to the study of digital media and the interdisciplinary study of neoliberalism.

From parametric trace slicing to rule systems

Parametric runtime verification is the process of verifying properties of execution traces of (data carrying) events produced by a running system. This paper continues our work exploring the relationship between specification techniques for parametric runtime verification. Here we consider the correspondence between trace-slicing automata-based approaches and rule systems. The main contribution is a translation from quantified automata to rule systems, which has been implemented in Scala. This then allows us to highlight the key differences in how the two formalisms handle data, an important step in our wider effort to understand the correspondence between different specification languages for parametric runtime verification. This paper extends a previous conference version of this paper with further examples, a proof of correctness, and an optimisation based on a notion of redundancy observed during the development of the translation.

Explaining Ovarian Cancer Gene Expression Profiles with Fuzzy Rules and Genetic Algorithms

The analysis of gene expression data is a complex task, and many tools and pipelines are available to handle big sequencing datasets for case-control (bivariate) studies. In some cases, such as pilot or exploratory studies, the researcher needs to compare more than two groups of samples consisting of a few replicates. Both standard statistical bioinformatic pipelines and innovative deep learning models are unsuitable for extracting interpretable patterns and information from such datasets. In this work, we apply a combination of fuzzy rule systems and genetic algorithms to analyze a dataset composed of 21 samples and 6 classes, useful for approaching the study of expression profiles in ovarian cancer, compared to other ovarian diseases. The proposed method is capable of performing a feature selection among genes that is guided by the genetic algorithm, and of building a set of if-then rules that explain how classes can be distinguished by observing changes in the expression of selected genes. After testing several parameters, the final model consists of 10 genes involved in the molecular pathways of cancer and 10 rules that correctly classify all samples.

Abstract versus Folk Legal Pluralism

This chapter differentiates between abstract legal pluralism and folk legal pluralism. Abstract concepts of law within legal pluralist literature can be placed in one of two broad categories based on form and function: the inner ordering of associations or institutionalized rule systems. However, both types of concepts of law inevitably result in over-inclusiveness by encompassing social phenomena that are usually not considered to be law, creating irresolvable problems. Folk legal pluralism identifies coexisting forms of law in terms of what people collectively view as law, examined through a social-historical lens that pays attention to how forms of law vary across social contexts and change over time. It also articulates three categories of law applied throughout this book: community law, regime law, and cross-polity law. This approach offers a commonsensical account of law and legal pluralism useful for scholars, development practitioners, social scientists, and legal theorists.

Dataset Sensitive Autotuning of Multi-versioned Code Based on Monotonic Properties

Functional languages allow rewrite-rule systems that aggressively generate a multitude of semantically-equivalent but differently-optimized code versions. In the context of GPGPU execution, this paper addresses the important question of how to compose these code versions into a single program that (near-)optimally discriminates them across different datasets. Rather than aiming at a general autotuning framework reliant on stochastic search, we argue that in some cases, a more effective solution can be obtained by customizing the tuning strategy for the compiler transformation producing the code versions.We present a simple and highly-composable strategy which requires that the (dynamic) program property used to discriminate between code versions conforms with a certain monotonicity assumption. Assuming the monotonicity assumption holds, our strategy guarantees that if an optimal solution exists it will be found. If an optimal solution doesn’t exist, our strategy produces human tractable and deterministic results that provide insights into what went wrong and how it can be fixed.We apply our tuning strategy to the incremental-flattening transformation supported by the publicly-available Futhark compiler and compare with a previous black-box tuning solution that uses the popular OpenTuner library. We demonstrate the feasibility of our solution on a set of standard datasets of real-world applications and public benchmark suites, such as Rodinia and FinPar. We show that our approach shortens the tuning time by a factor of $$6\times $$ 6 × on average, and more importantly, in five out of eleven cases, it produces programs that are (as high as $$10\times $$ 10 × ) faster than the ones produced by the OpenTuner-based technique.