Art produced outside hegemonic centers is often seen as a form of derivation or relegated to a provisional status. Forming Abstraction turns this narrative on its head. In the first book-length study of postwar Brazilian art and culture, Adele Nelson highlights the importance of exhibitionary and pedagogical institutions in the development of abstract art in Brazil. By focusing on the formation of the São Paulo Biennial in 1951; the early activities of artists Geraldo de Barros, Lygia Clark, Waldemar Cordeiro, Hélio Oiticica, Lygia Pape, and Ivan Serpa; and the ideas of critics like Mário Pedrosa, Nelson illuminates the complex, strategic processes of citation and adaption of both local and international forms. The book ultimately demonstrates that Brazilian art institutions and abstract artistic groups—and their exhibitions of abstract art in particular—served as crucial loci for the articulation of societal identities in a newly democratic nation at the onset of the Cold War.

Abstraction is a fundamental mechanism underlying both human and artificial perception, representation of knowledge, reasoning and learning. This mechanism plays a crucial role in many disciplines, notably Computer Programming, Natural and Artificial Vision, Complex Systems, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, Art, and Cognitive Sciences. This book first provides the reader with an overview of the notions of abstraction proposed in various disciplines by comparing both commonalities and differences. After discussing the characterizing properties of abstraction, a formal model, the KRA model, is presented to capture them. This model makes the notion of abstraction easily applicable by means of the introduction of a set of abstraction operators and abstraction patterns, reusable across different domains and applications. It is the impact of abstraction in Artificial Intelligence, Complex Systems and Machine Learning which creates the core of the book. A general framework, based on the KRA model, is presented, and its pragmatic power is illustrated with three case studies: Model-based diagnosis, Cartographic Generalization, and learning Hierarchical Hidden Markov Models.

This translation of the French Recherches sur l'abstraction reflechissante (1977), make available in English Piaget's only treatise on reflecting abstraction - a process he came to attribute considerable importance to in his later thinking and which he believed to be responsible for many of the advances that take place in human development, especially our understanding of mathematics. Rich with empirical research on reflecting abstraction at work in the thinking of 4 to 12 year olds, the studies in this volume examine its role in many contexts of cognitive development such as: reasoning about mathematics; forming analogies; putting objects in order by size and comparing the resulting series; and navigating through a wire maze. His theoretical discussions explore the relationships between reflecting abstraction and other central processes in his later theory, such as generalization, becoming conscious, and equilibration, as the differentiation of possibilities and their integration into necessities. These discussions indicate which aspects of his later theorizing were settled and which require further thought and investigation. Studies in Reflecting Abstraction will be of interest to developmental and cognitive psychologists, educationalists, philosophers and anyone who seeks to understand human knowledge and its development.

This book surveys methods, problems, and tools used in process control engineering. The book is intended both for interested nonspecialists who wish to become acquainted with the discipline of process control engineering and for process control engineers.