Social constructionism | EPFL Graph Search

In the fields of sociology, social ontology, and communication theory, social constructionism is a framework that proposes that certain ideas about physical reality arise from collaborative consensus, instead of the pure observation of said physical reality. The theory of social constructionism proposes that people collectively develop the meanings (denotations and connotations) of social constructs. Social constructionism has been characterised as a neo-Marxian theory and as a neo-Kantian theory, proposing that social constructionism replaces the transcendental subject with a societal concept that is descriptive and normative. While some social constructs are obvious, for instance money or the concept of currency, in that people have agreed to give it importance/value, others are less obvious, such as the concept of self/self-identity. This articulates the view that people in society construct ideas or concepts that may not exist without the existence of people or language to valid

Lieu hologrammatique, un concept et une méthodologie complexe de mesure de l'organisation spatiale des réalités sociales

Thibault Pierre Louis Romany

The urban is a complex phenomenon whose exploration remains a important scientific challenge. Choosing complex thought in order to renew our capacities for understanding and action on and with the urban is not trivial. The complex thought developed by Edgar Morin is as elegant as elusive. The social sciences of space developed by Jacques Lévy and Michel Lussault have contributed to the renewal of the space's place to understand the inhabited. The objective of this thesis is to articulate these two constructivist approaches, in order to achieve a higher level of synthesis regarding the understanding and measure of the social construction of inhabited space. The thesis consists in three parts :

the epistemological challenge : how to enagage with a complex problem ?
the theoretical challenge : how to appreciate the social construction of space in order to measure an urban substance ?
the methodological challenge : how to measure this substance ? Based on reflections concerning measuring urbanity, I propose a generalization to that of the spatialization of social realities. By translating the notions of metric, scale and place, the author's work leads to the proposal of an indisciplinary concept and methodology for measuring the spatialization of social realities: the hologrammatic place. The thesis defended is that such conceptualization allows us to identify boundaries of places by their emergence. Such an a posteriori identification allows the establishment not of an indicator, but of a measure of the spatialization of social realities. This research contribute to the renewal of urban planning methodologies toward the establishment of a complex methodology that makes conceivable a relative and relational urbanism.

EPFL2020

Studies on Types: Dormitories

Anja Fröhlich, Estelle Lépine, Vanessa Pointet, Tiago André Pratas Borges

Concepts of type and typology are not specific to architecture. Rather they represent an interdisciplinary approach to ordering knowledge and gaining insight. In the field of architecture, the study of types and typology offers a didactic perspective that allows us to see the complex network of inter-connections between theory and practice as an inseparable material and social construct. This publication is the result of a research project focused on dormitories as an architectural type, conducted at Laboratory EAST and produced in the frame of the teaching activities of the laboratory. Through a structured analysis, it unveils inherent knowledge of architectural solutions associated to the activity of sleeping collectively. The publication includes a theoretical framework with texts by Prof. Anja Fröhlich, Estelle Lépine, Arne Winkelmann, Tiago P. Borges and Vanessa Pointet.

EPFL Press2022

Advancing the State of Network Switch ASIC Offloading in the Linux Kernel

Andy Roulin

Modern data-center network operating systems rely on proprietary user-space daemons wrapping SDKs from switch vendors. Linux-based variants of these operating systems have benefited from increasing and simplified dataplane offloading support in recent years: kernel resources such as routes and next hops are offloaded to hardware and the kernel can, e.g., learn new MAC entries seen from the hardware forwarding plane. However, the Linux kernel in these operating systems has to be extended and customized as it still lacks constructs (constructs exposed to user-space or in-kernel constructs) needed for complete control plane processing and dataplane offloading. Managing limited hardware resources and keeping the kernel and hardware forwarding planes equivalent are two examples of challenges where the lack of appropriate constructs forces switch operating systems to use user-space solutions coupled with proprietary SDKs and custom kernel modifications. Filling the gaps, i.e., designing and adding the missing constructs, would enable faster control plane processing (less user-kernel context switches) and faster dataplane configura- tion. It would also encourage in-tree kernel drivers from hardware vendors instead of the current closed-source user-space SDKs which would also improve performance while estab- lishing Linux as the standardized API for network switches. This thesis explores the different designs, performance challenges and trade-offs of completing the in-kernel switching API, starting from switch port configuration, faster control path packet processing and ending with in-kernel ASIC resource management. As most hardware vendors are not yet ready to open their drivers in the kernel, workarounds to still provide support for vendors’ SDKs through the same in-kernel API are presented as well. A user-space switch port driver for Mellanox switches was ported to kernel space in order to accelerate control plane processing and bootstrap the in-kernel switch port configuration design. A prefetching scheme which hides PCI latency was designed to manage limited and shared ASIC resources with synchronous feedback to user-space daemons in case of exhausted resources.

2018

Advancing the State of Network Switch ASIC Offloading in the Linux Kernel

Andy Roulin

2018