Enabling collaboration in virtual reality navigators

In this paper we characterize a feature superset for Collaborative Virtual Reality Environments (CVRE), and derive a component framework to transform stand-alone VR navigators into full-fledged multithreaded collaborative environments. The contributions of our approach rely on a cost-effective and extensible technique for loading software components into separate POSIX threads for rendering, user interaction and network communications, and adding a top layer for managing session collaboration. The framework recasts a VR navigator under a distributed peer-to-peer topology for scene and object sharing, using callback hooks for broadcasting remote events and multicamera perspective sharing with avatar interaction. We validate the framework by applying it to our own ALICE VR Navigator. Experimental results show that our approach has good performance in the collaborative inspection of complex models.Postprint (published version

Apperceptive patterning: Artefaction, extensional beliefs and cognitive scaffolding

In “Psychopower and Ordinary Madness” my ambition, as it relates to Bernard Stiegler’s recent literature, was twofold: 1) critiquing Stiegler’s work on exosomatization and artefactual posthumanism—or, more specifically, nonhumanism—to problematize approaches to media archaeology that rely upon technical exteriorization; 2) challenging how Stiegler engages with Giuseppe Longo and Francis Bailly’s conception of negative entropy. These efforts were directed by a prevalent techno-cultural qualifier: the rise of Synthetic Intelligence (including neural nets, deep learning, predictive processing and Bayesian models of cognition). This paper continues this project but first directs a critical analytic lens at the Derridean practice of the ontologization of grammatization from which Stiegler emerges while also distinguishing how metalanguages operate in relation to object-oriented environmental interaction by way of inferentialism. Stalking continental (Kapp, Simondon, Leroi-Gourhan, etc.) and analytic traditions (e.g., Carnap, Chalmers, Clark, Sutton, Novaes, etc.), we move from artefacts to AI and Predictive Processing so as to link theories related to technicity with philosophy of mind. Simultaneously drawing forth Robert Brandom’s conceptualization of the roles that commitments play in retrospectively reconstructing the social experiences that lead to our endorsement(s) of norms, we compliment this account with Reza Negarestani’s deprivatized account of intelligence while analyzing the equipollent role between language and media (both digital and analog)

Human Computation and Convergence

Humans are the most effective integrators and producers of information, directly and through the use of information-processing inventions. As these inventions become increasingly sophisticated, the substantive role of humans in processing information will tend toward capabilities that derive from our most complex cognitive processes, e.g., abstraction, creativity, and applied world knowledge. Through the advancement of human computation - methods that leverage the respective strengths of humans and machines in distributed information-processing systems - formerly discrete processes will combine synergistically into increasingly integrated and complex information processing systems. These new, collective systems will exhibit an unprecedented degree of predictive accuracy in modeling physical and techno-social processes, and may ultimately coalesce into a single unified predictive organism, with the capacity to address societies most wicked problems and achieve planetary homeostasis.Comment: Pre-publication draft of chapter. 24 pages, 3 figures; added references to page 1 and 3, and corrected typ

Managing by data: algorithmic categories and organizing

Data and data management techniques increasingly permeate organizations and the contexts in which they are embedded. We conduct an empirical investigation of Last.fm, an online music discovery platform, with a view to unpacking the work of data and algorithms in the process of categorization. Drawing on Eleanor Rosch and her colleagues, we link the making of categories with the construction of basic objects that function as key filters or registers for perceiving and organizing the world and interacting with it. In contexts such as the ones we have studied, basic objects are made out of data rather than expert or community-based knowledge. In such settings, basic objects work as pervasive reality filters and as the entities on which other organizational objects and categories are built. As they diffuse, such objects and the categories they instantiate become naturalized, increasingly reconfiguring the social order of organizations and their environments as a data order. Once key organizational activities such as the making of objects and categorizing are rearranged by data and algorithms, organizations can no longer be framed as separate from the technologies they deploy

Conversations on a probable future: interview with Beatrice Fazi

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EventView - The Design Behind an Analysis Framework

The development of software used to process petabytes of data per year is an elaborate project. The complexity of the detector means components of very diverse nature are required to process the data and one needs well defined frameworks that are both flexible and maintainable. Modern programming architecture based on object-oriented component design supports desirable features of such frameworks. The principle has been applied in almost all sub-systems of ATLAS software and its robustness has benefited the collaboration. An implementation of such framework for physics analysis, however, did not exist before the work presented in this paper. As it turns out the realisation of object-oriented analysis framework is closely related to the design of the event data object. In this paper, we well review the design behind the analysis framework developed around a data class called ``EventView''. It is a highly integrated part of the ATLAS software framework and is now becoming a standard platform for physics analysis in the collaboration