A tribute to Lotfi Zadeh with personal recollections

Isaac Newton once wrote to Robert Hooke that (with slight paraphrasing) "If we have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants." Life has an interesting way of presenting opportunities for collaboration between us lesser mortals who are catalyzed by such giants. Certainly that has been our experience in our own collaborations over the past several years, with the "giant" in this case being Professor Lotfi Zadeh. Lotfi's pervasive inquiries into the nature of human reasoning, and his assemblage of a sophisticated mathematical apparatus enabling humble machines to mimic this marvel of cognition, however imperfectly, stand as one of the towering intellectual accomplishments of the past century.In this tribute, we are pleased to recount some of our experiences that have benefitted from a larger view of the horizon provided by standing upon Lotfi's broad shoulders

Model of Learning Ability

The problem domain of the investigation presented in this dissertation is knowledge increase. In particular the research is concerned with the process of knowledge increase. The research problem formulated is formulated a posteriori: "Which factors determine the increase of personal knowledge that occurs by absorbing a particular new knowledge of an individual, who is a member of an organization, and how these factors work?" To explore and shed light on this problem a number of disciplinary boundaries were engaged and some models, tools, descriptions, etc. were borrowed from a number of related disciplines. These areas are briefly presented in the dissertation, restricting presentation to the relevant issues. There are three models developed for this thesis and they are subsequently integrated into a fourth model. First the 'Model of Learning Willingness' (MLW) is developed to consider personal and organizational value systems. For this model, new concepts have been created, to indicate the position of new knowledge in both personal and organizational value systems. Stable and the unstable states of the model are identified as well as how it is possible to pass from one state to another as result of an interaction between the two value systems by means of influencing each other. Applying a 'systems theory approach' on the cognitive psychology conception of knowledge, the impact of the characteristics of existing knowledge on the absorption of new knowledge is described. The developed model is called the 'Model of Learning Capability' (MLC). - This is the second model. It is also necessary to pay attention to the ability to acquire new knowledge; this is described by the 'Model of Attention' (MA) - the third model. This model is based on two main factors, namely cognitive and social conditions. These three models are thus integrated into fourth one, which is called the 'Model of Learning Ability' (MLA). For exploration/validation the model is wwwed with the Doctus Knowledge-Based Expert System, which was also the means of comparing the evolved hypotheses with the input from reality, namely observations and thought experiments. The first insight from the model is a better understanding of the process of 'knowledge increase'. The model can also be used to support choosing the right person to learn a particular piece of new knowledge, to identify the reason for someone not performing well with regards to learning and/or identifying a possible way of improving the process. Using the logic of the model experts can also be evaluated in the process of knowledge acquisition when building an expert system. Considering the achieved results some new problems emerge: It is not known what motivates the personal value system during the knowledge absorption; it is not known if the model can be extended to other forms of knowledge increase besides learning; it is not known how the social factors apart from love (i.e. power and money) affect the attention. Some new research ideas also evolved from this investigation, e.g. an attempt to model the knowledge using dimensions of understanding

Creating for the Stage and Other Spaces: Questioning Practices and Theories

Abstract (ENGLISH)-This volume brings together most of the interventions by artists and scholars of the Third EASTAP Conference (European Association for the Study of Theatre and Performance), which should have been held in Bologna from 27 February to 1 March 2020, scheduled among the events of the VIE Festival 2020 and the activities of the Department of the Arts / DAMSLab. When everything was ready, the Conference, the last part of the Festival and the DAMSLab programme were suddenly canceled due to the first restrictions related to the pandemic. Following those sudden and unexpected events, the need to leave memory of the project arose from many quarters. It was thus decided to propose a publication which, while significantly differentiating from the original structure designed for the Conference, explicitly and directly refers to it, remaining an exceptional and significant testimony of the state of studies on theatre and performance in the pre-Covid era. The Conference plan envisaged two macro-sectors which concerned, one, the practices and theories relating to the composition of the texts; the other, the practices and theories relating to the composition of performative events referable to the methods of scenic writing. The volume takes up this polarity by framing it in a different division of relations, which explains – thanks to the groupings and their titles both the relations between text and text and those between sector and sector. The most consistent chapters are dedicated to performance and post-dramatic textuality: Questioning performance: theories and practices (17 reports) and Creating text for the stage: theories and practices (21 reports). The other chapters then come to place themselves in the force field described by these main groupings. Perfomer's body: the dancer, the actor (6 reports) and Creating for other spaces: landscape, sound, multimedia (7 reports) are ideally framed in the polarity of the performace, where to highlight the centrality of the body and the relational dynamics activated by spaces, sounds, and new technologies. Collective creations and community plays (7 reports), on the other hand, focuses on performance and new textuality. __________ Abstract (ITALIANO)-Il presente volume riunisce la maggior parte degli interventi di artisti e studiosi del III Convegno EASTAP (European Association for the Study of Theatre and Performance), che avrebbe dovuto tenersi a Bologna dal 27 febbraio al 1 marzo 2020, calendarizzato tra gli eventi di VIE Festival 2020 e le attività del Dipartimento delle Arti/DAMSLab. Quando tutto era ormai pronto, il Convegno, l’ultima parte del Festival e il programma DAMSLab sono stati improvvisamente annullati a causa delle prime restrizioni legate alla pandemia. In seguito a quei repentini e inattesi eventi, è nata l’esigenza da più parti avvertita di lasciare memoria del progetto. Si è deciso così di proporre una pubblicazione che, pur differenziandosi sensibilmente dalla struttura originaria pensata per il Convegno, a esso si richiamasse esplicitamente e direttamente, restando eccezionale e significativa testimonianza dello stato degli studi sul teatro e la performance nell’era pre-Covid. Il piano del Convegno prevedeva due macrosettori che riguardavano, l’uno, le pratiche e le teorie relative alla composizione dei testi; l’altro, le pratiche e le teorie relative alla composizione di eventi performativi riferibili alle modalità della scrittura scenica. Il volume riprende questa polarità inquadrandola in una diversa ripartizione delle relazioni, che esplicita – grazie ai raggruppamenti e ai loro titoli – sia le relazioni fra testo e testo che quelle fra settore e settore. Alla performance e alla testualità postdrammatica sono dedicati i capitoli più consistenti: Questioning performance: theories and practices (17 relazioni) e Creating text for the stage: theories and practices (21 relazioni). Gli altri capitoli si vengono quindi a posizionare nel campo di forze descritto da questi raggruppamenti principali. Perfomer’s body: the dancer, the actor (6 relazioni) e Creating for other spaces: landscape, sound, multimedia (7 relazioni) si inquadrano idealmente nella polarità della performace, dove evidenziare la centralità del corpo e le dinamiche relazionali attivate dagli spazi, dai suoni e dalle nuove tecnologie. Collective creations and community plays (7 relazioni) si orienta invece fra performance e nuova testualità