Managing complexity in a distributed digital library

As the capabilities of distributed digital libraries increase, managing organizational and software complexity becomes a key issue. How can collections and indexes be updated without impacting queries currently in progress? How can the system handle several user-interface clients for the same collections? Computer science professors and lectors from the University of Waikato have developed a software structure that successfully manages this complexity in the New Zealand Digital Library. This digital library has been a success in managing organizational and software complexity. The researchers' primary goal has been to minimize the effort required to keep the system operational and yet continue to expand its offerings

Exploring the Affective Loop

Research in psychology and neurology shows that both body and mind are involved when experiencing emotions (Damasio 1994, Davidson et al. 2003). People are also very physical when they try to communicate their emotions. Somewhere in between beings consciously and unconsciously aware of it ourselves, we produce both verbal and physical signs to make other people understand how we feel. Simultaneously, this production of signs involves us in a stronger personal experience of the emotions we express. Emotions are also communicated in the digital world, but there is little focus on users' personal as well as physical experience of emotions in the available digital media. In order to explore whether and how we can expand existing media, we have designed, implemented and evaluated /eMoto/, a mobile service for sending affective messages to others. With eMoto, we explicitly aim to address both cognitive and physical experiences of human emotions. Through combining affective gestures for input with affective expressions that make use of colors, shapes and animations for the background of messages, the interaction "pulls" the user into an /affective loop/. In this thesis we define what we mean by affective loop and present a user-centered design approach expressed through four design principles inspired by previous work within Human Computer Interaction (HCI) but adjusted to our purposes; /embodiment/ (Dourish 2001) as a means to address how people communicate emotions in real life, /flow/ (Csikszentmihalyi 1990) to reach a state of involvement that goes further than the current context, /ambiguity/ of the designed expressions (Gaver et al. 2003) to allow for open-ended interpretation by the end-users instead of simplistic, one-emotion one-expression pairs and /natural but designed expressions/ to address people's natural couplings between cognitively and physically experienced emotions. We also present results from an end-user study of eMoto that indicates that subjects got both physically and emotionally involved in the interaction and that the designed "openness" and ambiguity of the expressions, was appreciated and understood by our subjects. Through the user study, we identified four potential design problems that have to be tackled in order to achieve an affective loop effect; the extent to which users' /feel in control/ of the interaction, /harmony and coherence/ between cognitive and physical expressions/,/ /timing/ of expressions and feedback in a communicational setting, and effects of users' /personality/ on their emotional expressions and experiences of the interaction

The Art of Engaging: Implications for Computer Music Systems

The art of engaging with computer music systems is multifaceted. This paper will provide an overview of the issues of interface between musician and computer, cognitive aspects of engagement as involvement, and metaphysical understandings of engagement as proximity. Finally, this paper will examine implications for the design of computer music systems when these issues are taken into account

PIWeCS: enhancing human/machine agency in an interactive composition system

This paper focuses on the infrastructure and aesthetic approach used in PIWeCS: a Public Space Interactive Web-based Composition System. The concern was to increase the sense of dialogue between human and machine agency in an interactive work by adapting Paine's (2002) notion of a conversational model of interaction as a ‘complex system’. The machine implementation of PIWeCS is achieved through integrating intelligent agent programming with MAX/MSP. Human input is through a web infrastructure. The conversation is initiated and continued by participants through arrangements and composition based on short performed samples of traditional New Zealand Maori instruments. The system allows the extension of a composition through the electroacoustic manipulation of the source material

Art/Sci Nexus, 9 Evenings Revisited

Following the exhibition of Hybrid Bodies at KKW in 2016 Andrew Carnie and I were invited back to act as mentors to a group of young artists and scientists from all over Europe undertaking a week long workshop designed to lead to new art/science collaborations. We were also invited to present the Hybrid Bodies project at a one day public event preceding the workshop

RoboJam: A Musical Mixture Density Network for Collaborative Touchscreen Interaction

RoboJam is a machine-learning system for generating music that assists users of a touchscreen music app by performing responses to their short improvisations. This system uses a recurrent artificial neural network to generate sequences of touchscreen interactions and absolute timings, rather than high-level musical notes. To accomplish this, RoboJam's network uses a mixture density layer to predict appropriate touch interaction locations in space and time. In this paper, we describe the design and implementation of RoboJam's network and how it has been integrated into a touchscreen music app. A preliminary evaluation analyses the system in terms of training, musical generation and user interaction

Teensites.com: A Field Guide to the New Digital Landscape

A 2001 report from the Center for Media Education, provided here as background to work produced by Kathryn Montgomery after coming to American University and CSM (see http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/resources/publications/ecitizens/index2.htm -- Youth as E-Citizens'), surveys the burgeoning digital media culture directed at -- and in some cases created by -- teens.This report surveys the burgeoning new media culture directed at -- and in some cases created by -- teens. TeenSites.com -- A Field Guide to the New Digital Landscape examines the uniquely interactive nature of the new media, and explores the ways in which teens are at once shaping and being shaped by the electronic culture that surrounds them