33 research outputs found

    What do Collaborations with the Arts Have to Say About Human-Robot Interaction?

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    This is a collection of papers presented at the workshop What Do Collaborations with the Arts Have to Say About HRI , held at the 2010 Human-Robot Interaction Conference, in Osaka, Japan

    Cubus: autonomous embodied characters to stimulate creative idea generation in groups of children

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    Creativity is an ability that is crucial in nowadays societies. It is, therefore, important to develop activities that stimulate creativity at a very young age. It seems, however, that there is a lack of tools to support these activities. In this paper, we introduce Cubus, a tool that uses autonomous synthetic characters to stimulate idea generation in groups of children during a storytelling activity. With Cubus, children can invent a story and use the stop-motion technique to record a movie depicting it. In this paper, we explain Cubus’ system design and architecture and present the evaluation of Cubus’ impact in a creative task. This evaluation investigated idea generation in groups of children during their creative process of storytelling. Results showed that the autonomous behaviors of Cubus’ virtual agents contributed to the generation of more ideas in children, a key dimension of creativity.info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersio

    PHASE: PHysically-grounded Abstract Social Events for Machine Social Perception

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    The ability to perceive and reason about social interactions in the context of physical environments is core to human social intelligence and human-machine cooperation. However, no prior dataset or benchmark has systematically evaluated physically grounded perception of complex social interactions that go beyond short actions, such as high-fiving, or simple group activities, such as gathering. In this work, we create a dataset of physically-grounded abstract social events, PHASE, that resemble a wide range of real-life social interactions by including social concepts such as helping another agent. PHASE consists of 2D animations of pairs of agents moving in a continuous space generated procedurally using a physics engine and a hierarchical planner. Agents have a limited field of view, and can interact with multiple objects, in an environment that has multiple landmarks and obstacles. Using PHASE, we design a social recognition task and a social prediction task. PHASE is validated with human experiments demonstrating that humans perceive rich interactions in the social events, and that the simulated agents behave similarly to humans. As a baseline model, we introduce a Bayesian inverse planning approach, SIMPLE (SIMulation, Planning and Local Estimation), which outperforms state-of-the-art feed-forward neural networks. We hope that PHASE can serve as a difficult new challenge for developing new models that can recognize complex social interactions.Comment: The first two authors contributed equally; AAAI 2021; 13 pages, 7 figures; Project page: https://www.tshu.io/PHAS

    Fiction and video games:towards a ludonarrative model

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    Abstract. This thesis presents an evolutionary (rather than revolutionary) step towards a more holistic understanding of narrative meaningfulness in the medium commonly known as video games, based on the intrinsic semiotics of interactivity. The aim of the thesis is to highlight the narrative meaningfulness of not just the written or scripted content of a work, but also the emergent qualities, which may offer the player a serious tool for self-expression and co-authoring the experience. The concepts of coherence and cohesion are also discussed as they pertain to interactive mixed-media experiences. These concepts form the basis for a ludonarrative model that is intended for the examination, analysis and critique of narrative video games. The model is then further explicated by applying it to the examination of the commercially successful The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild.Tiivistelmä. Tämä tutkielma esittelee pienehkön kehitysaskeleen kohti tarinallisuuden kokonaisvaltaisempaa ymmärtämistä videopeleiksi kutsumassamme mediaformaatissa. Sen pohjana toimii videopeleille luontainen, vuorovaikutuspohjainen semiotiikan teoria. Tutkielman tarkoitus on korostaa pelien tarinallista merkittävyyttä kirjoitettujen ja käsikirjoitettujen sisältöjen lisäksi myös emergenteissä eli pelaamalla syntyvissä kokemuksissa, jotka voivat mahdollistaa laajankin itseilmaisun ja kanssakirjoittamisen muodon pelaajalle. Tutkielmassa käsitellään myös koheesiota ja koherenssia, sikäli kun ne koskettavat mediaa, joka yhdistelee erilaisia ilmaisun muotoja. Nämä konseptit muodostavat pohjan ludonarratiiviselle mallille, jonka tarkoituksena on mahdollistaa tarinallisten videopelien tarkastelu, analysointi ja kritisointi. Lopuksi mallia avataan soveltamalla sitä kaupallisestikin menestyneen The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild -videopelin tarkasteluun

    Holisms of communication

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    A central pillar of contemporary communication research is the analysis of filmed interactions between people. The techniques employed in such analysis first took on a recognizably modern form in the 1970s, but their roots go back to the earliest days of motion picture technology in the late nineteenth century. This book presents original essays accompanied by written responses which together create a dialogue exploring early efforts at audio-visual sequence analysis and their common goal to capture the "whole" of the communicative situation. The first three chapters of this volume look at the film-based research of Gestalt psychologists in Berlin as well as psychologists in the orbit of Karl and Charlotte Bühler in Vienna in the first decades of the twentieth century. Most of these figures – along with many other Central European scholars of this era – were driven into exile in the United States after the rise of National Socialism in the 1930s. This scientific migration led to the cross-pollination of communication studies in America, an outcome visible in the leading project in interaction research of the mid-twentieth century, the Natural History of an Interview. The following two chapters examine this project in its historical context. The volume closes with a critical edition of a treasure from the archives: the transcript of a speech delivered by Ray Birdwhistell, a key participant in the Natural History of an Interview project and founder of kinesics

    Robotics and the Lessons of Cyberlaw

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    Two decades of analysis have produced a rich set of insights as to how the law should apply to the Internet’s peculiar characteristics. But, in the meantime, technology has not stood still. The same public and private institutions that developed the Internet, from the armed forces to search engines, have initiated a significant shift toward developing robotics and artificial intelligence. This Article is the first to examine what the introduction of a new, equally transformative technology means for cyberlaw and policy. Robotics has a different set of essential qualities than the Internet and accordingly will raise distinct legal issues. Robotics combines, for the first time, the promiscuity of data with the capacity to do physical harm; robotic systems accomplish tasks in ways that cannot be anticipated in advance; and robots increasingly blur the line between person and instrument. Robotics will prove “exceptional” in the sense of occasioning systematic changes to law, institutions, and the legal academy. But we will not be writing on a clean slate: many of the core insights and methods of cyberlaw will prove crucial in integrating robotics and perhaps whatever technology follows
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