Where creativity comes from: the social spaces of embodied minds

This paper explores creative design, social interaction and perception. It proposes that creativity at a social level is not a result of many individuals trying to be creative at a personal level, but occurs naturally in the social interaction between comparatively simple minds embodied in a complex world. Particle swarm algorithms can model group interaction in shared spaces, but design space is not necessarily one pre-defined space of set parameters on which everyone can agree, as individual minds are very different. A computational model is proposed that allows a similar swarm to occur between spaces of different description and even dimensionality. This paper explores creative design, social interaction and perception. It proposes that creativity at a social level is not a result of many individuals trying to be creative at a personal level, but occurs naturally in the social interaction between comparatively simple minds embodied in a complex world. Particle swarm algorithms can model group interaction in shared spaces, but design space is not necessarily one pre-defined space of set parameters on which everyone can agree, as individual minds are very different. A computational model is proposed that allows a similar swarm to occur between spaces of different description and even dimensionality

Low-fi skin vision: A case study in rapid prototyping a sensory substitution system

We describe the design process we have used to develop a minimal, twenty vibration motor Tactile Vision Sensory Substitution (TVSS) system which enables blind-folded subjects to successfully track and bat a rolling ball and thereby experience 'skin vision'. We have employed a low-fi rapid prototyping approach to build this system and argue that this methodology is particularly effective for building embedded interactive systems. We support this argument in two ways. First, by drawing on theoretical insights from robotics, a discipline that also has to deal with the challenge of building complex embedded systems that interact with their environments; second, by using the development of our TVSS as a case study: describing the series of prototypes that led to our successful design and highlighting what we learnt at each stage

"Involving Interface": An Extended Mind Theoretical Approach to Roboethics

In 2008 the authors held Involving Interface, a lively interdisciplinary event focusing on issues of biological, sociocultural, and technological interfacing (see Acknowledgments). Inspired by discussions at this event, in this article, we further discuss the value of input from neuroscience for developing robots and machine interfaces, and the value of philosophy, the humanities, and the arts for identifying persistent links between human interfacing and broader ethical concerns. The importance of ongoing interdisciplinary debate and public communication on scientific and technical advances is also highlighted. Throughout, the authors explore the implications of the extended mind hypothesis for notions of moral accountability and robotics

Artificial in its own right

Artificial Cells, , Artificial Ecologies, Artificial Intelligence, Bio-Inspired Hardware Systems, Computational Autopoiesis, Computational Biology, Computational Embryology, Computational Evolution, Morphogenesis, Cyborgization, Digital Evolution, Evolvable Hardware, Cyborgs, Mathematical Biology, Nanotechnology, Posthuman, Transhuman

What is Computational Intelligence and where is it going?

What is Computational Intelligence (CI) and what are its relations with Artificial Intelligence (AI)? A brief survey of the scope of CI journals and books with ``computational intelligence'' in their title shows that at present it is an umbrella for three core technologies (neural, fuzzy and evolutionary), their applications, and selected fashionable pattern recognition methods. At present CI has no comprehensive foundations and is more a bag of tricks than a solid branch of science. The change of focus from methods to challenging problems is advocated, with CI defined as a part of computer and engineering sciences devoted to solution of non-algoritmizable problems. In this view AI is a part of CI focused on problems related to higher cognitive functions, while the rest of the CI community works on problems related to perception and control, or lower cognitive functions. Grand challenges on both sides of this spectrum are addressed

Autonomy: a review and a reappraisal

In the field of artificial life there is no agreement on what defines ‘autonomy’. This makes it difficult to measure progress made towards understanding as well as engineering autonomous systems. Here, we review the diversity of approaches and categorize them by introducing a conceptual distinction between behavioral and constitutive autonomy. Differences in the autonomy of artificial and biological agents tend to be marginalized for the former and treated as absolute for the latter. We argue that with this distinction the apparent opposition can be resolved