Explorations in engagement for humans and robots

This paper explores the concept of engagement, the process by which individuals in an interaction start, maintain and end their perceived connection to one another. The paper reports on one aspect of engagement among human interactors--the effect of tracking faces during an interaction. It also describes the architecture of a robot that can participate in conversational, collaborative interactions with engagement gestures. Finally, the paper reports on findings of experiments with human participants who interacted with a robot when it either performed or did not perform engagement gestures. Results of the human-robot studies indicate that people become engaged with robots: they direct their attention to the robot more often in interactions where engagement gestures are present, and they find interactions more appropriate when engagement gestures are present than when they are not.Comment: 31 pages, 5 figures, 3 table

Proceedings ICPW'07: 2nd International Conference on the Pragmatic Web, 22-23 Oct. 2007, Tilburg: NL

Proceedings ICPW'07: 2nd International Conference on the Pragmatic Web, 22-23 Oct. 2007, Tilburg: N

Mashup Archeology: A Case Study in the Role of Digital Technology in Cultural Production

Through examining the phenomena of the musical mashup against the backdrop of the contemporary American legal and economic situations, this work explores the complicated role of digital technology in contemporary cultural production and how it helps to constitute an agency of the contemporary digital subject, oriented towards participation and access. This research comes together in four parts, first weaving together against an understanding of the cultural and technical background as well as the legal and social backdrop that helped to birth the mashup, setting the stage for understanding the different powers at play. Secondly, through considering the construction and determination of culture and cultural production through media in the first instance this work puts those backgrounds into a framework of understanding how these different power structures influence culture. Third, through an understanding of how the mashup functions culturally via these power structures it begins to reveal some of the influences and how they have begun to take hold. Finally, I question what it is that these experiences and technical media are doing within this larger framework that is already controlled through aging and outdated legal and economic frameworks, outlining a framework that helps to understand the architectural determination of the mashup within contemporary society and why this phenomena persists despite legal and economic pushback. Through this exploration I argue that these technologies are turning the subject against these legal systems and towards sharing cultures as the experience with digital technology undermines legal stipulations. This work makes new contributions to understanding not only the role of digital technologies in cultural production, but also the role of digital technologies in the formation of the modern digital subject. Blending cybernetic theory, contemporary media studies, cultural studies, and continental philosophy, this work makes headway toward understanding the complexities of the modern cybernetic subject and how technology plays a role in determining the horizon of opportunities

Chatting with chatbots: Sign making in text-based human–computer interaction

This paper investigates the kind of sign making that goes on in text-based human–computer interaction, between human users and chatbots, from the point of view of integrational linguistics. A chatbot serves as a “conversational” user interface, allowing users to control computer programs in “natural language”. From the user’s perspective, the interaction is a case of semiologically integrated activity, but even if the textual traces of a chat may look like a written conversation between two humans the correspondence is not one-to-one. It is argued that chatbots cannot engage in communication processes, although they may display communicative behaviour. They presuppose a (second-order) language model, they can only communicate at the level of sentences, not utterances, and they implement communicational sequels by selecting from an inventory of executable skills. Instead of seeing them as interlocutors in silico, chatbots should be seen as powerful devices for humans to make signs with.    &nbsp

Reconciling Radical Constructivism with Social Organizations as Networks of Conversations and of Stakeholders

In this paper I am concerned with human agency and the construction of social organization. I am suggesting three concepts of human agency derived (a) from radical constructivism and autopoiesis, (b) from interactive use of language, and (c) from my work in the sociology of design. The former provides a background for human agency. The latter lead to two concepts of organization that acknowledge human agency in slightly different ways. In that process I am extending the second-order cybernetic idea of putting the observer into the observed to acknowledging the agency of humans in the construction of social organization of which they are a part. I think, talking about social systems as if that talk had nothing to do with the systems it brings about gets us back into first-order cybernetics, perhaps with the awareness that we are the observers of social systems. So, I will be concerned not with observation but with constituting social reality by participating in it constitutively. I am opposed to trivializing human agency that takes place when adopting vocabularies from discourses that cannot reflect on their communicative roles. The most blatant trivialization of human agency that I observe is found in the design of agent based computer programming, attributing agency to particular algorithms on account of being useful to computer users. One may take this use of agency as merely metaphorical, much as opening files and documents in human-computer interfaces are metaphors of what happens behind the screen, but the latter should not be confused with human agency. A more serious trivialization of human agency can be seen in the Actor-Network Theory (ANT) of M. Callon (1986) and Bruno Latour (1997), attributing agency to text, images and technological artifacts alike. A third example is to talk of social systems as abstractions from the everyday practices of living, sociological abstractions in particular, in effect generalizing and offering causal relationships between these abstractions in which human agency – intentionality, choices, actions, purposes, language and communication – which is important in social life, is no longer recognizable, thereby delivering the human use of human beings to those who are able to use their human agency irresponsibly and unchecked. However, in this paper I will take Richard Rorty\u27s (1989) suggestion to heart not to get sidetracked into critically reviewing what I am opposing and I shall propose instead vocabulary of what I am favoring, keeping in mind why I am doing this

Introduction to location-based mobile learning

[About the book] The report follows on from a 2-day workshop funded by the STELLAR Network of Excellence as part of their 2009 Alpine Rendez-Vous workshop series and is edited by Elizabeth Brown with a foreword from Mike Sharples. Contributors have provided examples of innovative and exciting research projects and practical applications for mobile learning in a location-sensitive setting, including the sharing of good practice and the key findings that have resulted from this work. There is also a debate about whether location-based and contextual learning results in shallower learning strategies and a section detailing the future challenges for location-based learning

Augmenting the field experience: a student-led comparison of techniques and technologies

In this study we report on our experiences of creating and running a student fieldtrip exercise which allowed students to compare a range of approaches to the design of technologies for augmenting landscape scenes. The main study site is around Keswick in the English Lake District, Cumbria, UK, an attractive upland environment popular with tourists and walkers. The aim of the exercise for the students was to assess the effectiveness of various forms of geographic information in augmenting real landscape scenes, as mediated through a range of techniques and technologies. These techniques were: computer-generated acetate overlays showing annotated wireframe views from certain key points; a custom-designed application running on a PDA; a mediascape running on the mScape software on a GPS-enabled mobile phone; Google Earth on a tablet PC; and a head-mounted in-field Virtual Reality system. Each group of students had all five techniques available to them, and were tasked with comparing them in the context of creating a visitor guide to the area centred on the field centre. Here we summarise their findings and reflect upon some of the broader research questions emerging from the project

An X-Windows Toolkit for knowledge acquisition and representation based on conceptual structures

This paper describes GET (Graph Editor and Tools), a tool based on Sowa's conceptual structures, which can be used for generic knowledge acquisition and representation. The system enabled the acquisition of semantic information (restrictions) for a lexicon used by a semantic interpreter for Portuguese sentences featuring some deduction capabilities. GET also enables the graphical representation of conceptual relations by incorporating an X-Windows based editor