Foundations of Human-Aware Planning -- A Tale of Three Models

abstract: A critical challenge in the design of AI systems that operate with humans in the loop is to be able to model the intentions and capabilities of the humans, as well as their beliefs and expectations of the AI system itself. This allows the AI system to be "human- aware" -- i.e. the human task model enables it to envisage desired roles of the human in joint action, while the human mental model allows it to anticipate how its own actions are perceived from the point of view of the human. In my research, I explore how these concepts of human-awareness manifest themselves in the scope of planning or sequential decision making with humans in the loop. To this end, I will show (1) how the AI agent can leverage the human task model to generate symbiotic behavior; and (2) how the introduction of the human mental model in the deliberative process of the AI agent allows it to generate explanations for a plan or resort to explicable plans when explanations are not desired. The latter is in addition to traditional notions of human-aware planning which typically use the human task model alone and thus enables a new suite of capabilities of a human-aware AI agent. Finally, I will explore how the AI agent can leverage emerging mixed-reality interfaces to realize effective channels of communication with the human in the loop.Dissertation/ThesisDoctoral Dissertation Computer Science 201

Patterns and Pattern Languages for Mobile Augmented Reality

Mixed Reality is a relatively new field in computer science which uses technology as a medium to provide modified or enhanced views of reality or to virtually generate a new reality. Augmented Reality is a branch of Mixed Reality which blends the real-world as viewed through a computer interface with virtual objects generated by a computer. The 21st century commodification of mobile devices with multi-core Central Processing Units, Graphics Processing Units, high definition displays and multiple sensors controlled by capable Operating Systems such as Android and iOS means that Mobile Augmented Reality applications have become increasingly feasible. Mobile Augmented Reality is a multi-disciplinary field requiring a synthesis of many technologies such as computer graphics, computer vision, machine learning and mobile device programming while also requiring theoretical knowledge of diverse fields such as Linear Algebra, Projective and Differential Geometry, Probability and Optimisation. This multi-disciplinary nature has led to a fragmentation of knowledge into various specialisations, making it difficult to integrate different solution components into a coherent architecture. Software design patterns provide a solution space of tried and tested best practices for a specified problem within a given context. The solution space is non-prescriptive and is described in terms of relationships between roles that can be assigned to software components. Architectural patterns are used to specify high level designs of complete systems, as opposed to domain or tactical level patterns that address specific lower level problem areas. Pattern Languages comprise multiple software patterns combining in multiple possible sequences to form a language with the individual patterns forming the language vocabulary while the valid sequences through the patterns define the grammar. Pattern Languages provide flexible generalised solutions within a particular domain that can be customised to solve problems of differing characteristics and levels of iii complexity within the domain. The specification of one or more Pattern Languages tailored to the Mobile Augmented Reality domain can therefore provide a generalised guide for the design and architecture of Mobile Augmented Reality applications from an architectural level down to the ”nuts-and-bolts” implementation level. While there is a large body of research into the technical specialisations pertaining to Mobile Augmented Reality, there is a dearth of up-to-date literature covering Mobile Augmented Reality design. This thesis fills this vacuum by: 1. Providing architectural patterns that provide the spine on which the design of Mobile Augmented Reality artefacts can be based; 2. Documenting existing patterns within the context of Mobile Augmented Reality; 3. Identifying new patterns specific to Mobile Augmented Reality; and 4. Combining the patterns into Pattern Languages for Detection & Tracking, Rendering & Interaction and Data Access for Mobile Augmented Reality. The resulting Pattern Languages support design at multiple levels of complexity from an object-oriented framework down to specific one-off Augmented Reality applications. The practical contribution of this thesis is the specification of architectural patterns and Pattern Language that provide a unified design approach for both the overall architecture and the detailed design of Mobile Augmented Reality artefacts. The theoretical contribution is a design theory for Mobile Augmented Reality gleaned from the extraction of patterns and creation of a pattern language or languages

Bodies of Water

This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. Water is the element that, more than any other, ties human beings in to the world around them – from the oceans that surround us to the water that makes up most of our bodies. Exploring the cultural and philosophical implications of this fact, Bodies of Water develops an innovative new mode of posthuman feminist phenomenology that understands our bodies as being fundamentally part of the natural world and not separate from or privileged to it. Building on the works by Luce Irigaray, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Gilles Deleuze, Astrida Neimanis’s book is a landmark study that brings a new feminist perspective to bear on ideas of embodiment and ecological ethics in the posthuman critical moment

Human Aspects in NATO Military Operations: Project developed under the framework of NATO's Defence against Terrorism Programme of Work with the support of Emerging Security Challenges Division/ NATO HQ

The Human Aspects of the Operational Environment (HAOE) project has its roots in the challenges posed to current North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) operations in Afghanistan. However it is obvious that focusing only on Afghanistan would not be enough since in the future NATO will be presumably involved more and more in operations outside its territory, and that the large majority of such operations will be represented by Non-Article 5 Crisis Response Operations (NA5CRO). The local population has been always one of the most important features of the operational environment, and as the conflict between the adversaries increasingly spreads among it, gaining local population’s support becomes the new centre of gravity of military operations. In NA5CRO NATO will have to interact directly with the local population that encompasses the entire range of ethnic groups and cultures and different actors from military/paramilitary, local governance, NGOs, criminality, security domains. Different environments require different capabilities. Therefore, a solid environmental understanding is vital during the operational planning and preparation phases, in order to ensure that appropriate capabilities are deployed. A thorough understanding of the local population is needed to comprehensively approach the operational environment, to enhance population support for NATO operations, and to improve the operational effectiveness and security. The NATO HUMINT Centre of Excellence (HCOE) assumed that the right manner to overcoming these challenges could be found only by a comprehensive approach, involving the military alongside academia and international and governmental organizations. Therefore the present project brought together subject matter experts (SME) from different domains with the goal of sharing their knowledge and current understanding of human aspects of the operational 5 HUMINT Centre of Excellence environment, in order to contribute to the improvement of NATO's Comprehensive Approach Strategy, and to act as a catalyst for the multidisciplinary research related to this topic

“Minima sensibilia”. The Medieval Latin Debate (ca. 1250-ca. 1350) and Its Roots

The thesis focuses on one of the least studied topics in Medieval Latin Aristotelian natural philosophy (ca. 1250-ca. 1350), i.e., the so-called topic of “minima sensibilia”. If, as claimed most notably in “Physics” VI, magnitudes are (potentially) infinitely divisible, a dilemma arises with respect to the limits of the divisibility of sensible qualities through the division of the matter (considered as an extended magnitude) with which they are united. Either sensible qualities are also (potentially) infinitely divisible (but this implies that the senses should have an infinite power in order to perceive them, against a fundamental Aristotelian assumption concerning the limits of every power existing in nature), or they are not (potentially) infinitely divisible (in this case, however, there would be portions of matter that can neither be cognised by the senses nor, evidently, by the intellect, and, what is worse, sensible entities would be ultimately composed of them, something entirely unacceptable in the Aristotelian worldview). To solve the dilemma, Aristotle, in Chapter 6 of the “De sensu et sensato” (445b3-446a20), makes use of the distinction between act and potency, affirming that sensible qualities are infinitely divisible in potency as part of the whole to which they belong, but there are minimal quantities of matter that can exist in act on their own endowed with their sensible qualities. The thesis investigates the reflection conducted by Medieval Latin commentators of the “De sensu et sensato” (always read in connection with their Greek and Islamic sources) on the subject of “minima sensibilia”, using it as a privileged gateway to study from a new and original point of view the Medieval Latin conception of the ontology and of the epistemology of sensible qualities. Indeed, through a close scrutiny of the debate (which is accompanied by a thorough reconstruction of the complex manuscript tradition of Medieval Latin “De sensu” commentaries, that have hitherto been largely neglected by scholars) it is demonstrated that Medieval Latin commentators progressively developed a conception according to which sensible qualities can exist on their own in the natural world without being perceptible in act due to the smallness of the matter with which they are united. Such sensible qualities (that are sometimes called “insensibilia propter parvitatem”) can, nevertheless, become perceptible in act by uniting with each other. Thanks to this fundamental development, not only sensible qualities started to be understood mostly in autonomy from their role in perception, but the sensible world became suddenly much more extended than the world that can be perceived by the senses, with the consequence that the confidence in the human ability to cognise its ultimate structure began to crumble

Computational Thematic Analysis of Online Communities

Public health researchers can use thematic analysis to develop human understandings of health topics from the lived experiences discussed in online communities. However, thematic analyses of online communities are difficult to conduct because large data sets amplify the resource intensity and complexity of the common phases: Data Collection, Data Familiarization, Coding, and Theme Review. Researchers can manage this amplification by integrating computational techniques that facilitate scalable interaction with large data sets when they converge with tasks completed during a thematic analysis. My thesis’ research explored barriers to integrating computational techniques into thematic analysis through three research questions: RQ1. Could computational techniques be used within a thematic analysis to assist with the analysis of online communities’ data? RQ2. How might tools be developed to not require programming expertise when integrating computational techniques as part of thematic analysis tasks? RQ3. How does a computational thematic analysis that integrates computational techniques compare with a traditional manual thematic analysis? To address these questions, I used a three-staged approach where I first piloted integrating techniques in a thematic analysis of addiction recovery. I then designed artifacts based on my pilot experience that allow qualitative researchers without programming expertise to integrate techniques. Finally, I deployed my artifacts with public health researchers to explore integration’s impact on their real-world thematic analyses. During my Pilot Stage, I conducted a topic-guided thematic analysis of two Reddit addiction recovery communities. Performing this analysis contributed a demonstration of integrating Latent Dirichlet Allocation topic modelling, a computational technique, to guide my reflexive thematic analysis by sampling interesting places in online discussion data sets for coding. Additionally, I discussed how integration benefited my data familiarization by facilitating the identification of patterns while being limited due to balancing metric optimization with interpretive usefulness when creating topic models. In my Design Stage, I created my Computational Thematic Analysis Workflow and Computational Thematic Analysis Toolkit to build upon my pilot stage experiences and support qualitative researchers. My workflow provides researchers with guidance on planning a reflexive thematic analysis of online communities that integrates computational techniques. Similarly, my toolkit supports qualitative researchers by implementing computational techniques as reusable tools in a graphic user interface that integrates into thematic analyses without requiring programmer expertise. My Deploy Stage investigated the impact of integrating computational techniques by collaborating with public health researchers studying COVID-19 news article comments.The researchers independently performed two inductive thematic analyses, one of which used my Computational Thematic Analysis Toolkit. I then work with the researchers to compare their processes and results. From this comparison, I identified that integrating computational techniques to facilitate multiple data interactions aided the analysis by enabling different interpretations. Additionally, despite both analyses developing a convergent set of themes, computational technique integration had subtle influences leading to divergent analysis processes and coding approaches. The contributions from my three stages have collective implications for qualitative research, human-computer interaction, and public health. My work provides qualitative researchers with demonstrations and tools that support integrating computational techniques to research online communities. My research created a base workflow and toolkit that human-computer interaction practitioners can support and extend to facilitate the integration of computational techniques into qualitative methods. Additionally, I addressed calls in human-computer interaction research to include qualitative perspectives in work that impacts qualitative researchers. Finally, public health researchers can use my guidance and toolkit to manage the amplification of resource intensity and complexity to perform thematic analyses on the lived experiences discussed in online communities. As researchers identify online communities’ perspectives on new and existing health issues, they can de- velop health interventions that impact people represented by online communities

Reflexive Space. A Constructionist Model of the Russian Reflexive Marker

This study examines the structure of the Russian Reflexive Marker ( ся/-сь) and offers a usage-based model building on Construction Grammar and a probabilistic view of linguistic structure. Traditionally, reflexive verbs are accounted for relative to non-reflexive verbs. These accounts assume that linguistic structures emerge as pairs. Furthermore, these accounts assume directionality where the semantics and structure of a reflexive verb can be derived from the non-reflexive verb. However, this directionality does not necessarily hold diachronically. Additionally, the semantics and the patterns associated with a particular reflexive verb are not always shared with the non-reflexive verb. Thus, a model is proposed that can accommodate the traditional pairs as well as for the possible deviations without postulating different systems. A random sample of 2000 instances marked with the Reflexive Marker was extracted from the Russian National Corpus and the sample used in this study contains 819 unique reflexive verbs. This study moves away from the traditional pair account and introduces the concept of Neighbor Verb. A neighbor verb exists for a reflexive verb if they share the same phonological form excluding the Reflexive Marker. It is claimed here that the Reflexive Marker constitutes a system in Russian and the relation between the reflexive and neighbor verbs constitutes a cross-paradigmatic relation. Furthermore, the relation between the reflexive and the neighbor verb is argued to be of symbolic connectivity rather than directionality. Effectively, the relation holding between particular instantiations can vary. The theoretical basis of the present study builds on this assumption. Several new variables are examined in order to systematically model variability of this symbolic connectivity, specifically the degree and strength of connectivity between items. In usage-based models, the lexicon does not constitute an unstructured list of items. Instead, items are assumed to be interconnected in a network. This interconnectedness is defined as Neighborhood in this study. Additionally, each verb carves its own niche within the Neighborhood and this interconnectedness is modeled through rhyme verbs constituting the degree of connectivity of a particular verb in the lexicon. The second component of the degree of connectivity concerns the status of a particular verb relative to its rhyme verbs. The connectivity within the neighborhood of a particular verb varies and this variability is quantified by using the Levenshtein distance. The second property of the lexical network is the strength of connectivity between items. Frequency of use has been one of the primary variables in functional linguistics used to probe this. In addition, a new variable called Constructional Entropy is introduced in this study building on information theory. It is a quantification of the amount of information carried by a particular reflexive verb in one or more argument constructions. The results of the lexical connectivity indicate that the reflexive verbs have statistically greater neighborhood distances than the neighbor verbs. This distributional property can be used to motivate the traditional observation that the reflexive verbs tend to have idiosyncratic properties. A set of argument constructions, generalizations over usage patterns, are proposed for the reflexive verbs in this study. In addition to the variables associated with the lexical connectivity, a number of variables proposed in the literature are explored and used as predictors in the model. The second part of this study introduces the use of a machine learning algorithm called Random Forests. The performance of the model indicates that it is capable, up to a degree, of disambiguating the proposed argument construction types of the Russian Reflexive Marker. Additionally, a global ranking of the predictors used in the model is offered. Finally, most construction grammars assume that argument construction form a network structure. A new method is proposed that establishes generalization over the argument constructions referred to as Linking Construction. In sum, this study explores the structural properties of the Russian Reflexive Marker and a new model is set forth that can accommodate both the traditional pairs and potential deviations from it in a principled manner.Siirretty Doriast

Hmotné fikce: Pohyb mezi obrazy současného umění

Tato magisterská diplomová práce vstupuje do toku pohyblivých obrazů současného umění s cílem nastínit některé obecnější ontologické kvality digitální vizuality a imaginace, jež stále výrazněji uniká ze všech pevných rám(c)ů a rozlévá se do prostoru mezi obrazovkami, kontexty a lidskými i nelidskými aktéry. V návaznosti na postřeh Stevena Shavira, že digitální média přinesla zcela nový režim tvárného technického obrazu, který již nutně nezávisí na žádném předcházejícím "reálném" prostoru, ale spíše produkuje svůj vlastní prostoročas, chápe tento text pohyblivé obrazy jako performativní světo-tvorné fikce s hmatatelným dopadem na skutečnost. Místo častého oplakávání ztracené vazby na jakoukoli předchozí realitu, hloubku či pravdu, vnímá přítomná práce bujení obrazů jako příležitost k přehodnocení samotné dělící čáry mezi realitou a fikcí, jež se nepřestává rozpíjet v našich interakcích s digitálními médii. A také přistoupit k obrazům nikoli jako k pouhým reprezentacím, ale jako k materiálním silám aktivně působícím jak na fyzickou hmotu světa, tak na naše vlastní kognitivní procesy. Aby popsal tuto neredukovatelnou materialitu digitálních obrazů-fikcí, propojuje text na jedné straně Françoise Laruella s Gillesem Deleuzem a Félixem Guattarim - jejichž vybrané filozofické koncepty jí pomáhají...7 Abstract This master's thesis engages moving images of contemporary art in order to sketch out certain ontological qualities of the digital image and imaginary, as they increasingly spill out of all fixed frames and fill the spaces between screens, contexts, and human and non-human agents. Following Steven Shaviro's observation that digital media brought about a completely "new regime" of mutable technical imaging often independent of any preceding "real" space, but instead able to produce its own space-time, this text treats moving images as performative world-shaping fictions with tangible traction on reality. Instead of understanding their growing proliferation in terms of the often-mourned disappeared correspondence to some previous reality, depth or truth, it suggests taking their fluidity as an opportunity to rethink the very divide placed between reality and fiction, as it continues to blur throughout our interactions with digital media, and to treat images not as mere representations but as material forces intensively active in the physical matter of the world, as well as in our own cognition. To articulate this irreducible materiality of digital image-fictions, the thesis weaves together on one hand respective philosophical concepts of François Laruelle and Gillese Deleuze and Félix Guattari -...Film Studies DepartmentKatedra filmových studiíFaculty of ArtsFilozofická fakult

The Political Economy of ‘Empowerability’: A Critical Discourse Analysis of the ‘Gender Equality as Smart Economics’ Policy Agenda

Gender equality initiatives in international development are increasingly dominated by messages about the ‘Smart Economics’ of empowerment and the economic benefits of capitalizing on women’s ‘untapped’ labour power. Which women are represented as most ‘empowerable’ in gender and development discourses, and what structures and processes shape them? This thesis interrogates how women are made visible as development objects by empowerment discourses; to this end, it develops the concept of ‘empowerability’ to critically analyze the discursive terrain of the ‘Smart Economics’ agenda. It uses critical discourse analysis of policy documents, publicity material, and public statements (supplemented by interviews) to examine the World Bank’s 2012 World Development Report, Global Private Sector Leaders Forum, Adolescent Girl Initiative, and Nike Foundation’s Girl Effect campaign. I develop the ‘empowerability’ framework by providing a feminist reading of Foucault’s critique of human capital, in order to map the relationship between bodies, subjectivities, and empowerment interventions. In the empirical chapters that follow, I apply this framework. With reference to the 2012 World Development Report, I demonstrate that empowerment discourses rely on highly exclusionary categories in order to identify ‘empowerable’ subjects, which reproduce essentialist tropes about maternal altruism as an engine for economic growth. They furthermore represent women as altruistic but irrational, non-market actors who require responsibilization through job and life skills training. Drawing on analysis of Bank public-private partnerships, my analysis shows that the narrative of empowerment that emerges from ‘Smart Economics’ literature works to legitimize corporate authority in the development process and position corporations as the actors best place to catalyze the empowerment process. The ‘empowerability’ framework shows that the dominant mode of empowerment deployed in ‘Smart Economics’ policy engenders a development discourse that is highly exclusionary and produces a restrictive neoliberal conception of the bodies and subjectivities who ‘matter’ for development