4,860 research outputs found

    Aesthetics and Predictive Processing: Grounds and Prospects of a Fruitful Encounter

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    In the last few years, a remarkable convergence of interests and results has emerged between scholars interested in the arts and aesthetics from a variety of perspectives and cognitive scientists studying the mind and brain within the predictive processing (PP) framework. This convergence has so far proven fruitful for both sides: while PP is increasingly adopted as a framework for understanding aesthetic phenomena, the arts and aesthetics, examined under the lens of PP, are starting to be seen as important windows into our mental functioning. The result is a vast and fast-growing research programme that promises to deliver important insights into our aesthetic encounters as well as a wide range of psychological phenomena of general interest. Here, we present this developing research programme, describing its grounds and highlighting its prospects. We start by clarifying how the study of the arts and aesthetics encounters the PP picture of mental functioning (§1). We then go on to outline the prospects of this encounter for the fields involved: philosophy and history of art (§2), psychology of aesthetics and neuroaesthetics (§3) and psychology and neuroscience more generally (§4). The upshot is an ambitious but well-defined framework within which aesthetics and cognitive science can partner up to illuminate crucial aspects of the human mind. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Art, aesthetics and predictive processing: theoretical and empirical perspectives’

    Personal Identity as a Hypothesis

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    I propose that the notions of personhood and personal identity are most accurately understood as merely negative hypotheses in the brains of us humans. Understanding the notions of personhood and personal identity in this way will also explain why the disagreements about the nature of personhood and personal identity have been intractable so far in the philosophical literature. And it also predicts that settling these disagreements through the analytic dialectic is unlikely

    An Integrated Deep Learning Model with Genetic Algorithm (GA) for Optimal Syngas Production Using Dry Reforming of Methane (DRM)

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    The dry reforming of methane is a chemical process transforming two primary sources of greenhouse gases, i.e., carbon dioxide (CO2) and methane (CH4), into syngas, a versatile precursor in the industry, which has gained significant attention over the past decades. Nonetheless, commercial development of this eco-friendly process faces barriers such as catalyst deactivation and high energy demand. Artificial intelligence (AI), specifically deep learning, accelerates the development of this process by providing advanced analytics. However, deep learning requires substantial training samples and collecting data on a bench scale encounters cost and physical constraints. This study fills this research gap by employing a pretraining approach, which is invaluable for small datasets. It introduces a software sensor for regression (SSR) powered by deep learning to estimate the quality parameters of the process. Moreover, combining the SSR with a genetic algorithm offers a prescriptive analysis, suggesting optimal thermodynamic parameters to improve the process efficiency

    Right Place, Right Time:Proactive Multi-Robot Task Allocation Under Spatiotemporal Uncertainty

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    For many multi-robot problems, tasks are announced during execution, where task announcement times and locations are uncertain. To synthesise multi-robot behaviour that is robust to early announcements and unexpected delays, multi-robot task allocation methods must explicitly model the stochastic processes that govern task announcement. In this paper, we model task announcement using continuous-time Markov chains which predict when and where tasks will be announced. We then present a task allocation framework which uses the continuous-time Markov chains to allocate tasks proactively, such that robots are near or at the task location upon its announcement. Our method seeks to minimise the expected total waiting duration for each task, i.e. the duration between task announcement and a robot beginning to service the task. Our framework can be applied to any multi-robot task allocation problem where robots complete spatiotemporal tasks which are announced stochastically. We demonstrate the efficacy of our approach in simulation, where we outperform baselines which do not allocate tasks proactively, or do not fully exploit our task announcement models

    Climate Change and Critical Agrarian Studies

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    Climate change is perhaps the greatest threat to humanity today and plays out as a cruel engine of myriad forms of injustice, violence and destruction. The effects of climate change from human-made emissions of greenhouse gases are devastating and accelerating; yet are uncertain and uneven both in terms of geography and socio-economic impacts. Emerging from the dynamics of capitalism since the industrial revolution — as well as industrialisation under state-led socialism — the consequences of climate change are especially profound for the countryside and its inhabitants. The book interrogates the narratives and strategies that frame climate change and examines the institutionalised responses in agrarian settings, highlighting what exclusions and inclusions result. It explores how different people — in relation to class and other co-constituted axes of social difference such as gender, race, ethnicity, age and occupation — are affected by climate change, as well as the climate adaptation and mitigation responses being implemented in rural areas. The book in turn explores how climate change – and the responses to it - affect processes of social differentiation, trajectories of accumulation and in turn agrarian politics. Finally, the book examines what strategies are required to confront climate change, and the underlying political-economic dynamics that cause it, reflecting on what this means for agrarian struggles across the world. The 26 chapters in this volume explore how the relationship between capitalism and climate change plays out in the rural world and, in particular, the way agrarian struggles connect with the huge challenge of climate change. Through a huge variety of case studies alongside more conceptual chapters, the book makes the often-missing connection between climate change and critical agrarian studies. The book argues that making the connection between climate and agrarian justice is crucial

    Cultures of Citizenship in the Twenty-First Century: Literary and Cultural Perspectives on a Legal Concept

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    In the early twenty-first century, the concept of citizenship is more contested than ever. As refugees set out to cross the Mediterranean, European nation-states refer to "cultural integrity" and "immigrant inassimilability," revealing citizenship to be much more than a legal concept. The contributors to this volume take an interdisciplinary approach to considering how cultures of citizenship are being envisioned and interrogated in literary and cultural (con)texts. Through this framework, they attend to the tension between the citizen and its spectral others - a tension determined by how a country defines difference at a given moment

    Sociotechnical Imaginaries, the Future and the Third Offset Strategy

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    A new global media order? : debates and policies on media and mass communication at UNESCO, 1960 to 1980

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    Defence date: 24 June 2019Examining Board: Professor Federico Romero, European University Institute (Supervisor); Professor Corinna Unger, European University Institute (Second Reader); Professor Iris Schröder, UniversitĂ€t Erfurt (External Advisor); Professor Sandrine Kott, UniversitĂ© de GenĂšveThe 1970s, a UNESCO report claimed, would be the “communication decade”. UNESCO had started research on new means of mass communication for development purposes in the 1960s. In the 1970s, the issue evolved into a debate on the so-called “New World Information and Communication Order” (NWICO) and the democratisation of global media. It led UNESCO itself into a major crisis in the 1980s. My project traces a dual trajectory that shaped this global debate on transnational media. The first follows communications from being seen as a tool and goal of national development in the 1960s, to communications seen as catalyst for recalibrated international political, cultural and economic relations. The second relates to the recurrent attempts, and eventual failure, of various actors to engage UNESCO as a platform to promote a new global order. I take UNESCO as an observation post to study national ambitions intersecting with internationalist claims to universality, changing understandings of the role of media in development and international affairs, and competing visions of world order. Looking at the modes of this debate, the project also sheds light on the evolving practices of internationalism. Located in the field of a new international history, this study relates to the recent rediscovery of the “new order”-discourses of the 1970s as well as to the increasingly diversified literature on internationalism. With its focus on international communications and attempts at regulating them, it also contributes to an international media history in the late twentieth century. The emphasis on the role of international organisations as well as on voices from the Global South will make contributions to our understanding of the historic macro-processes of decolonisation, globalisation and the Cold War
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