167,408 research outputs found
The Orion constellation as an installation - An innovative three dimensional teaching and learning environment
Visualising the three dimensional distribution of stars within a
constellation is highly challenging for both students and educators, but when
carried out in an interactive collaborative way it can create an ideal
environment to explore common misconceptions about size and scale within
astronomy. We present how the common table top activities based upon the Orion
constellation miss out on this opportunity. Transformed into a walk-through
Orion installation that includes the position of our Solar system, it allows
the students to fully immerse themselves within the model and experience
parallax. It enables participants to explore within the installation many other
aspects of astronomy relating to sky culture, stellar evolution, and stellar
timescales establishing an innovative learning and teaching environment.Comment: 2 pages, submitted to The Physics Teacher - Colum
Picbreeder: A Case Study in Collaborative Evolutionary Exploration of Design Space
For domains in which fitness is subjective or difficult to express formally, interactive evolutionary computation (IEC) is a natural choice. It is possible that a collaborative process combining feedback from multiple users can improve the quality and quantity of generated artifacts. Picbreeder, a large-scale online experiment in collaborative interactive evolution (CIE), explores this potential. Picbreeder is an online community in which users can evolve and share images, and most importantly, continue evolving others\u27 images. Through this process of branching from other images, and through continually increasing image complexity made possible by the underlying neuroevolution of augmenting topologies (NEAT) algorithm, evolved images proliferate unlike in any other current IEC system. This paper discusses not only the strengths of the Picbreeder approach, but its challenges and shortcomings as well, in the hope that lessons learned will inform the design of future CIE systems
Managing evolution and change in web-based teaching and learning environments
The state of the art in information technology and educational technologies is evolving constantly.
Courses taught are subject to constant change from organisational and subject-specific reasons. Evolution
and change affect educators and developers of computer-based teaching and learning environments alike â
both often being unprepared to respond effectively. A large number of educational systems are designed
and developed without change and evolution in mind. We will present our approach to the design and
maintenance of these systems in rapidly evolving environments and illustrate the consequences of evolution
and change for these systems and for the educators and developers responsible for their implementation and
deployment. We discuss various factors of change, illustrated by a Web-based virtual course, with the
objective of raising an awareness of this issue of evolution and change in computer-supported teaching and
learning environments. This discussion leads towards the establishment of a development and management
framework for teaching and learning systems
Virtual reality in the service of user participation in architecture
The issue of user participation in the processes of building and urban design is enjoying renewed attention following its relative neglect over the last 20 years due, in large measure, to significant advances in emerging information technologies, particularly multimedia, virtual reality and internet technologies. This paper re-established the theoretical framework for participatory design evolved in the late sixties and early seventies as part of the movement towards a more explicit design methodology and attempts an explanation of why the concept failed to gain commitment from the architectural and urban design professionals. The paper then gives an account of two significant developments in the evolution of the application of information technologies with which the authors have been engaged. These are: i. a responsive and interactive interface to wholly immersive and realistic virtual reality representations of proposed buildings and urban neighbourhoods. ii. an intuitive and platform-independent VR modelling environment allowing collaborative evolution of the scheme from within the virtual world. The impact of these IT developments is demonstrated in the context of the design of a leisure facility for a community of users with physical impairment
Collaborative participatory research as a learning process: the case of CIP and CARE in Peru
Participatory research (PR) has been analyzed and documented from different points of
view, but particularly taking into consideration the benefits that this process generates
for farmers. Studies of the benefits of PR for other actors such as field staff, researchers
and organizations have been limited, with organizational learning receiving the least
attention. This paper analyzes the interaction between the International Potato Center
(CIP) and CARE in Peru and makes the case that PR can also contribute to creating a
collaborative learning environment that generates important lessons for the individuals
and organizations involved. The paper describes the evolution of the collaborative
environment of these two institutions for more than a decade. Three interactive learning
periods are presented, namely the âinformation transfer periodâ (1993 â1996) the
âaction-learning periodâ (1997-2002), and the âsocial learning periodâ (on-going).
Several lessons from each period, as well as changes in institutional contexts and
perceptions, are described. The CIP-CARE case shows that research and developmentoriented
organizations can interact fruitfully using PR as a mechanism to promote
learning, as well as flexibility in interaction and innovativeness, and that a process of
osmosis of information occurs between groups that use PR in a specific case to other
groups within the organizations, influencing behavior. However, the paper also
indicates that institutional learning should be promoted more specifically in order to
extract guidelines from the lessons, which can influence the way organizations plan and
implement their projects in a constantly changing environment
The Case for a Mixed-Initiative Collaborative Neuroevolution Approach
It is clear that the current attempts at using algorithms to create
artificial neural networks have had mixed success at best when it comes to
creating large networks and/or complex behavior. This should not be unexpected,
as creating an artificial brain is essentially a design problem. Human design
ingenuity still surpasses computational design for most tasks in most domains,
including architecture, game design, and authoring literary fiction. This leads
us to ask which the best way is to combine human and machine design capacities
when it comes to designing artificial brains. Both of them have their strengths
and weaknesses; for example, humans are much too slow to manually specify
thousands of neurons, let alone the billions of neurons that go into a human
brain, but on the other hand they can rely on a vast repository of common-sense
understanding and design heuristics that can help them perform a much better
guided search in design space than an algorithm. Therefore, in this paper we
argue for a mixed-initiative approach for collaborative online brain building
and present first results towards this goal.Comment: Presented at WebAL-1: Workshop on Artificial Life and the Web 2014
(arXiv:1406.2507
Genetic Programming for Smart Phone Personalisation
Personalisation in smart phones requires adaptability to dynamic context
based on user mobility, application usage and sensor inputs. Current
personalisation approaches, which rely on static logic that is developed a
priori, do not provide sufficient adaptability to dynamic and unexpected
context. This paper proposes genetic programming (GP), which can evolve program
logic in realtime, as an online learning method to deal with the highly dynamic
context in smart phone personalisation. We introduce the concept of
collaborative smart phone personalisation through the GP Island Model, in order
to exploit shared context among co-located phone users and reduce convergence
time. We implement these concepts on real smartphones to demonstrate the
capability of personalisation through GP and to explore the benefits of the
Island Model. Our empirical evaluations on two example applications confirm
that the Island Model can reduce convergence time by up to two-thirds over
standalone GP personalisation.Comment: 43 pages, 11 figure
Emergent Communication in Interactive Sketch Question Answering
Vision-based emergent communication (EC) aims to learn to communicate through
sketches and demystify the evolution of human communication. Ironically,
previous works neglect multi-round interaction, which is indispensable in human
communication. To fill this gap, we first introduce a novel Interactive Sketch
Question Answering (ISQA) task, where two collaborative players are interacting
through sketches to answer a question about an image in a multi-round manner.
To accomplish this task, we design a new and efficient interactive EC system,
which can achieve an effective balance among three evaluation factors,
including the question answering accuracy, drawing complexity and human
interpretability. Our experimental results including human evaluation
demonstrate that multi-round interactive mechanism facilitates targeted and
efficient communication between intelligent agents with decent human
interpretability.Comment: Accepted by NeurIPS 202
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