17 research outputs found
Computational understanding and manipulation of symmetries
Attila Egri-Nagy, Chrystopher L Nehaniv, "Computational Understanding and Manipulation of Symmetries", in Chalup S. K., Blair A. D., Randall M. (Eds) Artificial Life and Computational Intelligence ACALCI, First Australasian Conference, Newcastle, NSW, Australia, February 5-7 2015, Proceedings, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Vol. 8955, 2015 © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2015 Final, published version of this paper is available online via doi: 10.1007/978-3-319-14803-8_2For natural and artificial systems with some symmetry structure, computational understanding and manipulation can be achieved without learning by exploiting the algebraic structure. This algebraic coordinatization is based on a hierarchical (de)composition method. Here we describe this method and apply it to permutation puzzles. Coordinatization yields a structural understanding, not just solutions for the puzzles. In the case of the Rubik’s Cubes, different solving strategies correspond to different decompositions
Embodied Cognitive Science of Music. Modeling Experience and Behavior in Musical Contexts
Recently, the role of corporeal interaction has gained wide recognition within cognitive musicology. This thesis reviews evidence from different directions in music research supporting the importance of body-based processes for the understanding of music-related experience and behaviour. Stressing the synthetic focus of cognitive science, cognitive science of music is discussed as a modeling approach that takes these processes into account and may theoretically be embedded within the theory of dynamic systems. In particular, arguments are presented for the use of robotic devices as tools for the investigation of processes underlying human music-related capabilities (musical robotics)
Developmental Bootstrapping of AIs
Although some current AIs surpass human abilities in closed artificial worlds
such as board games, their abilities in the real world are limited. They make
strange mistakes and do not notice them. They cannot be instructed easily, fail
to use common sense, and lack curiosity. They do not make good collaborators.
Mainstream approaches for creating AIs are the traditional manually-constructed
symbolic AI approach and generative and deep learning AI approaches including
large language models (LLMs). These systems are not well suited for creating
robust and trustworthy AIs. Although it is outside of the mainstream, the
developmental bootstrapping approach has more potential. In developmental
bootstrapping, AIs develop competences like human children do. They start with
innate competences. They interact with the environment and learn from their
interactions. They incrementally extend their innate competences with
self-developed competences. They interact and learn from people and establish
perceptual, cognitive, and common grounding. They acquire the competences they
need through bootstrapping. However, developmental robotics has not yet
produced AIs with robust adult-level competences. Projects have typically
stopped at the Toddler Barrier corresponding to human infant development at
about two years of age, before their speech is fluent. They also do not bridge
the Reading Barrier, to skillfully and skeptically draw on the socially
developed information resources that power current LLMs. The next competences
in human cognitive development involve intrinsic motivation, imitation
learning, imagination, coordination, and communication. This position paper
lays out the logic, prospects, gaps, and challenges for extending the practice
of developmental bootstrapping to acquire further competences and create
robust, resilient, and human-compatible AIs.Comment: 102 pages, 29 figure
Tartu Ülikooli toimetised. Tööd semiootika alalt. 1964-1992. 0259-4668
http://www.ester.ee/record=b1331700*es
The social role of AI advisers
Artificial Intelligence (AI) profoundly affects how people communicate, work, and perceive the world. While autonomous AI systems are the focal point in societal and academic discussions, advisory AI systems, which influence human decisions but don't undertake independent actions, often remain unexplored. Examples range from automated purchase recommendations to medical diagnoses. This dissertation seeks to understand what advisory AI systems truly are. Are they capable of autonomous, human-like action? Or can they be reduced to inert tools? And what happens when advisory AI systems are closely linked with human perception, especially through Augmented Reality and sensory augmentation? Does their ontological status change? This dissertation concludes that, regardless of their implementation, advisory AI systems occupy an ontological status between tools and humans. They are more than just tools but less than humans.Künstliche Intelligenz (KI) beeinflusst massiv, wie Menschen kommunizieren, arbeiten und die Welt wahrnehmen. Während autonome KI-Systeme gesellschaftlich und akademisch im Fokus stehen, bleiben beratende KI-Systeme, die menschliche Entscheidungen beeinflussen, aber keine eigenständige Handlung übernehmen, oft unerforscht. Beispiele reichen von automatisierten Kaufempfehlungen bis hin zu medizinischen Diagnosen. Die vorliegende Dissertation untersucht, was beratenden KI-Systeme wirklich sind. Sind sie zu eigenständiger, menschenähnlicher Handlung fähig? Oder lassen sie sich auf handlungsunfähige Werkzeuge reduzieren? Und was passiert, wenn beratende KI Systeme eng mit der menschlichen Wahrnehmung gekoppelt werden, insbesondere durch Augmented Reality und sensorische Augmentation? Verändert sich ihr ontologischer Status? Die vorliegende Dissertation schlussfolgert, dass unabhängig von Ihrer Implementation beratende KI-Systeme einen ontologischen Status zwischen Werkzeugen und Menschen einnehmen. Sie sind also mehr als nur Werkzeuge, aber weniger als Menschen.
Louis Longin ist wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter am Lehrstuhl für Philosophie des Geistes an der Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, wo er 2023 mit der vorliegenden Dissertation promoviert wurde. Seinem Interesse gilt der wachsende Einfluss der Künstlichen Intelligenz auf den menschlichen Nutzer, besonders in den Bereichen der sozialen Interaktion, Ethik und sensorischen Augmentation
Empirical modelling for participative business process reengineering
The purpose of this thesis is to introduce a new broad approach to computing - Empirical Modelling
(EM) - and to propose a way of applying this approach for system development so as to avoid the limitations
of conventional approaches and integrate system development with business process reengineering
(BPR). Based on the concepts of agency, observable and dependency, EM is an experiencebased
approach to modelling with computers in which the modeller interacts with an artefact through
continuous observations and experiments. It is a natural way of working for business process modelling
because the modeller is involved in, and takes account of, the real world context. It is also adaptable to
a rapidly changing environment as the computer-based models serve as creative artefacts with which
the modeller can interact in a situated and open-ended manner.
This thesis motivates and illustrates the EM approach to new concepts of participative BPR and
participative process modelling. That is, different groups of people, with different perceptions, competencies
and requirements, can be involved during the process of system development and BPR, rather
than just being involved at an early stage. This concept aims to address the well-known high failure rate
of BPR. A framework SPORE (situated process of requirements engineering), which has been proposed
to guide the process of cultivating requirements in a situated manner, is extended to participative
BPR (i.e. to support many users in a distributed environment). Two levels of modelling are proposed for
the integration of contextual understanding and system development. A comparison between EM and
object-orientation is also provided to give insight into how EM differs from current methodologies and to
point out the potential of EM in system development and BPR. The ISMs (interactive situation models),
built using the principles and tools of EM, are used to form artefacts during the modelling process. A
warehouse and logistics management system is taken as an illustrative case study for applying this
framework
Producing Humans: An Anthropology of Social and Cognitive Robots
In this thesis, I ask how the human is produced in robotics research,
focussing specifically on the work that is done to create humanoid robots
that exhibit social and intelligent behaviour. Robots, like other technologies,
are often presented as the result of the systematic application of progressive
scientific knowledge over time, and thus emerging as inevitable, ahistorical,
and a-territorial entities. However, as we shall see, the robot’s existence as a
recognisable whole, as well as the various ways in which researchers
attempt to shape, animate and imbue it ‘human-like’ qualities, is in fact the
result of specific events, in specific geographical and cultural locations.
Through an ethnographic investigation of the sites in which robotics
research takes place, I describe and analyse how, in robotics research,
robotics researchers are reflecting, reproducing, producing, and sometimes
challenging, core assumptions about what it means to be human.
The dissertation draws on three and a half years of ethnographic
research across a number of robotics research laboratories and field sites in
Ireland, the United Kingdom, and the United States between April 2016 and
December 2019. It also includes an investigation of the sites where robotics
knowledge is disseminated and evaluated, such as conferences and field test
sites. Through a combination of participant and non-participant observation,
interviews, and textual analysis, I explore how the robot reveals
assumptions about the human, revealing both individual, localised
engineering cultures, as well as wider Euro-American imaginaries.
In this dissertation, I build on existing ethnographies of laboratory
work and technological production, which investigate scientific laboratories
as cultural sites. I also contribute to contemporary debates in anthropology
and posthumanist theory, which question the foundational assumptions of
humanism. While contemporary scholarship has attempted to move beyond
the nature/culture binary by articulating a multitude of reconfigurations and
boundary negotiations, I argue that this is done by neglecting the body.
In order to address this gap, I bring together two complementary
conceptual devices. First, I employ the embodiment philosophy of Maurice
Merleau-Ponty (2012; 1968) particularly his emphasis on the body as a site
of knowing the world. Second, I use the core anthropological concept of the
‘fetish’ as elaborated by William Pietz (1985). By interrogating the robot as
‘fetish’, I elaborate how the robot is simultaneously a territorialised,
historicised, personalised, and reified object. This facilitates an exploration
of the disparate, and often contradictory nature, of the relations between
people and objects.
In my thesis, I find many boundary reconfigurations and dissolutions
between the human and the robot. However, deviating from the relational
ontology dominant in the anthropology of technology, I discover an
enduring asymmetry between the human and the robot, with the living body
emerging as a durable category that cannot be reasoned away. Thus, my
thesis questions how the existing literature might obscure important
questions about the category of the human by focusing disproportionately
on the blurring and/or blurred nature of human/non-human boundaries.
Ultimately, I argue for a collaborative and emergent configuration of the
human, and its relationship with the world, that is at once both relational
and embodied.
This dissertation is structured as follows. An initial introductory
chapter is followed by a chapter documenting the literature review and
conceptual framework. This is followed by four chapters that correspond to
the four aspects of the fetish in Pietz’s model: Historicisation,
Territorialisation, Reification and Personalisation. These chapters alternate
between scholarly sources and ethnographic data. In Historicisation, using
existing scholarship, I trace the history of the robot object, including the
continuities and discontinuities that led to its creation, as well as the futures
that are implicated in its identity. This is followed by the Territorialisation
chapter, in which ethnographic data is used to interrogate the robot’s
materiality, as well as the spaces in which it is built, modified, and tested.
The next chapter, Reification, considers the robot as a valuable object
according to institutions and the productive and ideological systems of
Euro-American imaginaries. This chapter integrates ethnographic detail
with existing scholarship to focus on contrasts between the dominant image
of imminent super-human intelligence and the human interventions and
social relationships necessary to produce the illusion of robot autonomy.
Finally, the chapter Personalisation brings ethnographic attention to the
intensely personal way that the robot-as-fetish is experienced in an
encounter with an embodied person, understood through the lens of
Merleau-Ponty’s embodiment philosophy. In the final chapter, I draw
together the various strands to articulate how understanding the robot as a
fetish, underscored by Merleau-Ponty’s embodiment phenomenology, can
provide useful resources for developing an alternative understanding of the
human in anthropology without dissolving it all together
User-Interface Metaphors in Theory and Practice
User-interface metaphors are a widely used, but poorly understood, technique employed
in almost all graphical user-interfaces. Although considerable research has gone into the
applications of the technique, little work has been performed on the analysis of the concept
itself. In this thesis, user-interface metaphor is defined and classified in considerable detail so
as to make it more understandable to those who use it. The theoretical approach is supported
by practical exploration of the concepts developed