190 research outputs found

    Artificial Collective Intelligence Engineering: a Survey of Concepts and Perspectives

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    Collectiveness is an important property of many systems--both natural and artificial. By exploiting a large number of individuals, it is often possible to produce effects that go far beyond the capabilities of the smartest individuals, or even to produce intelligent collective behaviour out of not-so-intelligent individuals. Indeed, collective intelligence, namely the capability of a group to act collectively in a seemingly intelligent way, is increasingly often a design goal of engineered computational systems--motivated by recent techno-scientific trends like the Internet of Things, swarm robotics, and crowd computing, just to name a few. For several years, the collective intelligence observed in natural and artificial systems has served as a source of inspiration for engineering ideas, models, and mechanisms. Today, artificial and computational collective intelligence are recognised research topics, spanning various techniques, kinds of target systems, and application domains. However, there is still a lot of fragmentation in the research panorama of the topic within computer science, and the verticality of most communities and contributions makes it difficult to extract the core underlying ideas and frames of reference. The challenge is to identify, place in a common structure, and ultimately connect the different areas and methods addressing intelligent collectives. To address this gap, this paper considers a set of broad scoping questions providing a map of collective intelligence research, mostly by the point of view of computer scientists and engineers. Accordingly, it covers preliminary notions, fundamental concepts, and the main research perspectives, identifying opportunities and challenges for researchers on artificial and computational collective intelligence engineering.Comment: This is the author's final version of the article, accepted for publication in the Artificial Life journal. Data: 34 pages, 2 figure

    Modeling and Simulation in Engineering

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    The Special Issue Modeling and Simulation in Engineering, belonging to the section Engineering Mathematics of the Journal Mathematics, publishes original research papers dealing with advanced simulation and modeling techniques. The present book, “Modeling and Simulation in Engineering I, 2022”, contains 14 papers accepted after peer review by recognized specialists in the field. The papers address different topics occurring in engineering, such as ferrofluid transport in magnetic fields, non-fractal signal analysis, fractional derivatives, applications of swarm algorithms and evolutionary algorithms (genetic algorithms), inverse methods for inverse problems, numerical analysis of heat and mass transfer, numerical solutions for fractional differential equations, Kriging modelling, theory of the modelling methodology, and artificial neural networks for fault diagnosis in electric circuits. It is hoped that the papers selected for this issue will attract a significant audience in the scientific community and will further stimulate research involving modelling and simulation in mathematical physics and in engineering

    Acting like a state: visual analysis of Islamic State’s (staged) performances of modern stateness

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    The ‘Islamicness’ (or not) of so-called ‘Islamic State’ (IS) has been controversial and come under intense scrutiny. This thesis investigates the under-studied other side of the equation: the ‘stateness of Islamic State’. Specifically, it enquires IS’s ‘performance of modern stateness’ projected in its official videos. Two core questions are addressed: How did IS project ‘performances of modern stateness’ in its official videos? What were the purposes behind those ‘performances’? The definition clause of the 1933 Montevideo Convention on Rights and Duties of States specifies that “[t]he political entity claiming to be a State must have (a) a permanent population; (b) a defined territory; (c) a government; and (d) the capacity to enter into relations with other states.” Following this framework and utilising qualitative data analysis software MAXQDA, the thesis provides detailed examination of IS’s portrayal of its population, territory, governance, and foreign policy in its videos. It establishes that IS had a vision to implement a 7th century ideology, but via 21st century means: its videos are replete with performances of specifically modern stateness. The thesis shows that IS performed like a State in its videos, not with the intention of seeking international recognition, but with the objective of giving local populations the impression that their needs as subjects were being met across the Caliphate while attracting immigrants from all over the world to come and help further the state project. This work contributes to a growing body of research on IS’s visual propaganda and its state-building project through detailed analysis of a large tranche of official IS videos, and will also prove beneficial in future research on de-facto Jihadi states and deradicalisation

    Tourism and heritage in the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone

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    Tourism and Heritage in the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone (CEZ) uses an ethnographic lens to explore the dissonances associated with the commodification of Chornobyl's heritage. The book considers the role of the guides as experience brokers, focusing on the synergy between tourists and guides in the performance of heritage interpretation. Banaszkiewicz proposes to perceive tour guides as important actors in the bottom-up construction of heritage discourse contributing to more inclusive and participatory approach to heritage management. Demonstrating that the CEZ has been going through a dynamic transformation into a mass tourism attraction, the book offers a critical reflection on heritagisation as a meaning-making process in which the resources of the past are interpreted, negotiated, and recognised as a valuable legacy. Applying the concepts of dissonant heritage to describe the heterogeneous character of the CEZ, the book broadens the interpretative scope of dark tourism which takes on a new dimension in the context of the war in Ukraine. Tourism and Heritage in the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone argues that post-disaster sites such as Chornobyl can teach us a great deal about the importance of preserving cultural and natural heritage for future generations. The book will be of interest to academics and students who are engaged in the study of heritage, tourism, memory, disasters and Eastern Europe

    Representations of Iran(ians) in Mainstream European News Sites

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    What role do media play in promoting or impeding intercultural understanding and international relations in times of conflict? With this question in mind, Leyla's research focuses on Iran's coverage in three mainstream European media during a period marked by tensions at home and abroad. Adopting Critical Discourse Analysis as theory and method, the study examines articles published on selected British, French, and German news sites juxtaposed with their attached comments, with the aim of contributing to scholarly work on cross-national comparative examination of foreign news coverage and 'top-down' Othering in journalistic texts in addition to incorporating an investigation into non-institutional discourse and 'bottom-up' Self/Other representations in comment sections.Welche Rolle spielen die Medien bei der Förderung oder Behinderung der interkulturellen VerstĂ€ndigung und internationalen Beziehungen in Konfliktzeiten? Vor diesem Hintergrund konzentriert sich Leylas Forschung auf die Berichterstattung ĂŒber den Iran in drei europĂ€ischen Mainstream-Medien in einer Zeit, die von Spannungen im In- und Ausland geprĂ€gt war. Die Studie ĂŒbernimmt Kritische Diskursanalyse als Theorie und Praxis und untersucht Artikel, die auf ausgewĂ€hlten britischen, französischen und deutschen Nachrichtenseiten veröffentlicht wurden, und stellt sie den beigefĂŒgten Kommentaren gegenĂŒber, mit dem Ziel, einen Beitrag zu wissenschaftlichen Arbeiten zur grenzĂŒberschreitenden vergleichenden Untersuchung auslĂ€ndischer Berichterstattung zu leisten und ‚top-down‘ Othering in journalistischen Texten, zusĂ€tzlich zur Aufnahme einer Untersuchung des nicht-institutionellen Diskurses und ‚bottom-up‘-Selbst-/Andere-Darstellungen in Kommentarsektionen

    Argumentation strategies in an online male separatist community

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    This thesis explores the legitimation of ‘male separatist’ ideology in an online community known as ‘Men Going Their Own Way’ (MGTOW). I take a discourse-historical approach to critical discourse studies (Reisigl and Wodak, 2016), as adapted for social media data (Unger et al., 2021), in order to examine the argumentation strategies and topoi used by members of this community to persuade others to abstain from relationships with women and reject feminism. The dataset comprises fifty threads totalling 46,000 words from the major MGTOW community hosted on Reddit. As well as contributing to a growing body of research on the manosphere, this thesis demonstrates how the DHA and topoi can be applied to social media discussion forums, where argumentation may be collaborative or expressed multimodally. Findings indicate that women were constructed as a homogenous group, meaning men must separate from all women. Arguments in favour of separatism typically relied on a topos of freedom in order to suggest that separating from women will increase men’s independence. This was often combined with a topos of finance, where increased personal freedoms included the freedom to decide how one’s money is spent and freedom from financial obligations to others. Relatedly, relationships were framed in economic terms and as a series of financial transactions, discussed in terms of the costs (to men) and benefits (to women). Furthermore, arguments against marriage used the topos of threat to construct women as a danger to men’s physical and emotional wellbeing, for example by arguing that married men risk having their lives ‘ruined’ by false claims of abuse. Arguments in opposition to feminism employed the topos of justice in order to highlight the purported the unequal treatment of men by feminists. Equality appeared to be equivalent to sameness and treating different genders in exactly the same manner, enabling commenters to delegitimise feminist activism targeting women as evidence of male oppression

    Interactive Sonic Environments: Sonic artwork via gameplay experience

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    The purpose of this study is to investigate the use of video-game technology in the design and implementation of interactive sonic centric artworks, the purpose of which is to create and contribute to the discourse and understanding of its effectiveness in electro-acoustic composition highlighting the creative process. Key research questions include: How can the language of electro-acoustic music be placed in a new framework derived from videogame aesthetics and technology? What new creative processes need to be considered when using this medium? Moreover, what aspects of 'play' should be considered when designing the systems? The findings of this study assert that composers and sonic art practitioners need little or no coding knowledge to create exciting applications and the myriad of options available to the composer when using video-game technology is limited only by imagination. Through a cyclic process of planning, building, testing and playing these applications the project revealed advantages and unique sonic opportunities in comparison to other sonic art installations. A portfolio of selected original compositions, both fixed and open are presented by the author to complement this study. The commentary serves to place the work in context with other practitioners in the field and to provide compositional approaches that have been taken
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