CTRL SHIFT

CTRL SHIFT makes a case for design under contemporary computation. The abstractions of reading, writing, metaphors, mythology, code, cryptography, interfaces, and other such symbolic languages are leveraged as tools for understanding. Alternative modes of knowledge become access points through which users can subvert the control structures of software. By challenging the singular expertise of programmers, the work presented within advocates for the examination of internalized beliefs, the redistribution of networked power, and the collective sabotage of computational authority

Mind out of matter: topics in the physical foundations of consciousness and cognition

This dissertation begins with an exploration of a brand of dual aspect monism and some problems deriving from the distinction between a first person and third person point of view. I continue with an outline of one way in which the conscious experience of the subject might arise from organisational properties of a material substrate. With this picture to hand, I first examine theoretical features at the level of brain organisation which may be required to support conscious experience and then discuss what bearing some actual attributes of biological brains might have on such experience. I conclude the first half of the dissertation with comments on information processing and with artificial neural networks meant to display simple varieties of the organisational features initially described abstractly.While the first half begins with a view of conscious experience and infers downwards in the organisational hierarchy to explore neural features suggested by the view, attention in the second half shifts towards analysing low level dynamical features of material substrates and inferring upwards to possible effects on experience. There is particular emphasis on clarifying the role of chaotic dynamics, and I discuss relationships between levels of description of a cognitive system and comment on issues of complexity, computability, and predictability before returning to the topic of representation which earlier played a central part in isolating features of brain organisation which may underlie conscious experience.Some themes run throughout the dissertation, including an emphasis on understanding experience from both the first person and the third person points of view and on analysing the latter at different levels of description. Other themes include a sustained effort to integrate the picture offered here with existing empirical data and to situate current problems in the philosophy of mind within the new framework, as well as an appeal to tools from mathematics, computer science, and cognitive science to complement the more standard philosophical repertoire

Human reasoning and cognitive science

In the late summer of 1998, the authors, a cognitive scientist and a logician, started talking about the relevance of modern mathematical logic to the study of human reasoning, and we have been talking ever since. This book is an interim report of that conversation. It argues that results such as those on the Wason selection task, purportedly showing the irrelevance of formal logic to actual human reasoning, have been widely misinterpreted, mainly because the picture of logic current in psychology and cognitive science is completely mistaken. We aim to give the reader a more accurate picture of mathematical logic and, in doing so, hope to show that logic, properly conceived, is still a very helpful tool in cognitive science. The main thrust of the book is therefore constructive. We give a number of examples in which logical theorizing helps in understanding and modeling observed behavior in reasoning tasks, deviations of that behavior in a psychiatric disorder (autism), and even the roots of that behavior in the evolution of the brain

Cognitive finance: Behavioural strategies of spending, saving, and investing.

Research in economics is increasingly open to empirical results. The advances in behavioural approaches are expanded here by applying cognitive methods to financial questions. The field of "cognitive finance" is approached by the exploration of decision strategies in the financial settings of spending, saving, and investing. Individual strategies in these different domains are searched for and elaborated to derive explanations for observed irregularities in financial decision making. Strong context-dependency and adaptive learning form the basis for this cognition-based approach to finance. Experiments, ratings, and real world data analysis are carried out in specific financial settings, combining different research methods to improve the understanding of natural financial behaviour. People use various strategies in the domains of spending, saving, and investing. Specific spending profiles can be elaborated for a better understanding of individual spending differences. It was found that people differ along four dimensions of spending, which can be labelled: General Leisure, Regular Maintenance, Risk Orientation, and Future Orientation. Saving behaviour is strongly dependent on how people mentally structure their finance and on their self-control attitude towards decision space restrictions, environmental cues, and contingency structures. Investment strategies depend on how companies, in which investments are placed, are evaluated on factors such as Honesty, Prestige, Innovation, and Power. Further on, different information integration strategies can be learned in decision situations with direct feedback. The mapping of cognitive processes in financial decision making is discussed and adaptive learning mechanisms are proposed for the observed behavioural differences. The construal of a "financial personality" is proposed in accordance with other dimensions of personality measures, to better acknowledge and predict variations in financial behaviour. This perspective enriches economic theories and provides a useful ground for improving individual financial services

Data Mining Applications On Web Usage Analysis & User Profiling

Tez (Yüksek Lisans) -- İstanbul Teknik Üniversitesi, Fen Bilimleri Enstitüsü, 2003Thesis (M.Sc.) -- İstanbul Technical University, Institute of Science and Technology, 2003Tez çalışmasında veri madenciliği teknolojisi, fonksiyonları ve uygulamaları özetlenmiştir. OLAP teknolojilerine ve veri ambarlarına da veri madenciliğinin anahtar kavramları olarak değinilmiştir. Uygulama kısmında müşteri ve alışveriş kalıpları analizi için bir internet parakendecisinin işlemsel verileri kullanılmıştır. Müşteri segmentasyonu ve kullanıcı betimleme gibi konulardaki kurumsal kararları desteklemek amacıyla veri içerisindeki kalıplar çıkarılmaya çalışılmıştır.This thesis gives a summary of data mining technology, its functionalities and applications. OLAP technology and data warehouses are also introduced as the key concepts in data mining. The usage of data mining on the internet and the decisions based on internet usage data are introduced. In the application section a web retailer’s transactional data is used for analyzing customer and shopping patterns.Hidden patterns within the data are tried to be extracted in order to support business decisions such as user profiling and customer segmentation.Yüksek LisansM.Sc

MULTI-MODAL TASK INSTRUCTIONS TO ROBOTS BY NAIVE USERS

This thesis presents a theoretical framework for the design of user-programmable robots. The objective of the work is to investigate multi-modal unconstrained natural instructions given to robots in order to design a learning robot. A corpus-centred approach is used to design an agent that can reason, learn and interact with a human in a natural unconstrained way. The corpus-centred design approach is formalised and developed in detail. It requires the developer to record a human during interaction and analyse the recordings to find instruction primitives. These are then implemented into a robot. The focus of this work has been on how to combine speech and gesture using rules extracted from the analysis of a corpus. A multi-modal integration algorithm is presented, that can use timing and semantics to group, match and unify gesture and language. The algorithm always achieves correct pairings on a corpus and initiates questions to the user in ambiguous cases or missing information. The domain of card games has been investigated, because of its variety of games which are rich in rules and contain sequences. A further focus of the work is on the translation of rule-based instructions. Most multi-modal interfaces to date have only considered sequential instructions. The combination of frame-based reasoning, a knowledge base organised as an ontology and a problem solver engine is used to store these rules. The understanding of rule instructions, which contain conditional and imaginary situations require an agent with complex reasoning capabilities. A test system of the agent implementation is also described. Tests to confirm the implementation by playing back the corpus are presented. Furthermore, deployment test results with the implemented agent and human subjects are presented and discussed. The tests showed that the rate of errors that are due to the sentences not being defined in the grammar does not decrease by an acceptable rate when new grammar is introduced. This was particularly the case for complex verbal rule instructions which have a large variety of being expressed

The audio-graphical interface to a personal integrated telecommunications system

Thesis (M.S.V.S.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Architecture, 1984.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 80-88).The telephone is proposed as an environment for exploring conversational computer systems. A personal communications system is developed which supports multi-modal access to multi-media mail. It is a testbed for developing novel methods of interactive information retrieval that are as intuitive and useful as the spoken word. A personalized telecommunications management system that handles both voice and electronic mail mess.ages through a unified user interface is described. Incoming voice messages are gathered via a conversational answering machine. Known callers are identified with a speech recognition unit so they can receive personal outgoing recordings. The system's owner accesses messages over the telephone by voice using natural language queries, or with the telephone keypad. Electronic mail messages and system status are transmitted by a text-to-speech synthesizer. Local access is provided by a touch sensitive screen and color raster display. Text and digitized voice messages are randomly accessible through graphical ideograms. A Rolodex-style directory permits dialing-by-name and the creation of outgoing recordings for individuals or mailing lists. Note: A 3/4 inch color U-matic video cassette accompanies this thesis, it is five minutes in length, and has an English narrative.by Barry Michael Arons.M.S.V.S