Information-rich user embodiment in groupware

Embodiments are virtual personifications of the user in real-time distributed groupware. Many embodiments in groupware are simple abstract 2D representations such as avatars and telepointers. Although current user embodiment techniques can reveal information related to position and orientation, they show far less than what is available in a face-to-face situation, and as a result, collaboration can become more difficult. The problem addressed in this research is that it is difficult for groupware users to recognize and characterize other participants using only their embodiments. The solution explored in this thesis is to provide more information about groupware users by enriching their embodiment. This scheme encodes state and context variables as visual augmentations on the embodiment. Providing information about characteristics such as skill, expertise, and experience can be valuable for collaboration; increasing the information in visual embodiments makes it easier and more natural for collaborators to recognize and characterize others, and thus coordinate activity, simplify communication, and find collaborators. Rich embodiments were tested in three separate experiments. The first experiment showed that users are able to recall a large number of variables displayed on embodiments, and are able to accurately determine the values of those variables. The second study showed that rich embodiments are useful in terms of collaboration and interaction in an actual groupware context – a multiplayer game. The final study further examined information-rich embodiment in a shared drawing task, and further revealed the potential of increasing awareness using embodiment

Prototyping Realistic Long-Term Human-Robot Interaction for the Study of Agent Migration

Kheng Koay, Dag Sverre Syrdal and Kerstin Dautenhahn, 'Prototyping Realistic Long-Term Human-Robot Interaction for the Study of Agent Migration', paper presented at the IEEE International Symposium . Columbia University, New York City, New York, USA, 26-31 August 2016.This paper examines participants’ experiences of interacting with a robotic companion (agent) that has the ability to move its “mind” between different robotic embodiments to take advantage of the features and functionalities associated with the different embodiments in a process called agent migration. In particular, we focus on identifying factors that can help the companion retain its identity in different embodiments. This includes examining the clarity of the migration behaviour and how this behaviour may contribute to identity retention. Nine participants took part in a long-term study, and interacted with the robotic companion in the smart house twice-weekly over a period of 5 weeks. We used Narrative-based Integrated Episodic Scenario (NIES) framework for designing long-term interaction scenarios that provided habituation and intervention phases while conveying the impression of continuous long-term interaction. The results show that NEIS allows us to explore complex intervention scenarios and obtain a sense of continuity of context across the long-term study. The results also suggest that as participants become habituated with the companion, they found the realisation of migration signaling clearer, and felt more certain of the identity of the companion in later sessions, and that the most important factor for this was the agent’s continuation of tasks across embodiments. This paper is both empirical as well as methodological in nature.Non peer reviewedFinal Accepted Versio

Displaced Affects: Emotional Embodied Experiences of Displaced Women in Colombia

This research aims to contribute to Colombia’s historical memory regarding the knowledges, experiences, and embodied subjectivities of displaced women, as active members of a society determined by more than fifty years of lasting conflict. Drawing on what has been called the ‘affective turn’, this work explores emotion as a pivotal bridge between the individual and the social, opening new possibilities for investigating and conceptualizing the subject of feminism as embodied, located and relational. Working with oral and visual narratives of displaced women, this research explores emotional-embodied-experiences of war, violence, and forced displacement, relevant in the constitution of oppressed/subversive subjectivities. Analyzing different spaces women have inhabited, objects they have interacted with, and social relationships they have established, during their forced mobility, this research aims to trace different actors within emotion’s sociality, recognizing that emotions of gendered violence are not processes inside victim’s minds and bodies, but effects and affects of social dynamics. This analysis aims to contribute to current debates regarding Colombian society’s accountability for maintaining and perpetuating social injustices in displaced women lives. By locating participant’s narratives at the core of knowledge theorization, this research elucidates new ways of entangle theoretical approaches in everyday life dynamics, widening the influence of the affective turn over cultural and social sciences approaches.La presente investigación busca contribuir a la memoria histórica Colombiana respecto a los conocimientos, experiencias, y subjetividades encarnadas de las mujeres desplazadas como miembros activos de una sociedad caracterizada por más de cincuenta años de conflicto armado. Inspirado en lo que se conoce como el ‘giro afectivo’ éste trabajo explora las emociones como un puente crucial entre lo individual y lo social, abriendo nuevas posibilidades para investigar y conceptualizar el sujeto del feminismo como encarnado, situado y relacional. Trabajando con narrativas orales y visuales de ocho mujeres jóvenes Colombianas, víctimas del desplazamiento interno, éste trabajo investiga algunas de las experiencias-emocionales-encarnadas causadas por la guerra, la violencia, y del desplazamiento, relevantes en la constitución de subjetividades oprimidas/subversivas. Analizando los diferentes espacios que estas mujeres han habitado, los objetos con los que han interactuado, y las relaciones sociales que han establecido, durante el desplazamiento forzado, esta investigacion busca rastrear diferentes actores dentro de la socialización de las emociones, reconociendo que las emociones de la violencia de genero no son procesos dentro de los cuerpos y mentes de las víctimas, sino efectos y afectos de las dinámicas sociales. Este análisis pretende contribuir a debates actuales sobre la responsabilidad de la sociedad Colombiana en el mantenimiento y la prolongación de las injusticias sociales en las vidas de las mujeres desplazadas. Situando las narrativas de las participantes en el centro de la teorización del conocimiento, esta investigación muestra nuevas formas de entrelazar propuestas teóricas con dinámicas del día a día, ampliando la influencia del giro afectivo sobre los estudios culturales y de las ciencias sociales.Máster Erasmus Mundus en Estudios de las Mujeres y de Género, GEMMA. VIII EDICIÓ

Individual recognition and long-term memory of inanimate interactive agents and humans in dogs

Investigation of individual recognition (IR) is difficult due to the lack of proper control of cues and previous experiences of subjects. Utilization of artificial agents (Unidentified Moving Objects: UMOs) may offer a better approach than using conspecifics or humans as partners. In Experiment 1, we investigated whether dogs are able to develop IR of UMOs (that is stable for at least 24 h) or that they only retain a more generalised memory about them. The UMO helped dogs to obtain an unreachable ball and played with them. One day, one week or one month later, we tested whether dogs display specific behaviour toward the familiar UMO over unfamiliar ones (four-way choice test). Dogs were also re-tested in the same helping context and playing interaction. Subjects did not approach the familiar UMO sooner than the others; however, they gazed at the familiar UMO earlier during re-testing of the problem solving task, irrespectively of the delay. In Experiment 2, we repeated the same procedure with human partners, applying a two-way choice test after a week delay, to study whether lack of IR was specific to the UMO. Dogs did not approach the familiar human sooner than the unfamiliar, but they gazed at the familiar partner earlier during re-testing. Thus, dogs do not seem to recognise an individual UMO or human after a short experience, but they remember the interaction with the novel partner in general, even after a long delay. We suggest that dogs need more experience with a specific social partner for the development of long-term memory. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s10071-022-01624-6

Latino/a Youth Subcultures in Elizabeth, New Jersey: Memory, Spacemaking, and Citizenship, 1980s-1990s.

“Latino/a Youth Subcultures in Elizabeth, New Jersey: Memory, Spacemaking, and Citizenship, 1980s-1990s” is a case study that documents youth experiences of coming of age in the house, hip hop, club kid, goth, and skate subcultures in and near Elizabeth, a post-industrial New Jersey city often perceived (along with its residents) to be in decline and undesirable. This narrative reveals that Elizabeth was an important, vibrant subcultural center of progressive youth of color. Youth involvement in subcultures often resonated in subtle ways with support for social movements for racial equality and sexual and gender diversity in the 1980s-1990s. These subcultures represented more than the commodifiable fashions and immature and rebellious phase often associated with them. Ultimately, youth subcultures challenged right wing movements and their assimilationist, heteronormative, and multicultural values, offered youth spaces for their self-determination, and represented yourths’ active cultural citizenship. I conduct ethnographic interviews of 25 second-generation Latinos/as about their experiences with youth spacemaking within or outside dominant publics, such as in a minority Latino and African American gay house scene, the New York City nightlife club kid scene, an annual goth party at a cemetery, an afterhours goth hangout in a diner, and an unofficial skate park. This project contributes to subculture studies by centering Latino/a perspectives in subcultures that are usually reductively coded either white (goth, club-kid and skate) or black (house and hip hop). For Latino/a Studies, this project encourages scholars to employ a subculture lens instead of merely traditional static markers of race, ethnicity, and notions of success and failure to understand Latino/a youth subjectivity and claims to belonging and citizenship.PhDAmerican CultureUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/133225/1/milavi_1.pd

Contemporary theatre and the experiential

In the context of the blurring of boundaries between club and theatre, game and theatre, and party and theatre, experiential spectatorship is spilling into the mainstream. This article starts from the recognition of the rapid rise of the experience economy as a turning point in consumer culture towards a specific appeal to the sensory body. The definition of experience in this analysis is key and a distinction is made between experience as it passes moment by moment, erlebnis, and experience as something that is cumulatively built up over time, erfahrung. This paper asks, in a society defined by the crisis of experience, does this rise of the experiential in theatre simply reflect the reduction of experience to a series of consumable sensory moments or is there a mode of experience modelled through performance interaction which moves both beyond this established mode of experience and also beyond the notion of experience as cumulatively formed wisdom (erfahrung)? Drawing a parallel between established popular cultural practices of the body and those of the spectator in spectacular promenade performance, Fuerzabruta is used as an illustrative example of popular experiential performance and Hwang’s The Road as an example of experiential performance in which a transformative aesthetic is made possible