Combining behavioural types with security analysis

Today's software systems are highly distributed and interconnected, and they increasingly rely on communication to achieve their goals; due to their societal importance, security and trustworthiness are crucial aspects for the correctness of these systems. Behavioural types, which extend data types by describing also the structured behaviour of programs, are a widely studied approach to the enforcement of correctness properties in communicating systems. This paper offers a unified overview of proposals based on behavioural types which are aimed at the analysis of security properties

Choreographic and Somatic Approaches for the Development of Expressive Robotic Systems

As robotic systems are moved out of factory work cells into human-facing environments questions of choreography become central to their design, placement, and application. With a human viewer or counterpart present, a system will automatically be interpreted within context, style of movement, and form factor by human beings as animate elements of their environment. The interpretation by this human counterpart is critical to the success of the system's integration: knobs on the system need to make sense to a human counterpart; an artificial agent should have a way of notifying a human counterpart of a change in system state, possibly through motion profiles; and the motion of a human counterpart may have important contextual clues for task completion. Thus, professional choreographers, dance practitioners, and movement analysts are critical to research in robotics. They have design methods for movement that align with human audience perception, can identify simplified features of movement for human-robot interaction goals, and have detailed knowledge of the capacity of human movement. This article provides approaches employed by one research lab, specific impacts on technical and artistic projects within, and principles that may guide future such work. The background section reports on choreography, somatic perspectives, improvisation, the Laban/Bartenieff Movement System, and robotics. From this context methods including embodied exercises, writing prompts, and community building activities have been developed to facilitate interdisciplinary research. The results of this work is presented as an overview of a smattering of projects in areas like high-level motion planning, software development for rapid prototyping of movement, artistic output, and user studies that help understand how people interpret movement. Finally, guiding principles for other groups to adopt are posited.Comment: Under review at MDPI Arts Special Issue "The Machine as Artist (for the 21st Century)" http://www.mdpi.com/journal/arts/special_issues/Machine_Artis

Investigating facial animation production through artistic inquiry

Studies into dynamic facial expressions tend to make use of experimental methods based on objectively manipulated stimuli. New techniques for displaying increasingly realistic facial movement and methods of measuring observer responses are typical of computer animation and psychology facial expression research. However, few projects focus on the artistic nature of performance production. Instead, most concentrate on the naturalistic appearance of posed or acted expressions. In this paper, the authors discuss a method for exploring the creative process of emotional facial expression animation, and ask whether anything can be learned about authentic dynamic expressions through artistic inquiry

Behavioral types in programming languages

A recent trend in programming language research is to use behav- ioral type theory to ensure various correctness properties of large- scale, communication-intensive systems. Behavioral types encompass concepts such as interfaces, communication protocols, contracts, and choreography. The successful application of behavioral types requires a solid understanding of several practical aspects, from their represen- tation in a concrete programming language, to their integration with other programming constructs such as methods and functions, to de- sign and monitoring methodologies that take behaviors into account. This survey provides an overview of the state of the art of these aspects, which we summarize as the pragmatics of behavioral types

Developing non-verbal ways of knowing in dance: Collaborative school / university action research.

Gardner (1983, 1993) has long argued that education privileges certain intelligences, primarily the linguistic and the logical-mathematical. As the arts tend to emphasise ways of knowing outside these intelligences, their marginalised status is exacerbated. A recent two-year project in eight primary schools on dance, drama, music and visual art found that the non-verbal aspects of each art form warranted serious attention to investigate what it means to learn in the arts. In this paper we describe and discuss the results of an aspect of action research in dance from this larger research project. We demonstrate how movement can be used as the primary expressive mode of communication, as opposed to privileging the spoken word. Through the use of powerpoint and video, we provide an intriguing and innovative model for providing non-verbal feedback and feed forward in the dance classroom

A correct-by-construction model for asynchronously communicating systems

The design and verification of distributed software systems is often hindered by their ever-increasing complexity and their asynchronous operational semantics. This article considers choreography specifications for distributed systems to reduce that complexity. We use labelled state-transitions systems as ground model for both choreographies and the corresponding distributed systems. Based on Event-B method, we propose a stepwise correct-by-construction model to build asynchronous distributed systems which a priori realise their choreographies. We rely on a sufficient and necessary realisability condition and we apply several refinement steps w.r.t. that condition to generate the distributed peers. The first refinement returns peer behaviours obtained by synchronous projection. The previously computed system is then refined into its asynchronous version using unbounded FIFO buffers. We prove, thanks to invariant preservation, that a sequence of exchanged messages is preserved at each refinement step. We provide a formalised proof of a realisability algorithm for deterministic choreographies. Besides that, our contribution is twofold: the approach is a priori and the problackposed solution scales up to any number of peers communicating with each other

Somatics, creativity, and choreography: creative cognition in somatics-based contemporary dance

This doctoral thesis will comprise an in-depth, multidisciplinary and mixed methods research project examining creativity in Somatics-based choreographic practices. The project draws on methodologies from phenomenology, ethnography, close reading, grounded theory, and thematic analysis. It involved data collected from three well-known Somatics practitioners who embody a professional hybridity as artists, authors, and Somatic Movement Educators—Sandra Reeve, Andrea Olsen, and Miranda Tufnell—and who each use their somatic practice as instrumental in their choreography. Each practitioner utilises different Somatics modalities (Move into Life, Authentic Movement, Embodied Anatomy, Alexander Technique, among others) in various settings (higher education, community arts, professional practice, etc.), which provides an international (US and UK) and cross modality scope to examine shared ideologies within Somatics. Data was collected in a semi-structured, open-ended interview process, participant observation of workshops and intensives delivered by the artists, and a close reading of their published texts. It was analysed for emergent shared themes. I posit that these themes identify connections between the identification, definition, and facilitation of creativity within Somatics-based choreographic practice and cognitive psychological theories of creativity. I identify shared elements of the pedagogical environment and argue that they facilitate the development of a refined perceptual ability. This perceptual expertise is presented as a change-agent in facilitating both novelty in movement generation and the generation of meaning, allowing for a discerning, selective retention of this movement material in giving form to that meaning choreographically. Situating the processes within the Interacting Cognitive Subsystems model and theories of embodied cognition, I then propose a philosophical audit-trace of the ways in which this meaning and expertise is developed cognitively in somatic practices, and how that expertise may allow for novelty and creativity in choreography. The research closes with a discussion of implications of my proposal, how understanding these pathways might be instrumental in shaping dance pedagogy to facilitate dancers’ creativity, and what directions this theory produces for future research