Dare forma alla vision. Apprendimento intergenerazionale e formazione

According to the research in the field of intergenerational learning, a wide range of skills are enhanced when they are developed in an intergenerational teaching and learning context. Language, literacy and numeracy skills can all be supported and extended by intergenerational models if they are facilitated effectively. Moreover, the intergenerational learning provides a non-threatening, reassuring learning environment and creates learning opportunities and activities that are relevant to the learner. In this theoretical contribution, the author discusses the form that learning takes in an intergenerational process, from implicit and informal learning, to enactive learning, which entails autonomy, sense-making, emergence, embodiment and experience. Furthermore, the author envisages the changes and challenges to be tackled in order to promote intergenerational learning for the future.La ricerca nel settore dell’apprendimento intergenerazionale indica che un’ampia rosa di competenze vengono migliorate attraverso contesti di apprendimento e insegnamento intergenerazionale. Le capacità linguisticoverbali e logico-matematiche sembrano essere supportate ed allargate da modelli intergenerazionali, se facilitate adeguatamente. Inoltre, l’apprendimento intergenerazionale fornisce un contesto rassicurante per i partecpanti, e crea opportunità di apprendimento significative. In questo contributo teorico l’autore discute i tipi di apprendimento alla base dell’apprendimento intergenerazionale, dall’apprendimento implicito all’apprendimento informale e l’apprendimento enattivo; queste forme di apprendimento implicano abilità e competenze come autonomia, processi di generazione di senso, apprendimento incarnato ed esperienza. Inoltre, l’autore considera i cambiamenti e sfide che dovranno essere affrontati in future con lo scopo di promuovere l’apprendimento intergenerazionale

Artificial Intelligence: Challenges For Future Growth

This paper discusses the challenges facing artificial intelligence (AI) as it relates to replicating the human brain and how these challenges are perceived by the human employee. Through my research I found approximately 19 challenges facing the growth and future development of A.I. in the workplace. A.I. is in 93% of all global industries and the remaining 7% are seriously looking into it. I reviewed academic sources to determine the challenges facing the advancement of A.I. in the workplace. A.I. extends all the way back to the 18th century Industrial Revolution. Since that time, human employees have feared becoming dehumanized and losing their livelihoods, causing them to be unemployed. However, their fears have not come to fruition. As A.I has grown, it has not replaced the human workforce, but augmented it. Keywords: Artificial Intelligence (A.I.), Industrial Revolution, Turing Test, Machine Learning, Automation, Deep Learning

Gatherings in biosemiotics

http://www.ester.ee/record=b2860486*es

Shaping the vision. Intergenerational Learning and Education

According to the research in the field of intergenerational learning, a wide range of skills are enhanced when they are developed in an intergenerational teaching and learning context. Language, literacy and numeracy skills can all be supported and extended by intergenerational models if they are facilitated effectively. Moreover, the intergenerational learning provides a non-threatening, reassuring learning environment and creates learning opportunities and activities that are relevant to the learner. In this theoretical contribution, the author discusses the form that learning takes in an intergenerational process, from implicit and informal learning, to enactive learning, which entails autonomy, sense-making, emergence, embodiment and experience. Furthermore, the author envisages the changes and challenges to be tackled in order to promote intergenerational learning for the futur

Never Too Old To Learn: On-line Evolution of Controllers in Swarm- and Modular Robotics

Eiben, A.E. [Promotor

Seeing things as people: anthropomorphism and common-sense psychology

This thesis is about common-sense psychology and its role in cognitive science. Put simply, the argument is that common-sense psychology is important because it offers clues to some complex problems in cognitive science, and because common-sense psychology has significant effects on our intuitions, both in science and on an everyday level. The thesis develops a theory of anthropomorphism in common-sense psychology. Anthropomorphism, the natural human tendency to ascribe human characteristics (and especially human mental characteristics) to things that aren't human, is an important theme in the thesis. Anthropomorphism reveals an endemic anthropocentricity that deeply influences our thinking about other minds. The thesis then constructs a descriptive model of anthropomorphism in common-sense psychology, and uses it to analyse two studies of the ascription of mental states. The first, Baron- Cohen et al. 's (1985) false belief test, shows how cognitive modelling can be used to compare different theories of common-sense psychology. The second study, Searle's (1980) `Chinese Room', shows 'that this same model can reproduce the patterns of scientific intuitions taken to systems which pass the Turing test (Turing, 1950), suggesting that it is best seen as a common-sense test for a mind, not a scientific one. Finally, the thesis argues that scientific theories involving the ascription of mentality through a model or a metaphor are partly dependent on each individual scientist's common-sense psychology. To conclude, this thesis develops an interdisciplinary study of common-sense psychology and shows that its effects are more wide ranging than is commonly thought. This means that it affects science more than might be expected, but that careful study can help us to become mindful of these effects. Within this new framework, a proper understanding of common-sense psychology could lay important new foundations for the future of cognitive science

Superhuman, Transhuman, Post/Human: Mapping the Production and Reception of the Posthuman Body

The figure of the cyborg, or more latterly, the posthuman body has been an increasingly familiar presence in a number of academic disciplines. The majority of such studies have focused on popular culture, particularly the depiction of the posthuman in science-fiction, fantasy and horror. To date however, few studies have focused on the posthuman and the comic book superhero, despite their evident corporeality, and none have questioned comics’ readers about their responses to the posthuman body. This thesis presents a cultural history of the posthuman body in superhero comics along with the findings from twenty-five, two-hour interviews with readers. By way of literature reviews this thesis first provides a new typography of the posthuman, presenting it not as a stable bounded subject but as what Deleuze and Guattari (1987) describe as a ‘rhizome’. Within the rhizome of the posthuman body are several discursive plateaus that this thesis names Superhumanism (the representation of posthuman bodies in popular culture), Post/Humanism (a critical-theoretical stance that questions the assumptions of Humanism) and Transhumanism (the philosophy and practice of human enhancement with technology). With these categories in mind the thesis explores the development of the posthuman in body in the Superhuman realm of comic books. Exploring the body-types most prominent during the Golden (1938-1945), Silver (1958-1974) and contemporary Ages of superheroes it presents three explorations of what I term the Perfect Body, Cosmic Body and Military-Industrial Body respectively. These body types are presented as ‘assemblages’ (Delueze and Guattari, 1987) that display rhizomatic connections to the other discursive realms of the Post/Human and Transhuman. This investigation reveals how the depiction of the Superhuman body developed and diverged from, and sometimes back into, these realms as each attempted to territorialise the meaning and function of the posthuman body. Ultimately it describes how, in spite of attempts by nationalistic or economic interests to control Transhuman enhancement in real-world practices, the realms of Post/Humanism and Superhumanism share a more critical approach. The final section builds upon this cultural history of the posthuman body by addressing reader’s relationship with these images. This begins by refuting some of the common assumptions in comics studies about superheroes and bodily representations. Readers stated that they viewed such imagery as iconographic rather than representational, whether it was the depiction of bodies or technology. Moreover, regular or committed readers of superhero comics were generally suspicious of the notion of human enhancement, displaying a belief in the same binary categories -artificial/natural, human/non-human - that critical Post/Humanism seeks to problematize. The thesis concludes that while superhero comics remain ultimately too human to be truly Post/Humanist texts, it is never the less possible to conceptualise the relationship between reader, text, producer and so on in Post/Humanist terms as reading-assemblage, and that such a cyborgian fusing of human and comic book allow both bodies to ‘become other’, to move in new directions and form new assemblages not otherwise possible when considered separately

The Ecology of Open-Ended Skill Acquisition: Computational framework and experiments on the interactions between environmental, adaptive, multi-agent and cultural dynamics

An intriguing feature of the human species is our ability to continuously invent new problems and to proactively acquiring new skills in order to solve them: what is called open-ended skill acquisition (OESA). Understanding the mechanisms underlying OESA is an important scientific challenge in both cognitive science (e.g. by studying infant cognitive development) and in artificial intelligence (aiming at computational architectures capable of open-ended learning). Both fields, however, mostly focus on cognitive and social mechanisms at the scale of an individual’s life. It is rarely acknowledged that OESA, an ability that is fundamentally related to the characteristics of human intelligence, has been necessarily shaped by ecological, evolutionary and cultural mechanisms interacting at multiple spatiotemporal scales. In this thesis, I present a research program aiming at understanding, modelingand simulating the dynamics of OESA in artificial systems, grounded in theories studying its eco-evolutionary bases in the human species. It relies on a conceptual framework expressing the complex interactions between environmental, adaptive, multi-agent and cultural dynamics. Three main research questions are developed and I present a selection of my contributions for each of them.- What are the ecological conditions favoring the evolution of skill acquisition?- How to bootstrap the formation of a cultural repertoire in populations of adaptive agents?- What is the role of cultural evolution in the open-ended dynamics of human skill acquisition?By developing these topics, we will reveal interesting relationships between theories in human evolution and recent approaches in artificial intelligence. This will lead to the proposition of a humanist perspective on AI: using it as a family of computational tools that can help us to explore and study the mechanisms driving open-ended skill acquisition in both artificial and biological systems, as a way to better understand the dynamics of our own species within its whole ecological context. This document presents an overview of my scientific trajectory since the start of my PhD thesis in 2007, the detail of my current research program, a selection of my contributions as well as perspectives for future work