Multi-Object Graph Affordance Network: Enabling Goal-Oriented Planning through Compound Object Affordances

Learning object affordances is an effective tool in the field of robot learning. While the data-driven models delve into the exploration of affordances of single or paired objects, there is a notable gap in the investigation of affordances of compound objects that are composed of an arbitrary number of objects with complex shapes. In this study, we propose Multi-Object Graph Affordance Network (MOGAN) that models compound object affordances and predicts the effect of placing new objects on top of the existing compound. Given different tasks, such as building towers of specific heights or properties, we used a search based planning to find the sequence of stack actions with the objects of suitable affordances. We showed that our system was able to correctly model the affordances of very complex compound objects that include stacked spheres and cups, poles, and rings that enclose the poles. We demonstrated the applicability of our system in both simulated and real-world environments, comparing our systems with a baseline model to highlight its advantages

Information Technology, Materiality, and Organizational Change: A Professional Odyssey

We begin with a retrospective reflection on the first author’s research career, which in large part is devoted to research about the implications of information technology (IT) for organizational change. Although IT has long been associated with organizational change, our historical review of the treatment of technology in organization theory demonstrates how easily the material aspects of organizations can disappear into the backwaters of theory development. This is an unfortunate result since the material characteristics of IT initiatives distinguish them from other organizational change initiatives. Our aim is to restore materiality to studies of IT impact by tracing the reasons for its disappearance and by offering options in which IT’s materiality plays a more central theoretical role. We adopt a socio-technical perspective that differs from a strict sociomaterial perspective insofar as we wish to preserve the ontological distinction between material artifacts and their social context of use. Our analysis proceeds using the concept of “affordance” as a relational concept consistent with the socio-technical perspective. We then propose extensions of organizational routines theory that incorporate material artifacts in the generative system known as routines. These contributions exemplify two of the many challenges inherent in adopting materiality as a new research focus in the study of IT’s organizational impacts

“No user is an island” Onlookers, affordances, and the impact of mobile devices on work practices

This paper addresses the question of how the use of mobile devices impacts work practices, based on an ethnographic study of the use of iPod Touch devices in operating rooms. Building on the concept of affordances in its recent conceptualization as “multifaceted relational structures”, we analyze the interplay between different affordances of iPods seen from the perspective of the user (who is interacting with the device), and from the perspective of the onlooker (who is interacting with the user, but not directly with the device itself). The analyses reveal that while the use of the device clearly had a function in supporting individual work practices, it negatively influenced the implicit coordination required for the interactive work practices. By including the onlookers’ perspective, we provide a more complete picture of how affordances are shaped and enacted within the social context of multiple relations and how this enactment further impacts work practices

Integration of Action and Language Knowledge: A Roadmap for Developmental Robotics

“This material is presented to ensure timely dissemination of scholarly and technical work. Copyright and all rights therein are retained by authors or by other copyright holders. All persons copying this information are expected to adhere to the terms and constraints invoked by each author's copyright. In most cases, these works may not be reposted without the explicit permission of the copyright holder." “Copyright IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. However, permission to reprint/republish this material for advertising or promotional purposes or for creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or to reuse any copyrighted component of this work in other works must be obtained from the IEEE.”This position paper proposes that the study of embodied cognitive agents, such as humanoid robots, can advance our understanding of the cognitive development of complex sensorimotor, linguistic, and social learning skills. This in turn will benefit the design of cognitive robots capable of learning to handle and manipulate objects and tools autonomously, to cooperate and communicate with other robots and humans, and to adapt their abilities to changing internal, environmental, and social conditions. Four key areas of research challenges are discussed, specifically for the issues related to the understanding of: 1) how agents learn and represent compositional actions; 2) how agents learn and represent compositional lexica; 3) the dynamics of social interaction and learning; and 4) how compositional action and language representations are integrated to bootstrap the cognitive system. The review of specific issues and progress in these areas is then translated into a practical roadmap based on a series of milestones. These milestones provide a possible set of cognitive robotics goals and test scenarios, thus acting as a research roadmap for future work on cognitive developmental robotics.Peer reviewe

Beyond the ‘e-’ in e-HRM : integrating a sociomaterial perspective

This review paper argues that e-HRM literature has not realised the full potential of different theoretical perspectives on information technology. This paper proposes one of them, a sociomaterial perspective, which recognises the equal importance of human agency and material artefacts in the formation and reproduction of e-HRM practices. The review juxtaposes existing perspectives within e-HRM literature with that of the sociomaterial perspective to illustrate the kinds of complementary theoretical and conceptual tools that can be applied to address current limitations in our understanding of the impact of e-HRM. A research agenda is presented that suggests ways to explore the materiality of technology, wider groups of actors and their agency, and emergent practices around technology. The application of this perspective means paying closer attention to how actions and material artefacts are intertwined and constitute ‘doing HRM’, which therefore requires thick descriptions of the organisational context and how work is performed in order to understand how technology matters, for whom and in what ways.© 2021 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way.fi=vertaisarvioitu|en=peerReviewed

A conceptual framework of influences on a non-profit GLAM crowdsourcing initiative: A socio-technical perspective

Crowdsourcing theory and research is in its infancy and fragmented with little theoretical agreement. This paper presents a conceptual framework that provides a holistic view of key influences on a non-profit GLAM (galleries, libraries, archives, museums) crowdsourcing initiative through an interpretive analysis. Three key themes of influences emerged from the case analysis: motivation, relational mechanisms and technology; however they were found to be mutually entangled in practice. The conceptual framework acknowledges the role of both crowd participants and organisational stakeholders through recursive use and interaction over time, and the emergence of multiple configurations of influences on crowdsourcing initiatives while aligning motivations of the crowd with that of the crowdsourcing initiative (i.e. motive alignment). The framework developed in this study extends existing knowledge of the key influences on non-profit crowdsourcing in a GLAM context and clarifies and expands our understanding of this phenomenon from a socio-technical perspective

Bootstrapping Relational Affordances of Object Pairs using Transfer

This work was supported in part by the U.K. EPSRC DTG EP/J5000343/1 at Aberdeen, and in part by the EU Cognitive Systems Project XPERIENCE at SDU under Grant FP7-ICT-270273.Peer reviewedPostprin

Towards a Better Comprehension of Adaptation to Information and Communication Technologies: A Multi-level Approach

Despite the variety of literature on ‘adaptation to technology’, the literature still witnesses a gap concerning the concept of adaptation especially about its multi-level nature. Recognizing the multilevel nature of IS adaptation, we rise the challenge of conducting an alternate template analysis of three cases of adaptation to IS in order to provide complementary explanations about the phenomenon. In order to expand the comprehension of the ‘adaptation’ concept, a multi-study dissertation model is adopted. The objective is to examine the adaptation concept on three different levels: the individual, the group level, and the organizational level. This thesis aims at 1) exploring the shaping of individual adaptive actions that knowledge workers engage towards technostress with a focus on the factors that influence their adaptation process; 2) examining the adaptive performance of a group facing an newlyimplemented technology based on the adaptive structuration theory (DeSanctis and Poole 1994) under which were puzzled the concepts of affordances (Leonardi 2011, Leonardi, Huysman et al. 2013) and the structure of usage (Burton-Jones and Straub Jr 2006, Burton-Jones and Gallivan 2007); 3) examining, through an organizational learning lens (Argyris and Schon 1978), the case of an organizational adaptation to environmental technological changes examined within a managerial cognition conceptual framework (Orlikowski and Gash 1994); (Bijker 1987, Bijker 1995). To answer the different research questions, the three studies adopt a qualitative approach falling within a critical realist perspective