Agents for educational games and simulations

This book consists mainly of revised papers that were presented at the Agents for Educational Games and Simulation (AEGS) workshop held on May 2, 2011, as part of the Autonomous Agents and MultiAgent Systems (AAMAS) conference in Taipei, Taiwan. The 12 full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from various submissions. The papers are organized topical sections on middleware applications, dialogues and learning, adaption and convergence, and agent applications

Compendium of Applications Technology Satellite user experiments

The achievements of the user experiments performed with ATS satellites from 1967 to 1973 are summarized. Included are fixed and mobile point to point communications experiments involving voice, teletype and facsimile transmissions. Particular emphasis is given to the Alaska and Hawaii satellite communications experiments. The use of the ATS satellites for ranging and position fixing of ships and aircraft is also covered. The structure and operating characteristics of the various ATS satellite are briefly described

Interrogating the technical, economic and cultural challenges of delivering the PassivHaus standard in the UK.

A peer-reviewed eBook, which is based on a collaborative research project coordinated by Dr. Henrik Schoenefeldt at the Centre for Architecture and Sustainable Environment at the University of Kent between May 2013 and June 2014. This project investigated how architectural practice and the building industry are adapting in order to successfully deliver Passivhaus standard buildings in the UK. Through detailed case studies the project explored the learning process underlying the delivery of fourteen buildings, certified between 2009 and 2013. Largely founded on the study of the original project correspondence and semi-structured interviews with clients, architects, town planners, contractors and manufacturers, these case studies have illuminated the more immediate technical as well as the broader cultural challenges. The peer-reviewers of this book stressed that the findings included in the book are valuable to students, practitioners and academic researchers in the field of low-energy design. It was launched during the PassivHaus Project Conference, held at the Bulb Innovation Centre on the 27th June 2014

The Digital Turn in Indian Film Sound: Ontologies and Aesthetics

My project maps film sound practices in India against the backdrop of the digital turn. It is a critical-historical account of the transitional era, roughly from 1998 to 2018, and examines practices and decisions taken ‘on the ground’ by film sound recordists, editors, designers and mixers. My work explores the histories and genealogies of the transition by analysing the individual, as well as collective, aesthetic concerns of film workers migrating from the celluloid to the digital age. My inquiry aimed to explore linkages between the digital turn and shifts in production practices, notably sound recording, sound design and sound mixing. The study probes the various ways in which these shifts shaped the aesthetics, styles, genre conventions, and norms of image-sound relationships in Indian cinema in comparison with similar practices from Euro-American film industries. I analysed nearly 60 hours of interviews I conducted with sound practitioners in India, examined trade magazines, online journals, the personal blogs of practitioners, technological literature from corporations like Dolby and Barco, and, as case studies, analysed the soundtrack of key Indian films from both the analogue and the digital eras. While my research clearly indicated significant shifts from the analogue to the digital era in India – increased stratification of sound recording and editing processes, aggressive adoption of multichannel sounds, wider acceptance of sync sound, the increasing dominance of the sound designer – it also revealed that many of the analogue era practices remain deeply embedded within digital era conventions. Moreover, technologies and practices from the Euro-American context have undergone substantial ‘Indianisation’ during the process of their adoption. I argue that digital technology, while reshaping deeply institutionalized practices of the analogue era, contributed to particularly radical changes in the practices of sound recording and editing in the digital era in India. While this dissertation is an ethnographic investigation of ‘living history’, it is largely informed by film sound theory, and seeks to achieve a balance between empirically grounded historical research and film theory

Atypical Uncertainty Estimation Across Psychopathology: Insights from a Novel Learning Task

“We sail within a vast sphere, ever drifting in uncertainty, driven from end to end”. B. Pascal, 1852Background: To survive, humans and animals must adapt behavior in response to outcomes. However, a central question in cognitive science is how the brain learns from outcomes associated with different choices, given that outcomes can be highly uncertain. To account for the remarkable skill of optimal inference and decision making in the face of a capricious world, it is proposed that the properties of uncertainty itself must be accurately estimated. These properties include the changeability (or volatility) and noisiness of outcomes. Drawing on a normative account of learning, the joint estimation of noise and volatility is suggested to determine the speed of learning itself. Using (neuro) computational models, systematic deviation from normative learning has been linked to dysfunctional decision making in psychiatric illness. However, research to date has focused on properties of uncertainty in isolation i.e., noise or volatility. Although vital research, this approach fails to consider the full problem facing the learner: that learning involves the simultaneous estimation of both volatility and noise (i.e., stochasticity). Additionally, while aberrant uncertainty estimation has been linked to multiple psychiatric disorder categories, novel dimensional approaches to psychiatric nosology support the identification of commonly perturbed biobehavioral mechanisms as a route towards improved treatment. Computational psychiatry, the mechanistic description of maladaptive behaviour, used in conjunction with large-scale online populations, has emerged as a promising tool for capturing how cognitive deficits relate to the continuous, rather than binary (on/off; healthy vs. ill) nature of mental illness. As such, this thesis aimed to develop, test, and implement a novel online learning task that was able to capture learning about multiple properties of uncertainty. This task was then used to test whether aberrant uncertainty estimation could represent a fundamental feature across symptoms of psychopathology.Methods: Firstly, a systematic review (patients/controls n=5371), assessed research that used (error-based) computational modelling to the question of belief updating in psychosis, depression, and anxiety disorders. Secondly, a novel learning task was developed. The task sampled from “ground truth” probability distributions that differed in their statistical configurations, designed to simulate different properties of uncertainty within the learning environment. The task included continuous response metrics that indicated the individuals’ estimate of both the variance (noise) and the mean on a trial wise basis. Two experiments tested the task on feasibility, reliability, and construct validity (n=555; n=167). Post validation, the task was applied to an eating disorder group (n=116) and healthy controls (n=67); a general population group with natural variation in across psychosis, depression and anxiety symptomology (n=580); and a selected population of high (n=81) and low (n=66) schizotypy traits. Generalised linear mixed effects models were used for learning data. An extended version of the Hierarchical Gaussian Filter (HGF: JGET) that “learns” about (1) the current mean value and (2) its variance of the input stream, was also applied (Chapter 6).Results. The systematic review revealed both overlap and dissociation between disorder groups. For example, aberrant learning in response to the valence of feedback specifically was found in depression, and not anxiety disorder. Anxiety and psychosis disorders instead showed overlap regarding a difficulty in learning about, and adapting to, volatility. The novel task, built to specifications set out in the review, was demonstrated to be feasible in an online setting and displayed good levels of reliability and construct validity across two studies (n=555; n=167). Experimental evidence showed partial evidence of a valence dependent deficit in depression only. Elevated psychosis and anxiety traits, and eating disorder patients (vs. healthy controls), overlapped in relation to an inflexibility in adapting to increases in volatility. Elevated psychosis traits were additionally associated with overall non-normative learning rates in isolated conditions of noise and volatility. Computational modelling applied to data from elevated schizotypy groups revealed a tendency to incorporate their belief about the noise into decision making when noise was irrelevant. Conclusion. This thesis demonstrates the ability for experimental design, and modelling approach, to explicitly test multiple dimensions of learning under uncertainty. In doing so, this research was able to provide insights into the simultaneous estimation of different aspects of uncertainty during learning. While further testing is required, a difficulty in adapting to increases in volatility may underlie multiple aspects of psychopathological symptomology, including eating disorder patients, and elevated trait anxiety and psychosis-related symptomology. However, elevated trait psychosis additionally showed a non-normative pattern of learning. In this case, it may be that difficulties in estimating the type of uncertainty e.g., mistaking noise for volatility, led to a trade-off effect in which estimates of volatility reached ceiling level. This could then lead to downstream impacts on both overall learning rates in volatility, and the ability to appropriately adapt to increases in volatility. Novel computational modelling approaches, for example the HGF: JGET were instrumental in capturing learning about the mean and variance independently and should be applied to future research interested in the joint estimation of uncertainty. Findings from the HGF: JGET suggest that schizotypy may be associated with an overloading of superfluous information when confronted with increased volatility, potentially due to a lack of confidence in a model of the world (i.e., volatility). Future research should build on these findings by investigating the interdependence of inferences about volatility and noise, and their relationships to unique and cross cutting symptoms of psychopathology

Towards the ethnography of filmic places: video-based research and found footage filmmaking in the anthropological investigation of Mexican migrant event video

This thesis offers an ethnography, with both audiovisual and written components, of the virtual places brought into being through the creation and consumption of event videos in a transnational community. It is intended as a contribution to the development of conceptual and methodological frameworks, which will allow anthropological engagements with vernacular audiovisual media that take into account their phenomenological properties as mimetically active assemblages. In San Francisco Tetlanohcan, Mexico, young parents often leave their children behind as they cross the border illegally, heading north to look for work. Event videos, made by videographers at rite of passage ceremonies and sent to the USA, are an important aspect of migrant life. This research draws on thinking in philosophy and film studies to conceptualise these videos as agents in a process of ‘filmic emplacement’ as their production and consumption bring into being imagined places and selves. The project combines methodological approaches borrowed from sensory ethnography with video editing techniques inspired by avant-garde filmmaking, in a dynamic evocation and exploration of these filmic places. Close participation in the creation and consumption of event videos combined with the movement of alternative ‘video messages’ across the border, gave the researcher a sense of these places. Shared screenings of found footage sequences materialised and refined that understanding. By co-opting the aesthetics of popular television, event videos transform that which they depict, bringing into being collectively created and experienced imagined places. This coherent and constant virtual realm allows for the creation and maintenance of kinship and fictive kinship relationships, despite separations over space and time. The video 900,000 Frames Between Us produced as part of this thesis uses the juxtaposition of ontologically diverse images and sounds to provide an audiovisual evocation of this ‘filmic home’. In addition to contributing to the anthropological understanding of San Francisco, this thesis suggests ways in which visual anthropologists might engage with and understand the mediated experiences of others