19,907 research outputs found
Ono: an open platform for social robotics
In recent times, the focal point of research in robotics has shifted from industrial ro- bots toward robots that interact with humans in an intuitive and safe manner. This evolution has resulted in the subfield of social robotics, which pertains to robots that function in a human environment and that can communicate with humans in an int- uitive way, e.g. with facial expressions. Social robots have the potential to impact many different aspects of our lives, but one particularly promising application is the use of robots in therapy, such as the treatment of children with autism. Unfortunately, many of the existing social robots are neither suited for practical use in therapy nor for large scale studies, mainly because they are expensive, one-of-a-kind robots that are hard to modify to suit a specific need. We created Ono, a social robotics platform, to tackle these issues. Ono is composed entirely from off-the-shelf components and cheap materials, and can be built at a local FabLab at the fraction of the cost of other robots. Ono is also entirely open source and the modular design further encourages modification and reuse of parts of the platform
Conflict and Computation on Wikipedia: a Finite-State Machine Analysis of Editor Interactions
What is the boundary between a vigorous argument and a breakdown of
relations? What drives a group of individuals across it? Taking Wikipedia as a
test case, we use a hidden Markov model to approximate the computational
structure and social grammar of more than a decade of cooperation and conflict
among its editors. Across a wide range of pages, we discover a bursty war/peace
structure where the systems can become trapped, sometimes for months, in a
computational subspace associated with significantly higher levels of
conflict-tracking "revert" actions. Distinct patterns of behavior characterize
the lower-conflict subspace, including tit-for-tat reversion. While a fraction
of the transitions between these subspaces are associated with top-down actions
taken by administrators, the effects are weak. Surprisingly, we find no
statistical signal that transitions are associated with the appearance of
particularly anti-social users, and only weak association with significant news
events outside the system. These findings are consistent with transitions being
driven by decentralized processes with no clear locus of control. Models of
belief revision in the presence of a common resource for information-sharing
predict the existence of two distinct phases: a disordered high-conflict phase,
and a frozen phase with spontaneously-broken symmetry. The bistability we
observe empirically may be a consequence of editor turn-over, which drives the
system to a critical point between them.Comment: 23 pages, 3 figures. Matches published version. Code for HMM fitting
available at http://bit.ly/sfihmm ; time series and derived finite state
machines at bit.ly/wiki_hm
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