What Was Artificial Intelligence?

When it was originally published in 2002, Sue Curry Jansen’s “What Was Artificial Intelligence?” attracted little notice. The long essay was published as a chapter in Jansen’s Critical Communication Theory, a book whose wisdom and erudition failed to register across the many fields it addressed. One explanation for the neglect, ironic and telling, is that Jansen’s sheer scope as an intellectual had few competent readers in the communication studies discipline into which she published the book. “What Was Artificial Intelligence?” was buried treasure. In this mediastudies.press edition, Jansen’s prescient autopsy of AI self-selling—the rhetoric of the masculinist sublime—is reprinted with a new introduction. Now an open access book, “What Was Artificial Intelligence?” is a message in a bottle, addressed to Musk, Bezos, and the latest generation of AI myth-makers

What Was Artificial Intelligence?

When it was originally published in 2002, Sue Curry Jansen’s “What Was Artificial Intelligence?” attracted little notice. The long essay was published as a chapter in Jansen’s Critical Communication Theory, a book whose wisdom and erudition failed to register across the many fields it addressed. One explanation for the neglect, ironic and telling, is that Jansen’s sheer scope as an intellectual had few competent readers in the communication studies discipline into which she published the book. “What Was Artificial Intelligence?” was buried treasure. In this mediastudies.press edition, Jansen’s prescient autopsy of AI self-selling—the rhetoric of the masculinist sublime—is reprinted with a new introduction. Now an open access book, “What Was Artificial Intelligence?” is a message in a bottle, addressed to Musk, Bezos, and the latest generation of AI myth-makers

Die Abenteuer von Alice im Wissenschaftsland

Lewis Carroll based much of his nonsense humour and curious themes in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass on his expertise in logic and mathematics. Years after the books were written, Alice, under the guidance of new authors, is experiencing new adventures in different regions of Scienceland, from Quantumland to Computerland. Situations, characters and concepts from Carroll’s books on Alice are often reused in different scientific fields to illustrate scientific phenomena. Alice has become an archetype placeholder name for experimentalists in physics and cryptology. Carroll’s books on Alice have been adopted by the scientific community and it seems that, although it is characteristic for science to keep changing, Alice’s adventures in Scienceland are here to stay.Velik dio nonsensnoga humora i začudnih tema u djelima Aličine pustolovine u Zemlji Čudesa i S onu stranu zrcala nadahnut je Carrollovim vrsnim poznavanjem logike i matematike. Godinama nakon nastanka spomenutih romana, u rukama novih autora, Alica doživljava nove pustolovine u raznim dijelovima Znanstvozemske: od Kvantozemske do Računalozemske. Situacije, likovi i pojmovi iz Carrollovih knjiga o Alici često se iznova rabe u raznim znanstvenim područjima u svrhu ilustriranja znanstvenih pojava. Sama Alica postala je arhetipskim imenom za ispitanike u fizici i kriptologiji. Iako su neprestane mijene jedna od odlika znanosti, jedna se stvar zacijelo neće promijeniti: junakinja Carrollovih romana, koje je znanstvena zajednica dobro prihvatila, i dalje će doživljavati pustolovine u Znanstvozemskoj.Zahlreiche Bespiele des Nonsens-Humors sowie eine Unmenge an sonderbaren Ereignissen aus den Werken Alice in Wunderland und Alice hinter den Spiegeln scheinen auf Carrolls ausgezeichneten Kenntnissen aus dem Bereich der Logik und der Mathematik zu beruhen. Noch jahrelang nach der Romanentstehung erlebt Alice unter den Händen anderer Autoren in unterschiedlichen Teilen des Wissenschaftslandes − von dem Quantenland bis hin zum Computerland − neuartige Abenteuer. Situationen, Gestalten und Begriffe aus Carrolls AliceBüchern werden in zahlreichen wissenschaftlichen Bereichen immer wieder verwendet, um dadurch wissenschaftliche Begriffe zu illustrieren. Alice wurde sogar zum archetypischen Namen für Experimentatoren im Bereich der Physik und Kryptologie. Ist auch der stete Wandel eines der Merkmale der Wissenschaft, eines wird sich gewiss nie ändern: Einmal in der wissenschaftlichen Gemeinschaft gut aufgenommen, wird Carrolls Romanheldin in Wissenschaftsland auch weiterhin zahlreiche Abenteuer erleben

The Pursuit of a Meaningful Life Through Taoism and the Golden Ratio

What constitutes a meaningful life is perhaps the most crucial question we can ask ourselves throughout our lifetime; for what we know, the desire to become knowledgeable of a definitive answer is a journey traveled by humans as early as the 6th century BCE. Nonetheless, history illustrates various paths that brave individuals took to provide guidelines for today’s society to reflect on and choose whether or not they wish to follow them. To portray some of these philosophies in greater detail, we begin by exploring the term “meaning” from a metaphysical perspective and then the categories such philosophies might fall under. Our main discussion will emphasize a mathematical concept that might initially seem insufficient in answering such a complex and abstract question. However, by evaluating the mystical and mathematical properties of the Golden Ratio, we might get a glimpse into how we could begin to answer what makes one’s life meaningful. This mathematical phenomenon alone might still not be enough to convince readers that it has a place in living a meaningful life, so I will also introduce a philosophy that, coincidentally, began in the 6th century BCE - Taoism. The development of this philosophy, despite not being as well-known or practiced as other belief systems, provides fascinating insights, which we will notice have similarities with what we illustrate through Phi (Φ). I conclude that this seemingly unexpected synergy between Taoism and the Golden Ratio demonstrates a valid relationship that mathematics has with portraying how we can live well

Apprentissage du contrôle de systèmes complexes par l'auto-organisation coopérative d'un système multi-agent: Application à la calibration de moteurs à combustion

This thesis tackles the problem of complex systems control with a multi-agent approach. Controlling a system means applying the adequate actions on its inputs, in order to put the system in a desired state. Usual methods are based on analytical models of the controlled system. They find their limits with complex systems, because of the non-linear dynamics. Building a model of this kind of system is indeed very difficult, and exploiting such a model is even harder. A better approach is to learn how to control, without having to exploit any model. But Ashby's Law taught us that the controller must be at least as complex as the controlled system. A part of the challenge is to build a complex system with the correct functionnality.This challenge is tackled with the Adaptive Multi-Agent Systems (AMAS) approach, which relies on cooperation and emergence to design adaptive multi-agent systems able to perform complex tasks.Cette thèse s'intéresse au contrôle de systèmes complexes, et propose une solution multi-agent.Contrôler un système, c'est appliquer les modifications adéquates sur ses entrées de façon à placer ses sorties dans un état attendu. Les méthodes habituelles se basent majoritairement sur l'utilisation de modèles mathématiques du système contrôlé, afin de calculer les actions de contrôle à effectuer. Ces méthodes trouvent leurs limites face aux systèmes complexes, qui ont une dynamique non-linéaire, et sont souvent bruités et instables. La construction d'un modèle est dans ce cas une tâche ardue, qui peut s'étendre sur plusieurs années. La plupart des méthodes proposent alors d'utiliser un algorithme d'apprentissage artificiel pour apprendre un modèle. Cependant, le modèle produit demeure difficile à exploiter pour le contrôle, puisqu'il reproduit les caractéristiques difficiles du système réel, notamment sa non-linéarité. Une meilleure approche, adoptée dans cette thèse, consiste à apprendre directement le contrôle. La loi de la variété requise indique que, pour être capable d'accomplir sa tâche, le contrôleur doit être au moins aussi complexe que le système contrôlé. Il faut donc concevoir un système capable d'apprendre, de contrôler, et surtout, de franchir le mur de la complexité.La distribution du contrôle, c'est-à-dire l'affectation du contrôle de chaque entrée d'un système à des contrôleurs plus ou moins indépendants, permet de s'attaquer à la complexité. Mais cela demeure un sujet de recherche actif, à plus forte raison lorsque vient s'ajouter une problématique d'apprentissage. Les systèmes multi-agents (SMA), composés d'entités autonomes, se prêtent naturellement aux problèmes distribués et peuvent ainsi beaucoup apporter. En particulier, les systèmes multi-agents adaptatifs (AMAS) s'appuient sur l'auto-organisation des agents pour faire émerger une fonction globale adéquate. Cette auto-organisation est guidée par la coopération. Chaque agent est capable de détecter et de résoudre les situations dans lesquelles il ne peut accomplir sa tâche. Un AMAS est ainsi doté de fortes capacités d'adaptation et d'apprentissage. Il est également capable, grâce à l'émergence, d'accomplir des tâches complexes. Appliquée au problème du contrôle et de son apprentissage, cette approche conduit à la définition d'un SMA particulier, présenté dans cette thèse. Les expérimentations, menées sur des simulations ainsi qu'en situation réelle (sur un moteur à combustion), ont montré la capacité du système à apprendre le contrôle de plusieurs entrées en fonction de critères sur plusieurs sorties, tout en étant robuste aux perturbations, et facile à instancier. Ces résultats sont analysés pour conclure sur la validité du système

Sight, sound, the chicken and the egg: Audio-visual co-dependency in music

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University.Amongst the modern day abundance of audio-visual media, where sounds represent everything from the swooping of virtual cameras through 3D spaces to the pressing of buttons and receiving of emails, and conversely where VJs routinely accompany live musical performance with an increasingly sophisticated language of abstract computer animation, the notion of music as a necessarily exclusively aural medium seems somewhat out of place. Psychological theories relating to the cognition of sound, in particular physical schema, accounting for the ubiquity of vertical plane pitch metaphors in most musical cultures, provide evidence of a deep-rooted spatially informed understanding of sound thus providing a common ground for both sound and vision in music. Furthermore, Western Classical composition is rife with examples of visually conceived forms from Bach’s Crab Canon (1747) to Xenakis’ architecturally inspired Metastasis (1954). However, in practice the gap between the listener’s auditory experience and the composer’s visual concept is often insurmountable. Rising to Schaeffer’s call for “Primacy to the ear!” (Schaeffer, 1967, pp. 28-30), acousmatic composers have sought to derive music exclusively from experientially verifiable criteria. However, in its pervasiveness of other musical genres, no doubt aided by technologically and commercially driven domination of the pre-recorded over the live listening experience in the latter half of the twentieth century, such an approach has lead to the neglect of visual aspects in the live performance of much art-music. This research aims to begin to redress this balance through the composition of, largely computer realised, audio-visual works whose conception arises not from a superimposition of one medium upon another, but through the very relations between the media themselves. Utilising modern computers’ ability to synchronise physical and virtual visual events with synthesised sound in real time not only affords composers an invaluable tool for enhancing listener’s perception of formal structures but also implies causal relationships between the sonic and the visual which can provide a base of intuitive understanding on which more complex formal ideas can be built.Sponsored by the Brunel University Isambard Scholarship

IS THIS ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE?

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has become one of the most frequently used terms in the technical jargon (and often in not-so-technical jargon). Recent advancements in the field of AI have certainly contributed to the AI hype, and so have numerous applications and results of using AI technology in practice. Still, just like with any other hype, the AI hype has its controversies. This paper critically examines developments in the field of AI from multiple perspectives – research, technological, social and pragmatic. Part of the controversies of the AI hype stem from the fact that people use the term AI differently, often without a deep understanding of the wider context in which AI as a field has been developing since its inception in Mid 1950s

Bird Noticing: A Virtual Reality Video Game About Bird Watching

Bird Noticing invites the player into a quiet clearing in some generic New England woods, and rewards them with the chance to interact with wildlife if they hold still and keep quiet. Bird Noticing is an attempt to answer the question of what virtual reality is for. It is the preserved, composite memory of every bird watching trip my partner has taken with his father, and my own childhood growing up in rural upstate New York, filtered through too many hours playing Animal Crossing. Its goal is to allow the user to live that composite memory