Creative Ecologies: Derek Walcott’s Postcolonial Ecopoetics

This essay explores the centrality of Derek Walcott’s poetics of nature to his creative imagination. Forensic attention to language illustrates how connections between the mind and its environments engage critical work at the intersection of ecocriticism and postcolonialism. Poetry’s contribution to a resolution of these discourses’ conflicting concerns is revealed, in a fresh analysis of Walcott’s poetic ecology

The Penobskan Porcupine Panic

This creative writing thesis takes its origins from a ten-page story written for a fiction class in the spring of 2015 and inspired by the song Penobska Oakwalk from the band Quilt

The Penobskan Porcupine Panic

This creative writing thesis takes its origins from a ten-page story written for a fiction class in the spring of 2015 and inspired by the song Penobska Oakwalk from the band Quilt

Wrist-driven passive grasping: interaction-based trajectory adaption with a compliant anthropomorphic hand

Abstract: The structure of the human musculo-skeletal systems shows complex passive dynamic properties, critical for adaptive grasping and motions. Through wrist and arm actuation, these passive dynamic properties can be exploited to achieve nuanced and diverse environment interactions. We have developed a passive anthropomorphic robot hand that shows complex passive dynamics. We require arm/wrist control with the ability to exploit these. Due to the soft hand structures and high degrees of freedom during passive-object interactions, bespoke generation of wrist trajectories is challenging. We propose a new approach, which takes existing wrist trajectories and adapts them to changes in the environment, through analysis and classification of the interactions. By analysing the interactions between the passive hand and object, the required wrist motions to achieve them can be mapped back to control of the hand. This allows the creation of trajectories which are parameterized by object size or task. This approach shows up to 86% improvement in grasping success rate with a passive hand for object size changes up to ±50%

Wrist-driven passive grasping: interaction-based trajectory adaption with a compliant anthropomorphic hand

Abstract: The structure of the human musculo-skeletal systems shows complex passive dynamic properties, critical for adaptive grasping and motions. Through wrist and arm actuation, these passive dynamic properties can be exploited to achieve nuanced and diverse environment interactions. We have developed a passive anthropomorphic robot hand that shows complex passive dynamics. We require arm/wrist control with the ability to exploit these. Due to the soft hand structures and high degrees of freedom during passive-object interactions, bespoke generation of wrist trajectories is challenging. We propose a new approach, which takes existing wrist trajectories and adapts them to changes in the environment, through analysis and classification of the interactions. By analysing the interactions between the passive hand and object, the required wrist motions to achieve them can be mapped back to control of the hand. This allows the creation of trajectories which are parameterized by object size or task. This approach shows up to 86% improvement in grasping success rate with a passive hand for object size changes up to ±50%

Creative Ecologies: Derek Walcott’s Postcolonial Ecopoetics

This essay explores the centrality of Derek Walcott’s poetics of nature to his creative imagination. Forensic attention to language illustrates how connections between the mind and its environments engage critical work at the intersection of ecocriticism and postcolonialism. Poetry’s contribution to a resolution of these discourses’ conflicting concerns is revealed, in a fresh analysis of Walcott’s poetic ecology

Toward Understanding Human Expression in Human-Robot Interaction

Intelligent devices are quickly becoming necessities to support our activities during both work and play. We are already bound in a symbiotic relationship with these devices. An unfortunate effect of the pervasiveness of intelligent devices is the substantial investment of our time and effort to communicate intent. Even though our increasing reliance on these intelligent devices is inevitable, the limits of conventional methods for devices to perceive human expression hinders communication efficiency. These constraints restrict the usefulness of intelligent devices to support our activities. Our communication time and effort must be minimized to leverage the benefits of intelligent devices and seamlessly integrate them into society. Minimizing the time and effort needed to communicate our intent will allow us to concentrate on tasks in which we excel, including creative thought and problem solving. An intuitive method to minimize human communication effort with intelligent devices is to take advantage of our existing interpersonal communication experience. Recent advances in speech, hand gesture, and facial expression recognition provide alternate viable modes of communication that are more natural than conventional tactile interfaces. Use of natural human communication eliminates the need to adapt and invest time and effort using less intuitive techniques required for traditional keyboard and mouse based interfaces. Although the state of the art in natural but isolated modes of communication achieves impressive results, significant hurdles must be conquered before communication with devices in our daily lives will feel natural and effortless. Research has shown that combining information between multiple noise-prone modalities improves accuracy. Leveraging this complementary and redundant content will improve communication robustness and relax current unimodal limitations. This research presents and evaluates a novel multimodal framework to help reduce the total human effort and time required to communicate with intelligent devices. This reduction is realized by determining human intent using a knowledge-based architecture that combines and leverages conflicting information available across multiple natural communication modes and modalities. The effectiveness of this approach is demonstrated using dynamic hand gestures and simple facial expressions characterizing basic emotions. It is important to note that the framework is not restricted to these two forms of communication. The framework presented in this research provides the flexibility necessary to include additional or alternate modalities and channels of information in future research, including improving the robustness of speech understanding. The primary contributions of this research include the leveraging of conflicts in a closed-loop multimodal framework, explicit use of uncertainty in knowledge representation and reasoning across multiple modalities, and a flexible approach for leveraging domain specific knowledge to help understand multimodal human expression. Experiments using a manually defined knowledge base demonstrate an improved average accuracy of individual concepts and an improved average accuracy of overall intents when leveraging conflicts as compared to an open-loop approach

Orchids of Mars: Book One and Reading the Reader: Virtual Reality as Science Fiction Trope

This paper investigates narrative from two standpoints: a creative one, comprising ten chapters of a science fiction novel, and a critical one, examining virtual reality as trope within three science fiction narratives. Creative and critical portions directly inform one another with regards to scrutiny and interrogation of the reader’s ability and desire to construct meaning from text. The creative portion opens a trilogy titled Orchids of Mars and follows three young characters as they attend school for the first time. The story depends upon several aspects of the virtual, including multiple, potential realities perceived and created by differing perspectives, as well as the illusory nature of the wards’ childhood. As the story proceeds, their various allergic reactions are imparted to the reader via increasingly erratic typographical transformations. This is a deliberate attempt to deny the reader an ‘easy’ reading experience; by adjoining textual aberrations to narrative allergic reactions, the reader’s uneasy reactions will closely mirror the characters’ fictional experiences. Reading the Reader is broad in scope, examining three aspects of the virtual as identified by Marie-Laure Ryan. Each aspect is studied over the course of one chapter, describing distinct formulations of the virtual reality trope made possible when accounting for Ryan’s differing aspects; examination of the effects generated when the trope is deployed within narrative; and theorising of reader reaction to resulting departures from traditional narrative tendencies. These critical analyses are executed using close readings of novels by Tad Williams, Suzanne Collins, and Jeff Noon, as well as the critical theories belonging to the field of narratology

A feature-based approach to continuous-gesture analysis

Thesis (M.S.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Program in Media Arts & Sciences, 1994.Includes bibliographical references (p. 95-98) and index.by Alan Daniel Wexelblat.M.S