Unsupervised navigation using an economy principle

We describe robot navigation learning based on self-selection of privileged vectors through the environment in accordance with an in built economy metric. This provides the opportunity both for progressive behavioural adaptation, and adaptive derivations, leading, through situated activity, to “representations" of the environment which are both economically attained and inherently meaningful to the agent

Social Event Detection via sparse multi-modal feature selection and incremental density based clustering

Combining items from social media streams, such as Flickr photos and Twitter tweets, into meaningful groups can help users contextu- alise and effectively consume the torrents of information now made available on the social web. This task is made challenging due to the scale of the streams and the inherently multimodal nature of the information to be contextualised. We present a methodology which approaches social event detection as a multi-modal clustering task. We address the various challenges of this task: the selection of the features used to compare items to one another; the construction of a single sparse affinity matrix; combining the features; relative importance of features; and clustering techniques which produce meaningful item groups whilst scaling to cluster large numbers of items. In our best tested configuration we achieve an F1 score of 0.94, showing that a good compromise between precision and recall of clusters can be achieved using our technique

Values-led Participatory Design as a pursuit of meaningful alternatives

Copyright © 2015 ACM. Participatory Design (PD) is inherently concerned with inquiring into and supporting human values when designing IT. We argue that a PD approach that is led by a focus upon participants' values can allow participants to discover meaningful alternatives - alternative uses and alternative conceptualizations for IT that are particularly meaningful to them. However, how PD works with values in the design process has not been made explicit. In this paper, we aim to (i) explicate this values-led PD approach, (ii) illustrate how this approach can lead to outcomes that are meaningful alternatives, and (iii) explain the nature of meaningful alternatives. We use a PD case study to illustrate how we work with participants in a values-led PD approach towards meaningful alternatives

Realistic Utopianism and Alternatives to Imprisonment:The ideology of crime and the utopia of harm

Although the harms and inadequacies of the criminal justice and penal systems are well-documented, the contemporary impulse is largely one born in critique.Currently, it seems that as critical scholars, activists, and citizens, we are far better at deconstruction than positive construction of meaningful alternatives.Even where evidence of an impulse toward the latter exists, this is often diluted over time via its translation into routine politics.Whilst, in many ways, understandable (given the contemporary climate of knowledge-production which eschews ‘radical’ reform as hopeless and idealistic and/or inherently dangerous, and where the politics of knowledge production sees an endless tension between political independence and irrelevance on the part of those working in this field), this article explores the question of how, given this climate, we might begin to move beyond critique, towards the development of radical, yet realistic, meaningful alternatives to punitive penal practices.Despite attempts to develop realistic alternatives within criminology and penology, through a burgeoning interest in the concept of utopia as a form of praxis, the central argument put forward here is that responding differently to crime begins by thinking differently about crime.Drawing on Mannheim’s distinction between ideology and utopia, it offers the discourse of social harm as an important means of encouraging us to think differently and respond differently to social problems.It is argued that, so long as we take the criminal justice system as the starting point of our critique and the locus for the construction of alternatives, reforms are destined to reinforce and legitimise the contemporary ‘regime of truth’ and dominant constructions of crime, harm and justice. Therefore, it is only through the adoption of a ‘replacement discourse’ of harm that we can start to build realistic utopias and meaningful alternatives to imprisonment

Intuitionistic computability logic

Computability logic (CL) is a systematic formal theory of computational tasks and resources, which, in a sense, can be seen as a semantics-based alternative to (the syntactically introduced) linear logic. With its expressive and flexible language, where formulas represent computational problems and "truth" is understood as algorithmic solvability, CL potentially offers a comprehensive logical basis for constructive applied theories and computing systems inherently requiring constructive and computationally meaningful underlying logics. Among the best known constructivistic logics is Heyting's intuitionistic calculus INT, whose language can be seen as a special fragment of that of CL. The constructivistic philosophy of INT, however, has never really found an intuitively convincing and mathematically strict semantical justification. CL has good claims to provide such a justification and hence a materialization of Kolmogorov's known thesis "INT = logic of problems". The present paper contains a soundness proof for INT with respect to the CL semantics. A comprehensive online source on CL is available at http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~giorgi/cl.htm

The Instability and Inequities of the Global Reserve System

This paper argues that the current global reserve system is inherently unstable due to the use of a national currency as the major international reserve currency, and the high demand for “self-insurance” by developing countries. The latter is due to the mix of highly pro-cyclical capital flows and the limited room to maneuver that developing countries have to manage counter-cyclical macroeconomic policies. Both features imply that the system is also inequitable. An important insight of the paper is that such inequities feed into the instability of current arrangements. Any meaningful reform of the system must therefore address these two interlinked features.Global reserve currency, seigniorage powers, financial volatility, pro-cyclical macroeconomic policies, self-insurance, inequities of international economic order