The Presence of Groove in Online Songwriting Projects

Collaboration for groups with members who are disconnected by geography or time is convenient for many reasons, but remains a challenge due to time zone differences, network congestion, and the attenuation of nonverbal communication cues. Virtual collaborators engaging in creative work often deal with these challenges, even more so when tasked with expressing their emotions to distant partners. This study seeks to determine the social factors and tools that impact the quality of an online creative collaboration. Members of the Kompoz.com music composition community were surveyed to solicit projects that had the potential to be optimal collaborations. Judges listened to these songs and measured how much each song prompted them to move. This measure, called groove, was used as an indication of a successful collaboration. Judges assisted in selecting one case that was an exemplar of groove, and another that urged them to move much less, to stand as an exemplar of diminished groove. The comparative case method was used to compare and contrast the tools, social practices, and skills employed in each project, and offers guidelines for the design of and participation in online creative communities

Conception d’un mécanisme intégré d’attention sélective dans une architecture comportementale pour robots autonomes

Le vieillissement de la population à travers le monde nous amène à considérer sérieusement l'intégration dans notre quotidien de robots de service afin d'alléger les besoins pour la prestation de soins. Or, il n'existe pas présentement de robots de service suffisamment avancés pour être utiles en tant que véritables assistants à des personnes en perte d'autonomie. Un des problèmes freinant le développement de tels robots en est un d'intégration logicielle. En effet, il est difficile d'intégrer les multiples capacités de perception et d'action nécessaires à interagir de manière naturelle et adéquate avec une personne en milieu réel, les limites des ressources de calculs disponibles sur une plateforme robotique étant rapidement atteintes. Même si le cerveau humain a des capacités supérieures à un ordinateur, lui aussi a des limites sur ses capacités de traitement de l'information. Pour faire face à ces limites, l'humain gère ses capacités cognitives avec l'aide de l'attention sélective. L'attention sélective lui permet par exemple d'ignorer certains stimuli pour concentrer ses ressources sur ceux utiles à sa tâche. Puisque les robots pourraient grandement bénéficier d'un tel mécanisme, l'objectif de la thèse est de développer une architecture de contrôle intégrant un mécanisme d'attention sélective afin de diminuer la charge de calcul demandée par les différents modules de traitement du robot. L'architecture de contrôle utilisé est basée sur l'approche comportementale, et porte le nom HBBA, pour Hybrid Behavior-Based Architecture. Pour répondre à cet objectif, le robot humanoïde nommé IRL-1 a été conçu pour permettre l'intégration de multiples capacités de perception et d'action sur une seule et même plateforme, afin de s'en servir comme plateforme expérimentale pouvant bénéficier de mécanismes d'attention sélective. Les capacités implémentées permettent d'interagir avec IRL-1 selon différentes modalités. IRL-1 peut être guidé physiquement en percevant les forces externes par le bias d'actionneurs élastiques utilisés dans la direction de sa plateforme omnidirectionnelle. La vision, le mouvement et l'audition ont été intégrés dans une interface de téléprésence augmentée. De plus, l'influence des délais de réaction à des sons dans l'environnement a pu être examinée. Cette implémentation a permis de valider l'usage de HBBA comme base de travail pour la prise de décision du robot, ainsi que d'explorer les limites en termes de capacités de traitement des modules sur le robot. Ensuite, un mécanisme d'attention sélective a été développé au sein de HBBA. Le mécanisme en question intègre l'activation de modules de traitement avec le filtrage perceptuel, soit la capacité de moduler la quantité de stimuli utilisés par les modules de traitement afin d'adapter le traitement aux ressources de calculs disponibles. Les résultats obtenus démontrent les bénéfices qu'apportent un tel mécanisme afin de permettre au robot d'optimiser l'usage de ses ressources de calculs afin de satisfaire ses buts. De ces travaux résulte une base sur laquelle il est maintenant possible de poursuivre l'intégration de capacités encore plus avancées et ainsi progresser efficacement vers la conception de robots domestiques pouvant nous assister dans notre quotidien

The Benefits of Arts Education in Nassau County, New York

Over the course of the last two hundred years, the arts have evolved into a crucial part of public school curriculums. Students across all academic grades enroll in classes dedicated to the arts as part of their graduation requirements. Recently, new programs have emerged with the intentions of incorporating the arts into the STEM based classrooms in schools, thus creating STEAM. STEM classrooms are those that are not dedicated to the arts, such as Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics. With efforts to combine the arts and STEM subjects, many schools, specifically schools in Nassau County, New York, are exploring the benefits of opening the arts to everyone. It was not until recently (the 1970’s) that children with disabilities were allowed to attend public school and receive an education that was of equal quality to the education of their peers who did not have disabilities. These education requirements included a form of arts education for children with special needs. Schools in Nassau County have proceeded to allow students to participate in all artistic classes regardless of abilities. These schools and others across the United States have recognized the benefits of incorporating arts into their curriculums. It has resulted in stronger performance rates inside the classroom with higher test scores. The arts have proven beneficial to children of all abilities academically, socially and emotionally in public schools

Age-Related Differences in Multimodal Information Processing and Their Implications for Adaptive Display Design.

In many data-rich, safety-critical environments, such as driving and aviation, multimodal displays (i.e., displays that present information in visual, auditory, and tactile form) are employed to support operators in dividing their attention across numerous tasks and sources of information. However, limitations of this approach are not well understood. Specifically, most research on the effectiveness of multimodal interfaces has examined the processing of only two concurrent signals in different modalities, primarily in vision and hearing. Also, nearly all studies to date have involved young participants only. The goals of this dissertation were therefore to (1) determine the extent to which people can notice and process three unrelated concurrent signals in vision, hearing and touch, (2) examine how well aging modulates this ability, and (3) develop countermeasures to overcome observed performance limitations. Adults aged 65+ years were of particular interest because they represent the fastest growing segment of the U.S. population, are known to suffer from various declines in sensory abilities, and experience difficulties with divided attention. Response times and incorrect response rates to singles, pairs, and triplets of visual, auditory, and tactile stimuli were significantly higher for older adults, compared to younger participants. In particular, elderly participants often failed to notice the tactile signal when all three cues were combined. They also frequently falsely reported the presence of a visual cue when presented with a combination of auditory and tactile cues. These performance breakdowns were observed both in the absence and presence of a concurrent visual/manual (driving) task. Also, performance on the driving task suffered the most for older adult participants and with the combined visual-auditory-tactile stimulation. Introducing a half-second delay between two stimuli significantly increased response accuracy for older adults. This work adds to the knowledge base in multimodal information processing, the perceptual and attentional abilities and limitations of the elderly, and adaptive display design. From an applied perspective, these results can inform the design of multimodal displays and enable aging drivers to cope with increasingly data-rich in-vehicle technologies. The findings are expected to generalize and thus contribute to improved overall public safety in a wide range of complex environments.PhDIndustrial and Operations EngineeringUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/133203/1/bjpitts_1.pd

Windows into Sensory Integration and Rates in Language Processing: Insights from Signed and Spoken Languages

This dissertation explores the hypothesis that language processing proceeds in "windows" that correspond to representational units, where sensory signals are integrated according to time-scales that correspond to the rate of the input. To investigate universal mechanisms, a comparison of signed and spoken languages is necessary. Underlying the seemingly effortless process of language comprehension is the perceiver's knowledge about the rate at which linguistic form and meaning unfold in time and the ability to adapt to variations in the input. The vast body of work in this area has focused on speech perception, where the goal is to determine how linguistic information is recovered from acoustic signals. Testing some of these theories in the visual processing of American Sign Language (ASL) provides a unique opportunity to better understand how sign languages are processed and which aspects of speech perception models are in fact about language perception across modalities. The first part of the dissertation presents three psychophysical experiments investigating temporal integration windows in sign language perception by testing the intelligibility of locally time-reversed sentences. The findings demonstrate the contribution of modality for the time-scales of these windows, where signing is successively integrated over longer durations (~ 250-300 ms) than in speech (~ 50-60 ms), while also pointing to modality-independent mechanisms, where integration occurs in durations that correspond to the size of linguistic units. The second part of the dissertation focuses on production rates in sentences taken from natural conversations of English, Korean, and ASL. Data from word, sign, morpheme, and syllable rates suggest that while the rate of words and signs can vary from language to language, the relationship between the rate of syllables and morphemes is relatively consistent among these typologically diverse languages. The results from rates in ASL also complement the findings in perception experiments by confirming that time-scales at which phonological units fluctuate in production match the temporal integration windows in perception. These results are consistent with the hypothesis that there are modality-independent time pressures for language processing, and discussions provide a synthesis of converging findings from other domains of research and propose ideas for future investigations

Art in the mouth: a critical evaluation of the chemical senses in contemporary art

Can the experiences that we have when we eat and smell make a meaningful contribution to art? Often referred to as ‘the bodily senses’ or ‘the lower senses’, the chemical senses of taste, olfaction and chemesthesis have been determined as unsuitable for inclusion in art in classical philosophical literature. This research challenges that exclusion by exploring the classical judgements and asking if these senses have anything to contribute to contemporary art. If so, what are the contributions of these senses and their limitations? This is new research within art theory that draws upon multidisciplinary research findings within the fields of life sciences, cognitive studies, anthropology, sociology, philosophy, food studies and flavour and fragrance chemistry. The contributions of this research are: assertions derived from data and expert opinions from within these fields; curated events which provide examples and discourse for critical consideration; and the proposal of a new paradigm that is the result of the synthesises of the research findings. My research strategy began with a survey of related literature and industry practice within art. A series of interviews with leading scientists contributed a contemporary understanding of these senses in life sciences. Case studies were developed, with insights from cognitive sciences, which investigated the conceptual potential of contemporary gastronomy. Finally, discourse was introduced through curated events and artistic actions that made relevant assertions concerning the suitability of these senses in art. Art is an expression of human experiences which are mediated by all of our senses. The implication of this research is a fresh starting place for critical discourse concerning the inclusion of the chemical senses in art that is founded upon current scientific knowledge. Broader implications of this research include a paradigm that could be applied to a possible new field of study, Critical Studies in Contemporary Gastronomy

The digitally 'Hand Made' object

This article will outline the author’s investigations of types of computer interfaces in practical three-dimensional design practice. The paper contains a description of two main projects in glass and ceramic tableware design, using a Microscribe G2L digitising arm as an interface to record three-dimensional spatial\ud design input.\ud \ud The article will provide critical reflections on the results of the investigations and will argue that new approaches in digital design interfaces could have relevance in developing design methods which incorporate more physical ‘human’ expressions in a three-dimensional design practice. The research builds on concepts indentified in traditional craft practice as foundations for constructing new types of creative practices based on the use of digital technologies, as outlined by McCullough (1996)

Whitworth University Catalog 2012-2013

https://digitalcommons.whitworth.edu/whitworthcatalogs/1087/thumbnail.jp