Robotics 2010

Without a doubt, robotics has made an incredible progress over the last decades. The vision of developing, designing and creating technical systems that help humans to achieve hard and complex tasks, has intelligently led to an incredible variety of solutions. There are barely technical fields that could exhibit more interdisciplinary interconnections like robotics. This fact is generated by highly complex challenges imposed by robotic systems, especially the requirement on intelligent and autonomous operation. This book tries to give an insight into the evolutionary process that takes place in robotics. It provides articles covering a wide range of this exciting area. The progress of technical challenges and concepts may illuminate the relationship between developments that seem to be completely different at first sight. The robotics remains an exciting scientific and engineering field. The community looks optimistically ahead and also looks forward for the future challenges and new development

KEER2022

Avanttítol: KEER2022. DiversitiesDescripció del recurs: 25 juliol 202

Applied Cognitive Sciences

Cognitive science is an interdisciplinary field in the study of the mind and intelligence. The term cognition refers to a variety of mental processes, including perception, problem solving, learning, decision making, language use, and emotional experience. The basis of the cognitive sciences is the contribution of philosophy and computing to the study of cognition. Computing is very important in the study of cognition because computer-aided research helps to develop mental processes, and computers are used to test scientific hypotheses about mental organization and functioning. This book provides a platform for reviewing these disciplines and presenting cognitive research as a separate discipline

Engineering the Brand: Automotive attribute management based on the cognitive categorisation of the branded product

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and was awarded by Brunel UniversityIn mature product markets competitive advantage is increasingly realised by the careful design and engineering of product attributes that emphasise a brand’s values. In the high-luxury automotive segment, user satisfaction appears to be particularly influenced by products that are perceived to be typical to the brand’s lineage. This research aims to explore the links between product specifications and the categorisation of the product as belonging to the brand, by studying the effect with the Bentley brand’s interiors. The research uses cognitive categorisation theory and related methodologies as a basis for understanding the cognitive processes that operate between the input of specific multisensory stimuli and assessments of typicality and therefore satisfaction. These processes are interpreted through Semantic Differentiation techniques in a number of studies of Bentley products and competitor vehicles. The results suggest that by identifying and defining a number of product properties, of varying importance, and measuring subject’s responses to them, brand-based categorisation effects can be visualised and quantified. The research investigates if these effects have been stable over time and finds that some patterns exist that might be used to predict how future products might be categorised. The benefits of the resulting assessment and measurement tool to the product development process appear to be at least two-fold; firstly, by informing the process, product specifications may be set and designs developed, that are considered more accurate, good and right for the brand, resulting in controlled development time and costs and increased consumer satisfaction. Secondly, by enabling the process, property strengths, weakness and competitive threats may be understood that facilitate experimental and actual design modifications to optimise brand distinctiveness

Paradoxes of Interactivity

Current findings from anthropology, genetics, prehistory, cognitive and neuroscience indicate that human nature is grounded in a co-evolution of tool use, symbolic communication, social interaction and cultural transmission. Digital information technology has recently entered as a new tool in this co-evolution, and will probably have the strongest impact on shaping the human mind in the near future. A common effort from the humanities, the sciences, art and technology is necessary to understand this ongoing co- evolutionary process. Interactivity is a key for understanding the new relationships formed by humans with social robots as well as interactive environments and wearables underlying this process. Of special importance for understanding interactivity are human-computer and human-robot interaction, as well as media theory and New Media Art. »Paradoxes of Interactivity« brings together reflections on »interactivity« from different theoretical perspectives, the interplay of science and art, and recent technological developments for artistic applications, especially in the realm of sound

Paradoxes of interactivity: perspectives for media theory, human-computer interaction, and artistic investigations

Current findings from anthropology, genetics, prehistory, cognitive and neuroscience indicate that human nature is grounded in a co-evolution of tool use, symbolic communication, social interaction and cultural transmission. Digital information technology has recently entered as a new tool in this co-evolution, and will probably have the strongest impact on shaping the human mind in the near future. A common effort from the humanities, the sciences, art and technology is necessary to understand this ongoing co- evolutionary process. Interactivity is a key for understanding the new relationships formed by humans with social robots as well as interactive environments and wearables underlying this process. Of special importance for understanding interactivity are human-computer and human-robot interaction, as well as media theory and New Media Art. "Paradoxes of Interactivity" brings together reflections on "interactivity" from different theoretical perspectives, the interplay of science and art, and recent technological developments for artistic applications, especially in the realm of sound

Design strategies for the exploration of product meaning in meaning-driven innovation

Design has been framed as a driver of innovation through product meaning, but it falls short when it comes to dedicated knowledge and methods directly applicable into design practices. Structured by Design Research Methodology (DRM) (Blessing and Chakrabarti 2009), this thesis combines exploratory research with practice-based design research. This thesis presents a literature review covering design studies, psychology, cognitive semantics, linguistics, marketing, innovation management and new product development. Together combined these have been used to develop a new framework of ‘product meaning’ consisting of 4 definitions: meaning as conceptualisation, as importance, as intention, and as representation. The framework has been used to demonstrate that different types of meaning are utilised throughout different stages of product development. Meaning as conceptualisation is identified as fundamental, and the most suitable, for design practice engaged in product meaning innovation. Three strategies of innovation of product meaning through product re-purposing are identified. Furthermore, from the field of cognitive science, theories and methods such as concept categorisation, thematic roles and conceptual blending are used as analysis tools for the selected 6 examples of innovative new meaning products. The structure of meaning innovations has been identified to consist of seven distinctive elements. Ten common characteristics of new meaning innovations are identified and, additionally, an exploratory method of current meanings of products is presented. Moreover, through engagement in practice-based design research a new meaning-driven design process has been developed. The findings from this research have been combined into a new design platform for an approach to meaning innovation and evaluated with experienced designers.</div

Computational and Psycho-Physiological Investigations of Musical Emotions

The ability of music to stir human emotions is a well known fact (Gabrielsson & Lindstrom. 2001). However, the manner in which music contributes to those experiences remains obscured. One of the main reasons is the large number of syndromes that characterise emotional experiences. Another is their subjective nature: musical emotions can be affected by memories, individual preferences and attitudes, among other factors (Scherer & Zentner, 2001). But can the same music induce similar affective experiences in all listeners, somehow independently of acculturation or personal bias? A considerable corpus of literature has consistently reported that listeners agree rather strongly about what type of emotion is expressed in a particular piece or even in particular moments or sections (Juslin & Sloboda, 2001). Those studies suggest that music features encode important characteristics of affective experiences, by suggesting the influence of various structural factors of music on emotional expression. Unfortunately, the nature of these relationships is complex, and it is common to find rather vague and contradictory descriptions. This thesis presents a novel methodology to analyse the dynamics of emotional responses to music. It consists of a computational investigation, based on spatiotemporal neural networks sensitive to structural aspects of music, which "mimic" human affective responses to music and permit to predict new ones. The dynamics of emotional responses to music are investigated as computational representations of perceptual processes (psychoacoustic features) and self-perception of physiological activation (peripheral feedback). Modelling and experimental results provide evidence suggesting that spatiotemporal patterns of sound resonate with affective features underlying judgements of subjective feelings. A significant part of the listener's affective response is predicted from the a set of six psychoacoustic features of sound - tempo, loudness, multiplicity (texture), power spectrum centroid (mean pitch), sharpness (timbre) and mean STFT flux (pitch variation) - and one physiological variable - heart rate. This work contributes to new evidence and insights to the study of musical emotions, with particular relevance to the music perception and emotion research communities

Natural Language Processing: Emerging Neural Approaches and Applications

This Special Issue highlights the most recent research being carried out in the NLP field to discuss relative open issues, with a particular focus on both emerging approaches for language learning, understanding, production, and grounding interactively or autonomously from data in cognitive and neural systems, as well as on their potential or real applications in different domains