Boy meets goal, boy loses goal, boy gets goal : the nature of feedback between goal-based simulation and understanding systems

We are designing a goal-based planning and simulation system called REACTOR for a multiple-actor world in which partially formulated plans are monitored during execution, providing feedback to the planner. Plan failures that occur are diagnosed by a combination of top-down (plan-synthesis) and bottom-up (plan-understanding) techniques, allowing an informed choice of response to the error. By maintaining separate belief spaces for each actor, we simulate planners who themselves simulate the planning and plan-understanding of other actors

Family Trouble: Heteronormativity, emotion work and queer youth mental health

Conflict with the family about sexual orientation and gender diversity is a key risk factor associated with poor mental health in youth populations. Findings presented here derive from a UK study that employed an interdisciplinary critical mental health approach that de-pathologized emotional distress and conceptualised families as social and affective units that are created through everyday practices. Our aim was to explore how family relationships foster, maintain or harm the mental health and wellbeing of LGBTQ+ youth. Data were generated through exploratory visual, creative and digital qualitative methods in two phases. Phase 1 involved digital/paper emotion maps and interviews with LGBTQ+ youth aged 16-25 (n=12) and family member/mentor interviews (n=7). Phase 2 employed diary methods and follow-up interviews (n=9). The data analytic strategy involved three stages: individual case analysis; cross-sectional thematic analysis; and metainterpretation. We found that family relationships impacted on queer youth mental health in complex ways that were related to the establishment of their autonomous queer selves, the desire to remain belonging to their family and the need to maintain a secure environment. The emotion work involved in navigating identity, belonging and security was made difficult because of family heteronormativity, youth autonomy and family expectations and had a stark impact on queer youth mental health and wellbeing. Improving the mental health of LGBTQ+ youth requires a much deeper understanding of the emotionality of family relationships and the difficulties negotiating these as a young person

Machine Ethics, Ethics for Machines: Context-Based Modeling for Machines Making Ethical Decisions

Machine ethics is an emerging, interdisciplinary field that focuses on if – and if so, how – machines can make ethical decisions autonomously. Through a close study of two positions on whether or not machines can be moral agents, this project sheds light on a clash of assumptions that is keeping the field of machine ethics in limbo. After making this clash of assumptions clear, I raise two questions which get at the scope of machine ethics itself: 1) What makes ethical decision-making different from other kinds of decision-making? 2) To what extent can machines engage with ethics and make ethical decisions? I address the first question by arguing that ethics is distinct because it requires the ability to understand and participate in human conventions. I address the second question by arguing that ethics has always been informed by our humanity, but machine ethics is an opportunity to expand our understanding of ethics so that machines can engage with it insofar as they are machines. This project aims to contribute to machine ethics by proposing a major shift in perspective, from a focus on human abilities to a focus on machines and their own radically novel abilities

The Role of Knowledge Accessibility in Episodic Future Thought

The capacity to think about specific events that one might encounter in the future--episodic future thought--involves the flexible: re)organization of knowledge. However, little is known about the cognitive mechanisms that guide this process. The reported studies demonstrate evidence for the role of knowledge accessibility as one such mechanism. First, comparisons were drawn between episodic future thought and other cognitive tasks that similarly require participants to produce open-ended responses and for which the role of knowledge accessibility is well established. Second, three experiments: N = 270) provided direct tests of whether accessible knowledge becomes incorporated into episodic future thought. In Experiments 1 and 2, priming knowledge relevant to an upcoming episode generation task shaped the content of thoughts about the future. Experiment 3 revealed that, as with other open-ended production tasks, primed knowledge must be processed in a meaningful manner in order for it to exert an influence on the content of episodic future thought. These results further understanding of episodic future thought and suggest important avenues for future research