Acquisition of Autonomy in Biotechnology and Artificial Intelligence

This presentation discusses a notion encountered across disciplines, and in different facets of human activity: autonomous activity. We engage it in an interdisciplinary way. We start by considering the reactions and behaviors of biological entities to biotechnological intervention. An attempt is made to characterize the degree of freedom of embryos & clones, which show openness to different outcomes when the epigenetic developmental landscape is factored in. We then consider the claim made in programming and artificial intelligence that automata could show self-directed behavior as to the determination of their step-wise decisions on courses of action. This question remains largely open and calls for some important qualifications. We try to make sense of the presence of claims of freedom in agency, first in common sense, then by ascribing developmental plasticity in biology and biotechnology, and in the mapping of programmed systems in the presence of environmental cues and self-referenced circuits as well as environmental coupling. This is the occasion to recall attempts at working out a logical and methodological approach to the openness of concepts that are still to be found, and assess whether they can operate the structuring intelligibility of a yet undeveloped or underdeveloped field of study, where a “bisociation" and a unification of knowledge might be possible

Philosophy of Blockchain Technology - Ontologies

About the necessity and usefulness of developing a philosophy specific to the blockchain technology, emphasizing on the ontological aspects. After an Introduction that highlights the main philosophical directions for this emerging technology, in Blockchain Technology I explain the way the blockchain works, discussing ontological development directions of this technology in Designing and Modeling. The next section is dedicated to the main application of blockchain technology, Bitcoin, with the social implications of this cryptocurrency. There follows a section of Philosophy in which I identify the blockchain technology with the concept of heterotopia developed by Michel Foucault and I interpret it in the light of the notational technology developed by Nelson Goodman as a notational system. In the Ontology section, I present two developmental paths that I consider important: Narrative Ontology, based on the idea of order and structure of history transmitted through Paul Ricoeur's narrative history, and the Enterprise Ontology system based on concepts and models of an enterprise, specific to the semantic web, and which I consider to be the most well developed and which will probably become the formal ontological system, at least in terms of the economic and legal aspects of blockchain technology. In Conclusions I am talking about the future directions of developing the blockchain technology philosophy in general as an explanatory and robust theory from a phenomenologically consistent point of view, which allows testability and ontologies in particular, arguing for the need of a global adoption of an ontological system for develop cross-cutting solutions and to make this technology profitable. CONTENTS: Abstract Introducere Tehnologia blockchain - Proiectare - Modele Bitcoin Filosofia Ontologii - Ontologii narative - Ontologii de intreprindere Concluzii Note Bibliografie DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.24510.3360

Tangible user interfaces : past, present and future directions

In the last two decades, Tangible User Interfaces (TUIs) have emerged as a new interface type that interlinks the digital and physical worlds. Drawing upon users' knowledge and skills of interaction with the real non-digital world, TUIs show a potential to enhance the way in which people interact with and leverage digital information. However, TUI research is still in its infancy and extensive research is required in or- der to fully understand the implications of tangible user interfaces, to develop technologies that further bridge the digital and the physical, and to guide TUI design with empirical knowledge. This paper examines the existing body of work on Tangible User In- terfaces. We start by sketching the history of tangible user interfaces, examining the intellectual origins of this field. We then present TUIs in a broader context, survey application domains, and review frame- works and taxonomies. We also discuss conceptual foundations of TUIs including perspectives from cognitive sciences, phycology, and philoso- phy. Methods and technologies for designing, building, and evaluating TUIs are also addressed. Finally, we discuss the strengths and limita- tions of TUIs and chart directions for future research

The Cost of Rational Agency

The rational agency assumption limits systems to domains of application that have never been observed. Moreover, representing agents as being rational in the sense of maximising utility subject to some well specified constraints renders software systems virtually unscalable. These properties of the rational agency assumption are shown to be unnecessary in representations or analogies of markets. The demonstration starts with an analysis of how the rational agency assumption limits the applicability and scalability of the IBM information filetering economy. An unrestricted specification of the information filtering economy is developed from an analysis of the properties of markets as systems and the implementation of a model based on intelligent agents. This extended information filtering economy modelis used to test the analytical results on the scope for agents to act as intermediaries between human users and information sources

Semiotic Analysis of Computer Visualization

The purpose of this chapter is to discuss the semiotic approach to form theory of computer visualization. Such theory should be the foundation of design, development, and evaluations of visualization systems. The “direct” semiotic analysis of visualization is defined and the scheme of the analysis is considered. This analysis reveals “who is who” in the process of the visualization semiosis and helps in design and development of the real visualization systems. The analysis allows to describe the problems arising at developments of specialized systems in terms of the semiotics and showing how this analysis can serve as a tool for the visualization systems design. It is important to analyze the sign nature of the human‐computer interface and the visualization. Such conceptions as computer metaphor, metaphor action, and metaphor formula are defined. The properties of metaphors are analyzed with a view to possible usage of metaphors for specific applications. The properties are considered by the example of the hierarchical sequence of the natural Room‐Building‐City (Landscape) metaphors. Also the properties of the molecule metaphor are considered in the context of software visualization systems. In conclusion, some approaches to the theory of computer visualization are outlined

Human-Level Performance on Word Analogy Questions by Latent Relational Analysis

This paper introduces Latent Relational Analysis (LRA), a method for measuring relational similarity. LRA has potential applications in many areas, including information extraction, word sense disambiguation, machine translation, and information retrieval. Relational similarity is correspondence between relations, in contrast with attributional similarity, which is correspondence between attributes. When two words have a high degree of attributional similarity, we call them synonyms. When two pairs of words have a high degree of relational similarity, we say that their relations are analogous. For example, the word pair mason/stone is analogous to the pair carpenter/wood; the relations between mason and stone are highly similar to the relations between carpenter and wood. Past work on semantic similarity measures has mainly been concerned with attributional similarity. For instance, Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) can measure the degree of similarity between two words, but not between two relations. Recently the Vector Space Model (VSM) of information retrieval has been adapted to the task of measuring relational similarity, achieving a score of 47% on a collection of 374 college-level multiple-choice word analogy questions. In the VSM approach, the relation between a pair of words is characterized by a vector of frequencies of predefined patterns in a large corpus. LRA extends the VSM approach in three ways: (1) the patterns are derived automatically from the corpus (they are not predefined), (2) the Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) is used to smooth the frequency data (it is also used this way in LSA), and (3) automatically generated synonyms are used to explore reformulations of the word pairs. LRA achieves 56% on the 374 analogy questions, statistically equivalent to the average human score of 57%. On the related problem of classifying noun-modifier relations, LRA achieves similar gains over the VSM, while using a smaller corpus

An aesthetics of touch: investigating the language of design relating to form

How well can designers communicate qualities of touch? This paper presents evidence that they have some capability to do so, much of which appears to have been learned, but at present make limited use of such language. Interviews with graduate designer-makers suggest that they are aware of and value the importance of touch and materiality in their work, but lack a vocabulary to fully relate to their detailed explanations of other aspects such as their intent or selection of materials. We believe that more attention should be paid to the verbal dialogue that happens in the design process, particularly as other researchers show that even making-based learning also has a strong verbal element to it. However, verbal language alone does not appear to be adequate for a comprehensive language of touch. Graduate designers-makers’ descriptive practices combined non-verbal manipulation within verbal accounts. We thus argue that haptic vocabularies do not simply describe material qualities, but rather are situated competences that physically demonstrate the presence of haptic qualities. Such competencies are more important than groups of verbal vocabularies in isolation. Design support for developing and extending haptic competences must take this wide range of considerations into account to comprehensively improve designers’ capabilities

Evolutionary Theory of Technological Change: Discussion of Missing Points and Promising Approaches

There are concerns that in order to exploit the powerful new capabilities provided by the Information Technology Era, it is necessary to advance Future-oriented Technology Analysis (FTA) of both product and process. Among these new capabilities, the FTA Methods Working Group has recently identified three main converging areas of development: complex networks, simulation modeling of complex adaptive systems (CAS), and the search of vast databases. Such convergence has rejuvenated the growth of FTA methods and practice, much in accordance with the perspective envisioned in Linstone (1999), following his optimistic view of a strong, confident technology-driven scenario, which would bring a renewed impetus toward new methods in technological forecasting. Focusing on new methods related to the new capabilities, we must borrow the discussion of methods and tools that have explosively grown in recent years in the fields of biosciences, bioinformatics and evolution. Among the needs for FTA envisioned by the FTA Methods Working Group, we find a questioning about the validity of the analogy between technological evolution and biological evolution (TFA Methods Working Group, 2004): Can artificial technological worlds be created by simulation modeling analogous to biological ones? This question is hardly a new one, and we can even trace at least a three-decade long debate on this issue. What makes the difference today, are exactly those powerful new capabilities provided by the Information Technology Era and the manifold convergence of information and molecular technologies that are contributing enormously to new insights in simulation methods and evolutionary programming. In the previously cited 30-year anniversary issue of Technological Forecasting and Social Change, Bowonder et al (1999); briefly reviewed this topic by mainly focusing on some of the lessons learned from evolutionary theory as it anticipates changes in evolutionary trajectories, and proposed a research agenda for future research. But these authors have not considered, in detail, the new capabilities and have not identified the possible problems and obstacles that must be overcome to transform evolutionary approaches into useful forecasting tools. The present paper intends to present the state-of-the-art on this debate and to address some important considerations necessary to answer the above question. The sense one gets from the published literature on this theme is that the effort to-date has been primarily centered on the striking similarities between biological evolution and technological evolution and is mostly based on verbal theorizing. It seems that a synthesis of biology and technology remains beyond reach, with some people even doubting whether it can ever be achieved. In the following lines we intend to point out and briefly discuss some quite important aspects that have been overlooked and misinterpreted in this exciting debate