9 research outputs found

    Actor & Avatar: A Scientific and Artistic Catalog

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    What kind of relationship do we have with artificial beings (avatars, puppets, robots, etc.)? What does it mean to mirror ourselves in them, to perform them or to play trial identity games with them? Actor & Avatar addresses these questions from artistic and scholarly angles. Contributions on the making of "technical others" and philosophical reflections on artificial alterity are flanked by neuroscientific studies on different ways of perceiving living persons and artificial counterparts. The contributors have achieved a successful artistic-scientific collaboration with extensive visual material

    XI CIDU. La transformación digital de la universidad Congreso Iberoamericano de Docencia Universitaria

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    Nesta comunicação apresenta-se uma experiência de gamificação realizada numa turma online, numa Universidade Virtual. Foram utilizados como elementos de jogo pontos, badges, leadboard, avatares e desafios. Do ponto de vista do desenho da unidade curricular, foi proposto um desafio global, sob a forma de roleplaying, que percorreu todo o semestre. Para este desafio global contribuíram três outros desafios, nos quais os estudantes deveriam dinamizar discussões, sendo atribuídos pontos e badges em função da sua prestação. No que se refere à metodologia, tratou-se de uma investigação exploratória, com carácter qualitativo. Como técnicas de recolha de dados, privilegiou-se a observação, realizada durante toda a unidade curricular, complementada por um questionário aos estudantes no final do semestre. Constatou-se que a estratégia adotada incentivou a participação ativa dos estudantes, tendo estes gostado da experiência. Verificaram-se, contudo, algumas limitações, pelo facto de os estudantes desta amostra serem adultos trabalhadores a frequentar uma licenciatura online, com outros compromissos profissionais e familiares. Com efeito, verificou-se que vários deles mencionaram ter dificuldade na gestão do tempo, limitando a possibilidade de adesão a um percurso exigente em termos de participação ativa.In this paper, we present a gamification experiment that took place in an online class at a virtual university. The game elements were points, badges, leaderboard, avatars and challenges. Taking into account the curricular unit design, a global challenge was proposed, in the form of roleplaying, and took place along the whole semester. Three other challenges contributed to this global challenge: the students had to dynamize debates, and received points and badges, according to their performance. In terms of methodology, it consisted in an exploratory research of a qualitative character. Observation, complemented by a questionnaire made available to the students at the end of the semester, were the chosen techniques for data collection. It was observed that the adopted strategy motivated the students’ active participation, who really enjoyed the experience. However, some limitations were also observed, once these students, attending an online First Cycle Degree, are adults who have professional and family responsibilities and commitments. Actually, several of them mentioned that the difficulty in organizing their time did limit the possibility of participating in the challenge, which was indeed demanding in terms of active participation.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

    Paradoxes of Interactivity

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    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

    Towards an Ontology of Software

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    Software is permeating every aspect of our personal and social life. And yet, the cluster of concepts around the notion of software, such as the notions of a software product, software requirements, software specifications, are still poorly understood with no consensus on the horizon. For many, software is just code, something intangible best defined in contrast with hardware, but it is not particularly illuminating. This erroneous notion, software is just code, presents both in the ontology of software literature and in the software maintenance tools. This notion is obviously wrong because it doesn’t account for the fact that whenever someone fixes a bug, the code of a software system changes, but nobody believes that this is a different software system. Several researchers have attempted to understand the core nature of software and programs in terms of concepts such as code, copy, medium and execution. More recently, a proposal was made by Irmak to consider software as an abstract artifact, distinct from code, just because code may change while the software remains the same. We share many of his intuitions, as well as the methodology he adopts to motivate his conclusions, based on an analysis of the condition under which software maintains its identity despite change. However, he leaves the question of ‘what is the identity of software’ open, and we answer this question here. Trying to answer the question left open by Irmak, the main objective of this dissertation is to lay the foundations for an ontology of software, grounded on the foundational ontology DOLCE. This new ontology of software is intended to facilitate the communication within the community by reducing terminological ambiguities, and by resolving inconsistencies. If we had a better footing on answering the question ‘What is software?’, we'd be in a position to build better tools for maintaining and managing a software system throughout its lifetime. The research contents of the thesis consist of three results. Firstly, we dive into the ontological nature of software, recognizing it as an abstract information artifact. To support this proposal the first main contribution of the dissertation is demonstrated from three dimensions: (1) We distinguish software (non-physical object) from hardware (physical object), and demonstrate the idea that the rapid changing speed of software is supported by the easy changeability of its medium hardware; (2) Furthermore, we discuss about the artifactual nature of software, addressing the erroneous notion, software is just code, presents both in the ontology of software literature and in the software maintenance tools; (3)At last, we recognize software as an information artifact, and this approach ensures that software inherits all the properties of an information artifact, and the study and research could be directly reused for software then. Secondly, we propose an ontology founded on the concepts adopted from Requirements Engineering (RE), such as the notions of World and Machine phenomena. In this ontology, we make a sharp distinction between different kinds of software artifacts (software program, software system, and software product), and describe the ways they are inter-connected in the context of a software engineering process. Additionally, we study software from a Social Perspective, explaining the concepts of licensable software product and licensed software product. Also, we discuss about the possibility to adopt our ontology of software in software configuration management systems to provide a better understanding and control of software changes. Thirdly, we note the important role played by assumptions in getting software to fulfill its requirements. The requirements for most software systems -- the intended states-of-affairs these systems are supposed to bring about -- concern their operational environment, usually a social world. But these systems don’t have any direct means to change that environment in order to bring about the intended states-of-affairs. In what sense then can we say that such systems fulfill their requirements? One of the main contributions of this dissertation is to account for this paradox. We do so by proposing a preliminary ontology of assumptions that are implicitly used in software engineering practice to establish that a system specification S fulfills its requirements R given a set of assumptions A, and our proposal is illustrated with a meeting scheduling example

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

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    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

    Proposition d'architecture et de processus pour la résilience des systèmes : application aux systèmes critiques à longue durée de vie

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    The long operational lifecycle of systems and the uncertainty of the environment are a great challenge to engineers. Resilience enhances reliability and safety to take into account the unforeseeable situations, without precedent. The goal is to understand the situation to avoid an accident. The quality of the human-machine interaction is the key issue to achieve this goal. The state of the art explains that sociotechnical systems resilience completes safety approach. Implementaing resilience impacts both system architecture and systems engineering processes. At the end, implementing resilience impacts human-computer interaction, user centred design as well as architecture models. We created the design pattern “to monitor and alert” applied to the function “to avoid” of the resilience. Its goal is to give to the operators the capacity to understand the dynamics of the system, to control at sight vis-a-vis unforeseeable situations, in order to avoid an accident. The proposal contents the processes to be implemented to contribute to the resilience of long lifecycle critical systems. The application to the railway domain is based on the analysis of three accident technical reports. It is declined, on the processes to be implemented to contribute to the resilience of a system, on the design pattern “to monitor and alert” for the architecture of a resilient system and to propose improvements of the user interface. Research forecasts supplement the report.Pour répondre aux enjeux de la longue vie opérationnelle des systèmes et de l’incertitude de l’environnement, la résilience complète la sûreté de fonctionnement pour prendre en compte les situations imprévisibles, sans précédent : l’objectif est de comprendre la situation pour éviter un accident. La qualité de l’interaction homme-machine est essentielle pour atteindre cet objectif. L’état de l’art présente la résilience des systèmes sociotechniques comme complémentaire à la sécurité. Mettre en œuvre la résilience affecte tant l’architecture système que les processus d’ingénierie système. Enfin, elle affecte aussi l’interaction homme-machine, tant son processus de conception centrée utilisateur, ses modèles utilisateur (persona), que ses modèles d’architecture. Nous avons créé le patron de conception « surveiller et alerter » appliqué à la fonction « éviter » de la résilience, pour donner aux opérateurs la capacité de comprendre la dynamique du système, le conduire à vue face à des situations imprévisibles, sans précédent afin d’éviter la survenue d’un accident. La proposition comprend aussi des processus à mettre en œuvre pour contribuer à la résilience d’un système critique à longue durée de vie. L’application au domaine ferroviaire s’appuie sur l’analyse de rapports d’enquête technique d’accidents. Elle se décline sur le patron de conception « surveiller et alerter » et sur le persona, in fine pour proposer des améliorations des interfaces utilisateur. Des perspectives de recherche complètent le mémoire

    Acta Polytechnica Hungarica 2008

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    CORPORATE SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY IN ROMANIA

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    The purpose of this paper is to identify the main opportunities and limitations of corporate social responsibility (CSR). The survey was defined with the aim to involve the highest possible number of relevant CSR topics and give the issue a more wholesome perspective. It provides a basis for further comprehension and deeper analyses of specific CSR areas. The conditions determining the success of CSR in Romania have been defined in the paper on the basis of the previously cumulative knowledge as well as the results of various researches. This paper provides knowledge which may be useful in the programs promoting CSR.Corporate social responsibility, Supportive policies, Romania

    Modeling Software Agent Awareness of Physical-Informatical Essence Duality

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