Chatbots’ greetings to human-computer communication

In the last years, chatbots have gained new attention, due to the interest showed by widely known personalities and companies. The concept is broad, and, in this paper we target the work developed by the (old) community that is typically associated with chatbot’s competitions. In our opinion, they contribute with very interesting know-how, but specially with large-scale corpora, gathered by interactions with real people, an invaluable resource considering the renewed interest in Deep Nets.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

The Ethics and Impact of Digital Immortality

The concept of digital immortality has emerged over the past decade and is defined here as the continuation of an active or passive digital presence after death. Advances in knowledge management, machine to machine communication, data mining and artificial intelligence are now making a more active presence after death possible. This paper examines the research and literature around active digital immortality and explores the emotional, social, financial, and business impact of active digital immortality on relations, friends, colleagues and institutions. The issue of digital immortality also raises issues about the legal implications of a possible autonomous presence that reaches beyond mortal existence, and this will also be investigated. The final section of the paper questions whether digital immortality is really a concern and reflects on the assumptions about it in relation to neoliberal capitalism. It suggests that digital immortality may in fact merely be a clever ruse which in fact is likely to have little, if any legal impact despite media assumptions and hyperbole

Information in the Context of Philosophy and Cognitive Sciences

This textbook briefly maps as many as possible areas and contexts in which information plays an important role. It attempts an approach that also seeks to explore areas of research that are not commonly associated, such as informatics, information and library science, information physics, or information ethics. Given that the text is intended especially for students of the Master's Degree in Cognitive Studies, emphasis is placed on a humane, philosophical and interdisciplinary approach. It offers rather directions of thought, questions, and contexts than a complete theory developed into mathematical and technical details

Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Domain-Specific Language Design and Implementation (DSLDI 2015)

The goal of the DSLDI workshop is to bring together researchers and practitioners interested in sharing ideas on how DSLs should be designed, implemented, supported by tools, and applied in realistic application contexts. We are both interested in discovering how already known domains such as graph processing or machine learning can be best supported by DSLs, but also in exploring new domains that could be targeted by DSLs. More generally, we are interested in building a community that can drive forward the development of modern DSLs. These informal post-proceedings contain the submitted talk abstracts to the 3rd DSLDI workshop (DSLDI'15), and a summary of the panel discussion on Language Composition

GAYME: The development, design and testing of an auto-ethnographic, documentary game about quarely wandering urban/suburban spaces in Central Florida.

GAYME is a transmedia story-telling world that I have created to conceptually explore the dynamics of queering game design through the development of varying game prototypes. The final iteration of GAYME is @deadquarewalking\u27. It is a documentary game and a performance art installation that documents a carless, gay/queer/quare man\u27s journey on Halloween to get to and from one of Orlando\u27s most well-known gay clubs - the Parliament House Resort. The art of cruising city streets to seek out queer/quare companionship particularly amongst gay, male culture(s) is well-documented in densely, populated cities like New York, San Francisco and London, but not so much in car-centric, urban environments like Orlando that are less oriented towards pedestrians. Cruising has been and continues to be risky even in pedestrian-friendly cities but in Orlando cruising takes on a whole other dimension of danger. In 2011-2012, The Advocate magazine named Orlando one of the gayest cities in America (Breen, 2012). Transportation for America (2011) also named the Orlando metropolitan region the most dangerous city in the country for pedestrians. Living in Orlando without a car can be deadly as well as a significant barrier to connecting with other people, especially queer/quare people, because of Orlando\u27s car-centric design. In Orlando, cars are sexy. At the same time, the increasing prevalence in gay, male culture(s) of geo-social, mobile phone applications using Global Positioning Systems (GPS) and location aware services, such as Grindr (Grindr, LLC., 2009) and even FourSquare (Crowley and Selvadurai, 2009) and Instagram (Systrom and Krieger, 2010), is shifting the way gay/queer/quare Orlandoans co-create social and sexual networks both online and offline. Urban and sub-urban landscapes have transformed into hybrid techno-scapes overlaying the electronic, the emotional and the social with the geographic and the physical (Hjorth, 2011). With or without a car, gay men can still geo-socially cruise Orlando\u27s car-centric, street life with mobile devices. As such emerging media has become more pervasive, it has created new opportunities to quarely visualize Orlando\u27s technoscape through phone photography and hashtag metadata while also blurring lines between the artist and the curator, the player and the game designer. This project particularly has evolved to employ game design as an exhibition tool for the visualization of geo-social photography through hashtag play. Using hashtags as a game mechanic generates metadata that potentially identifies patterns of play and ways of seeing across player experiences as they attempt to make meaning of the images they encounter in the game. @deadquarewalking also demonstrates the potential of game design and geo-social, photo-sharing applications to illuminate new ways of documenting and witnessing the urban landscapes that we both collectively and uniquely inhabit. \u27In Irish culture, quare can mean very or extremely or it can be a spelling of the rural or Southern pronunciation of the word queer. Living in the American Southeast, I personally relate more to the term quare versus queer. Cultural theorist E. Patrick Johnson (2001) also argues for quareness as a way to question the subjective bias of whiteness in queer studies that risks discounting the lived experiences and material realities of people of color. Though I do not identify as a person of color and would be categorized as white or European American, quareness has an important critical application for considering how Orlando\u27s urban design is intersectionally racialized, gendered and classed

"Narratives of Technological Globalization and Outsourced Call Centers in India: Droids, Mimic Machines, Automatons, and Bad 'Borgs"

Taking as a premise that contemporary communication and information technology-aided globalization is a world-making practice that relies on narratives to construct and transmit global imaginaries and relational identities, this project evaluates narrative discourses of Indian call centers serving clients and customers in the United States in order to analyze evolving hegemonic narratives of the "global" of late capitalism. In this project, I argue that constellations of local, national, and transnational hegemonies map outsourced Indian call centers into a position in capitalist geography at which vectors of the production of national, corporate, and racial identities converge in the technological production of power. Specifically, I look at assemblages of narratives corresponding to four tropes that metaphorize Indian tech workers as machines--the oriental droid, the mimic machine, the productive automaton, and the bad 'borg--how each metaphor is reinforced by labor processes in the call center, and how these are assimilated into new forms of subjugation to further extend and entrench participation in zero-sum economics across the globe