Emergence of Self-Organized Symbol-Based Communication \ud in Artificial Creatures

In this paper, we describe a digital scenario where we simulated the emergence of self-organized symbol-based communication among artificial creatures inhabiting a \ud virtual world of unpredictable predatory events. In our experiment, creatures are autonomous agents that learn symbolic relations in an unsupervised manner, with no explicit feedback, and are able to engage in dynamical and autonomous communicative interactions with other creatures, even simultaneously. In order to synthesize a behavioral ecology and infer the minimum organizational constraints for the design of our creatures, \ud we examined the well-studied case of communication in vervet monkeys. Our results show that the creatures, assuming the role of sign users and learners, behave collectively as a complex adaptive system, where self-organized communicative interactions play a \ud major role in the emergence of symbol-based communication. We also strive in this paper for a careful use of the theoretical concepts involved, including the concepts of symbol and emergence, and we make use of a multi-level model for explaining the emergence of symbols in semiotic systems as a basis for the interpretation of inter-level relationships in the semiotic processes we are studying

Advanced Knowledge Technologies at the Midterm: Tools and Methods for the Semantic Web

The University of Edinburgh and research sponsors are authorised to reproduce and distribute reprints and on-line copies for their purposes notwithstanding any copyright annotation hereon. The views and conclusions contained herein are the author’s and shouldn’t be interpreted as necessarily representing the official policies or endorsements, either expressed or implied, of other parties.In a celebrated essay on the new electronic media, Marshall McLuhan wrote in 1962:Our private senses are not closed systems but are endlessly translated into each other in that experience which we call consciousness. Our extended senses, tools, technologies, through the ages, have been closed systems incapable of interplay or collective awareness. Now, in the electric age, the very instantaneous nature of co-existence among our technological instruments has created a crisis quite new in human history. Our extended faculties and senses now constitute a single field of experience which demands that they become collectively conscious. Our technologies, like our private senses, now demand an interplay and ratio that makes rational co-existence possible. As long as our technologies were as slow as the wheel or the alphabet or money, the fact that they were separate, closed systems was socially and psychically supportable. This is not true now when sight and sound and movement are simultaneous and global in extent. (McLuhan 1962, p.5, emphasis in original)Over forty years later, the seamless interplay that McLuhan demanded between our technologies is still barely visible. McLuhan’s predictions of the spread, and increased importance, of electronic media have of course been borne out, and the worlds of business, science and knowledge storage and transfer have been revolutionised. Yet the integration of electronic systems as open systems remains in its infancy.Advanced Knowledge Technologies (AKT) aims to address this problem, to create a view of knowledge and its management across its lifecycle, to research and create the services and technologies that such unification will require. Half way through its sixyear span, the results are beginning to come through, and this paper will explore some of the services, technologies and methodologies that have been developed. We hope to give a sense in this paper of the potential for the next three years, to discuss the insights and lessons learnt in the first phase of the project, to articulate the challenges and issues that remain.The WWW provided the original context that made the AKT approach to knowledge management (KM) possible. AKT was initially proposed in 1999, it brought together an interdisciplinary consortium with the technological breadth and complementarity to create the conditions for a unified approach to knowledge across its lifecycle. The combination of this expertise, and the time and space afforded the consortium by the IRC structure, suggested the opportunity for a concerted effort to develop an approach to advanced knowledge technologies, based on the WWW as a basic infrastructure.The technological context of AKT altered for the better in the short period between the development of the proposal and the beginning of the project itself with the development of the semantic web (SW), which foresaw much more intelligent manipulation and querying of knowledge. The opportunities that the SW provided for e.g., more intelligent retrieval, put AKT in the centre of information technology innovation and knowledge management services; the AKT skill set would clearly be central for the exploitation of those opportunities.The SW, as an extension of the WWW, provides an interesting set of constraints to the knowledge management services AKT tries to provide. As a medium for the semantically-informed coordination of information, it has suggested a number of ways in which the objectives of AKT can be achieved, most obviously through the provision of knowledge management services delivered over the web as opposed to the creation and provision of technologies to manage knowledge.AKT is working on the assumption that many web services will be developed and provided for users. The KM problem in the near future will be one of deciding which services are needed and of coordinating them. Many of these services will be largely or entirely legacies of the WWW, and so the capabilities of the services will vary. As well as providing useful KM services in their own right, AKT will be aiming to exploit this opportunity, by reasoning over services, brokering between them, and providing essential meta-services for SW knowledge service management.Ontologies will be a crucial tool for the SW. The AKT consortium brings a lot of expertise on ontologies together, and ontologies were always going to be a key part of the strategy. All kinds of knowledge sharing and transfer activities will be mediated by ontologies, and ontology management will be an important enabling task. Different applications will need to cope with inconsistent ontologies, or with the problems that will follow the automatic creation of ontologies (e.g. merging of pre-existing ontologies to create a third). Ontology mapping, and the elimination of conflicts of reference, will be important tasks. All of these issues are discussed along with our proposed technologies.Similarly, specifications of tasks will be used for the deployment of knowledge services over the SW, but in general it cannot be expected that in the medium term there will be standards for task (or service) specifications. The brokering metaservices that are envisaged will have to deal with this heterogeneity.The emerging picture of the SW is one of great opportunity but it will not be a wellordered, certain or consistent environment. It will comprise many repositories of legacy data, outdated and inconsistent stores, and requirements for common understandings across divergent formalisms. There is clearly a role for standards to play to bring much of this context together; AKT is playing a significant role in these efforts. But standards take time to emerge, they take political power to enforce, and they have been known to stifle innovation (in the short term). AKT is keen to understand the balance between principled inference and statistical processing of web content. Logical inference on the Web is tough. Complex queries using traditional AI inference methods bring most distributed computer systems to their knees. Do we set up semantically well-behaved areas of the Web? Is any part of the Web in which semantic hygiene prevails interesting enough to reason in? These and many other questions need to be addressed if we are to provide effective knowledge technologies for our content on the web

Dynamics of cultural memory: mediation of the Ayotzinapa case

http://www.ester.ee/record=b4698559*es

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

When Things Matter: A Data-Centric View of the Internet of Things

With the recent advances in radio-frequency identification (RFID), low-cost wireless sensor devices, and Web technologies, the Internet of Things (IoT) approach has gained momentum in connecting everyday objects to the Internet and facilitating machine-to-human and machine-to-machine communication with the physical world. While IoT offers the capability to connect and integrate both digital and physical entities, enabling a whole new class of applications and services, several significant challenges need to be addressed before these applications and services can be fully realized. A fundamental challenge centers around managing IoT data, typically produced in dynamic and volatile environments, which is not only extremely large in scale and volume, but also noisy, and continuous. This article surveys the main techniques and state-of-the-art research efforts in IoT from data-centric perspectives, including data stream processing, data storage models, complex event processing, and searching in IoT. Open research issues for IoT data management are also discussed

Researching social media as if the social mattered

The institutions we have come to call “media” have been involved for over a century in providing an infrastructure for social life and have invested in a quite particular and privileged way of re-presenting the world as “social.” The dialectic between “media” and “social” has become more urgent to understand in an era when media and information infrastructures have expanded, converged, and become embedded more deeply in the texture of everyday life, while at the same time the claims of “media” to be social have become explicit, indeed insistent. This article asks what it would mean to address this new social/media dialectic head on—as if the social mattered. The word “social” is our necessary term for thinking about the complex interdependencies out of which human life really is made and the claims to represent that interdependent reality made from particular positions of power. All forms of power have invested in certain representations of the social. This battle matters, and now “social media”—the infrastructures of web 2.0—are at the heart of that battle. The article seeks to offer a plausible agenda for a collaborative program of research to address this struggle over the definition of “the social.

Making a name for Anonymous. Digital culture , anonymous publics and transgressie subjectivities

Recently, researchers from various domains of social sciences have been particularly concerned with the social, cultural, and political impacts of digital media. To give an account of the specific processes behind the formation of Anonymous, I develop a microsociological framework for the analysis of disembodied global forms – anchoring such forms in intersubjective reciprocity. In order to move beyond interpretative sociology’s emphasis on language as society’s integrative function, I privileged the dimensions of temporality, rhythms and patterns. I also focused on how “disembodied” internet collectives are enacted and assembled within computer screens, terminals, and the digital networks that connect them. My analysis takes into account those temporalities, projections and reflections, which point to the non-symbolic components of mediated sociality. Those dynamic interconnections behind the Anonymous collective are approached through the notions of publics, networks or even swarms.Recientemente, investigadores de diversos campos de las ciencias sociales se han enfocado en los impactos sociales, culturales y políticos de los medios digitales. Para dar cuenta de los procesos específicos detrás de la formación de Anonymous, yo desarrollo un marco microsociológico para el análisis de formas globales “desencarnadas” de sociabilidad, anclando estas formas en la reciprocidad intersubjetiva mediada. Para ir más allá del énfasis en el lenguaje como función integrativa de la sociedad de la sociología interpretativa, privilegié las dimensiones de la temporalidad, los ritmos y los patrones en mi análisis. También me enfoqué a ver cómo los colectivos de Internet "desencarnados" se construyen en pantallas de computadora, terminales y las redes digitales que los conectan. Mi análisis tiene en cuenta esas temporalidades, proyecciones y reflexiones, que apuntan a los componentes no simbólicos de la socialidad mediada. Esas interconexiones dinámicas detrás del colectivo Anónimo se acercan a través de las nociones de públicos, redes y enjambres.Recentment, investigadors de diversos camps de les ciències socials s'han enfocat en els impactes socials, culturals i polítics dels mitjans digitals. Per donar compte dels processos específics darrere de la formació d'Anonymous, jo desenvolupament un marc miocrosociològic per a l'anàlisi de formes globals "desencarnades" de sociabilitat, ancorant aquestes formes en la reciprocitat intersubjectiva intervinguda. Per anar més enllà de l'èmfasi en el llenguatge com a funció integrativa de la societat de la sociologia interpretativa, privilegiï les dimensions de la temporalitat, els ritmes i els patrons en la meva anàlisi. També vaig focalitzar a veure com els col·lectius d'Internet "desencarnats" es construeixen en pantalles d'ordinador, terminals i les xarxes digitals que els connecten. La meva anàlisi té en compte aquestes temporalitats, projeccions i reflexions, que apunten als components no simbòlics de la socialitat intervinguda. Aquestes interconnexions dinàmiques darrere del col·lectiu Anònim s'acosten a través de les nocions de públics, xarxes i eixams

The social psychology of digital photography: a process philosophy approach

This thesis addresses the nature of the image and its relationship to human perception and memory. Traditionally psychology approaches the relationship between the image and the human in a representationalist register, in which the world represents itself through images to the subjective observer. The thesis questions these assumptions about the representational relationship between the world, the mind and the image through a study of people using digital photographic technologies. It argues that digital images exist as a complex network of technology and activity that manage their incessant movement, production, consumption, convertibility, connectedness and fragility. The digital image exposes the complex nature of the image as more than a simple representation. If this is the case, then human involvement with images as networks occurs in terms of our inclusion in the network rather than as a subjective observer positioned outside of the world. Henri Bergson proposes that we see the image in terms of a distinction between time and space rather than as an intermediary between a subject and the object. The implications of this for the way in which we think about the interaction between people and technology and the nature of perception and memory are explored through some data examples from three settings. These are; amateur photographers using digital technology; families looking through their stocks of digital images and remembering past events together and finally, displays of family member's histories and identities on the internet

Software service adaptation based on interface localisation

The aim of Web services is the provision of software services to a range of different users in different locations. Service localisation in this context can facilitate the internationalisation and localisation of services by allowing their adaption to different locales. The authors investigate three dimensions: (i) lingual localisation by providing service-level language translation techniques to adopt services to different languages, (ii) regulatory localisation by providing standards-based mappings to achieve regulatory compliance with regionally varying laws, standards and regulations, and (iii) social localisation by taking into account preferences and customs for individuals and the groups or communities in which they participate. The objective is to support and implement an explicit modelling of aspects that are relevant to localisation and runtime support consisting of tools and middleware services to automating the deployment based on models of locales, driven by the two localisation dimensions. The authors focus here on an ontology-based conceptual information model that integrates locale specification into service architectures in a coherent way