Random Feature Maps via a Layered Random Projection (LaRP) Framework for Object Classification

The approximation of nonlinear kernels via linear feature maps has recently gained interest due to their applications in reducing the training and testing time of kernel-based learning algorithms. Current random projection methods avoid the curse of dimensionality by embedding the nonlinear feature space into a low dimensional Euclidean space to create nonlinear kernels. We introduce a Layered Random Projection (LaRP) framework, where we model the linear kernels and nonlinearity separately for increased training efficiency. The proposed LaRP framework was assessed using the MNIST hand-written digits database and the COIL-100 object database, and showed notable improvement in object classification performance relative to other state-of-the-art random projection methods.Comment: 5 page

Exploring New Forms of Random Projections for Prediction and Dimensionality Reduction in Big-Data Regimes

The story of this work is dimensionality reduction. Dimensionality reduction is a method that takes as input a point-set P of n points in R^d where d is typically large and attempts to find a lower-dimensional representation of that dataset, in order to ease the burden of processing for down-stream algorithms. In today’s landscape of machine learning, researchers and practitioners work with datasets that either have a very large number of samples, and or include high-dimensional samples. Therefore, dimensionality reduction is applied as a pre-processing technique primarily to overcome the curse of dimensionality. Generally, dimensionality reduction improves time and storage space required for processing the point-set, removes multi-collinearity and redundancies in the dataset where different features may depend on one another, and may enable simple visualizations of the dataset in 2-D and 3-D making the relationships in the data easy for humans to comprehend. Dimensionality reduction methods come in many shapes and sizes. Methods such as Principal Component Analysis (PCA), Multi-dimensional Scaling, IsoMaps, and Locally Linear Embeddings are amongst the most commonly used method of this family of algorithms. However, the choice of dimensionality reduction method proves critical in many applications as there is no one-size-fits-all solution, and special care must be considered for different datasets and tasks. Furthermore, the aforementioned popular methods are data-dependent, and commonly rely on computing either the Kernel / Gram matrix or the covariance matrix of the dataset. These matrices scale with increasing number of samples and increasing number of data dimensions, respectively, and are consequently poor choices in today’s landscape of big-data applications. Therefore, it is pertinent to develop new dimensionality reduction methods that can be efficiently applied to large and high-dimensional datasets, by either reducing the dependency on the data, or side-stepping it altogether. Furthermore, such new dimensionality reduction methods should be able to perform on par with, or better than, traditional methods such as PCA. To achieve this goal, we turn to a simple and powerful method called random projections. Random projections are a simple, efficient, and data-independent method for stably embedding a point-set P of n points in R^d to R^k where d is typically large and k is on the order of log n. Random projections have a long history of use in dimensionality reduction literature with great success. In this work, we are inspired to build on the ideas of random projection theory, and extend the framework and build a powerful new setup of random projections for large high-dimensional datasets, with comparable performance to state-of-the-art data-dependent and nonlinear methods. Furthermore, we study the use of random projections in domains other than dimensionality reduction, including prediction, and show the competitive performance of such methods for processing small dataset regimes

Pivoting the player:a methodological toolkit for player character research in offline role-playing games

This thesis introduces an innovative method for the analysis of the player character (PC) in offline computer role-playing games (cRPGs). It derives from the assumption that the character constitutes the focal point of the game, around which all the other elements revolve. This underlying observation became the foundation of the Pivot Player Character Model, the framework illustrating the experience of gameplay as perceived through the PC’s eyes. Although VG characters have been scrutinised from many different perspectives, a uniform methodology has not been formed yet. This study aims to fill that methodological void by systematising the hitherto research and providing a method replicable across the cRPG genre. The proposed methodology builds upon the research of characters performed in video games, fiction, film, and drama. It has been largely inspired by Anne Ubersfeld’s semiological dramatic character research implemented in Reading Theatre I (1999). The developed theoretical model is applied to three selected cRPGs, which form an accurate methodological sample: The Witcher (CD Projekt RED 2007), Fallout 3 (Bethesda Game Studios 2008), and Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines (Troika Games 2004). The choice of the game genre has been incited by the degree of attention it draws to the player character’s persona. No other genre features such a complex character development system as a computer role-playing game. <br/

Framing Strategies in Role-Playing Games. 'My Pleasure': Toward a Poetics of Framing in Tabletop Role-playing Games

The dissertation discusses the use and impact of “literary” framing (as by Werner Wolf) in generating and negotiating fictional spaces, narratives and meanings within the medium of tabletop role-playing games (TRPGs). In a second step, the text describes some of the specific and most salient framing features and strategies used by players during game sessions. By analyzing these through actual gameplay it is possible to identify the ‘transceptional’ border (Bunia) between reality and fiction to be the constitutive moment of role-play where players are both aware of, and immersed in, the fiction they collaboratively construct. Finally, the dissertation adapts Wolf’s theoretical framework in order to discuss and analyze the often overlooked category of “storytelling” TRPGs - one that, as the text argues, rather than focusing on narrative as such, aims at creating gameplay texts with heightened aesthetic and literary value while also enabling players to experience particular forms of immersion and deep emotional involvement. In the conclusion, the dissertation proposes re-conceptualizing literary framing as a defining characteristic of the fictional practice in general across media. In this regard, the dissertation argues, TRPGs reveal how framings are used and adapted in order to enable a specific mode of human interaction which is based on the figuration of emotional complexes via fictional “masks.

Fictional Practices of Spirituality I: Interactive Media

"Fictional Practices of Spirituality" provides critical insight into the implementation of belief, mysticism, religion, and spirituality into worlds of fiction, be it interactive or non-interactive. This first volume focuses on interactive, virtual worlds - may that be the digital realms of video games and VR applications or the imaginary spaces of life action role-playing and soul-searching practices. It features analyses of spirituality as gameplay facilitator, sacred spaces and architecture in video game geography, religion in video games and spiritual acts and their dramaturgic function in video games, tabletop, or LARP, among other topics. The contributors offer a first-time ever comprehensive overview of play-rites as spiritual incentives and playful spirituality in various medial incarnations

Visually Provoking: Dissertations in Art Education

Visually Provoking - a dynamic collection of visually oriented research about current doctoral studies from international art educators in Australia, Canada, China, Egypt, Finland, Greece, Iceland, Portugal, Spain, and the United States of America. Together we are thinking about, with and through the visual, focusing attention on practices that are reshaping our understandings of intellectual exchange in an effort to open deliberations, considerations, imaginations, and potentialities for different ways of doing research. This collection may be considered in tandem with our related book, International Perspectives on Visual Arts PhDs in Education: Provoking the Field (Intellect), which explores theoretical, methodological and practice-based accounts of doctoral studies. - Annita Sinner, Editorial NoteacceptedVersionPeer reviewe

Transitions-felt: William James, Locative Narrative and the Multi-stable Field of Expanded Narrative

Edited version embargoed until 16.03.2018 Full version: Access restricted permanently due to 3rd party copyright restrictions. Restriction set on 16.03.2017 by SC, Graduate schoolThis thesis is about expanded narrative, a new field of experimental narrative practices that are not represented by single subjects or by categories such as ‘interactive’. It is defined by works that present a challenge to the form, fiction or nonfiction, in terms of the content, structure, style of writing or audience engagement. Extending the cognitive term ‘perceptual multistability’, that refers to switching between interpretations experienced when we look at an ambiguous figures, such as, the Necker cube, this thesis develops the position that expanded narrative practices and specifically locative narrative, a genera of expanded narrative, hold the potential to prompt the experiential effects of multi-stability. The metaphor of multi-stability introduced here stands in for three aspects of experience: language, perception and belief. While ambiguity and misperceptions have been recognised in the literature of experiential narrative practices, further exposition is required. The thesis asks what are the conditions in which the qualities of the metaphor of multi-stability may be prompted and what framework usefully articulates the parameters of experience? Drawing upon the writings of the philosopher William James, subsequent pragmatists, cognitive neuroscience and narratology, it explores how a radical empiricist perspective can form the basis of a non-foundational experiential framework that questions the status of knowledge and the problems of translation between experience and narrative interpretation. It suggests that the subjective classification of imagined and perceptual objects can be affected by the relations between the narrative form, the environment and the participant’s beliefs. The major contributions of the thesis are (1) the development of the Jamesian experiential framework that sets up cross-disciplinary parameters for the thematics of experience to engage with the ontological and epistemological challenges of evaluating and designing for multistability presents; (2) a relational approach to interpretation and coding participants’ feedback of locative narratives; (3) that is employed in the development of a collection of speculative strategies for evoking the effect of the metaphor of multi-stability, based on the development of four published locative narrative apps and ten prototypes. While highly contingent, participant introspective accounts of experience are central here to the methodology, the process of serial hypothesis forming and the iterative development of prototypes and locative narrative case studies. This research does not attempt to draw causal connections from science to that of narrative experience or vice versa. The thesis first considers the field of expanded narrative and the semantic and pragmatic framings of the term narrative and narratological framings of language as multi-stable. It goes on to examine the antecedent and coexistent practices of locative narrative. The epistemological implications for misperception, the function of representation and intentionality in perception are examined in relation to the environmentally situated perceptual, interpretative, aesthetic and emotional dimensions of experience. This research contributes to research in narrative and creative practices. It extends the form of locative narrative with the concept of multi-stability that has a wider application with the field of expanded narrative, creative practice and narratology

Collected Software Engineering Papers, Volume 10

This document is a collection of selected technical papers produced by participants in the Software Engineering Laboratory (SEL) from Oct. 1991 - Nov. 1992. The purpose of the document is to make available, in one reference, some results of SEL research that originally appeared in a number of different forums. Although these papers cover several topics related to software engineering, they do not encompass the entire scope of SEL activities and interests. Additional information about the SEL and its research efforts may be obtained from the sources listed in the bibliography at the end of this document. For the convenience of this presentation, the 11 papers contained here are grouped into 5 major sections: (1) the Software Engineering Laboratory; (2) software tools studies; (3) software models studies; (4) software measurement studies; and (5) Ada technology studies