Reference Frames in Human Sensory, Motor, and Cognitive Processing

Reference-frames, or coordinate systems, are used to express properties and relationships of objects in the environment. While the use of reference-frames is well understood in physical sciences, how the brain uses reference-frames remains a fundamental question. The goal of this dissertation is to reach a better understanding of reference-frames in human perceptual, motor, and cognitive processing. In the first project, we study reference-frames in perception and develop a model to explain the transition from egocentric (based on the observer) to exocentric (based outside the observer) reference-frames to account for the perception of relative motion. In a second project, we focus on motor behavior, more specifically on goal-directed reaching. We develop a model that explains how egocentric perceptual and motor reference-frames can be coordinated through exocentric reference-frames. Finally, in a third project, we study how the cognitive system can store and recognize objects by using sensorimotor schema that allows mental rotation within an exocentric reference-frame

Producing Humans: An Anthropology of Social and Cognitive Robots

In this thesis, I ask how the human is produced in robotics research, focussing specifically on the work that is done to create humanoid robots that exhibit social and intelligent behaviour. Robots, like other technologies, are often presented as the result of the systematic application of progressive scientific knowledge over time, and thus emerging as inevitable, ahistorical, and a-territorial entities. However, as we shall see, the robot’s existence as a recognisable whole, as well as the various ways in which researchers attempt to shape, animate and imbue it ‘human-like’ qualities, is in fact the result of specific events, in specific geographical and cultural locations. Through an ethnographic investigation of the sites in which robotics research takes place, I describe and analyse how, in robotics research, robotics researchers are reflecting, reproducing, producing, and sometimes challenging, core assumptions about what it means to be human. The dissertation draws on three and a half years of ethnographic research across a number of robotics research laboratories and field sites in Ireland, the United Kingdom, and the United States between April 2016 and December 2019. It also includes an investigation of the sites where robotics knowledge is disseminated and evaluated, such as conferences and field test sites. Through a combination of participant and non-participant observation, interviews, and textual analysis, I explore how the robot reveals assumptions about the human, revealing both individual, localised engineering cultures, as well as wider Euro-American imaginaries. In this dissertation, I build on existing ethnographies of laboratory work and technological production, which investigate scientific laboratories as cultural sites. I also contribute to contemporary debates in anthropology and posthumanist theory, which question the foundational assumptions of humanism. While contemporary scholarship has attempted to move beyond the nature/culture binary by articulating a multitude of reconfigurations and boundary negotiations, I argue that this is done by neglecting the body. In order to address this gap, I bring together two complementary conceptual devices. First, I employ the embodiment philosophy of Maurice Merleau-Ponty (2012; 1968) particularly his emphasis on the body as a site of knowing the world. Second, I use the core anthropological concept of the ‘fetish’ as elaborated by William Pietz (1985). By interrogating the robot as ‘fetish’, I elaborate how the robot is simultaneously a territorialised, historicised, personalised, and reified object. This facilitates an exploration of the disparate, and often contradictory nature, of the relations between people and objects. In my thesis, I find many boundary reconfigurations and dissolutions between the human and the robot. However, deviating from the relational ontology dominant in the anthropology of technology, I discover an enduring asymmetry between the human and the robot, with the living body emerging as a durable category that cannot be reasoned away. Thus, my thesis questions how the existing literature might obscure important questions about the category of the human by focusing disproportionately on the blurring and/or blurred nature of human/non-human boundaries. Ultimately, I argue for a collaborative and emergent configuration of the human, and its relationship with the world, that is at once both relational and embodied. This dissertation is structured as follows. An initial introductory chapter is followed by a chapter documenting the literature review and conceptual framework. This is followed by four chapters that correspond to the four aspects of the fetish in Pietz’s model: Historicisation, Territorialisation, Reification and Personalisation. These chapters alternate between scholarly sources and ethnographic data. In Historicisation, using existing scholarship, I trace the history of the robot object, including the continuities and discontinuities that led to its creation, as well as the futures that are implicated in its identity. This is followed by the Territorialisation chapter, in which ethnographic data is used to interrogate the robot’s materiality, as well as the spaces in which it is built, modified, and tested. The next chapter, Reification, considers the robot as a valuable object according to institutions and the productive and ideological systems of Euro-American imaginaries. This chapter integrates ethnographic detail with existing scholarship to focus on contrasts between the dominant image of imminent super-human intelligence and the human interventions and social relationships necessary to produce the illusion of robot autonomy. Finally, the chapter Personalisation brings ethnographic attention to the intensely personal way that the robot-as-fetish is experienced in an encounter with an embodied person, understood through the lens of Merleau-Ponty’s embodiment philosophy. In the final chapter, I draw together the various strands to articulate how understanding the robot as a fetish, underscored by Merleau-Ponty’s embodiment phenomenology, can provide useful resources for developing an alternative understanding of the human in anthropology without dissolving it all together

Fast forward: technography of the social integration of connected and automated vehicles into UK society

The emerging connected and automated vehicles (CAV) have caught much research attention in the past few years. However, a techno-centric bias in the CAV research domain implies the lack of in-depth qualitative studies. To fill the gap, this Ph.D. project bridges the fields of Social Anthropology with STS by adopting technography, an ethnography of technology, to enable a thick description of the CAV technology’s social integration into UK society. By critically drawing a holistic view of the ongoing process of the CAV social deployment, it aims to (1) unfold CAV’s potential problems and dynamic contributions to everyday life through the lens of sociotechnical imaginaries, and (2) reveal and analyse the institutional practice on its social rollout. Based on pilot research and one-year-long fieldwork in London and Edinburgh, the thesis investigated a wide range of important socio-political aspects where fundamental topics such as trust, human-and-machine relationship, social safety, political transparency, and equity in transport systems were explicated. Different from the planners’ top-down CAV imaginaries that focused on its contribution to functional safety, environment, and the economy, the public’s bottom-up imaginaries highlighted issues that were related to their travelling experiences, such as inequity of transport service distribution and sexual harassment during commutes. These findings inspired thinking and rethinking on what constitutes the success of technology’s social deployment from multiple perspectives. In particular, it critically pointed out that safety means not only technological feasibility but also social safety that refers to a safe commuting environments. Such finding in my thesis thus suggests that CAV technology is not a one-size-fits-all solution to problems in our transport system and calls for research effort to the broader socio-political and ethical areas of this technology. through an investigation of the institutional practice, it identified four major institutional forces, including technicians, industry stakeholders, researchers, and policymakers who have been working on these aspects with different approaches and priorities. Apart from acknowledging their efforts in building safety cases, pushing forward the CAV legislation, and engaging the public in trials, it critically explained challenges such as technical uncertainty and political tension in developing and implementing a legal framework. Hence, the project contributes to an understanding of a close encounter between the CAV technology and its imaginaries, in which, technical and socio-political problems and potentials fabricate the richness in its social deployment. It also explicates the importance of embracing multiple perspectives and calls for continuous research in this field

Lockdown Cultures: The arts and humanities in the year of the pandemic, 2020-21

Lockdown Cultures is both a cultural response to our extraordinary times and a manifesto for the arts and humanities and their role in our post-pandemic society. This book offers a unique response to the question of how the humanities commented on and were impacted by one of the dominant crises of our times: the Covid-19 pandemic. While the role of engineers, epidemiologists and, of course, medics is assumed, Lockdown Cultures illustrates some of the ways in which the humanities understood and analysed 2020–21, the year of lockdown and plague. Though the impulse behind the book was topical, underpinning the richly varied and individual essays is a lasting concern with the value of the humanities in the twenty-first century. Each contributor approaches this differently but there are two dominant strands: how art and culture can help us understand the Covid crisis; and how the value of the humanities can be demonstrated by engaging with cultural products from the past. The result is a book that serves as testament to the humanities’ reinvigorated and reforged sense of identity, from the perspective of UCL and one of the leading arts and humanities faculties in the world. It bears witness to a globally impactful event while showcasing interdisciplinary thinking and examining how the pandemic has changed how we read, watch, write and educate. More than thirty individual contributions collectively reassert the importance of the arts and humanities for contemporary society

Lockdown Cultures

Lockdown Cultures is both a cultural response to our extraordinary times and a manifesto for the arts and humanities and their role in our post-pandemic society. This book offers a unique response to the question of how the humanities commented on and were impacted by one of the dominant crises of our times: the Covid-19 pandemic. While the role of engineers, epidemiologists and, of course, medics is assumed, Lockdown Cultures illustrates some of the ways in which the humanities understood and analysed 2020–21, the year of lockdown and plague. Though the impulse behind the book was topical, underpinning the richly varied and individual essays is a lasting concern with the value of the humanities in the twenty-first century. Each contributor approaches this differently but there are two dominant strands: how art and culture can help us understand the Covid crisis; and how the value of the humanities can be demonstrated by engaging with cultural products from the past. The result is a book that serves as testament to the humanities’ reinvigorated and reforged sense of identity, from the perspective of UCL and one of the leading arts and humanities faculties in the world. It bears witness to a globally impactful event while showcasing interdisciplinary thinking and examining how the pandemic has changed how we read, watch, write and educate. More than thirty individual contributions collectively reassert the importance of the arts and humanities for contemporary society

Lockdown Cultures

Lockdown Cultures is both a cultural response to our extraordinary times and a manifesto for the arts and humanities and their role in our post-pandemic society. This book offers a unique response to the question of how the humanities commented on and were impacted by one of the dominant crises of our times: the Covid-19 pandemic. While the role of engineers, epidemiologists and, of course, medics is assumed, Lockdown Cultures illustrates some of the ways in which the humanities understood and analysed 2020–21, the year of lockdown and plague. Though the impulse behind the book was topical, underpinning the richly varied and individual essays is a lasting concern with the value of the humanities in the twenty-first century. Each contributor approaches this differently but there are two dominant strands: how art and culture can help us understand the Covid crisis; and how the value of the humanities can be demonstrated by engaging with cultural products from the past. The result is a book that serves as testament to the humanities’ reinvigorated and reforged sense of identity, from the perspective of UCL and one of the leading arts and humanities faculties in the world. It bears witness to a globally impactful event while showcasing interdisciplinary thinking and examining how the pandemic has changed how we read, watch, write and educate. More than thirty individual contributions collectively reassert the importance of the arts and humanities for contemporary society

Proceedings of the 2018 Canadian Society for Mechanical Engineering (CSME) International Congress

Published proceedings of the 2018 Canadian Society for Mechanical Engineering (CSME) International Congress, hosted by York University, 27-30 May 2018