35,925 research outputs found
River archaeology – a new tool for historical hydrology
River archaeology is consisting of underwater research of the rivers themselves, and
also the archaeology of the valleys/floodplains with special interest in humanenvironmental
interactions (reconstructing space, environment, economy and society
on the basis of the material culture and traces of human impacts). As historical
hydrology is occupying similar questions from the hydrologist’s point of view, the
combination of different approaches offers fruitful cooperation for both disciplines.
The paper presents the type, nature and problems of archaeological record through
recent work in the Drava river basin
Empowerment or Engagement? Digital Health Technologies for Mental Healthcare
We argue that while digital health technologies (e.g. artificial intelligence, smartphones, and virtual reality) present significant opportunities for improving the delivery of healthcare, key concepts that are used to evaluate and understand their impact can obscure significant ethical issues related to patient engagement and experience. Specifically, we focus on the concept of empowerment and ask whether it is adequate for addressing some significant ethical concerns that relate to digital health technologies for mental healthcare. We frame these concerns using five key ethical principles for AI ethics (i.e. autonomy, beneficence, non-maleficence, justice, and explicability), which have their roots in the bioethical literature, in order to critically evaluate the role that digital health technologies will have in the future of digital healthcare
Information Compression, Intelligence, Computing, and Mathematics
This paper presents evidence for the idea that much of artificial
intelligence, human perception and cognition, mainstream computing, and
mathematics, may be understood as compression of information via the matching
and unification of patterns. This is the basis for the "SP theory of
intelligence", outlined in the paper and fully described elsewhere. Relevant
evidence may be seen: in empirical support for the SP theory; in some
advantages of information compression (IC) in terms of biology and engineering;
in our use of shorthands and ordinary words in language; in how we merge
successive views of any one thing; in visual recognition; in binocular vision;
in visual adaptation; in how we learn lexical and grammatical structures in
language; and in perceptual constancies. IC via the matching and unification of
patterns may be seen in both computing and mathematics: in IC via equations; in
the matching and unification of names; in the reduction or removal of
redundancy from unary numbers; in the workings of Post's Canonical System and
the transition function in the Universal Turing Machine; in the way computers
retrieve information from memory; in systems like Prolog; and in the
query-by-example technique for information retrieval. The chunking-with-codes
technique for IC may be seen in the use of named functions to avoid repetition
of computer code. The schema-plus-correction technique may be seen in functions
with parameters and in the use of classes in object-oriented programming. And
the run-length coding technique may be seen in multiplication, in division, and
in several other devices in mathematics and computing. The SP theory resolves
the apparent paradox of "decompression by compression". And computing and
cognition as IC is compatible with the uses of redundancy in such things as
backup copies to safeguard data and understanding speech in a noisy
environment
Darwin, sexual selection, and the origins of music
Humans devote ample time to produce and perceive music. How and why this behavioral propensity originated in our species is unknown. For centuries, speculation dominated the study of the evolutionary origins of musicality. Following Darwin’s early intuitions, recent empirical research is opening a new chapter to tackle this mystery
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Developing an ecology of mind in design
The relationship between design and sustainability (DfS) is forever evolving: from the early focus on cleaner production processes and resource efficiencies to more recent endeavours to promote environmentally benign behaviours or to counter the increasing impacts of climate change. The uncomfortable truth though is that the majority of design activity serves market forces at a global scale and at an ever-increasing rate. Despite predictions of resource scarcity – peak oil, peak minerals, peak water – the increase in the linear transit of material through the Global economy rises year on year. Design straddles this production consumption cycle: it conceives of the processes and technologies that shape our artificial world; and it fashions the forms of that artificial world that drive a consumption ideology. Neither position is sustainable. Informed by Sterling’s rigorous exploration of different sustainable education paradigms, this paper reconstructs a design literacy that has the capacity to realize effective transitions for the long-term wellbeing of environment, biodiversity and humankind
Towards Learning ‘Self’ and Emotional Knowledge in Social and Cultural Human-Agent Interactions
Original article can be found at: http://www.igi-global.com/articles/details.asp?ID=35052 Copyright IGI. Posted by permission of the publisher.This article presents research towards the development of a virtual learning environment (VLE) inhabited by intelligent virtual agents (IVAs) and modeling a scenario of inter-cultural interactions. The ultimate aim of this VLE is to allow users to reflect upon and learn about intercultural communication and collaboration. Rather than predefining the interactions among the virtual agents and scripting the possible interactions afforded by this environment, we pursue a bottomup approach whereby inter-cultural communication emerges from interactions with and among autonomous agents and the user(s). The intelligent virtual agents that are inhabiting this environment are expected to be able to broaden their knowledge about the world and other agents, which may be of different cultural backgrounds, through interactions. This work is part of a collaborative effort within a European research project called eCIRCUS. Specifically, this article focuses on our continuing research concerned with emotional knowledge learning in autobiographic social agents.Peer reviewe
MeshfreeFlowNet: A Physics-Constrained Deep Continuous Space-Time Super-Resolution Framework
We propose MeshfreeFlowNet, a novel deep learning-based super-resolution
framework to generate continuous (grid-free) spatio-temporal solutions from the
low-resolution inputs. While being computationally efficient, MeshfreeFlowNet
accurately recovers the fine-scale quantities of interest. MeshfreeFlowNet
allows for: (i) the output to be sampled at all spatio-temporal resolutions,
(ii) a set of Partial Differential Equation (PDE) constraints to be imposed,
and (iii) training on fixed-size inputs on arbitrarily sized spatio-temporal
domains owing to its fully convolutional encoder. We empirically study the
performance of MeshfreeFlowNet on the task of super-resolution of turbulent
flows in the Rayleigh-Benard convection problem. Across a diverse set of
evaluation metrics, we show that MeshfreeFlowNet significantly outperforms
existing baselines. Furthermore, we provide a large scale implementation of
MeshfreeFlowNet and show that it efficiently scales across large clusters,
achieving 96.80% scaling efficiency on up to 128 GPUs and a training time of
less than 4 minutes.Comment: Supplementary Video: https://youtu.be/mjqwPch9gDo. Accepted to SC2
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