430,959 research outputs found
Evolution of Prehension Ability in an Anthropomorphic Neurorobotic Arm
In this paper we show how a simulated anthropomorphic robotic arm controlled by an artificial neural network can develop effective reaching and grasping behaviour through a trial and error process in which the free parameters encode the control rules which regulate the fine-grained interaction between the robot and the environment and variations of the free parameters are retained or discarded on the basis of their effects at the level of the global behaviour exhibited by the robot situated in the environment. The obtained results demonstrate how the proposed methodology allows the robot to produce effective behaviours thanks to its ability to exploit the morphological properties of the robotâs body (i.e. its anthropomorphic shape, the elastic properties of its muscle-like actuators, and the compliance of its actuated joints) and the properties which arise from the physical interaction between the robot and the environment mediated by appropriate control rules
Evolution of Prehension Ability in an Anthropomorphic Neurorobotic Arm
In this paper, we show how a simulated anthropomorphic robotic arm controlled by an artificial neural network can develop effective reaching and grasping behaviour through a trial and error process in which the free parameters encode the control rules which regulate the fine-grained interaction between the robot and the environment and variations of the free parameters are retained or discarded on the basis of their effects at the level of the global behaviour exhibited by the robot situated in the environment. The obtained results demonstrate how the proposed methodology allows the robot to produce effective behaviours thanks to its ability to exploit the morphological properties of the robot's body (i.e. its anthropomorphic shape, the elastic properties of its muscle-like actuators and the compliance of its actuated joints) and the properties which arise from the physical interaction between the robot and the environment mediated by appropriate control rules
Flexibly Instructable Agents
This paper presents an approach to learning from situated, interactive
tutorial instruction within an ongoing agent. Tutorial instruction is a
flexible (and thus powerful) paradigm for teaching tasks because it allows an
instructor to communicate whatever types of knowledge an agent might need in
whatever situations might arise. To support this flexibility, however, the
agent must be able to learn multiple kinds of knowledge from a broad range of
instructional interactions. Our approach, called situated explanation, achieves
such learning through a combination of analytic and inductive techniques. It
combines a form of explanation-based learning that is situated for each
instruction with a full suite of contextually guided responses to incomplete
explanations. The approach is implemented in an agent called Instructo-Soar
that learns hierarchies of new tasks and other domain knowledge from
interactive natural language instructions. Instructo-Soar meets three key
requirements of flexible instructability that distinguish it from previous
systems: (1) it can take known or unknown commands at any instruction point;
(2) it can handle instructions that apply to either its current situation or to
a hypothetical situation specified in language (as in, for instance,
conditional instructions); and (3) it can learn, from instructions, each class
of knowledge it uses to perform tasks.Comment: See http://www.jair.org/ for any accompanying file
The Place of the User in Copyright Law
Copyright doctrine . . . is characterized by the absence of the user. As copyright moves into the digital age, this absence has begun to matter profoundly. As I will show, the absence of the user has consequences that reach far beyond debates about the legality of private copying, or about the proper scope of user-oriented exemptions such as the fair use and first sale doctrines. The user\u27s absence produces a domino effect that ripples through the structure of copyright law, shaping both its unquestioned rules and its thorniest dilemmas. The resulting imbalance - empty space where one cornerstone of a well-balanced copyright edifice should be - makes for bad theory, bad policy, and bad law
Design Ltd.: Renovated Myths for the Development of Socially Embedded Technologies
This paper argues that traditional and mainstream mythologies, which have
been continually told within the Information Technology domain among designers
and advocators of conceptual modelling since the 1960s in different fields of
computing sciences, could now be renovated or substituted in the mould of more
recent discourses about performativity, complexity and end-user creativity that
have been constructed across different fields in the meanwhile. In the paper,
it is submitted that these discourses could motivate IT professionals in
undertaking alternative approaches toward the co-construction of
socio-technical systems, i.e., social settings where humans cooperate to reach
common goals by means of mediating computational tools. The authors advocate
further discussion about and consolidation of some concepts in design research,
design practice and more generally Information Technology (IT) development,
like those of: task-artifact entanglement, universatility (sic) of End-User
Development (EUD) environments, bricolant/bricoleur end-user, logic of
bricolage, maieuta-designers (sic), and laissez-faire method to socio-technical
construction. Points backing these and similar concepts are made to promote
further discussion on the need to rethink the main assumptions underlying IT
design and development some fifty years later the coming of age of software and
modern IT in the organizational domain.Comment: This is the peer-unreviewed of a manuscript that is to appear in D.
Randall, K. Schmidt, & V. Wulf (Eds.), Designing Socially Embedded
Technologies: A European Challenge (2013, forthcoming) with the title
"Building Socially Embedded Technologies: Implications on Design" within an
EUSSET editorial initiative (www.eusset.eu/
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A situated cultural approach for cross-cultural studies in IS
Cultural anthropology seeks to understand the similarities and differences among groups of people in the contemporary world. Although there are many different models of national culture, most IS research has tended to rely almost solely on Hofstedeâs cultural model (Keil et al., 2000; Straub, 1994; Tan et al., 1995; Watson et al., 1994; Myers and Tan, 2002; Kirkman et al. 2006).). This paper, provides a comprehensive framework of situated culture approach to study culture within IS discipline. This is achieved via an articulation of Structuration Theory and the provision of an approach to study cross-cultural phenomena within IS discipline. The paper proposes two main components of the Structuration Theory based analysis model which is proposed as a way to study culture within IS discipline. First, the paper presents ideas behind the practice lens for studying the use of technology, as proposed by Orlikowski (2000). Secondly, the paper presents a Structurational analysis approach as detailed by Walsham (2002). The paper argues that using a practice lens contributes to identifying the mediated shared structures between actors through understanding the actions of the actors within the phenomena. Then, using a Structurational analysis approach contributes to identifying the cultural dimensions that are embedded in the identified mediated shared structures
AI: Inventing a new kind of machine.
A means-ends approach to engineering an artificial intelligence machine now suggests that we focus on the differences between human capabilities and the best computer programs. These differences suggest two basic limitations in the "symbolic" approach. First, human memory is much more than a storehouse where structures are put away, indexed, and rotely retrieved. Second, human reasoning involves more than searching, matching, and recombining previously stored descriptions of situations and action plans. Indeed, these hypotheses are related: Remembering and reasoning both involve reconceptualization. This short paper outlines recent work in situated cognition, robotics, and neural networks that suggests we frame the problem if AI in terms of inventing a new kind of machine
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