Applying Bourdieu to socio-technical systems: The importance of affordances for social translucence in building 'capital' and status to eBay's success

This paper introduces the work of Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu and his concepts of ‘the field’ and ‘capital’ in relation to eBay. This paper considers eBay to be a socio-technical system with its own set of social norms, rules and competition over ‘capital’. eBay is used as a case study of the importance of using a Bourdieuean approach to create successful socio-technical systems.Using a two-year qualitative study of eBay users as empirical illustration, this paper argues that a large part of eBay’s success is in the social and cultural affordances for social translucence and navigation of eBay’s website - in supporting the Bourdieuean competition over capital and status. This exploration has implications for wider socio-technical systems design which this paper will discuss - in particular, the importance of creating socially translucent and navigable systems, informed by Bourdieu’s theoretical insights, which support competition for ‘capital’ and status

Do Neural Language Representations Learn Physical Commonsense?

Humans understand language based on the rich background knowledge about how the physical world works, which in turn allows us to reason about the physical world through language. In addition to the properties of objects (e.g., boats require fuel) and their affordances, i.e., the actions that are applicable to them (e.g., boats can be driven), we can also reason about if-then inferences between what properties of objects imply the kind of actions that are applicable to them (e.g., that if we can drive something then it likely requires fuel). In this paper, we investigate the extent to which state-of-the-art neural language representations, trained on a vast amount of natural language text, demonstrate physical commonsense reasoning. While recent advancements of neural language models have demonstrated strong performance on various types of natural language inference tasks, our study based on a dataset of over 200k newly collected annotations suggests that neural language representations still only learn associations that are explicitly written down.Comment: Published in The Proceedings of the 41st Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2019

Can acquisition of expertise be supported by technology?

Professional trainees in the workplace are increasingly required to demonstrate specific standards of competence. Yet, empirical evidence of how professionals acquire competence in practice is lacking. The danger, then, is that efforts to support learning processes may be misguided. We hypothesised that a systemic view of how expertise is acquired would support more timely and appropriate development of technology to support workplace learning. The aims of this study were to provide an empirically based understanding of workplace learning and explore how learning could be facilitated through suitable application of technology. We have used the medical specialist trainee as an exemplar of how professionals acquire expertise within a complex working environment. We describe our methodological approach, based on the amalgam of systems analysis and qualitative research methods. We present the development of a framework for analysis and early findings from qualitative data analysis. Based on our findings so far, we present a tentative schema representing how technology can support learning with suggestions for the types of technology that could be used

What does semantic tiling of the cortex tell us about semantics?

Recent use of voxel-wise modeling in cognitive neuroscience suggests that semantic maps tile the cortex. Although this impressive research establishes distributed cortical areas active during the conceptual processing that underlies semantics, it tells us little about the nature of this processing. While mapping concepts between Marr's computational and implementation levels to support neural encoding and decoding, this approach ignores Marr's algorithmic level, central for understanding the mechanisms that implement cognition, in general, and conceptual processing, in particular. Following decades of research in cognitive science and neuroscience, what do we know so far about the representation and processing mechanisms that implement conceptual abilities? Most basically, much is known about the mechanisms associated with: (1) features and frame representations, (2) grounded, abstract, and linguistic representations, (3) knowledge-based inference, (4) concept composition, and (5) conceptual flexibility. Rather than explaining these fundamental representation and processing mechanisms, semantic tiles simply provide a trace of their activity over a relatively short time period within a specific learning context. Establishing the mechanisms that implement conceptual processing in the brain will require more than mapping it to cortical (and sub-cortical) activity, with process models from cognitive science likely to play central roles in specifying the intervening mechanisms. More generally, neuroscience will not achieve its basic goals until it establishes algorithmic-level mechanisms that contribute essential explanations to how the brain works, going beyond simply establishing the brain areas that respond to various task conditions

Towards Social Identity in Socio-Cognitive Agents

Current architectures for social agents are designed around some specific units of social behaviour that address particular challenges. Although their performance might be adequate for controlled environments, deploying these agents in the wild is difficult. Moreover, the increasing demand for autonomous agents capable of living alongside humans calls for the design of more robust social agents that can cope with diverse social situations. We believe that to design such agents, their sociality and cognition should be conceived as one. This includes creating mechanisms for constructing social reality as an interpretation of the physical world with social meanings and selective deployment of cognitive resources adequate to the situation. We identify several design principles that should be considered while designing agent architectures for socio-cognitive systems. Taking these remarks into account, we propose a socio-cognitive agent model based on the concept of Cognitive Social Frames that allow the adaptation of an agent's cognition based on its interpretation of its surroundings, its Social Context. Our approach supports an agent's reasoning about other social actors and its relationship with them. Cognitive Social Frames can be built around social groups, and form the basis for social group dynamics mechanisms and construct of Social Identity

The affordance-based concept

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2005.Includes bibliographical references (p. 89-95).Natural language use relies on situational context. The meaning of words and utterances depend on the physical environment and the goals and plans of communication partners. These facts should be central to theories of language and automatic language understanding systems. Instead, they are often ignored, leading to partial theories and systems that cannot fully interpret linguistic meaning. I introduce a new computational theory of conceptual structure that has as its core claim that concepts are neither internal nor external to the language user, but instead span the objective-subjective boundary. This theory proposes interaction and prediction as a central theme, rather than solely emphasizing deducing, sensing or acting. To capture the possible interactions between subject and object, the theory relies on the notion of perceived affordances: structured units of interaction that can be used for prediction at certain levels of abstraction. By using perceived affordances as a basis for language understanding, the theory accounts for many aspects of the situated nature of human language use. It provides a unified solution to a number of other demands on a theory of language understanding including conceptual combination, prototypicality effects, and the generative nature of lexical items.(cont.) To support the theory, I describe an implementation that relies on probabilistic hierarchical plan recognition to predict possible interactions. The elements of a recognized plan provide an instance of perceived affordances which are used by a linguistic parser to ground the meaning of words and grammatical constituents. Evaluations performed in a multiuser role playing game environment show that this implementation captures the meaning of free-form spontaneous directive speech acts that cannot be understood without taking into account the intentional and physical situation of speaker and listener.by Peter John Gorniak.Ph.D

MRnews: Design Explorations into Accessibility and News

Creating accessible technology and content is generally seen as beneficial for all users. This is particularly important when the content has a significant societal impact, such as news stories. To find new and innovative ways to engage users, digital news outlets are faced with challenges related to accessibility. In the case of Mixed Reality (MR) technology, the increasing interest emphasizes the need for the technology to be inclusive and accessible. The embodied nature and affordances of MR technology enable users to manipulate virtual objects using real-world knowledge and in real-time and enable them to utilize a wide range of skills when interacting with such systems. In turn, leveraging these affordances can enhance the accessibility of the task at hand. Contributions to developing accessibility guidelines have been made, and the use of MR applications to enhance accessibility is on the rise. However, these contributions are most prominent in education and not for leisurely use. This research project investigates the affordances of MR and of the Augmented Reality (AR) Head Mounted Display (HMD), HoloLens 2 (HL2) in particular, and how these can be leveraged to enhance accessibility when reading digital news. This is a Research through Design (RtD) project carried out in participation with users by conducting design activities and user evaluations. The RtD-process is supported by prototypes developed through an iterative process. MRnews is an application built for Microsoft’s AR HMD, the HL2. The implemented design showcases how news content creators and developers can leverage the affordances of MR technology to achieve accessibility in news stories. The results point toward direct manipulation of virtual content utilizing the spatial nature of MR technology and the use of sensory cues to keep the user oriented and focused impact accessibility.Masteroppgave i medie- og interaksjonsdesignMIX350MASV-MI

Allocentric emotional affordances in HRI : the multimodal binding

The concept of affordance perception is one of the distinctive traits of human cognition; and its application to robots can dramatically improve the quality of human-robot interaction (HRI). In this paper we explore and discuss the idea of "emotional affordances" by proposing a viable model for implementation into HRI; which considers allocentric and multimodal perception. We consider "2-ways" affordances: perceived object triggering an emotion; and perceived human emotion expression triggering an action. In order to make the implementation generic; the proposed model includes a library that can be customised depending on the specific robot and application scenario. We present the AAA (Affordance-Appraisal-Arousal) model; which incorporates Plutchik's Wheel of Emotions; and we outline some numerical examples of how it can be used in different scenarios

Histories of hating

This roundtable discussion presents a dialogue between digital culture scholars on the seemingly increased presence of hating and hate speech online. Revolving primarily around the recent #GamerGate campaign of intensely misogynistic discourse aimed at women in video games, the discussion suggests that the current moment for hate online needs to be situated historically. From the perspective of intersecting cultural histories of hate speech, discrimination, and networked communication, we interrogate the ontological specificity of online hating before going on to explore potential responses to the harmful consequences of hateful speech. Finally, a research agenda for furthering the historical understandings of contemporary online hating is suggested in order to address the urgent need for scholarly interventions into the exclusionary cultures of networked media