‘Anthropomorphic drones’ and colonized bodies: William Gibson’s the peripheral

William Gibson tends to write in trilogies, as his first nine novels show. These series – the Sprawl, the Bridge, and the Blue Ant trilogies – are set in three different time periods and are populated by characters who reappear from one book to the next. Given this pattern in Gibson’s writing habits, 2014’s The Peripheral can be considered a new work, set in a separate universe from any of Gibson’s previous novels. However, in terms of its philosophical position, The Peripheral is the continuation of a career-long trajectory. Gibson’s work is consistently concerned with the relationship of the individual to their society and the interface between the two, as mediated through the senses. The Sprawl trilogy and the Bridge trilogy privileged vision as the most important of the senses, particularly in cyberspace where the body is left behind and engagement with virtual reality happens mainly through the eyes gazing on a computer screen. 2003’s Pattern Recognition, the first novel in the Blue Ant trilogy which went on to include Spook Country (2007) and Count Zero (2010), began to resituate the body and specifically the haptic as key to engaging with the world while The Peripheral takes this philosophical journey further, privileging the haptic as a key site of phenomenological engagement

Double elevation: Autonomous weapons and the search for an irreducible law of war

What should be the role of law in response to the spread of artificial intelligence in war? Fuelled by both public and private investment, military technology is accelerating towards increasingly autonomous weapons, as well as the merging of humans and machines. Contrary to much of the contemporary debate, this is not a paradigm change; it is the intensification of a central feature in the relationship between technology and war: Double elevation, above one's enemy and above oneself. Elevation above one's enemy aspires to spatial, moral, and civilizational distance. Elevation above oneself reflects a belief in rational improvement that sees humanity as the cause of inhumanity and de-humanization as our best chance for humanization. The distance of double elevation is served by the mechanization of judgement. To the extent that judgement is seen as reducible to algorithm, law becomes the handmaiden of mechanization. In response, neither a focus on questions of compatibility nor a call for a 'ban on killer robots' help in articulating a meaningful role for law. Instead, I argue that we should turn to a long-standing philosophical critique of artificial intelligence, which highlights not the threat of omniscience, but that of impoverished intelligence. Therefore, if there is to be a meaningful role for law in resisting double elevation, it should be law encompassing subjectivity, emotion and imagination, law irreducible to algorithm, a law of war that appreciates situated judgement in the wielding of violence for the collective

SwarMan: Anthropomorphic Swarm of Drones Avatar with Body Tracking and Deep Learning-Based Gesture Recognition

Anthropomorphic robot avatars present a conceptually novel approach to remote affective communication, allowing people across the world a wider specter of emotional and social exchanges over traditional 2D and 3D image data. However, there are several limitations of current telepresence robots, such as the high weight, complexity of the system that prevents its fast deployment, and the limited workspace of the avatars mounted on either static or wheeled mobile platforms. In this paper, we present a novel concept of telecommunication through a robot avatar based on an anthropomorphic swarm of drones; SwarMan. The developed system consists of nine nanocopters controlled remotely by the operator through a gesture recognition interface. SwarMan allows operators to communicate by directly following their motions and by recognizing one of the prerecorded emotional patterns, thus rendering the captured emotion as illumination on the drones. The LSTM MediaPipe network was trained on a collected dataset of 600 short videos with five emotional gestures. The accuracy of achieved emotion recognition was 97% on the test dataset. As communication through the swarm avatar significantly changes the visual appearance of the operator, we investigated the ability of the users to recognize and respond to emotions performed by the swarm of drones. The experimental results revealed a high consistency between the users in rating emotions. Additionally, users indicated low physical demand (2.25 on the Likert scale) and were satisfied with their performance (1.38 on the Likert scale) when communicating by the SwarMan interface.Comment: 6 pages, 8 figures, IEEE SMC 2022 conferenc

Audience Attention and Emotion in News Filmed with Drones: A Neuromarketing Research

Emotional journalism is being driven by audiovisual technology such as drones, also known as unmanned aerial vehicles, which have demonstrated their usefulness in transforming objective news into news stories from a new visual perspective, facilitating access to dangerous or difficult places. They also allow for greater immersion by an audience that has become an active participant in the news, and they contribute to the storytelling of communication despite the risk to privacy and security that their misuse might entail. The aim of this research is to determine the differences in attention and intensity of the emotions experienced when viewing two pieces of audiovisual news: One was filmed with the technological support of a drone, and the other was produced in the conventional way. The techniques of eye tracking and galvanic skin response were used in 30 Spanish university students. The results suggest that attention was focused on the most spectacular visual elements, although the images filmed with a drone received a higher concentration of attention from the subjects, and this attention was spread throughout the entire image, which demonstrates that drones enhance the effectiveness of panoramic images with natural landscapes. The greatest emotion generated by viewing the images recorded with drones was statistically significant, but it was limited exclusively to these particular scenes, and not to the entire recording of the news

Enhanced Living Environments

This open access book was prepared as a Final Publication of the COST Action IC1303 “Algorithms, Architectures and Platforms for Enhanced Living Environments (AAPELE)”. The concept of Enhanced Living Environments (ELE) refers to the area of Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) that is more related with Information and Communication Technologies (ICT). Effective ELE solutions require appropriate ICT algorithms, architectures, platforms, and systems, having in view the advance of science and technology in this area and the development of new and innovative solutions that can provide improvements in the quality of life for people in their homes and can reduce the financial burden on the budgets of the healthcare providers. The aim of this book is to become a state-of-the-art reference, discussing progress made, as well as prompting future directions on theories, practices, standards, and strategies related to the ELE area. The book contains 12 chapters and can serve as a valuable reference for undergraduate students, post-graduate students, educators, faculty members, researchers, engineers, medical doctors, healthcare organizations, insurance companies, and research strategists working in this area

Critically Envisioning Biometric Artificial Intelligence in Law Enforcement

This report presents an overview of the Critically Exploring Biometric AI Futures project led by the University of Edinburgh in partnership with the University of Stirling. This short 3-month project explored the use of new Biometric Artificial Intelligence (AI) in law enforcement, the challenges of fostering trust around deployment and debates surrounding social, ethical and legal concerns

Drone Communication with Naive Humans

In recent times, drones have become ubiquitous and are tackling problems in such diverse areas as construction, disease control and product delivery. With the rise of drone usage in areas frequented by humans, natural human-drone interaction has become an important phenomenon to study. Designing behaviors for effective drone communication with humans is complex but necessary, especially if drones are to operate in human environments.We present research on drone communication with naive humans, that is, with people interacting with drones who are not themselves participating in whatever task with which the drone is engaged. Drones need to be able to communicate warnings and requests for assistance from humans that they just happen to encounter, and we are attempting to establish design methodologies for creating behaviors that can be interpreted by such naive humans.We have performed a user study (N=21) and presented the results. The results suggest that our approach works and most of the participants can recognize a drone's intentions from its demonstrations

Critically Envisioning Biometric Artificial Intelligence in Law Enforcement

This report presents an overview of the Critically Exploring Biometric AI Futures project led by the University of Edinburgh in partnership with the University of Stirling. This short 3-month project explored the use of new Biometric Artificial Intelligence (AI) in law enforcement, the challenges of fostering trust around deployment and debates surrounding social, ethical and legal concerns