I Probe, Therefore I Am: Designing a Virtual Journalist with Human Emotions

By utilizing different communication channels, such as verbal language, gestures or facial expressions, virtually embodied interactive humans hold a unique potential to bridge the gap between human-computer interaction and actual interhuman communication. The use of virtual humans is consequently becoming increasingly popular in a wide range of areas where such a natural communication might be beneficial, including entertainment, education, mental health research and beyond. Behind this development lies a series of technological advances in a multitude of disciplines, most notably natural language processing, computer vision, and speech synthesis. In this paper we discuss a Virtual Human Journalist, a project employing a number of novel solutions from these disciplines with the goal to demonstrate their viability by producing a humanoid conversational agent capable of naturally eliciting and reacting to information from a human user. A set of qualitative and quantitative evaluation sessions demonstrated the technical feasibility of the system whilst uncovering a number of deficits in its capacity to engage users in a way that would be perceived as natural and emotionally engaging. We argue that naturalness should not always be seen as a desirable goal and suggest that deliberately suppressing the naturalness of virtual human interactions, such as by altering its personality cues, might in some cases yield more desirable results.Comment: eNTERFACE16 proceeding

The nurse is present : a review exploring the temporality of illness through presence and narrative, an artist's perspective

“Illness works to deform and distort all the meaning and value one gives to one’s life” (Ahlzén, 2011, p.325). A feeling of terminal loss is experienced within the physical body as chaos floods the brain. Even language is incapable of fully addressing the internal tension that comes with illness, because it strives to make articulate the unpresentable or the abject. This review is directed towards analysing the experience of embodiment in illness, one’s relation to the self and to others, all within a particular context such as a place of constraint (hospital) or exchange (museum). The mediation between care and art practice, in fact, allows for the emergence of similar states that fluctuate between closeness and distance and between the unpresentable and the presentable as they enter in a process of dialogue. Such states allow the nurse and the artist to engage freely with the Other in a space defined by the intensity of the present moment and its assimilation through the path of narrativity. An empathic audio-visual tool called Sanctuary was created to serve a narrative, the ill person’s narrative. It is presented in the form of a visor which allows the viewer to enter a ‘bunker-like’ space. An empathic encounter with the self, aims to be triggered through the process of participation in the artwork. The play of tension within a restorative, sheltering space is followed with planned empathic dialogue between the nurse and the ill person.peer-reviewe

Accounting for the Specious Present: A Defense of Enactivism

I argue that conscious visual experience is essentially a non-representational demonstration of a skill. The explication and defense of this position depends on both phenomenological and empirical considerations. The central phenomenological claim is this: as a matter of human psychology, it is impossible to produce a conscious visual experience of a mind-independent object that is sufficiently like typical cases, without including concomitant proprioceptive sensations of the sort of extra-neural behavior that allows us to there and then competently detect such objects. I then argue that this view, which is a version of enactivism, best explains the temporality of conscious experience—what is often called the specious present

The memory of a tree; an interactive visual storytelling installation

Over the centuries, people have combined fields, leading to the creation of new domains. For example, artists have used technology to widen the range of their medium to express ideas in new ways. Similarly, technology has leveraged art to expand its range of application. Both art and technology continue to inspire innovation in each other. A contemporary example of this process is evident in interactive art era; this article covers this topic focusing on tangible interface pieces. There have been many compelling demonstrations that involve tangible interaction to increase audience interests through their embodied interaction. However, most existing approaches are limited to engaging a user’s immediate, temporary experience with setting some context of the environment with story elements. This article presents an interactive installation that engages the audience, building an immersive environment based on the synergy between embodied interaction and storytelling in a more active and meaningful way. It is based on the belief that tangible interfaces have the potential to convey narratives more meaningfully based on physical interaction and human senses and fundamentally, aims to supply another potential of tangible interfaces to spark further discussion in this area

Human Consciousness: Psychic and Energetic Approach

Objective: The article researches the essence and bases of functioning and development of the consciousness (conscious level of the human psyche) in the context of the psychic and energetic conception of the psyche and psychic.Background: There are thousands of writings about consciousness. However, operational and functional processes of conscious perception of the world and self, understanding of various connections in this world, determining of attitude to it and self and forming responsibilities for results of interaction are described unclearly almost in all psychological conceptions.Method: To disclose the human consciousness, the following methods were used: analysis, synthesis, comparison, abstraction, generalisation and grouping of existing knowledge about a human, functioning of the human psyche.Results: It has been proved that the conscious is the plurality of different psychic, about which human is aware. We have found out that the personal unconscious contains phenomena that are in the subconscious, not in the unconscious because "came" from consciousness.Conclusion: This plurality is the basis of forming psy-programs of different degree of complication and perfection to transform the world as external psyche through activity, behaviour, their comparison with previous experience, isolation of "Self" from the environment to analyse it and consciousness from different perspectives

Enactivism and Robotic Language Acquisition: A Report from the Frontier

In this article, I assess an existing language acquisition architecture, which was deployed in linguistically unconstrained human–robot interaction, together with experimental design decisions with regard to their enactivist credentials. Despite initial scepticism with respect to enactivism’s applicability to the social domain, the introduction of the notion of participatory sense-making in the more recent enactive literature extends the framework’s reach to encompass this domain. With some exceptions, both our architecture and form of experimentation appear to be largely compatible with enactivist tenets. I analyse the architecture and design decisions along the five enactivist core themes of autonomy, embodiment, emergence, sense-making, and experience, and discuss the role of affect due to its central role within our acquisition experiments. In conclusion, I join some enactivists in demanding that interaction is taken seriously as an irreducible and independent subject of scientific investigation, and go further by hypothesising its potential value to machine learning.Peer reviewedFinal Published versio

Critical Autobiography and Painting Practice

In 2000 I completed a PhD in Creative practice (painting) which had a contextualising thesis as part of the submission. My paintings at this time were based upon issues of memory and the text presented a narrative of the construction of the work but also examined how I was constructed by the work (both through the painting and writing). The tension between the past and what we make of it was central to my argument about the creative self in painting and so the title of this conference is very apt to the issues I was (and still am) dealing with both in my painting and writing. This writing also arose out of a feminist desire to unearth, in the words of Janet Wolff, ‘buried selves’ and to render visible the threads which connect experience and biography with intellectual work (Wolff, 1994, p.15). In this paper I will seek to address what theoretical and methodological issues I adopted in my Creative Practice PhD. In my thesis I established a triangulated research model of Self/Painting Practice/Social Practice. The first part of this paper will set out the model and the second part will develop it in relation to the production, intentions and form of the paintings themselves. A version of this paper was published in the Journal of Visual Art Practice Vol.1, No.3

Unpacking Non-Dualistic Design: The Soma Design Case

We report on a somaesthetic design workshop and the subsequent analytical work aiming to demystify what is entailed in a non-dualistic design stance on embodied interaction and why a first-person engagement is crucial to its unfoldings. However, as we will uncover through a detailed account of our process, these first-person engagements are deeply entangled with second- and third-person perspectives, sometimes even overlapping. The analysis furthermore reveals some strategies for bridging the body-mind divide by attending to our inner universe and dissolving or traversing dichotomies between inside and outside; individual and social; body and technology. By detailing the creative process, we show how soma design becomes a process of designing with and through kinesthetic experience, in turn letting us confront several dualisms that run like fault lines through HCI's engagement with embodied interaction