5,390 research outputs found
An End, Once and for All: Mass Effect 3, Video Game Controversies, and the Fight for Player Agency
Since the success of the player-led Mass Effect 3 ending controversy, player-led video game controversies have become mainstream sites of industrial and ideological contention between developers, players, and the culture itself. This dissertation focuses on the history of the Mass Effect 3 ending controversy, the game’s specific textual qualities that encouraged player protest, and the negotiations between players and developers in online spaces that persuaded developers to alter the game’s ending based on player demands. Using the Mass Effect 3 as its primary object, this dissertation argues this controversy—as well as subsequent player-led video game controversies—was not simply the result of dissatisfaction with a single plot point or representation in the text or video game community, but the complex negotiation of creative differences between players and developers over the production and control of video game texts and culture. Video games and their controversies are rooted in the medium\u27s intrinsic qualities of interactivity, choice, labor and the need for shared production between developers and players to progress and produce a video game text, which encourages the development of a sense of agency and ownership over the text for both groups. This dissertation argues that video games are not just texts that developers create and that players play, but rather texts produced through the co-creative production practice that Axel Bruns has defined as “produsage”—texts where producers act in dual roles as users while users to also act as producers—that allow players a creative stake in the outcome of a video game text, encourages a sense of agency and ownership, and collapses traditional boundaries between developers and players. Video game controversies naturally arise when players perceive a loss of agency and control over the video game text and attempt to reclaim control over ownership of the text through controversy
La traduzione specializzata all’opera per una piccola impresa in espansione: la mia esperienza di internazionalizzazione in cinese di Bioretics© S.r.l.
Global markets are currently immersed in two all-encompassing and unstoppable processes: internationalization and globalization. While the former pushes companies to look beyond the borders of their country of origin to forge relationships with foreign trading partners, the latter fosters the standardization in all countries, by reducing spatiotemporal distances and breaking down geographical, political, economic and socio-cultural barriers. In recent decades, another domain has appeared to propel these unifying drives: Artificial Intelligence, together with its high technologies aiming to implement human cognitive abilities in machinery. The “Language Toolkit – Le lingue straniere al servizio dell’internazionalizzazione dell’impresa” project, promoted by the Department of Interpreting and Translation (Forlì Campus) in collaboration with the Romagna Chamber of Commerce (Forlì-Cesena and Rimini), seeks to help Italian SMEs make their way into the global market. It is precisely within this project that this dissertation has been conceived. Indeed, its purpose is to present the translation and localization project from English into Chinese of a series of texts produced by Bioretics© S.r.l.: an investor deck, the company website and part of the installation and use manual of the Aliquis© framework software, its flagship product. This dissertation is structured as follows: Chapter 1 presents the project and the company in detail; Chapter 2 outlines the internationalization and globalization processes and the Artificial Intelligence market both in Italy and in China; Chapter 3 provides the theoretical foundations for every aspect related to Specialized Translation, including website localization; Chapter 4 describes the resources and tools used to perform the translations; Chapter 5 proposes an analysis of the source texts; Chapter 6 is a commentary on translation strategies and choices
The Development of Microdosimetric Instrumentation for Quality Assurance in Heavy Ion Therapy, Boron Neutron Capture Therapy and Fast Neutron Therapy
This thesis presents research for the development of new microdosimetric instrumentation for use with solid-state microdosimeters in order to improve their portability for radioprotection purposes and for QA in various hadron therapy modalities. Monte Carlo simulation applications are developed and benchmarked, pertaining to the context of the relevant therapies considered. The simulation and experimental findings provide optimisation recommendations relating to microdosimeter performance and possible radioprotection risks by activated materials.
The first part of this thesis is continuing research into the development of novel Silicon-on-Insulator (SOI) microdosimeters in the application of hadron therapy QA. This relates specifically to the optimisation of current microdosimeters, development of Monte Carlo applications for experimental validation, assessment of radioprotection risks during experiments and advanced Monte Carlo modelling of various accelerator beamlines.
Geant4 and MCNP6 Monte Carlo codes are used extensively in this thesis, with rigorous benchmarking completed in the context of experimental verification, and evaluation of the similarities and differences when simulating relevant hadron therapy facilities.
The second part of this thesis focuses on the development of a novel wireless microdosimetry system - the Radiodosimeter, to improve the operation efficiency and minimise any radioprotection risks. The successful implementation of the wireless Radiodosimeter is considered as an important milestone in the development of a microdosimetry system that can be operated by an end-user with no prior knowledge
A Connected World. Social Networks and Organizations
This is the submitted version. The final version is available from Cambridge University Press via the DOI in this recordThis Element synthesizes the current state of research on organizational social networks from its early foundations to contemporary debates. It highlights the characteristics that make the social network perspective distinctive in the organizational research landscape, including its emphasis on structure and outcomes. It covers the main theoretical developments and summarizes the research design questions that organizational researchers face when collecting and analyzing network data. Then, it discusses current debates ranging from agency and structure to network volatility and personality. Finally, the Element envisages future research directions on the role of brokerage for individuals and communities, network cognition, and the importance of past ties. Overall, the Element provides an innovative angle for understanding organizational social networks, engaging in empirical network research, and nurturing further theoretical development on the role of social interactions and connectedness in modern organizations
Speech-Driven Gesture Generation of Social Robot and Embodied Agents
With the development of artificial intelligence in the field of human-computer interaction, embedded agents in virtual agents or social robots are rapidly becoming more widespread. In human-to-human interactions, humans use nonverbal behaviors to express their atti- tudes, emotions, and intentions. Consequently, embedded agents also need this capability to improve the quality and e ectiveness of their speech. The problem of how to gen- erate interaction gestures for social robots and virtual agents is crucial and challenging. Data-driven approaches, especially those based on machine learning and deep learning, are more capable of generating more types and more comfortable gestures than tradi- tional rule-based approaches. However, unlike other highly developed application areas such as natural language processing and computer vision, deep learning applied to gesture generation is still at a relatively early stage. And, the evaluation criteria and validity of its practical applications remain to be verified, along with many related issues to be explored. The aim of this thesis is to use deep learning techniques to solve the problem of speech gesture generation and to implement and evaluate it on a robot.
This thesis begins with an introduction to gestures in human-robot interaction and their background and applications. Then it presents a literature review focusing on rule-based gesture-generation systems as well as data-driven gesture-generation systems. Also, this thesis presents feature extraction methods, gesture generation framework and mapping function for 3D gesture re-targeting.
Furthermore, this thesis presents a novel neural network system for data-driven gesture generation, where our system is able to extract semantic and acoustic features of speech to automatically generate the corresponding gestures that can be used in social robots and virtual agents. For our gesture generation system, both subjective and objective evaluations are conducted. Compared to state-of-the-art gesture generation systems, our system shows improved performance. In addition, the gestures generated by our system can be easily deployed on virtual agents, and for implementation on robots, we use a mapping function to convert the generated gestures into gesture sequence data that can be used in robot space. We also conduct an evaluation of the mapping function. Finally, this thesis discusses future work and potential directions for improvement in speech gesture generation
Sensing Collectives: Aesthetic and Political Practices Intertwined
Are aesthetics and politics really two different things? The book takes a new look at how they intertwine, by turning from theory to practice. Case studies trace how sensory experiences are created and how collective interests are shaped. They investigate how aesthetics and politics are entangled, both in building and disrupting collective orders, in governance and innovation. This ranges from populist rallies and artistic activism over alternative lifestyles and consumer culture to corporate PR and governmental policies. Authors are academics and artists. The result is a new mapping of the intermingling and co-constitution of aesthetics and politics in engagements with collective orders
Leveraging Large Language Models in Conversational Recommender Systems
A Conversational Recommender System (CRS) offers increased transparency and
control to users by enabling them to engage with the system through a real-time
multi-turn dialogue. Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) have exhibited an
unprecedented ability to converse naturally and incorporate world knowledge and
common-sense reasoning into language understanding, unlocking the potential of
this paradigm. However, effectively leveraging LLMs within a CRS introduces new
technical challenges, including properly understanding and controlling a
complex conversation and retrieving from external sources of information. These
issues are exacerbated by a large, evolving item corpus and a lack of
conversational data for training. In this paper, we provide a roadmap for
building an end-to-end large-scale CRS using LLMs. In particular, we propose
new implementations for user preference understanding, flexible dialogue
management and explainable recommendations as part of an integrated
architecture powered by LLMs. For improved personalization, we describe how an
LLM can consume interpretable natural language user profiles and use them to
modulate session-level context. To overcome conversational data limitations in
the absence of an existing production CRS, we propose techniques for building a
controllable LLM-based user simulator to generate synthetic conversations. As a
proof of concept we introduce RecLLM, a large-scale CRS for YouTube videos
built on LaMDA, and demonstrate its fluency and diverse functionality through
some illustrative example conversations
The Politics of Platformization: Amsterdam Dialogues on Platform Theory
What is platformization and why is it a relevant category in the contemporary political landscape? How is it related to cybernetics and the history of computation? This book tries to answer such questions by engaging in multidisciplinary dialogues about the first ten years of the emerging fields of platform studies and platform theory. It deploys a narrative and playful approach that makes use of anecdotes, personal histories, etymologies, and futurable speculations to investigate both the fragmented genealogy that led to platformization and the organizational and economic trends that guide nowadays platform sociotechnical imaginaries
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