Strategies for creating new informational primitives in minds and machines

Open-endedness is an important goal for designing systems that can autonomously find new and expected solutions to combinatorically-complex and ill-defined problems. Classically, issues of open-ended generation of novelty in the universe have come under the rubric of the problem of emergence. We distinguish two modes of creating novelty: combinatoric (new combinations of existing primitive

The intangible material of interactive art:agency, behavior and emergence

Aquest article presenta una anàlisi conceptual d'algunes de les nocions bàsiques per a la pràctica de l'art interactiu i les relacions entre aquestes nocions. Un bon coneixement d'aquestes nocions és fonamental per a la creació de l'estètica dels sistemes amb un comportament artístic. La interactivitat, l'agència, el comportament i l'emergència es presenten com a pilars fonamentals d'aquesta pràctica, comprenent que són com a mínim tan importants com els materials que físicament instancien els components i les instal·lacions que constitueixen el cos de l'art interactiu. La interactivitat es defineix i es confronta amb la metàfora de la conversació i la idea del disseny de sistemes interactius amb finalitats artístiques. Les nocions d'agència, comportament i performativitat es revisen a través de la lectura de la interpretació d'Andrew Pickering per a la ontologia de la cibernètica i en relació amb les pràctiques artístiques interactives. Finalment, el concepte d'emergència i l'emergència relativa a un model de Peter Cariani es presenten com a un marc teorètic en el qual es pot basar l'anàlisi i la creació de comportaments inesperats i no dissenyats prèviament en sistemes interactius.This paper presents a conceptual analysis of some of the basic notions for the practice of interactive art and the relations among them. A sound understanding of these notions is essential for the creation of the aesthetics of artistically behaving systems. Interactivity, agency, behavior and emergence are presented as the building blocks of this practice, understanding that they are at least as important as the materials that physically instantiate the pieces and installations that constitute the body of interactive art. Interactivity is defined and confronted to the metaphor of the conversation and to the idea of designing interactive systems with artistic purposes. The notions of agency, behavior and performativity are reviewed through the reading of Andrew Pickering’s account for the ontology of Cybernetics and in relation to interactive art practices. Finally, the concept of emergence and Peter Cariani’s emergence-relative-to-a-model are presented as a theoretical framework with which the analysis and creation of unexpected and non pre-designed behaviors in interactive systems can be based.Este artículo presenta un análisis conceptual de algunas de las nociones básicas para la práctica del arte interactivo y las relaciones entre estas. Un buen conocimiento de estas nociones es fundamental para la creación de la estética de los sistemas con un comportamiento artístico. La interactividad, la entidad, el comportamiento y la emergencia se presentan como los pilares fundamentales de esta práctica, comprendiendo que son como mínimo tan importantes como los materiales que físicamente instancian los componentes e instalaciones que constituyen el cuerpo del arte interactivo. La interactividad se define y confronta con la metáfora de la conversación y la idea del diseño de sistemas interactivos con fines artísticos. Las nociones de entidad, comportamiento y performatividad se revisan a través de la lectura de la interpretación de Andrew Pickering para la ontología de la cibernética y en relación con las prácticas artísticas interactivas. Por último, el concepto de emergencia y la emergencia relativa a un modelo de Peter Cariani se presentan como un marco teorético en el que se puede basar el análisis y la creación de comportamientos inesperados y no diseñados previamente en sistemas interactivos

Dynamic descriptions : steps towards a design machine

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Architecture, 2010.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (p. 59-61).This thesis questions which would be a valid approach for building design machine aided by computational intelligence capable of generating surprises for their designers-observers. There have been efforts since the 1960s towards developing frameworks for design machines that were envisioning computational systems as something more than tools for efficient production and representation. Some of them were dealing with design problems as complex systems that needed to be broken down in modular parts, for example Christopher Alexander's "Notes on the Synthesis of Form". However such strategies were associated with explicit languages of descriptions and strong hierarchies, defined in advance by the designer, that were constraining the design space to what these predefined descriptions were anticipating. This thesis draws its motivation from the work of Professor of Design and Computation George Stiny on visual computations operating on non-fixed sets of primitives, as well as from research conducted in the field of Artificial Intelligence on alternative representations. I will propose a framework for a design machine highlighting the importance of it being able to generate its own dynamic descriptions, "entities" that bear content independent of the interpretations of their designers. Inspired by a computational system, developed by Stephen Larson (2003), capable of grounding its own symbols in perception, I will experiment with self-organizing map algorithms suggesting them as a possible way for a design machine to build up and update its language of description from its perceptual information.by Varvara Toulkeridou.S.M

Actuating (Auto)Poiesis

This paper claims that the use of the computer as generative methodological tool for designing urban and building scenarios (when perceived systematically) is a misnomer, because the typical approach does not account for the incompleteness of computational processes. We will argue that the computerisation of architectural and urban scenarios with autopoietic and/or artificial life simulations does not account for what Edsger W. Dijkstra called “radical novelty”; and Gilles Deleuze termed “line of flight”. Typical computational methods do not open up genuine alternatives that produce radical morphologies. Our argument is predicated on the dominant notion of computation as opposed to a critique of computation per se. A critical analysis of the perception of novelty is made to support our view, and its connection with the incompleteness of axiomatic systems is explored in relation to three phases of cybernetic enquiry. Our argument draws on the ontologies of Alfred North Whitehead and Gilles Deleuze, which we utilise to reorient computational design to emphasise the potential of generating radical novelty and identify the inherent locus therein a matter of nonhuman decision-making

Remarks on the Foundations of Biology

This paper attempts, inevitably briefly, a re-categorization and partial resolution of some foundational issues in biology -clearing exercise extends the notion of causality in biology from merely the efficient cause to include also final and formal causality. The Human Genome Project (hpg) can be looked on as an attempt to ground explanation of the phenotype in terms of an efficient cause rooted in a gene. This notion gives rise to the first section discussing the computational metaphor and epigenesis and suggesting ways to extend this metaphor. The extended notion of causality alluded to above is necessary, but not sufficient, to demarcate a specific explanatory realm for the biological. While the universe can ultimately, perhaps, be explained by quantum fluctuations being computed through the laws of nature, the origin of life remains a mystery. The ground-clearing exercise refers to coincidences that motivate the cosmological anthropic principle, before raising an alert about the possibility of similar thermodynamic laws facilitating the emergence of life. "Life itself seems to involve symbolic operations that can be described by the grammatical rules within tightly-defined limits of complexity. The nascent field of biosemiotics has extended this argument, often in a Peircean direction. Yet, even here, the task involved needs to be specified. Is the organism creating proteins to launch an immune counter-attack ? Alternatively, is a pluripotent stem cell generating an entire organism? We consider what these separate tasks might look like computationally. The paper ends with further delimitation of the specifically biological. At what point in the infinitesimal does life refuse to reveal its secrets? Conversely, at what specific levels in increasing size and complexity do boundary conditions emerge with hierarchy becoming immanent

Pragmatic Frames for Teaching and Learning in Human-Robot interaction: Review and Challenges

Vollmer A-L, Wrede B, Rohlfing KJ, Oudeyer P-Y. Pragmatic Frames for Teaching and Learning in Human-Robot interaction: Review and Challenges. FRONTIERS IN NEUROROBOTICS. 2016;10: 10.One of the big challenges in robotics today is to learn from human users that are inexperienced in interacting with robots but yet are often used to teach skills flexibly to other humans and to children in particular. A potential route toward natural and efficient learning and teaching in Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) is to leverage the social competences of humans and the underlying interactional mechanisms. In this perspective, this article discusses the importance of pragmatic frames as flexible interaction protocols that provide important contextual cues to enable learners to infer new action or language skills and teachers to convey these cues. After defining and discussing the concept of pragmatic frames, grounded in decades of research in developmental psychology, we study a selection of HRI work in the literature which has focused on learning-teaching interaction and analyze the interactional and learning mechanisms that were used in the light of pragmatic frames. This allows us to show that many of the works have already used in practice, but not always explicitly, basic elements of the pragmatic frames machinery. However, we also show that pragmatic frames have so far been used in a very restricted way as compared to how they are used in human-human interaction and argue that this has been an obstacle preventing robust natural multi-task learning and teaching in HRI. In particular, we explain that two central features of human pragmatic frames, mostly absent of existing HRI studies, are that (1) social peers use rich repertoires of frames, potentially combined together, to convey and infer multiple kinds of cues; (2) new frames can be learnt continually, building on existing ones, and guiding the interaction toward higher levels of complexity and expressivity. To conclude, we give an outlook on the future research direction describing the relevant key challenges that need to be solved for leveraging pragmatic frames for robot learning and teaching

Smell's puzzling discrepancy: Gifted discrimination, yet pitiful identification

Mind &Language, Volume 35, Issue 1, Page 90-114, February 2020

Materiality, health informatics and the limits of knowledge production

© IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2014 Contemporary societies increasingly rely on complex and sophisticated information systems for a wide variety of tasks and, ultimately, knowledge about the world in which we live. Those systems are central to the kinds of problems our systems and sub-systems face such as health and medical diagnosis, treatment and care. While health information systems represent a continuously expanding field of knowledge production, we suggest that they carry forward significant limitations, particularly in their claims to represent human beings as living creatures and in their capacity to critically reflect on the social, cultural and political origins of many forms of data ‘representation’. In this paper we take these ideas and explore them in relation to the way we see healthcare information systems currently functioning. We offer some examples from our own experience in healthcare settings to illustrate how unexamined ideas about individuals, groups and social categories of people continue to influence health information systems and practices as well as their resulting knowledge production. We suggest some ideas for better understanding how and why this still happens and look to a future where the reflexivity of healthcare administration, the healthcare professions and the information sciences might better engage with these issues. There is no denying the role of health informatics in contemporary healthcare systems but their capacity to represent people in those datascapes has a long way to go if the categories they use to describe and analyse human beings are to produce meaningful knowledge about the social world and not simply to replicate past ideologies of those same categories