THE PHILOSOPHY OF ACTION IN LIVE PERFORMANCE INTERACTION DESIGN: ALIGNING FLOWS OF INTENTIONALITY

In recent years, ubiquitous computing has altered traditional performance spaces. Arts organizations have notably tested various strategies to either accommodate or eliminate the persistent and disruptive “glowing screen” of smartphones. While theatre and performance artists and scholars correctly identify many problems created by this influx of new technology, this dissertation argues that the rise of ubiquitous computing presents immense potential for theatre and performance studies to begin solving the design problems faced by computer scientists and user experience designers. Theatre and performance scholars hold a crucial role in ubiquitous technology design for live performance, and we have key knowledge of action that user experience designers seek now more than ever. I propose that human action is the basis for a common nomenclature and theoretical bridge between user experience design and theatre and performance studies. I extend Aristotle’s intentionalist mimetic theory using current philosophy of action and cognitive science, and argue that performance artists and designers select and align flows of intentionality in action that immerse spectators in the intentional presentation of an action. Furthermore, I follow Elizabeth Anscombe’s theory of action to argue for the incommensurability of propositionally articulated theoretical knowledge and non-propositional practical knowledge. Audiences experience the flow of a performance as they ascertain the interweaving of these incommensurable yet complimentary articulations of intentionality through a reciprocal feedback loop of active perception. Both performers and audiences derive the meaning of a performance from an “expanded description” of the teleological structure of actions that comprise it. This action-centric analysis of performance provides the basis for dialogue with human experience designers through an ecologically balanced mapping of the four Aristotelian causes of a performance onto the design of new technology. As a practical application of this theoretical framework, the dissertation also proposes a new platform for smartphone-based audience interactivity at live Jazz concerts. Applying the theoretical argument to the intentional flows of action in live jazz, the Nymbus system seeks to align the material, formal, and efficient causality of smartphones at concerts with the intentional flows in jazz performance in order to heighten and compliment audience immersion in jazz performance flow

Contextual awareness, messaging and communication in nomadic audio environments

Thesis (M.S.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Program in Media Arts & Sciences, 1998.Includes bibliographical references (p. 119-122).Nitin Sawhney.M.S

Intelligent Sensor Networks

In the last decade, wireless or wired sensor networks have attracted much attention. However, most designs target general sensor network issues including protocol stack (routing, MAC, etc.) and security issues. This book focuses on the close integration of sensing, networking, and smart signal processing via machine learning. Based on their world-class research, the authors present the fundamentals of intelligent sensor networks. They cover sensing and sampling, distributed signal processing, and intelligent signal learning. In addition, they present cutting-edge research results from leading experts

Proceedings of the Linux Audio Conference 2018

These proceedings contain all papers presented at the Linux Audio Conference 2018. The conference took place at c-base, Berlin, from June 7th - 10th, 2018 and was organized in cooperation with the Electronic Music Studio at TU Berlin

AXMEDIS 2008

The AXMEDIS International Conference series aims to explore all subjects and topics related to cross-media and digital-media content production, processing, management, standards, representation, sharing, protection and rights management, to address the latest developments and future trends of the technologies and their applications, impacts and exploitation. The AXMEDIS events offer venues for exchanging concepts, requirements, prototypes, research ideas, and findings which could contribute to academic research and also benefit business and industrial communities. In the Internet as well as in the digital era, cross-media production and distribution represent key developments and innovations that are fostered by emergent technologies to ensure better value for money while optimising productivity and market coverage

Quality of experience in telemeetings and videoconferencing: a comprehensive survey

Telemeetings such as audiovisual conferences or virtual meetings play an increasingly important role in our professional and private lives. For that reason, system developers and service providers will strive for an optimal experience for the user, while at the same time optimizing technical and financial resources. This leads to the discipline of Quality of Experience (QoE), an active field originating from the telecommunication and multimedia engineering domains, that strives for understanding, measuring, and designing the quality experience with multimedia technology. This paper provides the reader with an entry point to the large and still growing field of QoE of telemeetings, by taking a holistic perspective, considering both technical and non-technical aspects, and by focusing on current and near-future services. Addressing both researchers and practitioners, the paper first provides a comprehensive survey of factors and processes that contribute to the QoE of telemeetings, followed by an overview of relevant state-of-the-art methods for QoE assessment. To embed this knowledge into recent technology developments, the paper continues with an overview of current trends, focusing on the field of eXtended Reality (XR) applications for communication purposes. Given the complexity of telemeeting QoE and the current trends, new challenges for a QoE assessment of telemeetings are identified. To overcome these challenges, the paper presents a novel Profile Template for characterizing telemeetings from the holistic perspective endorsed in this paper

Felt_space infrastructure: Hyper vigilant spatiality to valence the visceral dimension

Felt_space infrastructure: Hypervigilant spatiality to valence the visceral dimension. This thesis evolves perception as a hypothesis to reframe architectural praxis negotiated through agent-situation interaction. The research questions the geometric principles of architectural ordination to originate the ‘felt_space infrastructure’, a relational system of measurement concerned with the role of perception in mediating sensory space and the cognised environment. The methodological model for this research fuses perception and environmental stimuli, into a consistent generative process that penetrates the inner essence of space, to reveal the visceral parameter. These concepts are applied to develop a ‘coefficient of affordance’ typology, ‘hypervigilant’ tool set, and ‘cognitive_tope’ design methodology. Thus, by extending the architectural platform to consider perception as a design parameter, the thesis interprets the ‘inference schema’ as an instructional model to coordinate the acquisition of spatial reality through tensional and counter-tensional feedback dynamics. Three site-responsive case studies are used to advance the thesis. The first case study is descriptive and develops a typology of situated cognition to extend the ‘granularity’ of perceptual sensitisation (i.e. a fine-grained means of perceiving space). The second project is relational and questions how mapping can coordinate perceptual, cognitive and associative attention, as a ‘multi-webbed vector field’ comprised of attractors and deformations within a viewer-centred gravitational space. The third case study is causal, and demonstrates how a transactional-biased schema can generate, amplify and attenuate perceptual misalignment, thus triggering a visceral niche. The significance of the research is that it progresses generative perception as an additional variable for spatial practice, and promotes transactional methodologies to gain enhanced modes of spatial acuity to extend the repertoire of architectural practice

Dynamic data placement and discovery in wide-area networks

The workloads of online services and applications such as social networks, sensor data platforms and web search engines have become increasingly global and dynamic, setting new challenges to providing users with low latency access to data. To achieve this, these services typically leverage a multi-site wide-area networked infrastructure. Data access latency in such an infrastructure depends on the network paths between users and data, which is determined by the data placement and discovery strategies. Current strategies are static, which offer low latencies upon deployment but worse performance under a dynamic workload. We propose dynamic data placement and discovery strategies for wide-area networked infrastructures, which adapt to the data access workload. We achieve this with data activity correlation (DAC), an application-agnostic approach for determining the correlations between data items based on access pattern similarities. By dynamically clustering data according to DAC, network traffic in clusters is kept local. We utilise DAC as a key component in reducing access latencies for two application scenarios, emphasising different aspects of the problem: The first scenario assumes the fixed placement of data at sites, and thus focusses on data discovery. This is the case for a global sensor discovery platform, which aims to provide low latency discovery of sensor metadata. We present a self-organising hierarchical infrastructure consisting of multiple DAC clusters, maintained with an online and distributed split-and-merge algorithm. This reduces the number of sites visited, and thus latency, during discovery for a variety of workloads. The second scenario focusses on data placement. This is the case for global online services that leverage a multi-data centre deployment to provide users with low latency access to data. We present a geo-dynamic partitioning middleware, which maintains DAC clusters with an online elastic partition algorithm. It supports the geo-aware placement of partitions across data centres according to the workload. This provides globally distributed users with low latency access to data for static and dynamic workloads.Open Acces

An investigation into computer and network curricula

This thesis consists of a series of internationally published, peer reviewed, journal and conference research papers that analyse the educational and training needs of undergraduate Information Technology (IT) students within the area of Computer and Network Technology (CNT) Education. Research by Maj et al has found that accredited computing science curricula can fail to meet the expectations of employers in the field of CNT: “It was found that none of these students could perform first line maintenance on a Personal Computer (PC) to a professional standard with due regard to safety, both to themselves and the equipment. Neither could they install communication cards, cables and network operating system or manage a population of networked PCs to an acceptable commercial standard without further extensive training. It is noteworthy that none of the students interviewed had ever opened a PC. It is significant that all those interviewed for this study had successfully completed all the units on computer architecture and communication engineering (Maj, Robbins, Shaw, & Duley, 1998). The students\u27 curricula at that time lacked units in which they gained hands-on experience in modern PC hardware or networking skills. This was despite the fact that their computing science course was level one accredited, the highest accreditation level offered by the Australian Computer Society (ACS). The results of the initial survey in Western Australia led to the introduction of two new units within the Computing Science Degree at Edith Cowan University (ECU), Computer Installation & Maintenance (CIM) and Network Installation & Maintenance (NIM) (Maj, Fetherston, Charlesworth, & Robbins, 1998). Uniquely within an Australian university context these new syllabi require students to work on real equipment. Such experience excludes digital circuit investigation, which is still a recommended approach by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) for computer architecture units (ACM, 2001, p.97). Instead, the CIM unit employs a top-down approach based initially upon students\u27 everyday experiences, which is more in accordance with constructivist educational theory and practice. These papers propose an alternate model of IT education that helps to accommodate the educational and vocational needs of IT students in the context of continual rapid changes and developments in technology. The ACM have recognised the need for variation noting that: There are many effective ways to organize a curriculum even for a particular set of goals and objectives (Tucker et al., 1991, p.70). A possible major contribution to new knowledge of these papers relates to how high level abstract bandwidth (B-Node) models may contribute to the understanding of why and how computer and networking technology systems have developed over time. Because these models are de-coupled from the underlying technology, which is subject to rapid change, these models may help to future-proof student knowledge and understanding of the ongoing and future development of computer and networking systems. The de-coupling is achieved through abstraction based upon bandwidth or throughput rather than the specific implementation of the underlying technologies. One of the underlying problems is that computing systems tend to change faster than the ability of most educational institutions to respond. Abstraction and the use of B-Node models could help educational models to more quickly respond to changes in the field, and can also help to introduce an element of future-proofing in the education of IT students. The importance of abstraction has been noted by the ACM who state that: Levels of Abstraction: the nature and use of abstraction in computing; the use of abstraction in managing complexity, structuring systems, hiding details, and capturing recurring patterns; the ability to represent an entity or system by abstractions having different levels of detail and specificity (ACM, 1991b). Bloom et al note the importance of abstraction, listing under a heading of: “Knowledge of the universals and abstractions in a field” the objective: Knowledge of the major schemes and patterns by which phenomena and ideas arc organized. These are large structures, theories, and generalizations which dominate a subject or field or problems. These are the highest levels of abstraction and complexity\u27\u27 (Bloom, Engelhart, Furst, Hill, & Krathwohl, 1956, p. 203). Abstractions can be applied to computer and networking technology to help provide students with common fundamental concepts regardless of the particular underlying technological implementation to help avoid the rapid redundancy of a detailed knowledge of modem computer and networking technology implementation and hands-on skills acquisition. Again the ACM note that: “Enduring computing concepts include ideas that transcend any specific vendor, package or skill set... While skills are fleeting, fundamental concepts are enduring and provide long lasting benefits to students, critically important in a rapidly changing discipline (ACM, 2001, p.70) These abstractions can also be reinforced by experiential learning to commercial practices. In this context, the other possibly major contribution of new knowledge provided by this thesis is an efficient, scalable and flexible model for assessing hands-on skills and understanding of IT students. This is a form of Competency-Based Assessment (CBA), which has been successfully tested as part of this research and subsequently implemented at ECU. This is the first time within this field that this specific type of research has been undertaken within the university sector within Australia. Hands-on experience and understanding can become outdated hence the need for future proofing provided via B-Nodes models. The three major research questions of this study are: •Is it possible to develop a new, high level abstraction model for use in CNT education? •Is it possible to have CNT curricula that are more directly relevant to both student and employer expectations without suffering from rapid obsolescence? •Can WI effective, efficient and meaningful assessment be undertaken to test students\u27 hands-on skills and understandings? The ACM Special Interest Group on Data Communication (SJGCOMM) workshop report on Computer Networking, Curriculum Designs and Educational Challenges, note a list of teaching approaches: ... the more \u27hands-on\u27 laboratory approach versus the more traditional in-class lecture-based approach; the bottom-up approach towards subject matter verus the top-down approach (Kurose, Leibeherr, Ostermann, & Ott-Boisseau, 2002, para 1). Bandwidth considerations are approached from the PC hardware level and at each of the seven layers of the International Standards Organisation (ISO) Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) reference model. It is believed that this research is of significance to computing education. However, further research is needed

The role of sound in robot-assisted hand function training post-stroke

In Folge eines Schlaganfalls leiden 90% aller Patienten an einer Handparese, die sich in 30-40% als chronisch manifestiert. Derzeit wächst seitens der Neurologie und Technologie das Forschungsinteresse an der Effektivität robotergestützter Therapieansätze, welche für schwer betroffene Patienten als besonders vielversprechend eingestuft werden. Die hierfür verwendeten Therapieroboter setzen sich aus einem mechanischen Teil und einer softwaregestützten virtuellen Umgebung zusammen, welche neben dem graphischen Interface, audio-visuelles Feedback sowie Musik beinhaltet. Bisher wurden Effekte der klanglichen Anteile dieses Szenarios noch nicht hinsichtlich möglicher Einflüsse auf Motivation, Bewegungsdurchführung, motorisches Lernen und den gesamten Rehabilitationsprozess untersucht. Die vorliegende Arbeit untersucht die Rolle von Sound in robotergestütztem Handfunktionstraining. Die Hauptziele im Rahmen dessen sind es, 1) Potentiale von Sound/ Musik für den Kontext robotergestützten Handfunktionstrainings zu explorieren, 2) spezifizierte klangliche Umgebungen zu entwickeln, 3) zu untersuchen, ob Schlaganfallpatienten von diesen spezifizierten Soundanwendungen profitieren, 4) ein besseres Verständnis über Wirkmechanismen von Sound und Musik mit Potential für robotergestützte Therapie darzulegen, und 5) Folgetechnologien über eine effektive Applikation von Sound/ Musik in robotergestützter Therapie zu informieren.90% of all stroke survivors suffer from a hand paresis which remains chronic in 30-40% of all cases. Currently, there is an increasing research interest in neurology and technology on the effectiveness of robot-assisted therapies. Robotic training is considered as especially promising for patients suffering from severe limitations. Commonly, rehabilitation robots consist of a mechanical part and a virtual training environment with a graphical user interface, audio-visual feedback, sound, and music. So far, the effects of sound and music that are embedded within these scenarios have never been evaluated in particular while taking into account that it might influence motivation, motor execution, motor learning and the whole recovery process. This thesis investigates the role of sound in robot-assisted hand function training post-stroke. The main goals of this work are 1) to explore potentials of sound/ music for robotic hand function training post-stroke, 2) to develop specified sound-/ music-applications for this context, 3) to examine whether stroke patients benefit from these specified sound/ music-application, 4) to gain a better understanding of sound-/ music-induced mechanisms with therapeutic potentials for robotic therapy, and 5) to inform further arising treatment approaches about effective applications of sound or music in robotic post-stroke motor training