The Crisis of Language in Contemporary Japan: Reading, Writing, and New Technology

My dissertation is an ethnographically inspired theoretical exploration of the crises of reading and writing in contemporary Japan. Each of the five chapters examines concrete instances of reading and writing practices that have been problematized in recent decades. By calling attention to underlying moral assumptions, established sociocultural protocols, and socio-technological conditions of the everyday, I theorize the concept of embodied reading and writing thresholds. The scope of analysis is partly informed by popular discourse decrying a perceived decline in reading and writing proficiency among Japanese youth. This alleged failing literacy figures as a national crisis under the assumption that the futurity of children's national language proficiency metonymically correlates with the future well being of its national cultural body. In light of heightened interests in the past, present, and future of books, and a series of recent state interventions on the prospect of "national" text culture, it is my argument that ongoing tensions surrounding the changing media landscape and symbolic relations to the world do not merely reflect changes in styles of language, structures of spatiotemporal awareness, or forms of knowledge production. Rather, they indicate profound transformations and apprehensions among the lives mediated and embodied by the very system of signification that has come under scrutiny in the post-Lost Decade Japan (03/1991-01/2002). My dissertation offers an unique point of critical intervention into 1) various forms of tension arising from the overlapping media technologies and polarized population, 2) formations of reading and writing body (embodiment) at an intersection of heterogeneous elements and everyday disciplining, 3) culturally specific conditions and articulations of the effects of "universal" technologies, 4) prospects of "proper" national reading and writing culture, and 5) questions of cultural transformation and transmission. I hope that the diverse set of events explored in respective chapters provide, as a whole, a broader perspective of the institutional and technological background as well as an intimate understanding of culturally specific circumstances in Japan. Insofar as this is an attempt to conduct a nuanced inquiry into the culturally specific configurations and articulations of a global phenomenon, each ethnographic moment is carefully contextualized to reflect Japan specific conditions while avoiding the pitfall of culturalist assumptions. Understanding how an existing system of representation, technological imperatives and sociohistorical predicaments have coalesced to form a unique constellation is the first step in identifying how the practice of reading and writing becomes a site of heated national debate in Japan. Against theories that problematize the de-corporealizing effects of digital technology within reading and writing, I emphasize the material specificity of contemporary reading and writing practices

Remote-controlled ambidextrous robot hand actuated by pneumatic muscles: from feasibility study to design and control algorithms

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University LondonThis thesis relates to the development of the Ambidextrous Robot Hand engineered in Brunel University. Assigned to a robotic hand, the ambidextrous feature means that two different behaviours are accessible from a single robot hand, because of its fingers architecture which permits them to bend in both ways. On one hand, the robotic device can therefore behave as a right hand whereas, on another hand, it can behave as a left hand. The main contribution of this project is its ambidextrous feature, totally unique in robotics area. Moreover, the Ambidextrous Robot Hand is actuated by pneumatic artificial muscles (PAMs), which are not commonly used to drive robot hands. The type of the actuators consequently adds more originality to the project. The primary challenge is to reach an ambidextrous behaviour using PAMs designed to actuate non-ambidextrous robot hands. Thus, a feasibility study is carried out for this purpose. Investigating a number of mechanical possibilities, an ambidextrous design is reached with features almost identical for its right and left sides. A testbench is thereafter designed to investigate this possibility even further to design ambidextrous fingers using 3D printing and an asymmetrical tendons routing engineered to reduce the number of actuators. The Ambidextrous Robot Hand is connected to a remote control interface accessible from its website, which provides video streaming as feedback, to be eventually used as an online rehabilitation device. The secondary main challenge is to implement control algorithms on a robot hand with a range twice larger than others, with an asymmetrical tendons routing and actuated by nonlinear actuators. A number of control algorithms are therefore investigated to interact with the angular displacement of the fingers and the grasping abilities of the hand. Several solutions are found out, notably the implementations of a phasing plane switch control and a sliding-mode control, both specific to the architecture of the Ambidextrous Robot Hand. The implementation of these two algorithms on a robotic hand actuated by PAMs is almost as innovative as the ambidextrous design of the mechanical structure itself

Synthèse et commande de dispositifs haptiques pour la communication à distance : application à une interface robotique anthropomorphe pour la poignée de main

Les systèmes de communication à distance entre les individus ont évolué significativement au cours des dernières années, de concert avec les innovations technologiques caractérisant notre société. Afin de réaliser une communication réaliste et intuitive, le système doit être capable de stimuler les sens qui sont habituellement impliqués dans l’interaction entre deux personnes, tels que l’ouïe, la vision et le toucher. Le téléphone a représenté une innovation importante dans les communications en permettant enfin de pouvoir parler avec son interlocuteur directement, sans devoir employer un signal codé comme le code Morse. Cette communication a été améliorée en introduisant les appels vidéo, lesquels permettent non seulement d’entendre l’interlocuteur mais aussi de le voir. Plusieurs recherches ont cependant démontré que le sens du toucher joue également un rôle très important dans les interactions entre individus. Une technologie relativement récente, connue comme technologie haptique, aborde le problème de la transmission du sens du toucher à distance, dans le but de mettre en oeuvre une communication complète et encore plus réaliste. Cette technologie a également d’autres applications tout aussi importantes. À titre d’exemple, l’haptique est utilisée dans le domaine de la réadaptation et de l’apprentissage guidé de personnes ayant des déficiences motrices. Cette thèse porte sur le développement de la technologie haptique pour la communication à distance entre deux individus. L’objectif final est la réalisation d’un système permettant aux deux utilisateurs de se serrer la main à distance. Afin d’atteindre cet objectif, nous devons aborder deux problèmes différents, tels que la conception d’une interface capable de reproduire le mouvement désiré et l’implémentation d’une loi de commande garantissant le comportement correct de cette interface. Toujours dans le cadre de l’interaction à distance par le biais d’un dispositif haptique, une interface pour l’apprentissage de l’écriture manuelle est également présentée. Cette application permet de démontrer, entre autres, l’importance d’un signal haptique dans l’interaction humain-humain et son influence sur les utilisateurs.Remote communication systems have significantly improved in the course of the recent years, in concert with technological innovations of our society. In order to realize a realistic and intuitive communication, the system must activate the part of the sensory system that is normally stimulated in an interaction between two people, i.e., the auditory system, the visual system and the haptic perception system, which concerns touch. The telephone represented an innovating communication system. It allowed to directly talk to the interlocutor without any need for a coded signal such as the Morse code. Remote communications have been further improved with the introduction of the video calls, which allow people not only to talk to but also to see each other. Several researches proved that the sense of touch plays a crucial role in social interactions. Haptic technology, which is relatively recent, approaches the problems related to the perception and the transmission of touch. One objective is to render remote communications even more complete and realistic. Haptic technology is also used in other important applications such as, for instance, rehabilitation and guided learning process of people with movement impairments. This thesis concerns the development of the haptic technology devoted to the implementation of remote communication systems. The final objective is to realize a teleoperation system which allows two users to remotely shake hands. In order to achieve this objective, two main issues must be faced : the design of a haptic interface capable of reproducing the required movement and the implementation of a control law which guarantees the proper response of such an interface. In the framework of a remote interaction via a haptic device, an interface for the training and assessment of handwriting capabilities is also presented. The latter application demonstrates the importance of haptic signals in a remote human-human interaction and its influence on the users

Robotic learning of force-based industrial manipulation tasks

Even with the rapid technological advancements, robots are still not the most comfortable machines to work with. Firstly, due to the separation of the robot and human workspace which imposes an additional financial burden. Secondly, due to the significant re-programming cost in case of changing products, especially in Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs). Therefore, there is a significant need to reduce the programming efforts required to enable robots to perform various tasks while sharing the same space with a human operator. Hence, the robot must be equipped with a cognitive and perceptual capabilities that facilitate human-robot interaction. Humans use their various senses to perform tasks such as vision, smell and taste. One sensethat plays a significant role in human activity is ’touch’ or ’force’. For example, holding a cup of tea, or making fine adjustments while inserting a key requires haptic information to achieve the task successfully. In all these examples, force and torque data are crucial for the successful completion of the activity. Also, this information implicitly conveys data about contact force, object stiffness, and many others. Hence, a deep understanding of the execution of such events can bridge the gap between humans and robots. This thesis is being directed to equip an industrial robot with the ability to deal with force perceptions and then learn force-based tasks using Learning from Demonstration (LfD).To learn force-based tasks using LfD, it is essential to extract task-relevant features from the force information. Then, knowledge must be extracted and encoded form the task-relevant features. Hence, the captured skills can be reproduced in a new scenario. In this thesis, these elements of LfD were achieved using different approaches based on the demonstrated task. In this thesis, four robotics problems were addressed using LfD framework. The first challenge was to filter out robots’ internal forces (irrelevant signals) using data-driven approach. The second robotics challenge was the recognition of the Contact State (CS) during assembly tasks. To tackle this challenge, a symbolic based approach was proposed, in which a force/torque signals; during demonstrated assembly, the task was encoded as a sequence of symbols. The third challenge was to learn a human-robot co-manipulation task based on LfD. In this case, an ensemble machine learning approach was proposed to capture such a skill. The last challenge in this thesis, was to learn an assembly task by demonstration with the presents of parts geometrical variation. Hence, a new learning approach based on Artificial Potential Field (APF) to learn a Peg-in-Hole (PiH) assembly task which includes no-contact and contact phases. To sum up, this thesis focuses on the use of data-driven approaches to learning force based task in an industrial context. Hence, different machine learning approaches were implemented, developed and evaluated in different scenarios. Then, the performance of these approaches was compared with mathematical modelling based approaches.</div

Generative Models for Learning Robot Manipulation Skills from Humans

A long standing goal in artificial intelligence is to make robots seamlessly interact with humans in performing everyday manipulation skills. Learning from demonstrations or imitation learning provides a promising route to bridge this gap. In contrast to direct trajectory learning from demonstrations, many problems arise in interactive robotic applications that require higher contextual level understanding of the environment. This requires learning invariant mappings in the demonstrations that can generalize across different environmental situations such as size, position, orientation of objects, viewpoint of the observer, etc. In this thesis, we address this challenge by encapsulating invariant patterns in the demonstrations using probabilistic learning models for acquiring dexterous manipulation skills. We learn the joint probability density function of the demonstrations with a hidden semi-Markov model, and smoothly follow the generated sequence of states with a linear quadratic tracking controller. The model exploits the invariant segments (also termed as sub-goals, options or actions) in the demonstrations and adapts the movement in accordance with the external environmental situations such as size, position and orientation of the objects in the environment using a task-parameterized formulation. We incorporate high-dimensional sensory data for skill acquisition by parsimoniously representing the demonstrations using statistical subspace clustering methods and exploit the coordination patterns in latent space. To adapt the models on the fly and/or teach new manipulation skills online with the streaming data, we formulate a non-parametric scalable online sequence clustering algorithm with Bayesian non-parametric mixture models to avoid the model selection problem while ensuring tractability under small variance asymptotics. We exploit the developed generative models to perform manipulation skills with remotely operated vehicles over satellite communication in the presence of communication delays and limited bandwidth. A set of task-parameterized generative models are learned from the demonstrations of different manipulation skills provided by the teleoperator. The model captures the intention of teleoperator on one hand and provides assistance in performing remote manipulation tasks on the other hand under varying environmental situations. The assistance is formulated under time-independent shared control, where the model continuously corrects the remote arm movement based on the current state of the teleoperator; and/or time-dependent autonomous control, where the model synthesizes the movement of the remote arm for autonomous skill execution. Using the proposed methodology with the two-armed Baxter robot as a mock-up for semi-autonomous teleoperation, we are able to learn manipulation skills such as opening a valve, pick-and-place an object by obstacle avoidance, hot-stabbing (a specialized underwater task akin to peg-in-a-hole task), screw-driver target snapping, and tracking a carabiner in as few as 4 - 8 demonstrations. Our study shows that the proposed manipulation assistance formulations improve the performance of the teleoperator by reducing the task errors and the execution time, while catering for the environmental differences in performing remote manipulation tasks with limited bandwidth and communication delays

Distributed virtual environment scalability and security

Distributed virtual environments (DVEs) have been an active area of research and engineering for more than 20 years. The most widely deployed DVEs are network games such as Quake, Halo, and World of Warcraft (WoW), with millions of users and billions of dollars in annual revenue. Deployed DVEs remain expensive centralized implementations despite significant research outlining ways to distribute DVE workloads. This dissertation shows previous DVE research evaluations are inconsistent with deployed DVE needs. Assumptions about avatar movement and proximity - fundamental scale factors - do not match WoW’s workload, and likely the workload of other deployed DVEs. Alternate workload models are explored and preliminary conclusions presented. Using realistic workloads it is shown that a fully decentralized DVE cannot be deployed to today’s consumers, regardless of its overhead. Residential broadband speeds are improving, and this limitation will eventually disappear. When it does, appropriate security mechanisms will be a fundamental requirement for technology adoption. A trusted auditing system (“Carbon”) is presented which has good security, scalability, and resource characteristics for decentralized DVEs. When performing exhaustive auditing, Carbon adds 27% network overhead to a decentralized DVE with a WoW-like workload. This resource consumption can be reduced significantly, depending upon the DVE’s risk tolerance. Finally, the Pairwise Random Protocol (PRP) is described. PRP enables adversaries to fairly resolve probabilistic activities, an ability missing from most decentralized DVE security proposals. Thus, this dissertations contribution is to address two of the obstacles for deploying research on decentralized DVE architectures. First, lack of evidence that research results apply to existing DVEs. Second, the lack of security systems combining appropriate security guarantees with acceptable overhead