Emotional characters for automatic plot creation

The Virtual Storyteller is a multi-agent framework for automatic story generation. In this paper we describe how plots emerge from the actions of semi-autonomous character agents, focusing on the influence of the characters’ emotions on plot development

Photography as a tool of Alienation: Aura

Regular photographical imaging record volumetric planes with smooth surfaces. The reason is the camera’s deficiency in perceiving and documenting the visual richness of “persuasive” details in life. HDR imaging methods used in creating this artwork series titled “Aura” helped making invisible organism-like textures emerge and point to the notions of decay and symbiosis. One of the main objectives in this series of artworks is to facilitate the emergence of the experiential visual complexity between the animate and inanimate, that is otherwise not possible to record. The latent aura of textural presences around us is not always noticeable easily since we tend to consume things too fast. With the rich textures achieved after high-dynamic-range-imaging (HDRI) procedures, a new symbiotic painterly visual relationship between biological (humans) and non-biological (space) was intended. In addition, the paper will focus on photography rather as a tool of personal world making, instead of photography as witnessing. During the process of unfolding this practice; notions of superimposition, palimpsest, painting vs. photography, truth, photography as an apparatus to provoke de-familiarization will be covered. The final aim is to confirm photography as a visual language that enriches and transforms human perception

Philosophy of Blockchain Technology - Ontologies

About the necessity and usefulness of developing a philosophy specific to the blockchain technology, emphasizing on the ontological aspects. After an Introduction that highlights the main philosophical directions for this emerging technology, in Blockchain Technology I explain the way the blockchain works, discussing ontological development directions of this technology in Designing and Modeling. The next section is dedicated to the main application of blockchain technology, Bitcoin, with the social implications of this cryptocurrency. There follows a section of Philosophy in which I identify the blockchain technology with the concept of heterotopia developed by Michel Foucault and I interpret it in the light of the notational technology developed by Nelson Goodman as a notational system. In the Ontology section, I present two developmental paths that I consider important: Narrative Ontology, based on the idea of order and structure of history transmitted through Paul Ricoeur's narrative history, and the Enterprise Ontology system based on concepts and models of an enterprise, specific to the semantic web, and which I consider to be the most well developed and which will probably become the formal ontological system, at least in terms of the economic and legal aspects of blockchain technology. In Conclusions I am talking about the future directions of developing the blockchain technology philosophy in general as an explanatory and robust theory from a phenomenologically consistent point of view, which allows testability and ontologies in particular, arguing for the need of a global adoption of an ontological system for develop cross-cutting solutions and to make this technology profitable. CONTENTS: Abstract Introducere Tehnologia blockchain - Proiectare - Modele Bitcoin Filosofia Ontologii - Ontologii narative - Ontologii de intreprindere Concluzii Note Bibliografie DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.24510.3360

Theories of the development of human communication

This article considers evidence for innate motives for sharing rituals and symbols from animal semiotics, developmental neurobiology, physiology of prospective motor control, affective neuroscience and infant communication. Mastery of speech and language depends on polyrhythmic movements in narrative activities of many forms. Infants display intentional activity with feeling and sensitivity for the contingent reactions of other persons. Talk shares many of its generative powers with music and the other ‘imitative arts’. Its special adaptations concern the capacity to produce and learn an endless range of sounds to label discrete learned understandings, topics and projects of intended movement

Unsupervised Learning from Narrated Instruction Videos

We address the problem of automatically learning the main steps to complete a certain task, such as changing a car tire, from a set of narrated instruction videos. The contributions of this paper are three-fold. First, we develop a new unsupervised learning approach that takes advantage of the complementary nature of the input video and the associated narration. The method solves two clustering problems, one in text and one in video, applied one after each other and linked by joint constraints to obtain a single coherent sequence of steps in both modalities. Second, we collect and annotate a new challenging dataset of real-world instruction videos from the Internet. The dataset contains about 800,000 frames for five different tasks that include complex interactions between people and objects, and are captured in a variety of indoor and outdoor settings. Third, we experimentally demonstrate that the proposed method can automatically discover, in an unsupervised manner, the main steps to achieve the task and locate the steps in the input videos.Comment: Appears in: 2016 IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR 2016). 21 page

Playing with Identity. Authors, Narrators, Avatars, and Players in The Stanley Parable and The Beginner’s Guide

This article offers a comparative analysis of Davey Wreden’s The Stanley Parable (Wreden 2011 / Galactic Cafe 2013) and The Beginner’s Guide (Everything Unlimited Ltd. 2015) in order to explore the interrelation of authors, narrators, avatars, and players as four salient functions in the play with identity that videogames afford. Building on theories of collective and collaborative authorship, of narratives and narrators across media, and of the avatar-player relationship, the article reconstructs the similarities and differences between the way in which The Stanley Parable and The Beginner’s Guide position their players in relation to the two games’ avatars, narrators, and (main) author, while also underscoring how both The Stanley Parable and The Beginner’s Guide use metareferential strategies to undermine any overly rigid conceptualization of these functions and their interrelation

User-centred design of flexible hypermedia for a mobile guide: Reflections on the hyperaudio experience

A user-centred design approach involves end-users from the very beginning. Considering users at the early stages compels designers to think in terms of utility and usability and helps develop the system on what is actually needed. This paper discusses the case of HyperAudio, a context-sensitive adaptive and mobile guide to museums developed in the late 90s. User requirements were collected via a survey to understand visitors’ profiles and visit styles in Natural Science museums. The knowledge acquired supported the specification of system requirements, helping defining user model, data structure and adaptive behaviour of the system. User requirements guided the design decisions on what could be implemented by using simple adaptable triggers and what instead needed more sophisticated adaptive techniques, a fundamental choice when all the computation must be done on a PDA. Graphical and interactive environments for developing and testing complex adaptive systems are discussed as a further step towards an iterative design that considers the user interaction a central point. The paper discusses how such an environment allows designers and developers to experiment with different system’s behaviours and to widely test it under realistic conditions by simulation of the actual context evolving over time. The understanding gained in HyperAudio is then considered in the perspective of the developments that followed that first experience: our findings seem still valid despite the passed time

Psychopower and Ordinary Madness: Reticulated Dividuals in Cognitive Capitalism

Despite the seemingly neutral vantage of using nature for widely-distributed computational purposes, neither post-biological nor post-humanist teleology simply concludes with the real "end of nature" as entailed in the loss of the specific ontological status embedded in the identifier "natural." As evinced by the ecological crises of the Anthropocene—of which the 2019 Brazil Amazon rainforest fires are only the most recent—our epoch has transfixed the “natural order" and imposed entropic artificial integration, producing living species that become “anoetic,” made to serve as automated exosomatic residues, or digital flecks. I further develop Gilles Deleuze’s description of control societies to upturn Foucauldian biopower, replacing its spacio-temporal bounds with the exographic excesses in psycho-power; culling and further detailing Bernard Stiegler’s framework of transindividuation and hyper-control, I examine how becoming-subject is predictively facilitated within cognitive capitalism and what Alexander Galloway terms “deep digitality.” Despite the loss of material vestiges qua virtualization—which I seek to trace in an historical review of industrialization to postindustrialization—the drive-based and reticulated "internet of things" facilitates a closed loop from within the brain to the outside environment, such that the aperture of thought is mediated and compressed. The human brain, understood through its material constitution, is susceptible to total datafication’s laminated process of “becoming-mnemotechnical,” and, as neuroplasticity is now a valid description for deep-learning and neural nets, we are privy to the rebirth of the once-discounted metaphor of the “cybernetic brain.” Probing algorithmic governmentality while posing noetic dreaming as both technical and pharmacological, I seek to analyze how spirit is blithely confounded with machine-thinking’s gelatinous cognition, as prosthetic organ-adaptation becomes probabilistically molded, networked, and agentially inflected (rather than simply externalized)

“There’s no good excuse for the kind of shit I’ve made up” : a Narratological-empiric investigation into actual readers’ perceptions of unreliability in digital app-novella Pry (2014/2016)

Tässä empiiristä tutkimusotetta ja kirjallisuustieteellistä teoriaa yhdistävässä tutkielmassa tarkastellaan epäluotettavan kerronnan toteutumista Samantha Gormanin ja Danny Cannizzaron digitaalisessa iOS-kirjasovelluksessa Pry. Tutkielmassa argumentoidaan, että puhtaasti teoreettinen kirjallisuustiede tarvitsee välttämättä tuekseen empiiristä lukijatutkimusta, mikäli tavoitteena on tuottaa tietoa kerronnallisten rakenteiden todellisista toteutuvista toiminnan muodoista. Tutkielman kolme päätavoitetta ovat (1) kerronnallisen epäluotettavuuden tarkastelu teoksessa, (2) empiirisen lukijatutkimuksen merkittävyyden osoittaminen sekä (3) tutkielmassa käytettyjen menetelmien kriittinen arviointi ja kehittäminen. Tutkielman teoreettisena viitekehyksenä käytetään kertomusten rakenteiden systemaattiseen tarkasteluun perustuvaa narratologiaa. Tutkielmassa hyödynnetään erityisesti Wayne C. Boothin ja James Phelanin kerronnan epäluotettavuutta kuvaavia teorioita, joita kehitetään edelleen empiiriseen tarkasteluun sopiviksi. Lisäksi tutkielmassa tarkastellaan 64 kirjoittajan tuottamia analyyseja multimodaalisesta Prysta sekä laadullisin että määrällisin menetelmin. Suuri osa aineistosta koostuu yhdysvaltalaisten, kanadalaisten ja uusiseelantilaisten yliopisto-opiskelijoiden kurssisuorituksina julkaistuista blogiteksteistä, mutta aineistoon kuuluu myös ammattimaisten kirjoittajien sekä harrastajien tuottamia analyyseja. Lukijatulkintojen rinnalle tarjotaan tutkielman kirjoittajan oma luenta, jossa Pry tulkitaan kriittisenä, moniäänisyyden mahdollistavana tarkasteluna erinäisten kollektiivien suhteista erityisesti Persianlahden sodassa ja Irakin sodassa, joihin teos kerronnassaan viittaa. Kirjoittajan oman luennan ja muiden lukijatulkintojen väliin muodostuvan jännitteen kautta tutkielma pyrkii osoittamaan, että yksittäisen lukijan valitsema tulkintakehys voi muokata voimakkaasti luennan pohjalta kehitettävää analyysia ja siten kirjallisuustieteellistä teoretisointia. Tutkielmassa havaitaan, että Pryn kerronnalliset elementit voivat tuottaa toisistaan poikkeavia luentoja, minkä vuoksi kerronnan epäluotettavuus näyttäytyy eri lukijoille eri muodossa. Tulkinnat eivät kuitenkaan ole sattumanvaraisia, vaan ne vaikuttavat asettuvan tiettyjen raamien sisään. Tutkielman lopputulema on, että näihin tulkinnallisiin rajapisteisiin tulisi kiinnittää huomiota jatkotutkimuksessa sekä kerronnallisten rakenteiden tarkastelussa ylipäätään