Rich Socio-Cognitive Agents for Immersive Training Environments: Case of NonKin Village

Demand is on the rise for scientifically based human-behavior models that can be quickly customized and inserted into immersive training environments to recreate a given society or culture. At the same time, there are no readily available science model-driven environments for this purpose (see survey in Sect. 2). In researching how to overcome this obstacle, we have created rich (complex) socio-cognitive agents that include a large number of social science models (cognitive, sociologic, economic, political, etc) needed to enhance the realism of immersive, artificial agent societies. We describe current efforts to apply model-driven development concepts and how to permit other models to be plugged in should a developer prefer them instead. The current, default library of behavioral models is a metamodel, or authoring language, capable of generating immersive social worlds. Section 3 explores the specific metamodels currently in this library (cognitive, socio-political, economic, conversational, etc.) and Sect. 4 illustrates them with an implementation that results in a virtual Afghan village as a platform-independent model. This is instantiated into a server that then works across a bridge to control the agents in an immersive, platform-specific 3D gameworld (client). Section 4 also provides examples of interacting in the resulting gameworld and some of the training a player receives. We end with lessons learned and next steps for improving both the process and the gameworld. The seeming paradox of this research is that as agent complexity increases, the easier it becomes for the agents to explain their world, their dilemmas, and their social networks to a player or trainee

What is a Good Pattern of Life Model? Guidance for Simulations

We have been modeling an ever-increasing scale of applications with agents that simulate the pattern of life (PoL) and real-world human behaviors in diverse regions of the world. The goal is to support sociocultural training and analysis. To measure progress, we propose the definition of a measure of goodness for such simulated agents, and review the issues and challenges associated with first-generation (1G) agents. Then we present a second generation (2G) agent hybrid approach that seeks to improve realism in terms of emergent daily activities, social awareness, and micro-decision making in simulations. We offer a PoL case study with a mix of 1G and 2G approaches that was able to replace the pucksters and avatar operators needed in large-scale immersion exercises. We conclude by observing that a 1G PoL simulation might still be best where large-scale, pre-scripted training scenarios will suffice, while the 2G approach will be important for analysis or if it is vital to learn about adaptive opponents or unexpected or emergent effects of actions. Lessons are shared about ways to blend 1G and 2G approaches to get the best of each

Sidney's Two Roads to Arcadia: Romance and the Narrative of Experience

Literature and Comparative Literatur

Patterns in spiritual awakening: A study of Augustine, Coleridge and Eliot

My thesis explores the role of the self in spiritual narratives, adopting the philosophical perspectives of Plato, Aristotle, and Kierkegaard as modes of apprehending the reader\u27s inward response to literature. I examine patterns of spiritual awakening in St. Augustine\u27s Confessions, Coleridge\u27s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner , and T. S. Eliot\u27s The Family Reunion, tracing and retracing phases in the protagonist\u27s life, which lead to a crucial moment of conversion. I attempt to show how each character\u27s experience acquires spiritual meaning on the basis of transformative insights and demonstrates its potential to shape the self. The purpose of the thesis is to allow the religious point of view to cast light on secular literature and to address various ways of approaching religious truths on a textual basis. In offering a religious response to secular spheres of culture, including art and philosophy, the thesis indicates how theology provides insights into literary texts that are concerned with ultimate meaning

The Old Man and the Sea: Hemingway, heteroglossia, and the hero\u27s voice

In this subjective hero concept lies an intriguing aspect of Bakhtin\u27s paradigm: A hero is not necessarily a living entity; a hero can be ideas, objects and locations. When viewed through the lens of traditional western rhetorical theory, Hemingway\u27s The Old Man and the Sea appears as a monologue wherein Santiago seemingly speaks for the author about the subject of doom and man\u27s relationship to the world

Representing Wilderness: Community, Collaboration, and Artistic Practice

This dissertation project serves as an inquiry into Canadian representational practices and discourses surrounding colonialism, wilderness, nature and nationhood. The written thesis presented here is part of a multidisciplinary project that also comprised of an art exhibition held at Western’s McIntosh Gallery, from June 3rd to Junes 25th, 2016. This paper, alongside the drawing, sculpture, and videos created for my exhibition, examine depictions of nature and nation in Canada through an analysis of antimodernism, primitivism, and a seeking of the spiritual connected to constructions of “white wilderness” and the spatial imaginary of Canada’s colonial frontier. This paper also explores ways in which decolonial art and theory seeks to challenge those same configurations of identity and power, including the development of settler-based decolonizing strategies aimed at unsettling dominant political and cultural narratives. Specifically in relation to my own art practice, this means challenging the enduring colonial legacies of Canada’s settler past and the contemporary representational practices that continue to privilege and empower colonial constructions of space and place. This dissertation project proposes a collaborative-based research practice that operates in relation to issues of the local, domestic, and lived practices of people and their interaction with the environment. As such, this paper examines mainstream articulations of nature and nation in Canada through historicized interpretations of dominant Settler/First Nation narratives and demonstrates how an understanding of this history becomes vitally important when trying to achieve performative, transformative, and collaborative understandings of the colonial experience that continues to define life in Canada

Home as Found

Originally published in 1979. Eric Sundquist takes four representative writers—James Fenimore Cooper, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville—and considers the way in which each grapples with the crucial issues of genealogy and authority in his works. From all four a common pattern emerges: the desire to revolt against the past is countered by the need to invoke or even repeat it. Sundquist's approach to the texts is psychoanalytic, but he does not attempt a clinical dissection of each writer; rather, he determines how personal crisis became material for engaging with larger questions of social and literary crisis

Shelley with Benjamin: A critical mosaic

Yet what surprises me most of all at this time is that what I have written consists, as it were, almost entirely of quotations. – Compositions so produced are to poetry what mosaic is to painting. – It is the craziest mosaic technique you can imagine – and the very mind which directs the hands in formation is incapable of accounting to itself for the origin, the gradations, or the media of the process. Shelley with Benjamin: A critical mosaic is an experiment in comparative reading. Born a century apart, Percy Bysshe Shelley and Walter Benjamin are separated by time, language, temperament and genre – one a Romantic poet known for his revolutionary politics and delicate lyricism, the other a melancholy intellectual who pioneered a dialectical method of thinking in constellations. Yet, as the above montage of citations from their works demonstrates, their ideas are mutually illuminating: the mosaic is but one of several images that both use to describe how literature lives on through practices of citation, translation and critical commentary. In a series of close readings that are by turns playful, erotic and violent, Mathelinda Nabugodi unveils affinities between two writers whose works are simultaneously interventions in literary history and blueprints for an emancipated future. In addition to offering fresh interpretations of both major and minor writings, she elucidates the personal and ethical stakes of literary criticism. Throughout the book, marginal annotations and interlinear interruptions disrupt the faux-objective and colourblind stance of standard academic prose in an attempt to reckon with the barbarism of our past and its legacy in the present. The book will appeal to readers of Shelley and Benjamin as well as those with an interest in comparative literature, literary theory, romantic poetics, and creative critical writing