Communities at a Crossroads. Material semiotics for online sociability in the fade of cyberculture

How to conceptualize online sociability in the 21st century? To answer this question, Communities at a Crossroads looks back at the mid-2000s. With the burst of the creative-entrepreneur alliance, the territorialization of the internet and the commercialization of interpersonal ties, that period constituted a turning point for digital communitarian cultures. Many of the techno-libertarian culture\u2019s utopias underpinning the ideas for online sociability faced systematic counter evidence. This change in paradigm has still consequences today. Avoiding both empty invocations of community and swift conclusions of doom, Annalisa Pelizza investigates the theories of actions that have underpinned the development of techno-social digital assemblages after the \u2018golden age\u2019 of online communities. Communities at a Crossroads draws upon the analysis of Ars Electronica\u2019s Digital Communities archive, which is the largest of its kind worldwide, and in doing so presents a multi-faceted picture of internet sociability between the two centuries. Privileging an anti-essentialist, performative approach over sociological understandings of online communities, Communities at a Crossroads proposes a radical epistemological turn. It argues that in order to conceptualize contemporary online sociability, we need first to abandon the techno-libertarian communalist rhetoric. Then, it is necessary to move beyond the foundational distinction between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, and adopt a material semiotic approach. In the end, we might have to relinquish the effort to define online or digital communities and engage in more meaningful mapping exercises

Tracing back Communities. An Analysis of Ars Electronica's Digital Communities archive from an ANT perspective

Since long before the popularization of the Web, community-making has been a significant driving force for the development of the Internet. As a consequence, in mid 1990s online communities became a key object of study at the intersection of social sciences, organizational studies and computer sciences. Today, about fifteen years after these early studies, the concept \u2018online community\u2019 seems to be at stake. As a matter of fact, while communitarian ties enabled by digital media are more and more invocated, in late 2000s the Internet is revealing itself as a much more bureaucratic and profit-oriented domain than ever, to the point that it is not clear whether there exist online ties that are specific enough to be called \u2018communitarian\u2019. In order to analyse such an opaque and unstable object of study as current techno-social assemblages, innovative methods specifically developed to study fuzzy objects have to be devised and some epistemological questions have to be addressed. This research starts indeed from the impasse that the digital communitarian culture is experiencing at the end of the 2000s and borrows some epistemological insights from the Actor-Network Theory. By analyzing the entry forms submitted to the world\u2019s leading competition for digital communities, Prix Ars Electronica, this research thus calls into question some \u2018black-boxed\u2019 concepts like \u2018cyberculture\u2019, \u2018digital revolution\u2019, \u2018empowerment\u2019 and \u2018online community\u2019 itself. On one hand, the results bring into question both leading sociological positions and hype-generated commonplaces. On the other hand, the results offer evidence to those arguments according to which current ICT developments represent the beginning of a new phase of technological enclosure

Dealing with Expectations and Traditions in Research

"When considering societal expectations and traditions in research, assumptions are often an integral aspect – particularly in the disciplines pertaining to organization studies. The objective of this anthology is to analyze, clarify and demystify assumptions about research and the way that organizations work. The book is interdisciplinary in its form and content. The chapters are in part theoretical and analytical, yet draw on various empirical illustrations. In doing so, the book touches on the research process, basic assumptions in research, possibilities as well as pitfalls that both novice researchers as well as more experienced ones ought to keep in mind. The individual chapters address research and publication through a range of areas and topics including: accounting and management control, examination of the term ‘organization’ itself, and exploration of behavioral and social processes that lead to change in organizations and society as a whole. All of the chapters illuminate different roles in the research process in organization studies. Dealing with Expectations and Traditions in Research will be of interest to researchers on all levels, including PhD students and master’s students writing term papers and their theses, as well as in methodological courses and discussions.

The Archive of Unrealised Devices

Google Patents is an eight-year-old virtual searchable database containing the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) and the European Patent Office (EPO) patents, with US patent applications dating back to 1790. This searchable online archive of invention, novelty and innovation is a valuable tool for designers and researchers. As a point of departure for recent art-based research, Google Patents online database is mined by me as a creative practitioner. As an artist-hacker, the found material used in my research arises from patent searches for fantastical machines and devices developed to assist with swimming, dating from the 1870s to the early twentieth century. The retrieved patent, etched drawings and information evidence an understanding of a new sport at particular moments in time. However, almost all of these patents remained ‘unrealized’, only contained within the drawing and text of the patent itself. These patents are used as the visual and conceptual basis for The Swimming Machine Archive (2014), a growing body of collages featuring fictional devices for moving through water

Towards full-scale autonomy for multi-vehicle systems planning and acting in extreme environments

Currently, robotic technology offers flexible platforms for addressing many challenging problems that arise in extreme environments. These problems’ nature enhances the use of heterogeneous multi-vehicle systems which can coordinate and collaborate to achieve a common set of goals. While such applications have previously been explored in limited contexts, long-term deployments in such settings often require an advanced level of autonomy to maintain operability. The success of planning and acting approaches for multi-robot systems are conditioned by including reasoning regarding temporal, resource and knowledge requirements, and world dynamics. Automated planning provides the tools to enable intelligent behaviours in robotic systems. However, whilst many planning approaches and plan execution techniques have been proposed, these solutions highlight an inability to consistently build and execute high-quality plans. Motivated by these challenges, this thesis presents developments advancing state-of-the-art temporal planning and acting to address multi-robot problems. We propose a set of advanced techniques, methods and tools to build a high-level temporal planning and execution system that can devise, execute and monitor plans suitable for long-term missions in extreme environments. We introduce a new task allocation strategy, called HRTA, that optimises the task distribution amongst the heterogeneous fleet, relaxes the planning problem and boosts the plan search. We implement the TraCE planner that enforces contingent planning considering propositional temporal and numeric constraints to deal with partial observability about the initial state. Our developments regarding robust plan execution and mission adaptability include the HLMA, which efficiently optimises the task allocation and refines the planning model considering the experience from robots’ previous mission executions. We introduce the SEA failure solver that, combined with online planning, overcomes unexpected situations during mission execution, deals with joint goals implementation, and enhances mission operability in long-term deployments. Finally, we demonstrate the efficiency of our approaches with a series of experiments using a new set of real-world planning domains.Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) grant EP/R026173/

XR Development with the Relay and Responder Pattern

Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) provide powerful, natural, and robust ways to interact with digital content, across a number of different domains. AR and VR, collectively known as Extended Reality (XR), can facilitate the execution of surgical procedures, aid in maintenance and repair of mechanical equipment, provide novel visualization paradigms for data analysis, and even empower new ways to experience video games. These experiences are built on rich, complex real-time interactive systems (RISs) that require the integration of numerous components supporting everything from rendering of virtual content to tracking of objects and people in the real world. There are decades of research on the development of robust RISs, utilizing different software engineering modalities, which facilitate the creation of these systems. While in the past, developers would frequently write all of the components and the “logical glue” themselves (often built with graphics suites such as OpenGL and DirectX), with the the rise of popular 3D game creation engines, such as Unity and Unreal, new development modalities have begun to emerge. While the underlying game engines provide a significantly easier pipeline to integrate different subsystems of AR/VR applications, there are a number of development questions that arise when considering how interaction, visualization, rendering, and application logic should interact, as developers are often left to create the “logical glue” on their own, leading to software components with low reusability. As the needs of users of these systems increase and become more complex, and as the software and hardware technology improves and becomes more sophisticated, the underlying subsystems must also evolve to help meet these needs. In this work, I present a new software design pattern, the Relay & Responder (R&R) pattern, that attempts to address the concerns found with many traditional object-oriented approaches in XR systems. The R&R pattern simplifies the design of these systems by separating logical components from the communication infrastructure that connects them, while minimizing coupling and facilitating the creation of logical hierarchies that can improve XR application design and module reuse. Additionally, I explore how this pattern can, across a number of different research development efforts, aid in the creation of powerful and rich XR RISs. I first present related work in XR system design and introduce the R&R pattern. Then I discuss how XR development can be eased by utilizing modular building blocks and present the Mercury Messaging framework, which implements the R&R pattern. Next I delve into three new XR systems that explore complex XR RIS designs (including user study management modules) using the pattern and framework. I then address the creation of multi-user, networked XR RISs using R&R and Mercury. Finally I end with a discussion on additional considerations, advantages, and limitations of the pattern and framework, in addition to prospective future work that will help improve both