Minds Online: The Interface between Web Science, Cognitive Science, and the Philosophy of Mind

Alongside existing research into the social, political and economic impacts of the Web, there is a need to study the Web from a cognitive and epistemic perspective. This is particularly so as new and emerging technologies alter the nature of our interactive engagements with the Web, transforming the extent to which our thoughts and actions are shaped by the online environment. Situated and ecological approaches to cognition are relevant to understanding the cognitive significance of the Web because of the emphasis they place on forces and factors that reside at the level of agent–world interactions. In particular, by adopting a situated or ecological approach to cognition, we are able to assess the significance of the Web from the perspective of research into embodied, extended, embedded, social and collective cognition. The results of this analysis help to reshape the interdisciplinary configuration of Web Science, expanding its theoretical and empirical remit to include the disciplines of both cognitive science and the philosophy of mind

Communicating the Past in the Digital Age: Proceedings of the International Conference on Digital Methods in Teaching and Learning in Archaeology (12-13 October 2018)

Recent developments in the field of archaeology are not only progressing archaeological fieldwork but also changing the way we practise and present archaeology today. As these digital technologies are being used more and more every day on excavations or in museums, this also means that we must change the way we approach teaching and communicating archaeology as a discipline. This volume presents the outcome of a two-day international symposium on digital methods in teaching and learning in archaeology held at the University of Cologne in October 2018. Specialists from around the world share their views on the newest developments in the field of archaeology and the way we teach these with the help of archaeogaming, augmented and virtual reality, 3D reconstruction and many more

IFIP TC 13 Seminar: trends in HCI proceedings, March 26, 2007, Salamanca (Spain)

Actas del 13o. Seminario de la International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP), celebrado en Salamanca el 26 de marzo de 2007, sobre las nuevas líneas de investigación en la interacción hombre-máquina, gestión del conocimiento y enseñanza por la Web

Desenvolvimento de um periférico de gaming inclusivo

Dissertação de Mestrado em Design com a especialização em Design de Produto, dissertação apresentada na Faculdade de Arquitetura da Universidade de Lisboa para obtenção do grau de Mestre.Os videojogos conheceram um crescimento exponencial da sua popularidade ao longo das três últimas décadas, afirmando-se atualmente como um dos meios de entretenimento mais influentes do século XXI. No entanto, apesar do aumento no número de jogos, da sua componente competitiva, dos periféricos de jogo e do surgimento de cada vez mais plataformas online dedicadas à proliferação de conteúdo relacionado com videojogos, existe ainda uma grande lacuna a nível não só da indústria, mas também da investigação existente, no que diz respeito à inclusão de pessoas com deficiências físicas nos membros superiores no universo dos videojogos. Assim, o objetivo da presente investigação consiste na integração social de pessoas com uma deficiência num dos membros superiores na vasta e diversificada comunidade de gaming, através do desenvolvimento de um periférico de jogo para PC que possibilite uma jogabilidade com qualidade e conforto, assim como melhoria da sua experiência de jogo, empoderando-as a jogar desde jogos mais simples a jogos que exigem maior destreza motora. Durante a investigação foi aplicada uma metodológica mista, de carater intervencionista e não-intervencionista, de base qualitativa e quantitativa. A fim de compreender os vários conceitos, assim como toda a investigação que fora realizada nas áreas abordadas, recorreu-se a uma revisão da literatura. Em seguida, realizou-se uma investigação ativa composta por uma análise de casos de estudo, que consistiu num levantamento dos periféricos de gaming baseados na inclusão de pessoas com deficiências físicas e das suas características principais, e por um questionário online, realizado com o intuito de traçar o perfil dos destinatários do projeto e recolher inputs valiosos sobre a sua interação com os videojogos. Por último desenvolveu-se o projeto, que culminou na criação de um protótipo funcional e na sua validação através de um estudo de usabilidade.ABSTRACT : Videogames have experienced an exponential growth in popularity over the past three decades, asserting themselves as one of the most influential entertainment media of the 21st century. However, despite the increase in the number of games, their competitive component, gaming peripherals, and the emergence of more and more online platforms dedicated to the proliferation of content related to videogames, there is still a big gap not only in the industry, but also of the existing research regarding the inclusion of people with physical disabilities in the upper limbs in the universe of videogames. Thus, the objective of the present investigation is the social integration of people with a disability in one of the upper limbs in the vast and diversified gaming community, through the development of a gaming peripheral for PC that enables quality and comfort gameplay, as well as match the level of performance between people with and without disabilities, empowering them to play from simpler to more complex games that require greater motor skills. During the investigation, a mixed methodology, of an interventionist and non-interventionist nature, with a qualitative and quantitative basis was applied. In order to understand the various concepts, as well as all the research that had been carried out in the areas covered, a literature review was used. Then, an active investigation was carried out, consisting of an analysis of case studies, which consisted of a survey of gaming peripherals based on the inclusion of people with physical disabilities and their main characteristics, and an online questionnaire, carried out with the aim to profile the project’s recipients and collect valuable input about their interaction with videogames. Lastly, the project was developed, which culminated in the creation of a functional prototype and its validation through a usability study.N/

Using MapReduce Streaming for Distributed Life Simulation on the Cloud

Distributed software simulations are indispensable in the study of large-scale life models but often require the use of technically complex lower-level distributed computing frameworks, such as MPI. We propose to overcome the complexity challenge by applying the emerging MapReduce (MR) model to distributed life simulations and by running such simulations on the cloud. Technically, we design optimized MR streaming algorithms for discrete and continuous versions of Conway’s life according to a general MR streaming pattern. We chose life because it is simple enough as a testbed for MR’s applicability to a-life simulations and general enough to make our results applicable to various lattice-based a-life models. We implement and empirically evaluate our algorithms’ performance on Amazon’s Elastic MR cloud. Our experiments demonstrate that a single MR optimization technique called strip partitioning can reduce the execution time of continuous life simulations by 64%. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to propose and evaluate MR streaming algorithms for lattice-based simulations. Our algorithms can serve as prototypes in the development of novel MR simulation algorithms for large-scale lattice-based a-life models.https://digitalcommons.chapman.edu/scs_books/1014/thumbnail.jp

Human Computer Interaction and Emerging Technologies

The INTERACT Conferences are an important platform for researchers and practitioners in the field of human-computer interaction (HCI) to showcase their work. They are organised biennially by the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) Technical Committee on Human–Computer Interaction (IFIP TC13), an international committee of 30 member national societies and nine Working Groups. INTERACT is truly international in its spirit and has attracted researchers from several countries and cultures. With an emphasis on inclusiveness, it works to lower the barriers that prevent people in developing countries from participating in conferences. As a multidisciplinary field, HCI requires interaction and discussion among diverse people with different interests and backgrounds. The 17th IFIP TC13 International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction (INTERACT 2019) took place during 2-6 September 2019 in Paphos, Cyprus. The conference was held at the Coral Beach Hotel Resort, and was co-sponsored by the Cyprus University of Technology and Tallinn University, in cooperation with ACM and ACM SIGCHI. This volume contains the Adjunct Proceedings to the 17th INTERACT Conference, comprising a series of selected papers from workshops, the Student Design Consortium and the Doctoral Consortium. The volume follows the INTERACT conference tradition of submitting adjunct papers after the main publication deadline, to be published by a University Press with a connection to the conference itself. In this case, both the Adjunct Proceedings Chair of the conference, Dr Usashi Chatterjee, and the lead Editor of this volume, Dr Fernando Loizides, work at Cardiff University which is the home of Cardiff University Press

Proceedings of the 9th international conference on disability, virtual reality and associated technologies (ICDVRAT 2012)

The proceedings of the conferenc

Semantic discovery and reuse of business process patterns

Patterns currently play an important role in modern information systems (IS) development and their use has mainly been restricted to the design and implementation phases of the development lifecycle. Given the increasing significance of business modelling in IS development, patterns have the potential of providing a viable solution for promoting reusability of recurrent generalized models in the very early stages of development. As a statement of research-in-progress this paper focuses on business process patterns and proposes an initial methodological framework for the discovery and reuse of business process patterns within the IS development lifecycle. The framework borrows ideas from the domain engineering literature and proposes the use of semantics to drive both the discovery of patterns as well as their reuse

The Paranoiac-Critical Method of Reflectance Transformation Imaging

A performative talk examining Reflectance Transformation Imaging (RTI), an open source computational photographic process that is transforming methodologies in archaeology and heritage conservation for its ability to interactively re-light artefacts within a virtual hemisphere of illumination and extrude a digital topography that is hyper-legible in space-time, from its contemporary application in facial recognition via Bertrand Tavernier's 1980 science fiction film La Mort en Direct and a return of the death mask through digital extrusion, ultimately locating a progenitor of the heightened objectivity promised by RTI paradoxically in Surrealist photography and the fugitive facialities of Salvador Dali's Paranoiac-Critical Method. As emerging imaging technologies such as RTI are seen to open novel ways of extracting latent data from historical artefacts, reassembling objects of study in a new (virtual) light, collateral opportunities provided by these technologies to re-enter archival still and moving image recordings inadvertently recalibrate their spatio-temporal ground and destabilise their indexical reading through an excessive production of new traces and signs. If methodologies can be seen to play a significant role in constructing their objects of study, then emerging computational imaging operations such as RTI have their own subjectivities to disclose: In performing a media archaeology of this digital process, the talk proposes that we not only narrate the subjects of our study but the very tools of investigation themselves

Video Games for Earthly Survival: Gaming in the Post-Anthropocene

In this paper I evaluate the sixth mass extinction on planet Earth, and its implications for the medium of the video game. The Anthropocene, a term popularized by the end of the 20th century to refer to the geological impact of human beings on planet Earth, assumes temporal development, a ‘before’ and ‘after’ the appearance of humankind. The ‘after’ period, the Post-Anthropocene, is repeatedly claimed by scientists to be approaching within the next few decades, as over-consumption is destroying vital resources of the planet. Allegedly, the sixth mass extinction in the history of our planet is already unfolding, and might determine the disappearance of life from Earth and, as far as we know, from the Universe and beyond. Video games responding to the arrival of the future is not just imagined in fictional settings (e.g. The Legenda of Zelda: Majora’s Mask, Nintendo, 2000; Horizon: Zero Dawn, Guerrilla Games, 2017), but within game design. In the last decade an increasing number of video games requiring limited human intervention has been released. Incremental/ idle games such as Cookie Clicker (Julien Thiennot, 2013) and AdVenture Capitalist (Hyper Hippo Productions, 2014) require an initial input from the player to start, and then keep playing themselves in the background operations of a laptop or smartphone. Virtual environments can be entirely designed by algorithms, as experimented by Hello Games for No Man’s Sky (2016). Artificial Intelligence is also used to play games. Screeps, a massive-multiplayer online game, requires players to program an AI that will play the game in their place, and which will “live within the game even while you are offline” (Screeps Team, 2014). Ghost cars in racing games replace the human actor with a representation of their performance. The same concept is further explored by the Drivatar of the Forza Motorsport series (Microsoft Studios, 2005-2017), which simulates the driving style of the player and competes online against other AI-controlled cars. These are only some of the examples that suggest that human beings are becoming peripheral in the act of playing games. In short, it is probably becoming ‘easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of gaming’. While studies on games with no players, and on the non-human side of gaming, have been proposed in the past, my presentation takes a non-normative and non-systemic approach to the study of games for the Post-Anthropocene. I am concerned with the creative potential of the paradoxes, spoofs, and contradictions opened by games that take Man/Anthropos as being no longer at the centre of ‘interaction’, ‘fun’, and many other mythological aspects of digital gaming. Nonhuman gaming questions the historical, political, ecological and even geological situatedness of our knowledge on games and gamers, interaction and passivity, life and death