Spectators’ aesthetic experiences of sound and movement in dance performance

In this paper we present a study of spectators’ aesthetic experiences of sound and movement in live dance performance. A multidisciplinary team comprising a choreographer, neuroscientists and qualitative researchers investigated the effects of different sound scores on dance spectators. What would be the impact of auditory stimulation on kinesthetic experience and/or aesthetic appreciation of the dance? What would be the effect of removing music altogether, so that spectators watched dance while hearing only the performers’ breathing and footfalls? We investigated audience experience through qualitative research, using post-performance focus groups, while a separately conducted functional brain imaging (fMRI) study measured the synchrony in brain activity across spectators when they watched dance with sound or breathing only. When audiences watched dance accompanied by music the fMRI data revealed evidence of greater intersubject synchronisation in a brain region consistent with complex auditory processing. The audience research found that some spectators derived pleasure from finding convergences between two complex stimuli (dance and music). The removal of music and the resulting audibility of the performers’ breathing had a significant impact on spectators’ aesthetic experience. The fMRI analysis showed increased synchronisation among observers, suggesting greater influence of the body when interpreting the dance stimuli. The audience research found evidence of similar corporeally focused experience. The paper discusses possible connections between the findings of our different approaches, and considers the implications of this study for interdisciplinary research collaborations between arts and sciences

Stock Prediction Analyzing Investor Sentiments

We are going through a phase of data evolution where a major portion of the data from our daily lives is now been stored on social media platforms. In recent years, social media has become ubiquitous and important for social networking and content sharing. Sentiment analysis and opinion mining is the field of study that analyzes people's opinions, sentiments, evaluations, attitudes, and emotions from written language. In the financial sector, sentiments are also of paramount importance, and this dissertation mainly focuses on the effect of sentiments from investors [3] on the behavior of stocks. The dissertation work leverages social data from Twitter and seeks the sentiment of certain investors. Once the sentiment of the tweets is calculated using an advanced sentiment analyzer, it is used as an additional attribute to the other fundamental properties of the stock. This dissertation demonstrates how incorporating the sentiments improves forecasting accuracy of predicting stock valuation. In addition, various experimental analysis on regression based statistical models are considered which show statistical measures to consider for effectively predicting the closing price of the stock. The Efficient Market Hypothesis (EMH) states that stock market prices are largely driven by additional information and follow a random walk pattern [7, 8, 37, 39, 41]. Though this hypothesis is widely accepted by the research community as a central paradigm governing the markets in general, several people have attempted to extract patterns in the way stock markets behave and respond to external stimuli. We test a hypothesis based on the premise of behavioral economics, that the emotions and moods of individuals basically the sentiments affect their decision-making process, thus, leading to a direct correlation between ?public sentiment? and ?market sentiment? [42, 43, 44, 45]. We first select key investors from Twitter [27, 28] whose sentiments matter and do sentiment analysis on the tweets pertaining to stock related information. Once we retrieve the sentiment for every stock, we combine this information with the other fundamental information about stocks and build different regression-based prediction models to predict their closing price

Agents for educational games and simulations

This book consists mainly of revised papers that were presented at the Agents for Educational Games and Simulation (AEGS) workshop held on May 2, 2011, as part of the Autonomous Agents and MultiAgent Systems (AAMAS) conference in Taipei, Taiwan. The 12 full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from various submissions. The papers are organized topical sections on middleware applications, dialogues and learning, adaption and convergence, and agent applications

Natural Language Processing for Modeling Domains in Higher Education

The present dissertation investigates elements of domain formalization, resource allocation, and student success in higher education to conceptually design a university-wide system to assist in strategic planning efforts. The proposed system is a program-level tool with a modular design to allow scalability and generalizability across the entire university. Higher education strategic planning decisions are under investigation by stakeholders and transparency is needed. University resources allocation models are often outdated lack to adequately support program-level decisions. Further, with the dynamic nature of technology, domain knowledge components are evolving rapidly. This complicates the situation as updating curriculum takes additional time and resources. Using the University of Central Florida\u27s (UCF) School of Modeling, Simulation, and Training (SMST) as a case study to build and validate the system, I investigate Modeling and Simulation (M&S) domain knowledge, skills, and abilities (KSAs) using a series of natural language, text mining, and machine learning techniques to model topics within domain-specific texts including publication abstracts, job postings, and graduate course descriptions. From there, I use this information to identify and enumerate terms used to develop M&S ontology and expert models for the future university-wide system. This investigation benefits both the M&S field of study, clarifying ill-defined domain components and it helps inform the design of university-wide strategic planning systems

Humanistic interpretation and machine learning

This paper investigates how unsupervised machine learning methods might make hermeneutic interpretive text analysis more objective in the social sciences. Through a close examination of the uses of topic modeling—a popular unsupervised approach in the social sciences—it argues that the primary way in which unsupervised learning supports interpretation is by allowing interpreters to discover unanticipated information in larger and more diverse corpora and by improving the transparency of the interpretive process. This view highlights that unsupervised modeling does not eliminate the researchers’ judgments from the process of producing evidence for social scientific theories. The paper shows this by distinguishing between two prevalent attitudes toward topic modeling, i.e., topic realism and topic instrumentalism. Under neither can modeling provide social scientific evidence without the researchers’ interpretive engagement with the original text materials. Thus the unsupervised text analysis cannot improve the objectivity of interpretation by alleviating the problem of underdetermination in interpretive debate. The paper argues that the sense in which unsupervised methods can improve objectivity is by providing researchers with the resources to justify to others that their interpretations are correct. This kind of objectivity seeks to reduce suspicions in collective debate that interpretations are the products of arbitrary processes influenced by the researchers’ idiosyncratic decisions or starting points. The paper discusses this view in relation to alternative approaches to formalizing interpretation and identifies several limitations on what unsupervised learning can be expected to achieve in terms of supporting interpretive work.This paper investigates how unsupervised machine learning methods might make hermeneutic interpretive text analysis more objective in the social sciences. Through a close examination of the uses of topic modeling—a popular unsupervised approach in the social sciences—it argues that the primary way in which unsupervised learning supports interpretation is by allowing interpreters to discover unanticipated information in larger and more diverse corpora and by improving the transparency of the interpretive process. This view highlights that unsupervised modeling does not eliminate the researchers’ judgments from the process of producing evidence for social scientific theories. The paper shows this by distinguishing between two prevalent attitudes toward topic modeling, i.e., topic realism and topic instrumentalism. Under neither can modeling provide social scientific evidence without the researchers’ interpretive engagement with the original text materials. Thus the unsupervised text analysis cannot improve the objectivity of interpretation by alleviating the problem of underdetermination in interpretive debate. The paper argues that the sense in which unsupervised methods can improve objectivity is by providing researchers with the resources to justify to others that their interpretations are correct. This kind of objectivity seeks to reduce suspicions in collective debate that interpretations are the products of arbitrary processes influenced by the researchers’ idiosyncratic decisions or starting points. The paper discusses this view in relation to alternative approaches to formalizing interpretation and identifies several limitations on what unsupervised learning can be expected to achieve in terms of supporting interpretive work.Peer reviewe

Recent Trends in Computational Intelligence

Traditional models struggle to cope with complexity, noise, and the existence of a changing environment, while Computational Intelligence (CI) offers solutions to complicated problems as well as reverse problems. The main feature of CI is adaptability, spanning the fields of machine learning and computational neuroscience. CI also comprises biologically-inspired technologies such as the intellect of swarm as part of evolutionary computation and encompassing wider areas such as image processing, data collection, and natural language processing. This book aims to discuss the usage of CI for optimal solving of various applications proving its wide reach and relevance. Bounding of optimization methods and data mining strategies make a strong and reliable prediction tool for handling real-life applications