3,119 research outputs found
Risk and Threat during the Covid-19 Pandemic: a Micro-Diachronic Perspective.
Communicating risk during the Covid-19 pandemic
Since the Covid-19 pandemic outbreak, media content has focused on issues related to the virus,
ranging from scientific and medical information (i.e. structure of the virus, effects, vaccines, etc.)
to safety measures and government restrictions (i.e. lockdown, curfews, use of masks, etc.).
Covid-19 discourse has raised much interest in academia, both in linguistics and the social
sciences especially concerning the frequently used metaphor of war (Sabucedo et al 2020,
Wagener 2020, Castro Seixas 2021, Panzeri et al. 2021, Taylor 2021). Other studies have
focused on the communication of risk during Covid-19 from a health perspective to address
eventual gaps in the interaction between doctors and virologists and patients and non-experts
(Abrams and Greenhawt 2020, Chesser et al. 2020). However, to our knowledge risk is yet to be
studied from a linguistic perspective.
The aim of this paper is to analyse how risk was conveyed in newspapers and on online
magazines during 2020. More specifically, we present a diachronic analysis of the words risk and
threat in the Coronavirus Corpus which was created to keep record of the economic, social and
political impact of the pandemic. By tracing changes (if there are any) in frequency and meaning
over the months, we aim at identifying collocates and phraseology used to convey issues related
to risk and virus menace since the start of the outbreak.
Results will shed light on the communication of risk and on significant patterns associated to the
semantic field of threat during a health emergency
Local Causal States and Discrete Coherent Structures
Coherent structures form spontaneously in nonlinear spatiotemporal systems
and are found at all spatial scales in natural phenomena from laboratory
hydrodynamic flows and chemical reactions to ocean, atmosphere, and planetary
climate dynamics. Phenomenologically, they appear as key components that
organize the macroscopic behaviors in such systems. Despite a century of
effort, they have eluded rigorous analysis and empirical prediction, with
progress being made only recently. As a step in this, we present a formal
theory of coherent structures in fully-discrete dynamical field theories. It
builds on the notion of structure introduced by computational mechanics,
generalizing it to a local spatiotemporal setting. The analysis' main tool
employs the \localstates, which are used to uncover a system's hidden
spatiotemporal symmetries and which identify coherent structures as
spatially-localized deviations from those symmetries. The approach is
behavior-driven in the sense that it does not rely on directly analyzing
spatiotemporal equations of motion, rather it considers only the spatiotemporal
fields a system generates. As such, it offers an unsupervised approach to
discover and describe coherent structures. We illustrate the approach by
analyzing coherent structures generated by elementary cellular automata,
comparing the results with an earlier, dynamic-invariant-set approach that
decomposes fields into domains, particles, and particle interactions.Comment: 27 pages, 10 figures;
http://csc.ucdavis.edu/~cmg/compmech/pubs/dcs.ht
Digital Ecosystems: Ecosystem-Oriented Architectures
We view Digital Ecosystems to be the digital counterparts of biological
ecosystems. Here, we are concerned with the creation of these Digital
Ecosystems, exploiting the self-organising properties of biological ecosystems
to evolve high-level software applications. Therefore, we created the Digital
Ecosystem, a novel optimisation technique inspired by biological ecosystems,
where the optimisation works at two levels: a first optimisation, migration of
agents which are distributed in a decentralised peer-to-peer network, operating
continuously in time; this process feeds a second optimisation based on
evolutionary computing that operates locally on single peers and is aimed at
finding solutions to satisfy locally relevant constraints. The Digital
Ecosystem was then measured experimentally through simulations, with measures
originating from theoretical ecology, evaluating its likeness to biological
ecosystems. This included its responsiveness to requests for applications from
the user base, as a measure of the ecological succession (ecosystem maturity).
Overall, we have advanced the understanding of Digital Ecosystems, creating
Ecosystem-Oriented Architectures where the word ecosystem is more than just a
metaphor.Comment: 39 pages, 26 figures, journa
Are knowledge ascriptions sensitive to social context?
Plausibly, how much is at stake in some salient practical task can affect how generously people ascribe knowledge of task-relevant facts. There is a metaphysical puzzle about this phenomenon, and an empirical puzzle. Metaphysically: there are competing theories about when and how practical stakes affect whether it is correct to ascribe knowledge. Which of these theories is the right one? Empirically: experimental philosophy has struggled to find a stakes-effect on people’s knowledge ascriptions. Is the alleged phenomenon just a philosopher’s fantasy? I propose a new psychological account of when and why people’s knowledge ascriptions are sensitive to stakes. My hypothesis is motivated by empirical research on how people’s judgements are sensitive to their social context. Specifically, people’s evaluations are sensitive to their ‘psychological distance’ from the scenarios they are considering. When using ‘fixed-evidence probes’, experimental philosophy has found that what’s at stake for a fictional character in a made-up scenario has little or no effect on how participants ascribe knowledge to them. My hypothesis predicts this finding: the scenarios are too ‘psychologically distant’ to participants. Our empirical puzzle is resolved: the stakes-effect often present in the wild won’t be present in vignette studies. (This illustrates a widespread problem with X-phi vignette studies: if people might judge differently in other social contexts, we can’t generalize from the results of these experiments. That is, vignette studies are of doubtful ‘external validity’.) The hypothesis also resolves our metaphysical puzzle. It predicts that people do not ascribe knowledge in a way deemed correct by any of the standard philosophical views, namely classical invariantism, interest-relative invariantism, and contextualism. Our knowledge ascriptions shift around in the way that’s most useful for social beings like us, and this pattern in our judgements can only be endorsed by a genuinely relativist metaphysics for knowledge
HOI4ABOT: Human-Object Interaction Anticipation for Human Intention Reading Collaborative roBOTs
Robots are becoming increasingly integrated into our lives, assisting us in
various tasks. To ensure effective collaboration between humans and robots, it
is essential that they understand our intentions and anticipate our actions. In
this paper, we propose a Human-Object Interaction (HOI) anticipation framework
for collaborative robots. We propose an efficient and robust transformer-based
model to detect and anticipate HOIs from videos. This enhanced anticipation
empowers robots to proactively assist humans, resulting in more efficient and
intuitive collaborations. Our model outperforms state-of-the-art results in HOI
detection and anticipation in VidHOI dataset with an increase of 1.76% and
1.04% in mAP respectively while being 15.4 times faster. We showcase the
effectiveness of our approach through experimental results in a real robot,
demonstrating that the robot's ability to anticipate HOIs is key for better
Human-Robot Interaction. More information can be found on our project webpage:
https://evm7.github.io/HOI4ABOT_page/Comment: Proceedings in Conference on Robot Learning 202
Ten Lectures on Diachronic Construction Grammar
In this book, Martin Hilpert lays out how Construction Grammar can be applied to the study of language change. In a series of ten lectures on Diachronic Construction Grammar, the book presents the theoretical foundations, open questions, and methodological approaches that inform the constructional analysis of diachronic processes in language. The lectures address issues such as constructional networks, competition between constructions, shifts in collocational preferences, and differentiation and attraction in constructional change. The book features analyses that utilize modern corpus-linguistic methodologies and that draw on current theoretical discussions in usage-based linguistics. It is relevant for researchers and students in cognitive linguistics, corpus linguistics, and historical linguistics.. Readership: The book is especially relevant for researchers and students in cognitive linguistics, corpus linguistics, and historical linguistics
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