What to Read: A Biased Guide to AI Literacy for the Beginner

Acknowledgements. It was Ken Forbus' idea, and he, Howie Shrobe, Dan Weld, and John Batali read various drafts. Dan Huttenlocher and Tom Knight helped with the speech recognition section. The science fiction section was prepared with the aid of my SF/AI editorial board, consisting of Carl Feynman and David Wallace, and of the ArpaNet SF-Lovers community. Even so, all responsibility rests with me.This note tries to provide a quick guide to AI literacy for the beginning AI hacker and for the experienced AI hacker or two whose scholarship isn't what it should be. most will recognize it as the same old list of classic papers, give or take a few that I feel to be under- or over-rated. It is not guaranteed to be thorough or balanced or anything like that.MIT Artificial Intelligence Laborator

Approximate reasoning using terminological models

Term Subsumption Systems (TSS) form a knowledge-representation scheme in AI that can express the defining characteristics of concepts through a formal language that has a well-defined semantics and incorporates a reasoning mechanism that can deduce whether one concept subsumes another. However, TSS's have very limited ability to deal with the issue of uncertainty in knowledge bases. The objective of this research is to address issues in combining approximate reasoning with term subsumption systems. To do this, we have extended an existing AI architecture (CLASP) that is built on the top of a term subsumption system (LOOM). First, the assertional component of LOOM has been extended for asserting and representing uncertain propositions. Second, we have extended the pattern matcher of CLASP for plausible rule-based inferences. Third, an approximate reasoning model has been added to facilitate various kinds of approximate reasoning. And finally, the issue of inconsistency in truth values due to inheritance is addressed using justification of those values. This architecture enhances the reasoning capabilities of expert systems by providing support for reasoning under uncertainty using knowledge captured in TSS. Also, as definitional knowledge is explicit and separate from heuristic knowledge for plausible inferences, the maintainability of expert systems could be improved

The postcolonial cultural economy the politics of British Asian cultural production

This thesis is an investigation into the production of British Asian cultural commodities. While the hybrid qualities of contemporary British Asian vernacular cultures have largely been celebrated within cultural studies for de-essentialising fixed notions of national identity and disrupting racist nationalist discourse, the thesis considers how this political potential is determined during the process of commodification. As certain radical cultural studies theorists have argued, capitalism is inscribed with a neo-colonial logic that has the effect of transforming British Asian cultural forms in particular, into Orientalist sites of exotica, thus undermining their transcriptive capacity. Yet such accounts lack a sustained engagement with the cultural industries and cultural production, and subsequently fail to adequately explain how such a process actually occurs. Reconceptualising commodification as a technology through which capitalism governs the counter-narratives of difference, this thesis is an empirical investigation into the experiences of British Asian cultural production in the culture industries. It focuses on the production of Asian cultural commodities in three cultural industries: theatre, broadcast television, and book publishing. Drawing from in-depth interviews, participant observation, and analysis of trade literatures, publicity materials and the commodities themselves, the research elaborates accounts of British Asian cultural production, providing a deeper and multi-layered reading of what occurs during the commodification of Otherness. It is through the concept of the postcolonial cultural economy that this thesis argues that a sociological approach to the cultural industries and cultural production, framed within postcolonial concepts of epistemology and power, is the most effective way of conceptualising the political effectiveness of particular anti-racist cultural strategies. I argue that such an approach provides a more nuanced understanding of the complex relation between capitalism and race as it occurs in the global cultural economy, revealing the spaces from which effective cultural-political interventions can be held

Epistemological activators and students' epistemologies in learning modern STEM topics

This dissertation is a collection of studies developed during my Ph.D. program within the Physics Education Research group of the University of Bologna. The entire work is driven by the role of epistemology in science as a means to orient learning and identity construction. Specifically, the study aims (i) to characterize epistemologically the design of teaching modules for High School on two main modern STEM topics: Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Quantum Physics (QP), and (ii) to investigate the so-called ‘students’ epistemologies’ in the context of learning QP. In the first part, the use that I do of epistemology involves the individuation of transversal themes, activities, and ideas – that I define ‘epistemological activators’ - that can structure students’ knowledge on a meta-level and foster them to reflect on the nature of disciplines and knowledge in general; this results in the proposal of teaching paths and insights for High School both in the contexts of QP and AI. In the second part, I conduct a qualitative study on students’ epistemologies in learning QP. Previous analysis showed evidence of three specific requirements that students show in learning QP, which I referred to as epistemic needs: the needs of visualization, comparability and ‘reification’. Along with these results, I decided to conduct a study on the nature of the factors that trigger students’ stances towards and acceptance of QP, building on the research literature on personal epistemologies. To this extent, I collected extensive written and recorded data of High School students participating in an introductory course on QP. The analysis mainly highlighted (i) evidence of expectations about the role of ‘visual modeling’ and ‘math’ as two personally reliable means to bridge classical and quantum domains., and (ii) evidence of entanglement between specific students’ epistemologies and their meta-affective stances towards challenges in learning QP

Investigating How Facilitators View the Functions and Perceived Values of Reflective Activities on Transformative Learning Amongst People in Addiction

Although there has been considerable empirical support for the effect of reflection, and specifically reflective activities, within the domain of transformative learning (Ballon & Skinner, 2008; King, 2004; Mezirow, 2012; Roessger, 2014; Taylor, 2017), there is a gap in the literature concerning the value of formal reflective activities when used with people in addiction recovery programs. I will interview facilitators of addiction programs to inquire on the methods of reflection their programming provides people in addiction, investigate the effectiveness of the activities, and then determine the connections (if any) between formal reflective activities and transformation in people in addiction. This study will add to the epistemological framework of addiction, reflection, and transformative learning by adding empirical evidence that addresses these gaps in the research. This study will use a qualitative phenomenological approach, and participants will be purposefully sampled. The researcher will interview professionals who have specific experience facilitating addiction (both substance and behavioral addiction) and substance abuse groups and sessions

Investigating How Facilitators View the Functions and Perceived Values of Reflective Activities on Transformative Learning Amongst People in Addiction

Although there has been considerable empirical support for the effect of reflection, and specifically reflective activities, within the domain of transformative learning (Ballon & Skinner, 2008; King, 2004; Mezirow, 2012; Roessger, 2014; Taylor, 2017), there is a gap in the literature concerning the value of formal reflective activities when used with people in addiction recovery programs. I will interview facilitators of addiction programs to inquire on the methods of reflection their programming provides people in addiction, investigate the effectiveness of the activities, and then determine the connections (if any) between formal reflective activities and transformation in people in addiction. This study will add to the epistemological framework of addiction, reflection, and transformative learning by adding empirical evidence that addresses these gaps in the research. This study will use a qualitative phenomenological approach, and participants will be purposefully sampled. The researcher will interview professionals who have specific experience facilitating addiction (both substance and behavioral addiction) and substance abuse groups and sessions