Emotional Biosensing: Exploring Critical Alternatives

Emotional biosensing is rising in daily life: Data and categories claim to know how people feel and suggest what they should do about it, while CSCW explores new biosensing possibilities. Prevalent approaches to emotional biosensing are too limited, focusing on the individual, optimization, and normative categorization. Conceptual shifts can help explore alternatives: toward materiality, from representation toward performativity, inter-action to intra-action, shifting biopolitics, and shifting affect/desire. We contribute (1) synthesizing wide-ranging conceptual lenses, providing analysis connecting them to emotional biosensing design, (2) analyzing selected design exemplars to apply these lenses to design research, and (3) offering our own recommendations for designers and design researchers. In particular we suggest humility in knowledge claims with emotional biosensing, prioritizing care and affirmation over self- improvement, and exploring alternative desires. We call for critically questioning and generatively re- imagining the role of data in configuring sensing, feeling, ‘the good life,’ and everyday experience

Multi-Sensory Interaction for Blind and Visually Impaired People

This book conveyed the visual elements of artwork to the visually impaired through various sensory elements to open a new perspective for appreciating visual artwork. In addition, the technique of expressing a color code by integrating patterns, temperatures, scents, music, and vibrations was explored, and future research topics were presented. A holistic experience using multi-sensory interaction acquired by people with visual impairment was provided to convey the meaning and contents of the work through rich multi-sensory appreciation. A method that allows people with visual impairments to engage in artwork using a variety of senses, including touch, temperature, tactile pattern, and sound, helps them to appreciate artwork at a deeper level than can be achieved with hearing or touch alone. The development of such art appreciation aids for the visually impaired will ultimately improve their cultural enjoyment and strengthen their access to culture and the arts. The development of this new concept aids ultimately expands opportunities for the non-visually impaired as well as the visually impaired to enjoy works of art and breaks down the boundaries between the disabled and the non-disabled in the field of culture and arts through continuous efforts to enhance accessibility. In addition, the developed multi-sensory expression and delivery tool can be used as an educational tool to increase product and artwork accessibility and usability through multi-modal interaction. Training the multi-sensory experiences introduced in this book may lead to more vivid visual imageries or seeing with the mind’s eye

Why Scalings Matter?—an investigation of translators' adjustments of rhetorical force in English-Chinese translations

This thesis presents findings based on a study of the translation from English into (Mandarin) Chinese of those linguistic resources by which expressions can be up-scaled or down-scaled, and how translators of different Chinese translations dealt with utterances which included such scalings. The study involved three English advertisements of Apple products and their translations intended for the Hong Kong, Taiwan and Mainland China markets. The linguistic analysis employed for the project was grounded in Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) and specifically relied on the description of the meanings of up/down scaling outlined in the graduation system within the Appraisal framework of Martin and White (2005). Some significant degree of shifts of the meanings of scaling was noted, not only between the English original and Chinese translations but also among the regional translations themselves. A general tendency was observed by which the translators tended to provide additional instances of intensification or to further strengthen the existing instances of intensification. Since these meaning shifts were overwhelmingly in connection with utterances which provide positive assessments of the advertised products, it is proposed that they may result from the promotional purpose of boosting the desirability of the products for readers. These shifts were also observed to occur at different frequencies across the regional translations. Proposals are advanced as to the possibility that differences between the markets for which the translations were intended may have been a factor underlying these differences. As an interdisciplinary study, this study makes two major contributions. Firstly, to systematically identify the shifts of scaling in translations from English to Chinese, it was necessary for the project to provide an outline of the resources for realizing semantic features of graduation in Chinese. This is because no such outline had previously been developed for Chinese. The project extends our knowledge of graduation cross-linguistically in that it found the graduation networks in Chinese and English are broadly homologous. Secondly, it provides a systemic examination of the shifts involved in scaling expressions and explores possible factors which might be influencing translators’ decision-making; thus, the findings show potential application in translation education and translator training

REBA: A Refinement-Based Architecture for Knowledge Representation and Reasoning in Robotics

This paper describes an architecture for robots that combines the complementary strengths of probabilistic graphical models and declarative programming to represent and reason with logic-based and probabilistic descriptions of uncertainty and domain knowledge. An action language is extended to support non-boolean fluents and non-deterministic causal laws. This action language is used to describe tightly-coupled transition diagrams at two levels of granularity, with a fine-resolution transition diagram defined as a refinement of a coarse-resolution transition diagram of the domain. The coarse-resolution system description, and a history that includes (prioritized) defaults, are translated into an Answer Set Prolog (ASP) program. For any given goal, inference in the ASP program provides a plan of abstract actions. To implement each such abstract action, the robot automatically zooms to the part of the fine-resolution transition diagram relevant to this action. A probabilistic representation of the uncertainty in sensing and actuation is then included in this zoomed fine-resolution system description, and used to construct a partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP). The policy obtained by solving the POMDP is invoked repeatedly to implement the abstract action as a sequence of concrete actions, with the corresponding observations being recorded in the coarse-resolution history and used for subsequent reasoning. The architecture is evaluated in simulation and on a mobile robot moving objects in an indoor domain, to show that it supports reasoning with violation of defaults, noisy observations and unreliable actions, in complex domains.Comment: 72 pages, 14 figure