Children as robot designers

We present the design process of the robot YOLO aimed at stimulating creativity in children. This robot was developed under a human-centered design approach with participatory design practices during two years and involving 142 children as active contributors at all design stages. The main contribution of this work is the development of methods and tools for child-centered robot design. We adapted existing participatory design practices used with adults to ft children’s development stages.We followed the Double-Diamond Design Process Model and rested the design process of the robot on the following principles: Low foor and wide walls, creativity provocations, open-ended playfulness, and disappointment avoidance through abstraction. The fnal product is a social robot designed for and with children. Our results show that YOLO increases their creativity during play, demonstrating a successful robot design project.We identifed several guidelines that made the design process successful: the use of toys as tools, playgrounds as spaces, the emphasis of playfulness for child expression, and child policies as allies for design studies. The design process described empowers children’s in the design of robots.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Digital Interaction and Machine Intelligence

This book is open access, which means that you have free and unlimited access. This book presents the Proceedings of the 9th Machine Intelligence and Digital Interaction Conference. Significant progress in the development of artificial intelligence (AI) and its wider use in many interactive products are quickly transforming further areas of our life, which results in the emergence of various new social phenomena. Many countries have been making efforts to understand these phenomena and find answers on how to put the development of artificial intelligence on the right track to support the common good of people and societies. These attempts require interdisciplinary actions, covering not only science disciplines involved in the development of artificial intelligence and human-computer interaction but also close cooperation between researchers and practitioners. For this reason, the main goal of the MIDI conference held on 9-10.12.2021 as a virtual event is to integrate two, until recently, independent fields of research in computer science: broadly understood artificial intelligence and human-technology interaction

Artificial intelligence within the interplay between natural and artificial computation:Advances in data science, trends and applications

Artificial intelligence and all its supporting tools, e.g. machine and deep learning in computational intelligence-based systems, are rebuilding our society (economy, education, life-style, etc.) and promising a new era for the social welfare state. In this paper we summarize recent advances in data science and artificial intelligence within the interplay between natural and artificial computation. A review of recent works published in the latter field and the state the art are summarized in a comprehensive and self-contained way to provide a baseline framework for the international community in artificial intelligence. Moreover, this paper aims to provide a complete analysis and some relevant discussions of the current trends and insights within several theoretical and application fields covered in the essay, from theoretical models in artificial intelligence and machine learning to the most prospective applications in robotics, neuroscience, brain computer interfaces, medicine and society, in general.BMS - Pfizer(U01 AG024904). Spanish Ministry of Science, projects: TIN2017-85827-P, RTI2018-098913-B-I00, PSI2015-65848-R, PGC2018-098813-B-C31, PGC2018-098813-B-C32, RTI2018-101114-B-I, TIN2017-90135-R, RTI2018-098743-B-I00 and RTI2018-094645-B-I00; the FPU program (FPU15/06512, FPU17/04154) and Juan de la Cierva (FJCI-2017–33022). Autonomous Government of Andalusia (Spain) projects: UMA18-FEDERJA-084. Consellería de Cultura, Educación e Ordenación Universitaria of Galicia: ED431C2017/12, accreditation 2016–2019, ED431G/08, ED431C2018/29, Comunidad de Madrid, Y2018/EMT-5062 and grant ED431F2018/02. PPMI – a public – private partnership – is funded by The Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research and funding partners, including Abbott, Biogen Idec, F. Hoffman-La Roche Ltd., GE Healthcare, Genentech and Pfizer Inc

Developmental Bootstrapping of AIs

Although some current AIs surpass human abilities in closed artificial worlds such as board games, their abilities in the real world are limited. They make strange mistakes and do not notice them. They cannot be instructed easily, fail to use common sense, and lack curiosity. They do not make good collaborators. Mainstream approaches for creating AIs are the traditional manually-constructed symbolic AI approach and generative and deep learning AI approaches including large language models (LLMs). These systems are not well suited for creating robust and trustworthy AIs. Although it is outside of the mainstream, the developmental bootstrapping approach has more potential. In developmental bootstrapping, AIs develop competences like human children do. They start with innate competences. They interact with the environment and learn from their interactions. They incrementally extend their innate competences with self-developed competences. They interact and learn from people and establish perceptual, cognitive, and common grounding. They acquire the competences they need through bootstrapping. However, developmental robotics has not yet produced AIs with robust adult-level competences. Projects have typically stopped at the Toddler Barrier corresponding to human infant development at about two years of age, before their speech is fluent. They also do not bridge the Reading Barrier, to skillfully and skeptically draw on the socially developed information resources that power current LLMs. The next competences in human cognitive development involve intrinsic motivation, imitation learning, imagination, coordination, and communication. This position paper lays out the logic, prospects, gaps, and challenges for extending the practice of developmental bootstrapping to acquire further competences and create robust, resilient, and human-compatible AIs.Comment: 102 pages, 29 figure

Minority models: Masochism, masculinity, and the machine in Asian American cultural politics

Dissertation (Ph.D.)--University of California, Berkeley, 2017.As W.E.B. DuBois asked African Americans in The Souls of Black Folk, “How does it feel to be the problem?”, Vijay Prashad asked Asian Americans in The Karma of Brown Folk, “How does it feel to be the solution?” That is, what are the affective and ethical repercussions of being positioned as “model minority” in the U.S. racial system? In response, this dissertation aims to develop a queer theory of Asian American masochism, gesturing to a cultural politics intertwined with this racial position, negotiated through a masochistic attachment to the figure of the machine. My dissertation, Minority Models: Masochism, Masculinity, and the Machine in Asian American Cultural Politics, analyzes the masochistic performance of masculine Asian American cultural production in the co-constitution of Asianness and machineness in Asian American identity from 1982 to the present day. Through the study of Asian American literature and theater, the political histories of Asian American critique, as well as new media forms like video games and comics, I argue that masculine Asian American cultural production places Asian American masculinity and mechanization into a symbiotic relationship in its articulations of Asian American identity. My work asks: what are the affective and ethical repercussions of being positioned as “model minority” in the U.S. racial system? One answer, this text suggests, lies in masochistic pleasure, wherein reception of pain and penetrability become sources of both pleasure and moral legitimacy. Building upon prior scholarship that models Asian American subject formation within a rubric of melancholic lack—such as Anne Cheng’s Melancholy of Race and David Eng’s Racial Castration—I gesture towards revising such models in favor of the pleasures of masochism. I argue that Asian American cultural production generates affective and ethical meaning from masochism as a moral economy, source of pleasure, and avenue for imagining racial form beyond human boundaries

Proceedings of the European Conference on Agricultural Engineering AgEng2021

This proceedings book results from the AgEng2021 Agricultural Engineering Conference under auspices of the European Society of Agricultural Engineers, held in an online format based on the University of Évora, Portugal, from 4 to 8 July 2021. This book contains the full papers of a selection of abstracts that were the base for the oral presentations and posters presented at the conference. Presentations were distributed in eleven thematic areas: Artificial Intelligence, data processing and management; Automation, robotics and sensor technology; Circular Economy; Education and Rural development; Energy and bioenergy; Integrated and sustainable Farming systems; New application technologies and mechanisation; Post-harvest technologies; Smart farming / Precision agriculture; Soil, land and water engineering; Sustainable production in Farm buildings