About the nature of Kansei information, from abstract to concrete

Designer’s expertise refers to the scientific fields of emotional design and kansei information. This paper aims to answer to a scientific major issue which is, how to formalize designer’s knowledge, rules, skills into kansei information systems. Kansei can be considered as a psycho-physiologic, perceptive, cognitive and affective process through a particular experience. Kansei oriented methods include various approaches which deal with semantics and emotions, and show the correlation with some design properties. Kansei words may include semantic, sensory, emotional descriptors, and also objects names and product attributes. Kansei levels of information can be seen on an axis going from abstract to concrete dimensions. Sociological value is the most abstract information positioned on this axis. Previous studies demonstrate the values the people aspire to drive their emotional reactions in front of particular semantics. This means that the value dimension should be considered in kansei studies. Through a chain of value-function-product attributes it is possible to enrich design generation and design evaluation processes. This paper describes some knowledge structures and formalisms we established according to this chain, which can be further used for implementing computer aided design tools dedicated to early design. These structures open to new formalisms which enable to integrate design information in a non-hierarchical way. The foreseen algorithmic implementation may be based on the association of ontologies and bag-of-words.AN

Palm theory, mass transports and ergodic theory for group-stationary processes

This work is about random measures stationary with respect to a possibly non-transitive group action. It contains chapters on Palm Theory, the Mass-Transport Principle and Ergodic Theory for such random measures. The thesis ends with discussions of several new models in Stochastic Geometry (Cox Delauney mosaics, isometry stationary random partitions on Riemannian manifolds). These make crucial use of the previously developed techniques and objects

Palm Theory, Mass Transports and Ergodic Theory for Group-Stationary Processes

This thesis is about random measures stationary with respect to a possibly non-transitive group action. It contains chapters on Palm Theory, the Mass-Transport Principle and Ergodic Theory for such random measures. The thesis ends with a discussion of several new models in Stochastic Geometry (Cox Delauney mosaics, isometry stationary random partitions on Riemannian manifolds)

Sensitivity to relational similarity and object similarity in apes and children

This research was supported by NSF SLC Grant SBE-0541957 awarded to the Spatial Intelligence and Learning Center (SILC), the Max Planck Society, and Swarthmore Lang Sabbatical Fellowship.Relational reasoning is a hallmark of sophisticated cognition in humans [1, 2]. Does it exist in other primates? Despite some affirmative answers [3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11], there appears to be a wide gap in relational ability between humans and other primates—even other apes [1, 2]. Here, we test one possible explanation for this gap, motivated by developmental research showing that young humans often fail at relational reasoning tasks because they focus on objects instead of relations [12, 13, 14]. When asked, “duck:duckling is like tiger:?,” preschool children choose another duckling (object match) rather than a cub. If other apes share this focus on concrete objects, it could undermine their relational reasoning in similar ways. To test this, we compared great apes and 3-year-old humans’ relational reasoning on the same spatial mapping task, with and without competing object matches. Without competing object matches, both children and Pan species (chimpanzees and bonobos) spontaneously used relational similarity, albeit children more so. But when object matches were present, only children responded strongly to them. We conclude that the relational gap is not due to great apes’ preference for concrete objects. In fact, young humans show greater object focus than nonhuman apes.PostprintPeer reviewe

Gambier Observer, August 23, 1833

https://digital.kenyon.edu/observer1833/1001/thumbnail.jp

Identifying the BLE Advertising Channel for Reliable Distance Estimation on Smartphones

Estimating the distance between two smartphones plays an important role in a host of applications. For this purpose, smartphones emit and scan for Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) signals. When a device is detected, the distance is estimated by evaluating the received strength of these signals. The main insight that is exploited for distance estimation is that the attenuation of a signal increases with the distance along which it has traveled. However, besides distance, there are multiple additional factors that impact the attenuation and hence disturb the distance estimation procedure. Among them, frequency-selective hardware and signal propagation belong to the most significant ones. For example, a BLE device transmits packets on three different frequencies (channels), while the transmit power and the receiver sensitivity depend on the frequency. As a result, the received signal strength varies for each channel, even when the distance remains constant. However, the information on which wireless channel a packet has been received is not made available to a smartphone. Hence, this error cannot be compensated, e.g. by calibration. In this paper, we for the first time provide a solution to detect the wireless channel on which a packet has been received by a smartphone application. We experimentally evaluate our proposed technique on multiple different smartphone models. Our results help to make distance estimation on smartphones more robust and accurate

Palm pairs and the general mass-transport principle

We consider a lcsc group G acting properly on a Borel space S and measurably on an underlying sigma-finite measure space. Our first main result is a transport formula connecting the Palm pairs of jointly stationary random measures on S. A key (and new) technical result is a measurable disintegration of the Haar measure on G along the orbits. The second main result is an intrinsic characterization of the Palm pairs of a G-invariant random measure. We then proceed with deriving a general version of the mass-transport principle for possibly non-transitive and non-unimodular group operations first in a deterministic and then in its full probabilistic form.Comment: 26 page

The development of metaphorical language comprehension in typical development and in Williams syndrome

The domain of figurative language comprehension was used to probe the developmental relation between language and cognition in typically developing individuals and individuals with Williams syndrome. Extending the work of Vosniadou and Ortony, the emergence of nonliteral similarity and category knowledge was investigated in 117 typically developing children between 4 and 12 years of age, 19 typically developing adults, 15 children with Williams syndrome between 5 and 12 years of age, and 8 adults with Williams syndrome. Participants were required to complete similarity and categorization statements by selecting one of two words (e.g., either “The sun is like ___” or “The sun is the same kind of thing as ___”) with word pairs formed from items that were literally, perceptually, or functionally similar to the target word or else anomalous (e.g., moon, orange, oven, or chair, respectively). Results indicated that individuals with Williams syndrome may access different, less abstract knowledge in figurative language comparisons despite the relatively strong verbal abilities found in this disorder