ARtonomous: Introducing Middle School Students to Reinforcement Learning Through Virtual Robotics

Typical educational robotics approaches rely on imperative programming for robot navigation. However, with the increasing presence of AI in everyday life, these approaches miss an opportunity to introduce machine learning (ML) techniques grounded in an authentic and engaging learning context. Furthermore, the needs for costly specialized equipment and ample physical space are barriers that limit access to robotics experiences for all learners. We propose ARtonomous, a relatively low-cost, virtual alternative to physical, programming-only robotics kits. With ARtonomous, students employ reinforcement learning (RL) alongside code to train and customize virtual autonomous robotic vehicles. Through a study evaluating ARtonomous, we found that middle-school students developed an understanding of RL, reported high levels of engagement, and demonstrated curiosity for learning more about ML. This research demonstrates the feasibility of an approach like ARtonomous for 1) eliminating barriers to robotics education and 2) promoting student learning and interest in RL and ML.Comment: In Proceedings of Interaction Design and Children (IDC '22

Two sword lengths apart: Credible commitment problems and physical violence in democratic national legislatures

Ideally, national legislatures in democracies should be venues for peacefully resolving conflicts between opposing groups. However, they can become places of physical violence. Such violence can be an indication that countries’ legislative institutions are functioning far from the democratic ideal of being venues for peaceful conflict reconciliation. In some cases, such as Ukraine prior to the 2014 outbreak of armed conflict in the country’s east and south, violence can indicate and possibly fuel deeper political divisions. In this first global study of legislative violence, I show that brawls are more likely when legislators find it difficult to credibly commit to follow peaceful bargains. Credible commitment problems are more acute in countries with new democracies and disproportionate electoral outcomes – that is, when electoral votes for parties do not closely correspond to the legislative seats they are given. I find robust support for this argument by first examining a case study of legislative violence in the antebellum United States Senate. Pro- and anti-slavery senators became increasingly unable to maintain credible commitments in the lead-up to the 1856 caning of Senator Charles Sumner as the allocation of seats in the legislative body became more disproportional. Second, I find further support for my argument in a new global dataset of contemporary instances of violence in national legislatures. In addition, I find strong evidence that violence is more likely in legislatures with small minority governments. Despite reasonable expectations, civil wars are not associated with more legislative violence

Mahatma Gandhi and the Prisoner’s Dilemma: Strategic Civil Disobedience and Great Britain’s Great Loss of Empire in India

This paper examines the relationship between statutory monopoly and collective action as a multi-person assurance game culminating in an end to British Empire in India. In a simple theoretical model, it is demonstrated whether or not a collective good enjoys (or is perceived to enjoy) pure jointness of production and why the evolutionary stable strategy of non-violence was supposed to work on the principle that the coordinated reaction of a ethnically differentiated religious crowd to a conflict between two parties (of colonizer and colonized) over confiscatory salt taxation would significantly affect its course. Following Mancur Olson (1965) and Dennis Chong (1991), a model of strategic civil disobedience is created which is used to demonstrate how collective action can be used to produce an all-or-nothing public good to achieve economic and political independence

Social Movements and International Relations: A Relational Framework

Social movements are increasingly recognized as significant features of contemporary world politics, yet to date their treatment in international relations theory has tended to obfuscate the considerable diversity of these social formations, and the variegated interactions they may establish with state actors and different structures of world order. Highlighting the difficulties conventional liberal and critical approaches have in transcending conceptions of movements as moral entities, the article draws from two under-exploited literatures in the study of social movements in international relations, the English School and Social Systems Theory, to specify a wider range of analytical interactions between different categories of social movements and of world political structures. Moreover, by casting social movement phenomena as communications, the article opens international relations to consideration of the increasingly diverse trajectories and second-order effects produced by social movements as they interact with states, intergovernmental institutions, and transnational actors