Dance-making on the internet: can on-line choreographic projects foster creativity in the user-participant?

Interactive Internet artworks invite viewers to become involved as user-participants as the creative process unfolds. Through analysis of selected Internet projects, the authors discuss the potential for facilitating an interactive, creative experience for participants in the process of making dance. This study was carried out in 1998 and 1999, but the findings remain relevant, as there have been few subsequent developments in the field

Exploring Latent Semantic Factors to Find Useful Product Reviews

Online reviews provided by consumers are a valuable asset for e-Commerce platforms, influencing potential consumers in making purchasing decisions. However, these reviews are of varying quality, with the useful ones buried deep within a heap of non-informative reviews. In this work, we attempt to automatically identify review quality in terms of its helpfulness to the end consumers. In contrast to previous works in this domain exploiting a variety of syntactic and community-level features, we delve deep into the semantics of reviews as to what makes them useful, providing interpretable explanation for the same. We identify a set of consistency and semantic factors, all from the text, ratings, and timestamps of user-generated reviews, making our approach generalizable across all communities and domains. We explore review semantics in terms of several latent factors like the expertise of its author, his judgment about the fine-grained facets of the underlying product, and his writing style. These are cast into a Hidden Markov Model -- Latent Dirichlet Allocation (HMM-LDA) based model to jointly infer: (i) reviewer expertise, (ii) item facets, and (iii) review helpfulness. Large-scale experiments on five real-world datasets from Amazon show significant improvement over state-of-the-art baselines in predicting and ranking useful reviews

Heat sterilizable Ni-Cd battery development Quarterly progress report, 1 Oct. - 31 Dec. 1967

Microscopic, X ray diffraction, porosity, and pore size distribution data for heat sterilizable Ni-Cd batter

Heat sterilizable Ni-Cd battery development Quarterly report, 1 Apr. - 30 Jun. 1968

Development of heat sterilizable, hermetically sealed nickel cadmium batteries for space application

Heat sterilizable Ni-Cd battery development Quarterly report, 1 Jul. - 30 Sep. 1967

Effect of heat sterilization on electrochemistry of nickel-cadmium batterie

Missing in Action: Embodied Experience and Virtual Reality

This essay examines embodied experience in virtual reality (VR) theatre, performance art, and installations in one-to-one engagements with virtual worlds and in telematic interactions with other people. It proposes that bodies in VR are blurred, virtual and physical, absent and present, compounded and indivisible, even though body and environment have different materialities. This blurring can cause confusion in the ethics of embodiment that usually govern physical interactions between audience and performer—when, and if, to touch or be touched—since embodied experience confounds cognitive separation between the physical and virtual. Such confusion can result in a mismatch between the embodied self and disembodied Other that the gaming world is poorly equipped to negotiate, but that could have profound effects on VR users. Theatre, on the other hand, is well-versed in the negotiation of the real and the virtual, and virtual environments allow us to ask questions about embodiment and humanity through the experiences of individual bodies in ways that were never previously achievable. How can theatre and performance help us to understand the nature of embodied experience in VR when anything can be done but the body is apparently missing? It becomes possible to explore impossible situations and experiences through the eyes of others. Yet, is it ethically defensible to engage in any experience or action that would not be viable, or perhaps condoned, in the physical world on the basis that it is not “real”? The essay examines the nature of embodied experience in VR and considers the implications for theatre

Chapter Gesture and Movement

Three players bring their avatars to the same in-game location to start a quest together. As they arrive, the gnome bounces on the spot and waves. The elf throws back her head in laughter before dancing with a provocative hip sway. The human salutes smartly and bows. Each of these gestures communicates information about the avatars themselves and about the interaction choices of the players controlling them. An avatar’s movement includes a range of motions, from programmed gaits and postures to the ways in which the avatar moves in and through virtual space as guided by the player. Gestures are a subset of this movement -- a specific kind of motion that encodes personal, social, and cultural information. Gestures can be decoded by others who share an understanding of the relevant codes, communicating information about intentions, emotions, and responses to events and to other people. Gesture and movement can play a key role in avatar-mediated relationships—both in interactions with other players and in information exchanges between players and their own avatars. The importance of these conveyances may be intensified in immersive gaming as an avatar’s digital body becomes more closely aligned with a player’s physical body, with the potential for influences on the player’s embodied experience

An Analysis of Three Path-Integral Based Approximations to Quantum Dynamics

Simulating the motion of atoms and molecules is a challenging problem, especially when the dynamics of the atomic nuclei need to be treated quantum mechanically. In this thesis we analyse three path-integral based approximations for computing quantum time-correlation functions: constant-uncertainty molecular dynamics (CUMD), the fitted harmonic approximation (FHA) and windowed centroid molecular dynamics (WCMD). The CUMD method has been proposed as a simple and efficient method to incorporate nuclear quantum effects in molecular simulations. The method applies a position-momentum constraint between system replicas based on the uncertainty principle. After reproducing the results from the original publication, we show that the method uses an ad hoc fix to apply the constraint which makes it impractical when extended to systems larger than toy models. The FHA is proposed in this work as a locally harmonic approximation to the linearised-semi classical initial value representation. We find that the FHA results in time correlation functions which are similar to and in some cases better than those obtained from the local gaussian approximation (LGA). In its current implementation, the FHA method is a proof of principle which has been applied to test systems in one and two dimensions, but the results obtained are sufficiently promising to suggest that future implementations of the FHA could compete with the LGA. The WCMD method is proposed in this work as a simple method for removing contributions from delocalised ring polymers in centroid molecular dynamics calculations, in which they are known to cause artificial red shifts in vibrational spectra. We apply the WCMD method to two dimensional test systems and find that by filtering out the delocalised ring polymers we are able to eliminate the artificial red shift. This result is extremely promising and suggests that the WCMD method should be extendable in future work to treat systems such as gas phase and liquid water.EPSRC CDT in Computational methods for materials scienc

Building artificial personalities: expressive communication channels based on an interlingua for a human-robot dance

The development of artificial personalities requires that we develop a further understanding of how personality is communicated. This can be done through developing humanrobot interaction (HRI). In this paper we report on the development of the SpiderCrab robot. This uses an interlingua based on Laban Movement Analysis (LMA) to intermediate a human-robot dance. Specifically, we developed measurements to analyse data in real time from a simple vision system and implemented a simple stochastic dancing algorithm on a custom built robot. This shows how, through some simple rules, a personality can emerge by biasing random behaviour. The system was tested with professional dancers and members of the public and the results (formal and anecdotal) are presented herein