"Inner Listening" as a Basic Principle for Developing Immersive Virtual Worlds.

Ludmil Duridanov and Simeon Simoff call in their paper “'Inner Listening' as a Basic Principle for Developing Immersive Virtual Worlds” for an approach that focuses on visualisation as an important way of analysing a Virtual World. They argued that immersive Virtual Worlds have developed on ad-hoc basis, driven mainly by the need for creating inhabited places for virtual communities and environments for distributed gameplay. The goal of achieving immersion has been mainly pursued using convincing 3D interactive graphics technology and the approaches to design have focused on the visualisation aspects, neglecting the “audio design” and the consistent integration of visual and audio designs. As the collaborative and community-related aspects of these environments are expected to be dominant in the future, the authors argue that there is a clear need to develop deeper underlying principles for the design of these inhabited virtual spaces. They conclude that Virtual Worlds of the future should be places that allow for a creative and enlightened state of mind by their inhabitants. Thereby two sources of wisdom – the Judeo-Islamic and Buddhist tradition – should be explored for establishing the principle of “inner listening” as one of the basic principles for developing immersive Virtual Worlds

Populating virtual cities with diverse physiology driven crowds of intelligent agents

When conducting archaeological excavations of ancient cities, 3D reconstruction has become an important mechanism of documenting the findings and showing the results to general public in an accessible way. Most such reconstructions, however, mainly focus on visualising buildings and artefacts, while rarely simulating the actual people that populated the reconstructed city and aspects of their everyday life. Simulating such people and their lives in all their diversity is a costly and time-consuming exercise comparable in cost and efforts to development of a commercial video game, involving years of development and millions of dollars in funding. In this paper we present a novel approach that can significantly decrease the cost and effort required for simulating everyday life of ancient inhabitants of virtual cities, while still capturing enough detail to be useful in historical simulations. We show how it is possible to manually design a small number of individual avatars and then automatically generate a substantially large crowd of virtual agents, which will live their lives in the simulated city, perform choirs and rituals as well as other routine activities that are consistent with their social status. The key novelty of our approach that enables simulating such sophisticated crowds is the combination of physiological needs - for generating agent goals, emotions and personality - for choosing how to fulfil each goal and genetically informed propagation of appearance and personality traits - to propagate aspects of appearance and behaviour from a small sample of manually designed individuals to large agent groups of a desired size. The usefulness of our approach is demonstrated by applying it to simulating everyday life in the ancient city of Uruk, 3000 B.C.

City of Uruk 3000 B.C. : using genetic algorithms, dynamic planning and crowd simulation to re-enact everyday life of ancient Sumerians

Virtual reality reconstructions of ancient historical sites have become a valuable technique for popularising science and visualising expert knowledge to general audiences. Most such reconstructions only re-create buildings and artefacts and place them in the context of the virtual environment, but what is often missing in such simulations is the ability to see how ancient people lived their daily life in these environments. Our presented case study shows how the use of genetic algorithms and simulation of physiological needs helped us to populate the 3D reconstruction of the city of Uruk with a large crowd of intelligent agents simulating daily life of ancient Sumerians in Uruk

Dispute Resolution Using Argumentation-Based Mediation

Mediation is a process, in which both parties agree to resolve their dispute by negotiating over alternative solutions presented by a mediator. In order to construct such solutions, mediation brings more information and knowledge, and, if possible, resources to the negotiation table. The contribution of this paper is the automated mediation machinery which does that. It presents an argumentation-based mediation approach that extends the logic-based approach to argumentation-based negotiation involving BDI agents. The paper describes the mediation algorithm. For comparison it illustrates the method with a case study used in an earlier work. It demonstrates how the computational mediator can deal with realistic situations in which the negotiating agents would otherwise fail due to lack of knowledge and/or resources.Comment: 6 page

Interpretability of machine learning solutions in public healthcare : the CRISP-ML approach

Public healthcare has a history of cautious adoption for artificial intelligence (AI) systems. The rapid growth of data collection and linking capabilities combined with the increasing diversity of the data-driven AI techniques, including machine learning (ML), has brought both ubiquitous opportunities for data analytics projects and increased demands for the regulation and accountability of the outcomes of these projects. As a result, the area of interpretability and explainability of ML is gaining significant research momentum. While there has been some progress in the development of ML methods, the methodological side has shown limited progress. This limits the practicality of using ML in the health domain: the issues with explaining the outcomes of ML algorithms to medical practitioners and policy makers in public health has been a recognized obstacle to the broader adoption of data science approaches in this domain. This study builds on the earlier work which introduced CRISP-ML, a methodology that determines the interpretability level required by stakeholders for a successful real-world solution and then helps in achieving it. CRISP-ML was built on the strengths of CRISP-DM, addressing the gaps in handling interpretability. Its application in the Public Healthcare sector follows its successful deployment in a number of recent real-world projects across several industries and fields, including credit risk, insurance, utilities, and sport. This study elaborates on the CRISP-ML methodology on the determination, measurement, and achievement of the necessary level of interpretability of ML solutions in the Public Healthcare sector. It demonstrates how CRISP-ML addressed the problems with data diversity, the unstructured nature of data, and relatively low linkage between diverse data sets in the healthcare domain. The characteristics of the case study, used in the study, are typical for healthcare data, and CRISP-ML managed to deliver on these issues, ensuring the required level of interpretability of the ML solutions discussed in the project. The approach used ensured that interpretability requirements were met, taking into account public healthcare specifics, regulatory requirements, project stakeholders, project objectives, and data characteristics. The study concludes with the three main directions for the development of the presented cross-industry standard process

Flexibility in Online Teaching and Learning Spaces

This paper discusses the loose integration approach in building flexible virtual environments as a collection of several underlying technologies. The framework allows for the development of an open integrated environment which supports consistent human computer interaction, uniting existing supporting technologies at both the conceptual and interface level. The proposed approach provides flexibility in constructing online teaching and learning environments with respect to the requirements of the subject. It is suitable for developing flexible learning environments for subjects, which include in their curriculum a variety of computer mediated technologies and different modes of deliver

RFID Localisation For Internet Of Things Smart Homes: A Survey

The Internet of Things (IoT) enables numerous business opportunities in fields as diverse as e-health, smart cities, smart homes, among many others. The IoT incorporates multiple long-range, short-range, and personal area wireless networks and technologies into the designs of IoT applications. Localisation in indoor positioning systems plays an important role in the IoT. Location Based IoT applications range from tracking objects and people in real-time, assets management, agriculture, assisted monitoring technologies for healthcare, and smart homes, to name a few. Radio Frequency based systems for indoor positioning such as Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) is a key enabler technology for the IoT due to its costeffective, high readability rates, automatic identification and, importantly, its energy efficiency characteristic. This paper reviews the state-of-the-art RFID technologies in IoT Smart Homes applications. It presents several comparable studies of RFID based projects in smart homes and discusses the applications, techniques, algorithms, and challenges of adopting RFID technologies in IoT smart home systems.Comment: 18 pages, 2 figures, 3 table

Cooperative Healthcare

Health care is increasingly being viewed as a team effort between practitioner and patient, with the recognition of the quality of interaction as a potential problem in such team effort. The paper addresses this problem, providing a solution that enables to record, monitor and analyse the quality of such interactions. It is based on a visual language used to represent the quality of interactions. The shape and behaviour of the visual elements and expressions are based on the physicality of human movement. The visual expressions resemble musical scores. As the behaviour of the visual elements corresponds to our bodily knowledge, commonly understandable to humans, the information about the quality of the interactions, expressed in this language is easily digestible by people with a broad range of backgrounds. The paper presents also the visual reasoning technique that works with the setting and a high-level view of the underlying ICT architecture. The practical utilisation is demonstrated with an example from occupational therapy

Disruptive Practices of Participatory Learning

In the last decade students of the so-called App generation committed a “positive disruption” on existing practices of cognitive experience and the ways to access knowledge. Developing a natural feeling of reality through a permanent online presence they are using a variety of web tools and mobile apps in a NETWORK SOCIETY (under construction). In the introduction we show how a paradigm shift from INSTRUCTOR-CENTERED TEACHING to a STUDENT-BASED PARTICIPATORY LEARNING occurs within a variety of “disruptive practices” imposed by the requirements of global market interaction on education models. In this paper we focus especially on how DISRUPTIVE EXPERIENCE of so-called DIGITAL NATIVES could be followed within dynamic in-class scenarios. A social and cognitive phenomenon of “disrupting ourselves” will be approached here in the following ways. On the one side it highlights radical changes of natural communication of the App generation and their impact on educational models. On the other side it emphasizes how educators could simulate a close-to-market professional ambience to follow available SPONTANEOUS PROTOCOLS of multichannel communication. The learning advantage extracted by instructor’s SPONTANEOUS PROTOCOL (mostly as a DIGITAL IMMIGRANT) evolves student requirements (mostly as a DIGITAL NATIVE) on demand and is based on responding to nonverbal signals of so-called DIGITAL NATIVES. This way we have a SPONTANEOUS SETTING of disruptive practices within participatory learning: FIRST, instructor (mostly a DIGITAL IMMIGRANT) acknowledges an appropriate place and time to various roles interacting with DIGITAL NATIVES by using a SPONTANEOUS PROTOCOL as a communication instrument to respond to “secret signals” of students body language in-class and to introduce “theatre scenarios” within synchronous (face-to-face one-to-many and one-to-one, and distanced) and asynchronous (distanced) interaction. SECOND, instructor “disrupts” one’s own cognitive experience resp. know-how and reshapes segments of knowledge into SOCIAL CONSTRAINTS of attractive learning procedures which evolve DIGITAL NATIVES in the dynamic following of a SPONTANEOUS IN-CLASS PROTOCOL. THIRD, educator “disrupts” both instructor and student in-class roles where the acknowledged shift from teaching to learning (since 1995) transforms educational interaction between instructors and students from ONE-TO-MANY to ONE-TO-ONE and/or MANY-TO-MANY in face-to-face and distanced communication scenarios. The instructor uses a SEDUCTIVE STRATEGY to engage students in playing instructor’s roles within a game of interchangeable teaching and learning