Why Computers Can’t Feel Pain

The most cursory examination of the history of artificial intelligence highlights numerous egregious claims of its researchers, especially in relation to a populist form of ‘strong’ computationalism which holds that any suitably programmed computer instantiates genuine conscious mental states purely in virtue of carrying out a specific series of computations. The argument presented herein is a simple development of that originally presented in Putnam’s (Representation & Reality, Bradford Books, Cambridge in 1988) monograph, “Representation & Reality”, which if correct, has important implications for turing machine functionalism and the prospect of ‘conscious’ machines. In the paper, instead of seeking to develop Putnam’s claim that, “everything implements every finite state automata”, I will try to establish the weaker result that, “everything implements the specific machine Q on a particular input set (x)”. Then, equating Q (x) to any putative AI program, I will show that conceding the ‘strong AI’ thesis for Q (crediting it with mental states and consciousness) opens the door to a vicious form of panpsychism whereby all open systems, (e.g. grass, rocks etc.), must instantiate conscious experience and hence that disembodied minds lurk everywhere.     

An improved data hiding approach for polygon meshes

We present an improved technique for data hiding in polygonal meshes, which is based on the work of Bogomjakov et al. (Comput. Graph. Forum 27(2):637–642, 2008). Like their method, we use an arrangement on primitives relative to a reference ordering to embed a message. But instead of directly interpreting the index of a primitive in the reference ordering as the encoded/decoded bits, our method slightly modifies the mapping so that our modification doubles the chance of encoding an additional bit compared to Bogomjakov et al.’s (Comput. Graph. Forum 27(2):637–642, 2008). We illustrate the inefficiency in the original mapping of Bogomjakov et al. (Comput. Graph. Forum 27(2):637–642, 2008) with an intuitive representation using a binary tree.     

Is presence a technology issue? Some insights from cognitive sciences

The International Society of Presence Research, defines “presence” (a shortened version of the term “telepresence”) as a “psychological state in which even though part or all of an individual’s current experience is generated by and/or filtered through human-made technology, part or all of the individual’s perception fails to accurately acknowledge the role of the technology in the experience” (ISPR 2000, The concept of presence: explication statement. Accessed 15 Jan 2009). In this article, we will draw on the recent outcomes of cognitive sciences to offer a broader definition of presence, not related to technology only. Specifically, presence is described here as a core neuropsychological phenomenon whose goal is to produce a sense of agency and control: subjects are “present” if they are able to enact in an external world their intentions. This framework suggests that any environment, virtual or real, does not provide undifferentiated information, ready-made objects equal for everyone. It offers different opportunities and produces presence according to its ability in supporting the users and their intentions. The possible consequences of this approach for the development of presence-inducing virtual environments are also discussed.     

Hegel and the extended mind

We examine the theory of the extended mind, and especially the concept of the “parity principle” (Clark and Chalmers in Analysis 58.1:7–19, 1998), in light of Hegel’s notion of objective spirit. This unusual combination of theories raises the question of how far one can extend the notion of extended mind and whether cognitive processing can supervene on the operations of social practices and institutions. We raise some questions about putting this research to critical use.     

On very true operators on pocrims

Hájek introduced the logic enriching the logic BL by a unary connective vt which is a formalization of Zadeh’s fuzzy truth value “very true”. algebras, i.e., BL-algebras with unary operations, called vt-operators, which are among others subdiagonal, are an algebraic counterpart of Partially ordered commutative integral residuated monoids (pocrims) are common generalizations of both BL-algebras and Heyting algebras. The aim of our paper is to introduce and study algebraic properties of pocrims endowed by “very-true” and “very-false”-like operators. Research is supported by the Research and Development Council of Czech Government via project MSN 6198959214.     

On Total Variation Minimization and Surface Evolution Using Parametric Maximum Flows

In a recent paper Boykov et al. (LNCS, Vol. 3953, pp. 409–422, 2006) propose an approach for computing curve and surface evolution using a variational approach and the geo-cuts method of Boykov and Kolmogorov (International conference on computer vision, pp. 26–33, 2003). We recall in this paper how this is related to well-known approaches for mean curvature motion, introduced by Almgren et al. (SIAM Journal on Control and Optimization 31(2):387–438, 1993) and Luckhaus and Sturzenhecker (Calculus of Variations and Partial Differential Equations 3(2):253–271, 1995), and show how the corresponding problems can be solved with sub-pixel accuracy using Parametric Maximum Flow techniques. This provides interesting algorithms for computing crystalline curvature motion, possibly with a forcing term. A. Chambolle’s research supported by ANR project “MICA”, grant ANR-08-BLAN-0082. J. Darbon’s research supported by ONR grant N000140710810.     

Lower Bounds for Kernelizations and Other Preprocessing Procedures

We first present a method to rule out the existence of parameter non-increasing polynomial kernelizations of parameterized problems under the hypothesis P≠NP. This method is applicable, for example, to the problem Sat parameterized by the number of variables of the input formula. Then we obtain further improvements of corresponding results in (Bodlaender et al. in Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 5125, pp. 563–574, Springer, Berlin, 2008; Fortnow and Santhanam in Proceedings of the 40th ACM Symposium on the Theory of Computing (STOC’08), ACM, New York, pp. 133–142, 2008) by refining the central lemma of their proof method, a lemma due to Fortnow and Santhanam. In particular, assuming that the polynomial hierarchy does not collapse to its third level, we show that every parameterized problem with a “linear OR” and with NP-hard underlying classical problem does not have polynomial self-reductions that assign to every instance x with parameter k an instance y with |y|=k ^O(1)⋅|x|^1−ε (here ε is any given real number greater than zero). We give various applications of these results. On the structural side we prove several results clarifying the relationship between the different notions of preprocessing procedures, namely the various notions of kernelizations, self-reductions and compressions.     

Web data retrieval: solving spatial range queries using k-nearest neighbor searches

As Geographic Information Systems (GIS) technologies have evolved, more and more GIS applications and geospatial data are available on the web. Spatial objects in a given query range can be retrieved using spatial range query − one of the most widely used query types in GIS and spatial databases. However, it can be challenging to retrieve these data from various web applications where access to the data is only possible through restrictive web interfaces that support certain types of queries. A typical scenario is the existence of numerous business web sites that provide their branch locations through a limited “nearest location” web interface. For example, a chain restaurant’s web site such as McDonalds can be queried to find some of the closest locations of its branches to the user’s home address. However, even though the site has the location data of all restaurants in, for example, the state of California, it is difficult to retrieve the entire data set efficiently due to its restrictive web interface. Considering that k-Nearest Neighbor (k-NN) search is one of the most popular web interfaces in accessing spatial data on the web, this paper investigates the problem of retrieving geospatial data from the web for a given spatial range query using only k-NN searches. Based on the classification of k-NN interfaces on the web, we propose a set of range query algorithms to completely cover the rectangular shape of the query range (completeness) while minimizing the number of k-NN searches as possible (efficiency). We evaluated the efficiency of the proposed algorithms through statistical analysis and empirical experiments using both synthetic and real data sets.

Priority scheduling service for E-commerce web servers

Service scheduling is one of the crucial issues in E-commerce environment. E-commerce web servers often get overloaded as they have to deal with a large number of customers’ requests—for example, browse, search, and pay, in order to make purchases or to get product information from E-commerce web sites. In this paper, we propose a new approach in order to effectively handle high traffic load and to improve web server’s performance. Our solution is to exploit networking techniques and to classify customers’ requests into different classes such that some requests are prioritised over others. We contend that such classification is financially beneficial to E-commerce services as in these services some requests are more valuable than others. For instance, the processing of “browse” request should get less priority than “payment” request as the latter is considered to be more valuable to the service provider. Our approach analyses the arrival process of distinct requests and employs a priority scheduling service at the network nodes that gives preferential treatment to high priority requests. The proposed approach is tested through various experiments which show significant decrease in the response time of high priority requests. This also reduces the probability of dropping high priority requests by a web server and thus enabling service providers to generate more revenue.     

Back to the Future: An Historical Perspective on the Pendulum-Like Changes in Literacy

This article focuses on the pendulum-like change in the way people read and use text, which was triggered by the introduction of new reading and writing technologies in human history. The paper argues that textual features, which characterized the ancient pre-print writing culture, disappeared with the establishment of the modern-day print culture and has been “revived” in the digital post-modern era. This claim is based on the analysis of four cases which demonstrate this textual-pendulum swing: (1) The swing from concrete iconic-graphic representation of letters and words in the ancient alphabet to abstract phonetic representation of text in modern eras, and from written abstract computer commands “back” to the concrete iconic representation in graphic user interfaces of the digital era; (2) The swing from scroll reading in the pre-print era to page or book reading in the print era and “back” to scroll reading in the digital era; (3) The swing from a low level of authorship in the pre-print era to a strong authorship perception in the print era, and “back” to a low degree of authorship in the digital era; (4) The swing from synchronic representation of text in both visual and audio formats during the pre-print era to a visual representation only in print, and “back” to a synchronic representation in many environments of the digital era. We suggest that the print culture, which is usually considered the natural and preferred textual environment, should be regarded as the exception.     

An improved adaptive sampling scheme for the construction of explicit boundaries

This article presents an improved adaptive sampling scheme for the construction of explicit decision functions (constraints or limit state functions) using Support Vector Machines (SVMs). The proposed work presents substantial modifications to an earlier version of the scheme (Basudhar and Missoum, Comput Struct 86(19–20):1904–1917, 2008). The improvements consist of a different choice of samples, a more rigorous convergence criterion, and a new technique to select the SVM kernel parameters. Of particular interest is the choice of a new sample chosen to remove the “locking” of the SVM, a phenomenon that was not understood in the previous version of the algorithm. The new scheme is demonstrated on analytical problems of up to seven dimensions.     

Helen Keller Was Never in a Chinese Room

William Rapaport, in “How Helen Keller used syntactic semantics to escape from a Chinese Room,” (Rapaport 2006), argues that Helen Keller was in a sort of Chinese Room, and that her subsequent development of natural language fluency illustrates the flaws in Searle’s famous Chinese Room Argument and provides a method for developing computers that have genuine semantics (and intentionality). I contend that his argument fails. In setting the problem, Rapaport uses his own preferred definitions of semantics and syntax, but he does not translate Searle’s Chinese Room argument into that idiom before attacking it. Once the Chinese Room is translated into Rapaport’s idiom (in a manner that preserves the distinction between meaningful representations and uninterpreted symbols), I demonstrate how Rapaport’s argument fails to defeat the CRA. This failure brings a crucial element of the Chinese Room Argument to the fore: the person in the Chinese Room is prevented from connecting the Chinese symbols to his/her own meaningful experiences and memories. This issue must be addressed before any victory over the CRA is announced.     

Space efficiency in group recommendation

Imagine a system that gives you satisfying recommendations when you want to rent a movie with friends or find a restaurant to celebrate a colleague’s farewell: at the core of such a system is what we call group recommendation. While computing individual recommendations have received lots of attention (e.g., Netflix prize), group recommendation has been confined to studying users’ satisfaction with different aggregation strategies. In this paper (Some results are published in an earlier conference paper (Amer-Yahia et al. in VLDB, 2009). See Sect. “Paper contributions and outline” for details.), we describe the challenges and desiderata of group recommendation and formalize different group consensus semantics that account for both an item’s predicted ratings to the group members and the disagreements among them. We focus on the design and implementation of efficient group recommendation algorithms that intelligently prune and merge per-user predicted rating lists and pairwise disagreement lists of items. We further explore the impact of space constraints on maintaining per-user and pairwise item lists and develop two complementary solutions that leverage shared user behavior to maintain the efficiency of our recommendation algorithms within a space budget. The first solution, behavior factoring, factors out user agreements from disagreement lists, while the second solution, partial materialization, selectively materializes a subset of disagreement lists. Finally, we demonstrate the usefulness of our group recommendations and the efficiency and scalability of our algorithms using an extensive set of experiments on the 10 M ratings MovieLens data set.     

Toward objective software process information: experiences from a case study

A critical problem in software development is the monitoring, control and improvement in the processes of software developers. Software processes are often not explicitly modeled, and manuals to support the development work contain abstract guidelines and procedures. Consequently, there are huge differences between ‘actual’ and ‘official’ processes: “the actual process is what you do, with all its omissions, mistakes, and oversights. The official process is what the book, i.e., a quality manual, says you are supposed to do” (Humphrey in A discipline for software engineering. Addison-Wesley, New York, 1995). Software developers lack support to identify, analyze and better understand their processes. Consequently, process improvements are often not based on an in-depth understanding of the ‘actual’ processes, but on organization-wide improvement programs or ad hoc initiatives of individual developers. In this paper, we show that, based on particular data from software development projects, the underlying software development processes can be extracted and that automatically more realistic process models can be constructed. This is called software process mining (Rubin et al. in Process mining framework for software processes. Software process dynamics and agility. Springer Berlin, Heidelberg, 2007). The goal of process mining is to better understand the development processes, to compare constructed process models with the ‘official’ guidelines and procedures in quality manuals and, subsequently, to improve development processes. This paper reports on process mining case studies in a large industrial company in The Netherlands. The subject of the process mining is a particular process: the change control board (CCB) process. The results of process mining are fed back to practice in order to subsequently improve the CCB process.     

Zero-Automatic Networks

We continue the study of zero-automatic queues first introduced in Dao-Thi and Mairesse (Adv Appl Probab 39(2):429–461, 2007). These queues are characterized by a special buffering mechanism evolving like a random walk on some infinite group or monoid. The simple M/M/1 queue and Gelenbe’s G-queue with positive and negative customers are the two simplest 0-automatic queues. All stable 0-automatic queues have an explicit “multiplicative” stationary distribution and a Poisson departure process (Dao-Thi and Mairesse, Adv Appl Probab 39(2):429–461, 2007). In this paper, we introduce and study networks of 0-automatic queues. We consider two types of networks, with either a Jackson-like or a Kelly-like routing mechanism. In both cases, and under the stability condition, we prove that the stationary distribution of the buffer contents has a “product-form” and can be explicitly determined. Furthermore, the departure process out of the network is Poisson.

Border Collision Bifurcations in a Footloose Capital Model with First Nature Firms

In this paper we extend the discrete time Footloose Capital model analyzed in Commendatore et al. (Nonlinear Dyn Psychol Life Sci 11(2):267–289, 2007) by introducing “first nature firms”, i.e., firms that use locally specific blueprints and, therefore, are immobile. Due to the presence of first nature firms (symmetrically distributed across the regions), the central dynamic map becomes a piecewise differentiable function: in addition to “standard” flip and pitchfork bifurcations also border collision bifurcations are possible and instances of multistability may emerge. Our analysis confirms and extends the results of Commendatore et al. (2007): (1) continuous time formulation hides complex dynamics patterns; (2) asymmetric distributions of industrial activity can be endogenously generated and are path dependent.     

Safe and effective navigation of autonomous robots in hazardous environments

The development of autonomous mobile machines to perform useful tasks in real work environments is currently being impeded by concerns over effectiveness, commercial viability and, above all, safety. This paper introduces a case study of a robotic excavator to explore a series of issues around system development, navigation in unstructured environments, autonomous decision making and changing the behaviour of autonomous machines to suit the prevailing demands of users. The adoption of the Real-Time Control Systems (RCS) architecture (Albus, 1991) is proposed as a universal framework for the development of intelligent systems. In addition it is explained how the use of Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDP) (Kaelbling et al., 1998) can form the basis of decision making in the face of uncertainty and how the technique can be effectively incorporated into the RCS architecture. Particular emphasis is placed on ensuring that the resulting behaviour is both task effective and adequately safe, and it is recognised that these two objectives may be in opposition and that the desired relative balance between them may change. The concept of an autonomous system having “values” is introduced through the use of utility theory. Limited simulation results of experiments are reported which demonstrate that these techniques can create intelligent systems capable of modifying their behaviour to exhibit either ‘safety conscious’ or ‘task achieving’ personalities.     

“Those found responsible have been sacked”: some observations on the usefulness of error

Erik Hollnagel’s body of work in the past three decades has molded much of the current research approach to system safety, particularly notions of “error”. Hollnagel regards “error” as a dead-end and avoids using the term. This position is consistent with Rasmussen’s claim that there is no scientifically stable category of human performance that can be described as “error”. While this systems view is undoubtedly correct, “error” persists. Organizations, especially formal business, political, and regulatory structures, use “error” as if it were a stable category of human performance. They apply the term to performances associated with undesired outcomes, tabulate occurrences of “error”, and justify control and sanctions through “error”. Although a compelling argument can be made for Hollnagel’s view, it is clear that notions of “error” are socially and organizationally productive. The persistence of “error” in management and regulatory circles reflects its value as a means for social control.