面向情境的移动应用研发

移动网络的出现极大推进普适计算发展,智能设备成为生活、工作不可缺少的部分,形成个体随时、随地在线状态,显具身和情境性,形成应用研发新环境,为软件设计理论、方法、技术等层面创新提供条件。基于被誉为认知科学二次革命的具身、分布认知等新思想,情境、认知将成为移动应用创新切入点,为情境矢量化,认知大数据处理提供理论;移动情境是Agent生存数字空间,其设计思想、方法、矢量化技术直接关系到服务品质。以物流行业移动应用为例,阐述物流情境矢量化架构,认知动力系统结构。     

computation,among other things,is beneath us

What's computation? The received answer is that computation is a computer at work, and a computer at work is that which can be modelled as a Turing machine at work. Unfortunately, as John Searle has recently argued, and as others have agreed, the received answer appears to imply that AI and Cog Sci are a royal waste of time. The argument here is alarmingly simple: AI and Cog Sci (of the “Strong” sort, anyway) are committed to the view that cognition is computation (or brains are computers); butall processes are computations (orall physical things are computers); so AI and Cog Sci are positively silly. I refute this argument herein, in part by defining the locutions ‘x is a computer’ and ‘c is a computation’ in a way that blocks Searle's argument but exploits the hard-to-deny link between What's Computation? and the theory of computation. However, I also provide, at the end of this essay, an argument which, it seems to me, implies not that AI and Cog Sci are silly, but that they're based on a form of computation that is well “beneath” human persons.     

iCub: the design and realization of an open humanoid platform for cognitive and neuroscience research

The development of robotic cognition and the advancement of understanding of human cognition form two of the current greatest challenges in robotics and neuroscience, respectively. The RobotCub project aims to develop an embodied robotic child (iCub) with the physical (height 90 cm and mass less than 23 kg) and ultimately cognitive abilities of a 2.5-year-old human child. The iCub will be a freely available open system which can be used by scientists in all cognate disciplines from developmental psychology to epigenetic robotics to enhance understanding of cognitive systems through the study of cognitive development. The iCub will be open both in software, but more importantly in all aspects of the hardware and mechanical design. In this paper the design of the mechanisms and structures forming the basic 'body' of the iCub are described. The papers considers kinematic structures dynamic design criteria, actuator specification and selection, and detailed mechanical and electronic design. The paper concludes with tests of the performance of sample joints, and comparison of these results with the design requirements and simulation projects.     

Views of work and the design and use of group support systems

The view of work embodied in a group support system constitutes a designer's understanding of how work gets done in collaborative settings. This paper argues that a designer's view of collaborative work shapes the design space of a group support system. This in turn affects the system's functionality, as well as the manner in which it is used. An analysis of the views of work underlying four group support systems used in research and commercial domains, reveals sharp differences in their perspectives on collaborative work. Our approach suggests three implications. First the design process should be driven by an explicit articulation of the view of work. Second, examining convergence between a system's view of work and the work practices of a setting, can usefully indicate whether the system is appropriate for the setting. Finally, research on the mediating role of the view of work in the effectiveness of group support systems, can lead to a richer understanding of the impact of such systems.     

MASAHIKO HIGASHI - ECOLOGIST,MASTER WEAVER AUGUST 11, 1954-MARCH 27, 2000

M.C. Escher is a graphic artist whose visual-spatial illusions scientists, and especially mathematicians eagerly study. However, there is much more than that. It seems that Escher's optical illusions have strikingly deeper theoretical, conceptual and philosophical layers not yet revealed. It is worth while using the abductive research method utilizing the possibilities of systems approach to reveal some of their mysteries. Escher's lithograph Reptiles is not only a work belonging to the theme of the illusion of space as Bruno Ernst, a close friend of Escher, states. This paper aims at proving in what ways Reptiles actually illustrates the concepts of onticity as reality and ontology as conceptual representation of reality, and their conceptual intermingling in a complex and systemic way. Thus, it appears that onticity and ontology, which are our ways of conceptual cognition are two facets of our systemic understanding. This paper also touches some aspects of Fuenmayor's phenomenological ontology.     

Answering subcognitive Turing Test questions: a reply to French

Robert French has argued that a disembodied computer is incapable of passing a Turing Test that includes subcognitive questions. Subcognitive questions are designed to probe the network of cultural and perceptual associations that humans naturally develop as we live, embodied and embedded in the world. This paper shows how it is possible for a disembodied computer to answer subcognitive questions appropriately, contrary to French's claim. The paper's approach to answering subcognitive questions is to use statistical information extracted from a very large collection of text. In particular, it is shown how it is possible to answer a sample of subcognitive questions taken from French, by issuing queries to a search engine that indexes about 350 million Web pages. This simple algorithm may shed light on the nature of human (sub-) cognition, but the scope of this paper is limited to demonstrating that French is mistaken: a disembodied computer can answer subcognitive questions.     

结合用户聚类和项目类型的协同过滤算法

为了解决协同过滤算法中数据稀疏性问题,提高推荐效果,提出一种改进的协同过滤算法.该算法首先通过一种新的相似度计算方法来计算项目类型相似度,将相似度大于某阈值的项目作为目标项目的邻居;然后根据目标用户对邻居项目的评分信息来预测该用户对目标项目的评分值,并将预测值填入稀疏的用户项目评分矩阵;最后对填充后的评分矩阵采用基于用户聚类（K-means聚类）的协同过滤算法做出最终的预测评分进行推荐.在Movielens数据集上进行实验验证,结果表明该算法能够很好地缓解数据稀疏性、降低计算复杂度,提高推荐精度.     

Context‐Centric Speech‐Based Human–Computer Interaction

This paper describes research that addresses the problem of dialog management from a strong, context‐centric approach. We further present a quantitative method of measuring the importance of contextual cues when dealing with speech‐based human–computer interactions. It is generally accepted that using context in conjunction with a human input, such as spoken speech, enhances a machine's understanding of the user's intent as a means to pinpoint an adequate reaction. For this work, however, we present a context‐centric approach in which the use of context is the primary basis for understanding and not merely an auxiliary process. We employ an embodied conversation agent that facilitates the seamless engagement of a speech‐based information‐deployment entity by its human end user. This dialog manager emphasizes the use of context to drive its mixed‐initiative discourse model. A typical, modern automatic speech recognizer (ASR) was incorporated to handle the speech‐to‐text translations. As is the nature of these ASR systems, the recognition rate is consistently less than perfect, thus emphasizing the need for contextual assistance. The dialog system was encapsulated into a speech‐based embodied conversation agent platform for prototyping and testing purposes. Experiments were performed to evaluate the robustness of its performance, namely through measures of naturalness and usefulness, with respect to the emphasized use of context. The contribution of this work is to provide empirical evidence of the importance of conversational context in speech‐based human–computer interaction using a field‐tested context‐centric dialog manager.     

Product selection in Internet business: a fuzzy approach

In this paper, we propose a methodology which helps customers buy products through the Internet. This procedure takes into account the customer's level of desire in the product attributes, which are normally fuzzy, or in linguistically defined terms. The concept of fuzzy number will be used to measure the degree of similarities of the available products to that of the customer's requirements. The degrees of similarities so obtained over all the attributes give rise to the fuzzy probabilities and hence the fuzzy expected values of availing a product on the Internet as per the customer's requirement. Attribute‐wise the fuzzy expected values are compared with those of the available products on the Internet and the product that is closest to the customer's preference is selected as the best product. The multi‐attribute weighted average method is used here to evaluate and hence to select the best product.     

Exploring how children use their hands to think: an embodied interactional analysis

In order to better understand how to design hands-on child-computer interaction, we explore how different styles of interaction facilitate children's thinking while they use their hands to manipulate objects. We present an exploratory study of children solving a spatial puzzle task. We investigate how the affordances of physical, graphical and tangible interfaces may facilitate the development of thinking skills including mental visualisation, problem space exploration and collaboration. We utilise the theory of complementary actions taken from embodied cognition to develop a video coding methodology that allows us to classify behavioural activity and make inferences about thinking skills development. Our findings indicated that the combination of direct hands-on input style with audio-visual feedback facilitated by the tangible user interface enabled a dynamic task completion strategy, which supports the development of mental skills with a slight time cost. The mouse and graphical user interface supported a trial and error approach, which may limit skills development. The physical cardboard puzzle enabled effective task completion but provided less support for social interaction and problem space exploration. We conclude with design recommendations.     

HUYGENS' PRINCIPLE,PHYSICS AND COMPUTERS

We discuss the emergence of topology from a consideration of set extensions in General Systems Theory. Boundaries arise in a natural way, separating independent elements or regions of the system. Our aim is a unification of Etter theory, Kron's method of Tearing and Jessel's formulation of Huygens' Principle. This should make explicit the equivalence between the objective, structural, holographic and the subjective, relative definitions of information, sought in Bowden (1994b), reprinted in this Special Issue. It connects the abstract generalisations of Schrodinger's equation and Bom's rule derived in probabilistic Etter theory with the real world of electrical and other physical phenomena in General Physical Systems Theory. This paper can be considered as a continuation of Bowden (1990; 1994a) and as a response to Bowden (1994b), reprinted in this issue.

We review the ideas behind Kron's Method of Tearing and Jessel's Principle of Secondary sources (both special cases of the above theory) and their equivalence. We follow Hiley's argument in Hiley (1996) to show how Schrodinger's equation can be thought of as specifying the evolution of (a series of) tearings in continuous space. These can be shown on a commutative diagram as a series of similarity transforms. We compare this with Etter's derivation (Etter, 1998). We describe briefly a recently published derivation of Maxwell's equations from a non-commutative algebra and show how they fit onto a related commutative diagram. Finally we make some comments on applications of the general theory to computer systems. This paper is a series of vignettes of work in progress. It is designed to point the direction of work to come in Constructive Physics.     

New type of standard for accessibility,designed to foster the competition and innovation of designers,developers, and project and business management

This paper describes the many beneficiaries of accessibility to IT, creating a multifaceted business opportunity. Evolution is underway as some organizations and governments develop and adopt accessibility standards and regulations. But organized planning, design and development of technology solutions require improved tactics and strategies. The very recent US Section 508 is a new and novel regulatory marketing strategy in the evolution of standards. This regulatory standard's effectiveness dependents upon the 'innovation and divergent thinking' of those directly involved in product design. Designers, developers and their management are most comfortable with an analytical structure based on improved definition and measurement. Research will improve understanding of the human performance requirements of the client audience. Research and standards should continue but certain areas are in need of more immediate focus, e.g. human performance requirements in cognition.     

Exploring similarities and differences in teamwork across diverse healthcare contexts using communication analysis

Teamwork is prevalent in many work contexts. This study explored the similarities and differences in teamwork processes across different healthcare work contexts with the aim of assessing knowledge transfer feasibility. The research approach was to aggregate team communication analyses from four healthcare contexts to uncover teamwork similarities and differences. The four healthcare contexts included two handoffs and two surgery contexts. The communication analysis segmented communication into meaningful sequences. It categorized utterances into content categories and verbal behaviors. There were a few similar content categories across the four contexts. A clear information structure emerged in the two handoff contexts. In addition, there were more dialogues and requests in the surgeries compared to more reports in the handoffs. The content similarities suggest that some knowledge is transferable among the contexts. However, the differences in communication patterns reflect fundamental differences between handoff and surgery contexts in some teamwork processes. This research demonstrated that using communication analysis can uncover similarities and differences in team cognition and teamwork processes across work contexts. This in turn can help determine what knowledge and methods pertaining to team training, procedures, and technology are transferable across the contexts.     

Quantum Physical Symbol Systems

Because intelligent agents employ physically embodied cognitive systems to reason about the world, their cognitive abilities are constrained by the laws of physics. Scientists have used digital computers to develop and validate theories of physically embodied cognition. Computational theories of intelligence have advanced our understanding of the nature of intelligence and have yielded practically useful systems exhibiting some degree of intelligence. However, the view of cognition as algorithms running on digital computers rests on implicit assumptions about the physical world that are incorrect. Recently, the view is emerging of computing systems as goal-directed agents, evolving during problem solving toward improved world models and better task performance. A full realization of this vision requires a new logic for computing that incorporates learning from experience as an intrinsic part of the logic, and that permits full exploitation of the quantum nature of the physical world. This paper proposes a theory of physically embodied cognitive agents founded upon first-order logic, Bayesian decision theory, and quantum physics. An abstract architecture for a physically embodied cognitive agent is presented. The cognitive aspect is represented as a Bayesian decision theoretic agent; the physical aspect is represented as a quantum process; and these aspects are related through von Neumann’s principle of psycho-physical parallelism. Alternative metaphysical positions regarding the meaning of quantum probabilities and the role of efficacious choices by agents are discussed in relation to the abstract agent architecture. The concepts are illustrated with an extended example from the domain of science fiction.     

Computational theories of mind,and Fodor's analysis of neural network behaviour

The purpose of this paper is to examine critically Jerry Fodor's views of the limits of computational neural network approaches to understand intelligence. Fodor distinguishes between two different approaches to computationally modelling intelligence, and while he raises problems with both, he is more concerned with the approach taken by those who make use of neural network models of intelligence or cognition. Fodor's claims regarding neural networks are found wanting, and the implications of these shortcomings for computational modelling of cognition are discussed.     

Enactive artificial intelligence: Investigating the systemic organization of life and mind

The embodied and situated approach to artificial intelligence (AI) has matured and become a viable alternative to traditional computationalist approaches with respect to the practical goal of building artificial agents, which can behave in a robust and flexible manner under changing real-world conditions. Nevertheless, some concerns have recently been raised with regard to the sufficiency of current embodied AI for advancing our scientific understanding of intentional agency. While from an engineering or computer science perspective this limitation might not be relevant, it is of course highly relevant for AI researchers striving to build accurate models of natural cognition. We argue that the biological foundations of enactive cognitive science can provide the conceptual tools that are needed to diagnose more clearly the shortcomings of current embodied AI. In particular, taking an enactive perspective points to the need for AI to take seriously the organismic roots of autonomous agency and sense-making. We identify two necessary systemic requirements, namely constitutive autonomy and adaptivity, which lead us to introduce two design principles of enactive AI. It is argued that the development of such enactive AI poses a significant challenge to current methodologies. However, it also provides a promising way of eventually overcoming the current limitations of embodied AI, especially in terms of providing fuller models of natural embodied cognition. Finally, some practical implications and examples of the two design principles of enactive AI are also discussed.     

Walking partner robot chatting about scenery

ABSTRACT

We believe that many future scenarios will exist where a partner robot will talk with people on walks. To improve the user experience, we aim to endow robots with the capability to select an appropriate conversation topics by allowing them to start chatting about a topic that matches the current scenery and to extend it based on the user's interest and involvement in it. We implemented a function to compute the similarities between utterances and scenery by comparing their topic vectors. First, we convert the scenery into a list of words by leveraging Google Cloud Vision library [Google Cloud Vision Api [Online]. Available from: https://cloud.google.com/vision/] . We form a topic vector space with the Latent Dirichlet Allocation method and transform a list of words into a topic vector. Our system uses this function to choose (from an utterance database) the utterance that best matches the current scenery. Then it estimates the user's level of involvement in the chat with a simple rule based on the length of their responses. If the user is actively involved in the chat topic, the robot continues the current topic using pre-defined derivative utterances. If the user's involvement sags, the robot selects a new topic based on the current scenery. The topic selection that is based on the current scenery was proposed in our previous work [Totsuka R, Satake S, Kanda T, et al. Is a robot a better walking partner if it associates utterances with visual scenes? ACM/IEEE Int. Conf. on Human–Robot Interaction (HRI2017), Aula der Wissenschaft, Vienna, Austria; 2017. p. 313–322]. Our main contribution is the whole chat system, which includes the user's involvement estimation. We implemented our system with a shoulder-mounted robot and conducted a user study to evaluate its effectiveness. Our experimental results show that users evaluated the robot with the proposed system as a better walking partner than one that randomly chose utterances.     

Interactivist–constructivist foundations for embodying attention

This article discusses the increasing use of ideas from, and consistency with, the embodiment program in artificial intelligence (AI) and cognitive science. A model is embodied if it is (1) functionally grounded in behavioral regulation and (2) strongly constrained by both the physical and computational parameters of its implementation. The main goal of this is to put forward some dynamical foundations for embodying attention. A recent embodied model of attention is discussed in this context. It is shown that although the model's framework qualifies as embodied, its specific implementation does not. From here, its framework is used to develop a reconstruction of the model's dynamics, from which a new implementation which fits more closely into the embodiment program can be developed in the future. A general strategy of using dynamic considerations to constrain the development of embodied models is in this way advanced.     

Particularism,Analogy, and Moral Cognition

‘Particularism’ and ‘generalism’ refer to families of positions in the philosophy of moral reasoning, with the former playing down the importance of principles, rules or standards, and the latter stressing their importance. Part of the debate has taken an empirical turn, and this turn has implications for AI research and the philosophy of cognitive modeling. In this paper, Jonathan Dancy’s approach to particularism (arguably one of the best known and most radical approaches) is questioned both on logical and empirical grounds. Doubts are raised over whether Dancy’s brand of particularism can adequately explain the graded nature of similarity assessments in analogical arguments. Also, simple recurrent neural network models of moral case classification are presented and discussed. This is done to raise concerns about Dancy’s suggestion that neural networks can help us to understand how we could classify situations in a way that is compatible with his particularism. Throughout, the idea of a surveyable standard—one with restricted length and complexity—plays a key role. Analogical arguments are taken to involve multidimensional similarity assessments, and surveyable contributory standards are taken to be attempts to articulate the dimensions of similarity that may exist between cases. This work will be of relevance both to those who have interests in computationally modeling human moral cognition and to those who are interested in how such models may or may not improve our philosophical understanding of such cognition.     

Reputation rating modeling for open environment lack of communication by using online social cognition

This paper defines the available reputation rating models at present from the viewpoint of set theory. Furthermore, to solve the problem that present reputation models fail in the condition of open environment without previous exchanging information, i.e. lack of participant's communication and evidence, online social cognition reputation ratings model is offered. Information seeking online is used to achieve the online behaviors for rating and the reputation can be evaluated by social experience in virtual world based on individual and group social cognition according to the definition of online social cognition set in this model. As online social cognition experience is drawled from a sample set of the open system, when a newcomer enter the evaluation set default reasoning is used to guarantee the model's extension. Finally, the reputation rating evaluation in Health Care Products Web site demonstrates the validity of the model and the results also show that group online social cognition is better than individual's.