To hear—to say: the mediating presence of the healing witness

Illness and trauma challenge self-narratives. Traumatized individuals, unable to speak about their experiences, suffer in isolation. In this paper, I explore Kristeva’s theories of the speaking subject and signification, with its symbolic and semiotic modalities, to understand how a person comes to speak the unspeakable. In discussing the origin of the speaking subject, Kristeva employs Plato’s chora (related to choreo, “to make room for”). The chora reflects the mother’s preparation of the child’s entry into language and forms an interior darkroom, the reservoir of lived experience, from which self-narratives issue. Unable to speak of their suffering, traumatized individuals need someone to help them make room for a time of remembrance, someone who is a willing and capable listener. I call such a person a healing witness. Through the mediating presence of the healing witness, fragmented memories of trauma are recreated and incorporated into self-narratives that are sharable with others. Unfortunately, opportunities for witnessing are vanishing. In the last section, I examine the failure of modern media and communication technologies to bear (“hold,” “carry,” “transport”) acts of witnessing. I argue that they perturb the semiotic. According to Kristeva, meaning arises from the dialectical tension between the semiotic (drives and affects) and the symbolic (logic and rules) and is threatened by arid discourse, psychosomatic illnesses, and outbreaks of violence when the semiotic is not represented. Unless we open technology to the imaginary, we risk losing the capacity to bear witness to one another and to create narratives and connections that are meaningful.     

Pregroup Grammars and Chomsky’s Earliest Examples

Pregroups are partially ordered monoids in which each element has two “adjoints”. Pregroup grammars provide a computational approach to natural languages by assigning to each word in the mental dictionary a type, namely an element of the pregroup freely generated by a partially ordered set of basic types. In this expository article, the attempt is made to introduce linguists to a pregroup grammar of English by looking at Chomsky’s earliest examples.     

Rudolph M. Schindler—Proportion,Scale and the “Row”

Jin-Ho Park interprets Schindler’s “reference frames in space” as set forth in his 1916 lecture note on mathematics, proportion, and architecture, in the context of Robinson’s1898–99 articles in the Architectural Record. Schindler’s unpublished, handwritten notes provide a source for his concern for “rhythmic” dimensioning in architecture. He uses a system in which rectangular dimensions are arranged in “rows.” Architectural examples of Schindler’s Shampay, Braxton-Shore and How Houses illustrate the principles.     

Beyond Mind: How Brains Make up Artificial Cognitive Systems

What I call semiotic brains are brains that make up a series of signs and that are engaged in making or manifesting or reacting to a series of signs: through this semiotic activity they are at the same time engaged in “being minds” and so in thinking intelligently. An important effect of this semiotic activity of brains is a continuous process of disembodiment of mind that exhibits a new cognitive perspective on the mechanisms underling the semiotic emergence of meaning processes. Indeed at the roots of sophisticated thinking abilities there is a process of disembodiment of mind that presents a new cognitive perspective on the role of external models, representations, and various semiotic materials. Taking advantage of Turing’s comparison between “unorganized” brains and “logical” and “practical” machines” this paper illustrates the centrality to cognition of the disembodiment of mind from the point of view of the interplay between internal and external representations, both mimetic and creative. The last part of the paper describes the concept of mimetic mind I have introduced to shed new cognitive and philosophical light on the role of computational modeling and on the decline of the so-called Cartesian computationalism.     

Doing Virtually Nothing: Awareness and Accountability in Massively Multiplayer Online Worlds

To date the most popular and sophisticated types of virtual worlds can be found in the area of video gaming, especially in the genre of Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORPG). Game developers have made great strides in achieving game worlds that look and feel increasingly realistic. However, despite these achievements in the visual realism of virtual game worlds, they are much less sophisticated when it comes to modeling face-to-face interaction. In face-to-face, ordinary social activities are “accountable,” that is, people use a variety of kinds of observational information about what others are doing in order to make sense of others’ actions and to tightly coordinate their own actions with others. Such information includes: (1) the real-time unfolding of turns-at-talk; (2) the observability of embodied activities; and (3) the direction of eye gaze for the purpose of gesturing. But despite the fact that today’s games provide virtual bodies, or “avatars,” for players to control, these avatars display much less information about players’ current state than real bodies do. In this paper, we discuss the impact of the lack of each type of information on players’ ability to tightly coordinate their activities and offer guidelines for improving coordination and, ultimately, the players’ social experience. “They come here to talk turkey with suits from around the world, and they consider it just as good as a face-to-face. They more or less ignore what is being said—a lot gets lost in translation, after all. They pay attention to the facial expressions and body language of the people they are talking to. And that’s how they know what’s going on inside a person’s head—by condensing fact from the vapor of nuance.” —Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash, 1992     

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.     

Simultaneous cognitive origin of life and information

Shannon’s information quantity I(E) = log(1/P(E)) is defined under an assumption of the existence of a “cognitive subjective entity” capable of judging yes/no or occurred/not-occurred of an event E (which occurs with a probability P(E)). The final acceptor/user of information is a living individual, although first and/or intermediate sender(s) and/or acceptor(s) of information may be either living individual(s) or nonliving element(s) or man-made machine(s). Therefore we can conclude that information is a most essential character of living individuals, and that information and life must have emerged simultaneously as a “minimum cognitive system” (MCS). Since then, living individuals/lives must have evolved as “self-revising learning neural network machines” capable of “active evolution”. How MCS could have emerged was discussed.     

Generating novel memories by integration of chaotic neural network modules

A principle of integrating neural network modules based on chaotic dynamics was studied on our two-moduled Nozawa model. Chaotic neural networks represent each embedded pattern as a low-dimensional periodic orbit, and the others are shown as high-dimensional chaotic attractors. This is equivalent to W. Freeman’s “I don’t know” and “I know” states. In particular, we noted that the combination of two-way inputs to each neural network module conflicted with embedded Hebbian correspondence. It was found that the interaction between the modules generated a novel “I know” state in addition to the embedded representation. Chaotic neural network modules can autonomously generate novel memories or functions by this interaction. The result suggests a functional integration in neural networks as it ought to be, e.g., feature binding and gestalt. This work was presented, in part, at the Fourth International Symposium on Artificial Life and Robotics, Oita, Japan, January 19–22, 1999     

BOSS QUATTRO: an open system for parametric design

During the two past decades, engineers have shown growing interest in automatic structural optimization techniques. These were first used to solve analytical problems and were then rapidly adapted to structural sizing problems coupled to finite element analysis software. Moreover, shape optimization problems featuring complex CAD systems were addressed in the early 90’s. This article describes the capabilities of the optimization product developed by SAMTECH S.A. in Liège, Belgium. One will read here what led the company and a group of research engineers at LTAS (Laboratoire des Techniques Aéronautiques et Spatiales, Université de Liège) to the achievement of a so-called open system for parametric design. The BOSS/Quattro package is a general-purpose design program. It includes several “engines”: optimization, parametric studies, “Monte-Carlo” studies, “design of experiments” and updating. It is interesting to note that the “engines” can be easily mixed through the graphical user interface (GUI), and, this, with several analysis models. Received December 30, 2000     

Scheduling algorithms for procrastinators

This paper presents scheduling algorithms for procrastinators, where the speed that a procrastinator executes a job increases as the due date approaches. We give optimal off-line scheduling policies for linearly increasing speed functions. We then explain the computational/numerical issues involved in implementing this policy. We next explore the online setting, showing that there exist adversaries that force any online scheduling policy to miss due dates. This impossibility result motivates the problem of minimizing the maximum interval stretch of any job; the interval stretch of a job is the job’s flow time divided by the job’s due date minus release time. We show that several common scheduling strategies, including the “hit-the-highest-nail” strategy beloved by procrastinators, have arbitrarily large maximum interval stretch. Then we give the “thrashing” scheduling policy and show that it is a Θ(1) approximation algorithm for the maximum interval stretch. Research of M.A. Bender was supported in part by NSF Grants CCR-0208670, CCF-0621439/0621425, CCF-0540897/05414009, CCF-0634793/0632838, and CNS-0627645.     

The Virtual Scylla: an exploration of “serious games”, artificial life and simulation complexity

This paper addresses the integration of artificial life simulations with interactive games-based technologies and describes how the results are being exploited not only for scientific visualisation and education, but also for fundamental research into simulation complexity, focusing on the behavioural representation of species in fragile or long-vanished landscapes and ecosystems. Earlier research is described that supported the development of a virtual recreation of a submerged Mesolithic river valley, discovered during petrochemical surveys of the Southern Basin of the North Sea. Using pollen sample records and vegetation predictions from previous studies, a new alife “engine” was developed that simulated the interaction between “artificialised” vegetation and environmental factors, thus helping researchers to postulate pre-glacial melting migratory and settlement patterns of ancient civilisations from continental Europe to the British Isles. More recently, and to take advantage of the existence of a more accessible and living ecosystem, work has been conducted in collaboration with the UK’s National Marine Aquarium, this time focusing on the Scylla Artificial Reef—a Royal Navy frigate scuttled off the coast of Cornwall in South West England. The resulting “serious games”-based test beds are now providing the foundation for scientific investigations into how models and simulations of marine ecologies behave under different measures of complexity. The exploitation of the artificial life and underwater rendering efforts in others areas, including education and naval training, are also described.     

Trust, privacy, and legal protection in the use of software with surreptitiously installed operations: An empirical evaluation

The class of software which is “surreptitiously installed on a user’s computer and monitors a user’s activity and reports back to a third party on that behavior” is referred to as spyware “(Stafford and Urbaczewski in Communications of the AIS 14:291–306, 2004)”. It is a strategic imperative that software vendors, who either embed surreptitious data collection and other operations in legitimate software applications or whose software is unwittingly used as a delivery vehicle for surreptitious operations, understand users’ perceptions of trust, privacy, and legal protection of such software to remain competitive. This paper develops and tests a research model to explore application software users’ perceptions in the use of software with embedded surreptitious operations. An experiment was undertaken to examine whether the presence of spyware in application software impacts users’ perceptions and beliefs about trustworthiness of the application software, privacy control of the software vendor, United States legal protection, and overall trust of the software vendor. The results indicate users of software with spyware, versus users of software without spyware, have lower trust perceptions of a software vendor. Further examination of trustworthiness as a multi-dimensional construct reveals a software vendor’s competence in appropriately using private user information collected and the user’s belief that the vendor will abide by acceptable principles in information exchange are important influences in gaining users’ overall trust in a vendor. User trust in software utilization is critical for a software vendor’s success because without it, users may avoid a vendor’s software should the presence of spyware be discovered. Software vendors should respond to the strategic necessity to gain users’ trust. Vendors must institute proactive and protective measures to demonstrate that their software should be trusted. These protections could take the form of technological approaches or government legislation, or both.

Opinion helpfulness prediction in the presence of “words of few mouths”

This paper identifies a widely existing phenomenon in social media content, which we call the “words of few mouths” phenomenon. This phenomenon challenges the development of recommender systems based on users’ online opinions by presenting additional sources of uncertainty. In the context of predicting the “helpfulness” of a review document based on users’ online votes on other reviews (where a user’s vote on a review is either HELPFUL or UNHELPFUL), the “words of few mouths” phenomenon corresponds to the case where a large fraction of the reviews are each voted only by very few users. Focusing on the “review helpfulness prediction” problem, we illustrate the challenges associated with the “words of few mouths” phenomenon in the training of a review helpfulness predictor. We advocate probabilistic approaches for recommender system development in the presence of “words of few mouths”. More concretely, we propose a probabilistic metric as the training target for conventional machine learning based predictors. Our empirical study using Support Vector Regression (SVR) augmented with the proposed probability metric demonstrates advantages of incorporating probabilistic methods in the training of the predictors. In addition to this “partially probabilistic” approach, we also develop a logistic regression based probabilistic model and correspondingly a learning algorithm for review helpfulness prediction. We demonstrate experimentally the superior performance of the logistic regression method over SVR, the prior art in review helpfulness prediction.     

Getting closer: tailored human–computer speech dialog

This paper presents an advanced call center, which adapts presentation and interaction strategy to properties of the caller such as age, gender, and emotional state. User studies on interactive voice response (IVR) systems have shown that these properties can be used effectively to “tailor” services to users or user groups who do not maintain personal preferences, e.g., because they do not use the service on a regular basis. The adopted approach to achieve individualization of services, without being able to personalize them, is based on the analysis of a caller’s voice. This paper shows how this approach benefits service providers by being able to target entertainment and recommendation options. It also shows how this analysis at the same time benefits the customer, as it can increase accessibility of IVR systems to user segments which have particular expectations or which do not cope well with a “one size fits all” system. The paper summarizes the authors’ current work on component technologies, such as emotion detection, age and gender recognition on telephony speech, and presents results of usability and acceptability tests as well as an architecture to integrate these technologies in future multi-modal contact centers. It is envisioned that these will eventually serve customers with an avatar representation of an agent and tailored interaction strategies, matching powerful output capabilities with advanced analysis of the user’s input.

“Carnivore personal edition”: exploring distributed data surveillance

The goal of this paper is to offer, in straight forward terms, some practical insight into distributed data surveillance. I will use the software project Carnivore as a case study. Carnivore is a public domain riff on the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation’s software “Carnivore,” which was developed to perform electronic wiretaps of email. As founder of the Radical Software Group (RSG), and lead developer on the Carnivore project, I will describe the technological, philosophical, and political reasons for launching the project. I will also offer an account of the development cycle of the core engine, identify trends in “client” interface designs, and present a series of design challenges that still remain.Alexander R. Galloway is an assistant professor at New York University. He is author of Protocol: How Control Exists After Decentralization (Cambridge, The MIT Press, 2004), and a founding member of the software development group RSG.     

Mobile computer Web-application design in medicine: some research based guidelines

Designing Web-applications is considerably different for mobile computers (handhelds, Personal Digital Assistants) than for desktop computers. The screen size and system resources are more limited and end-users interact differently. Consequently, detecting handheld-browsers on the server side and delivering pages optimized for a small client form factor is inevitable. The authors discuss their experiences during the design and development of an application for medical research, which was designed for both mobile and personal desktop computers. The investigations presented in this paper highlight some ways in which Web content can be adapted to make it more accessible to mobile computing users. As a result, the authors summarize their experiences in design guidelines and provide an overview of those factors which have to be taken into consideration when designing software for mobile computers. “The old computing is about what computers can do, the new computing is about what people can do” (Leonardo’s laptop: human needs and the new computing technologies, MIT Press, 2002).     

Giotto and Renaissance Perspective

A careful geometric examination of the blind arcades (coretti) depicted in Giotto’s fresco on the choir wall in the Arena Chapel in Padua shows that they were designed and painted according to the rules of what I term “progressive costruzione legittima” and thus represent simulations of visual images. Because no images of this type have come down from Classical Antiquity and because the literary references remain silent in this respect, the coretti must be considered, according to today’s knowledge, the oldest monuments manifesting the application of the costruzione legittima. This means the history of the central (linear) perspective must be rewritten. In any case it was not a Renaissance invention. I expressly agree with the researchers who see Giotto’s painting in conjunction with the findings of the Scholastic “optics specialists” (such as Grosseteste, Witelo, Bacon), who all stood with their feet firmly planted on the ground of Euclid’s rigidly geometrically conceived visual theory and its Arab commentators.     

Weak Derandomization of Weak Algorithms: Explicit Versions of Yao��s Lemma

A simple averaging argument shows that given a randomized algorithm A and a function f such that for every input x, Pr[A(x) = f(x)] ≥ 1 − ρ (where the probability is over the coin tosses of A), there exists a non-uniform deterministic algorithm B “of roughly the same complexity” such that Pr[B(x) = f(x)] ≥ 1 − ρ (where the probability is over a uniformly chosen input x). This implication is often referred to as “the easy direction of Yao’s lemma” and can be thought of as “weak derandomization” in the sense that B is deterministic but only succeeds on most inputs. The implication follows as there exists a fixed value r′ for the random coins of A such that “hardwiring r′ into A” produces a deterministic algorithm B. However, this argument does not give a way to explicitly construct B.     

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.