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Digital Immortality

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In this conversation, Siân Bayne explains theoretical and practical underpinnings of the Digital Education Group's Manifesto for teaching online. She defines posthumanism in relation to transhumanism, and describes the relationships between posthumanism and human learning. The conversation moves on to the historic concepts of cyberspace and cyborg. While these concepts have become slightly obsolete, the notions of smooth and striated cyberspaces, as well as the notion of cyborg learner, still offer a lot of value for contemporary digital learning. The conversation introduces the feeling of uncanny as a useful perspective for discussing the experience of digital learning. It moves on to show that approaching digital education through the lens of (digital) cultural studies is slightly dated, and offers another way of looking at digital experiences through social topologies of distance students. It analyses the metaphor of the network, shows that it still offers a lot of value, and concludes that it should be complemented by other approaches and metaphors. Looking at past concepts, it analyses the main problems with Prensky's digital native - digital immigrant binary, and calls for its complete abandon. The conversation looks into the relationships between open access to information and open education, links openness and creativity, and shows that every act of opening is simultaneously an act of closure. On that basis, it dismantles the myth that open education is a democratizing, liberating, and empowering end in itself. The conversation shows that distance is a positive principle, and that education at a distance can indeed be better than classroom education. It analyses the relationships between big data, algorithms, and the politics of data science, and calls for balancing interests of corporations and the interests of the academy. It explores teacher automation through Bayne's experience with teacherbots, and analyses the present and future of the Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). It analyses important contributions to the field by the networked learning community, and concludes that networked learning (NL) approach is much more advanced than the technology enhanced learning (TEL) approach. Finally, it advocates reaching beyond the entrenched, embodied legacy of humanism within education, and calls for approaching contemporary digital learning from a critical posthumanist perspective.
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Many biological monitoring projects rely on acoustic detection of birds. Despite increasingly large datasets, this detection is often manual or semi-automatic, requiring manual tuning/postprocessing. We review the state of the art in automatic bird sound detection, and identify a widespread need for tuning-free and species-agnostic approaches. We introduce new datasets and an IEEE research challenge to address this need, to make possible the development of fully automatic algorithms for bird sound detection.
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The real-time skin deformation of 3D virtual human is one of the hot spots of research fields in 3D virtual human. On the basis of smooth skinning deformation algorithm, this paper proposes a whole body skin deformation method of real-time in motion state, which uses the simple polygon surface model to virtualize the human skin geometry model and uses the bone skin algorithm to drive the skin deformation. This method can simplify the bone level, decrease the complexity of skeleton subspace, simplify deformation algorithm, divide the skin into rigid areas and flexible areas to reduce the amount of calculation, and improve the efficiency of the deformation. At the same time, combining with the quaternion interpolation method, it further improves the effect of skin deformation of large-range movement area such as shoulder and hip. This method is applicable to any virtual human model of grid skin organization, and could generate real-time and realistic skin deformation, on the condition of any motion.
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Beginning with the premise that the human mind is fundamentally a computer, and extrapolating from the history of computer technology, which has yielded everincreasing processing speeds, some futurists forecast a time when it may become possible to upload the human brain to a computer and thereby attain enhanced powers and a sort of immortality. Such predictions add new meaning to the idiom of having one's mind in a cloud. They also raise profound ethical questions. The suggestion that brain uploading could be achieved safely suggests unbridled hubris. The belief that human identity could be faithfully replicated in a machine is possible only within a reductionistic, hence inadequate, understanding of the human person. A hypothetical post-neuron future in silicon could never be more than a collection of inauthentic human representations.
Conference Paper
Recent developments in character rigging and animation shape the computer graphics industry in general and visual effects in particular. Advances in deformation techniques, which include linear blend skinning, dual quaternion skinning and shape interpolation, meet with sophisticated muscle and skin simulations to produce more realistic results. Effects such as skin sliding, wrinkling and contact of subcutaneous fat and muscles become possible when simulating the anatomy of human-like characters as well as creatures in feature films. One of the main techniques adopted nowadays in the industry is the Finite Element Method (FEM) for deformable objects. Despite the life-like results, the setup cost to generate and tweak volumetric anatomical models for a FEM solver is not only very high, but it cannot easily guarantee the quality of the models either, in terms of simulation requirements. In a production environment in fact (see Fig. 1), models often require additional processing in order to be ready for FEM simulations. For example, self-intersections or interpenetrations in rest pose may result in unwanted forces from the collision detection and response algorithms that affect negatively the simulation at its start.
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Post-mortem profiles on social network sites serve as both an archive of the deceased person's life and a gathering place for friends and loved ones. Many existing systems utilize inheritance as a model for post-mortem data management. However, the social and networked nature of personal data on social media, as well as the memorializing practices in which friends engage, indicate that other approaches are necessary. In this paper, we articulate the design choices made throughout the development of Legacy Contact, a post-mortem data management solution designed and deployed at Facebook. Building on the duties and responsibilities identified by Brubaker et al., we describe how Legacy Contact was designed to honor last requests, provide information surrounding death, preserve the memory of the deceased, and facilitate memorializing practices. We provide details around the design of the Legacy Contact selection process, the functionality provided to legacy contacts after accounts have been memorialized, and changes made to post-mortem profiles.
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We review the First International Competition on Computational Models of Argumentation (ICCMA'15). The competition evaluated submitted solvers performance on four different computational tasks related to solving abstract argumentation frameworks. Each task evaluated solvers in ways that pushed the edge of existing performance by introducing new challenges. Despite being the first competition in this area, the high number of competitors entered, and differences in results, suggest that the competition will help shape the landscape of ongoing developments in argumentation theory solvers.
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There is a growing awareness of the significance and value that modelling using information technology can bring to the functionally oriented linguistic enterprise. This encompasses a spectrum of areas as diverse as concept modelling, language processing and grammar modelling, conversational agents, and the visualisation of complex linguistic information in a functional linguistic perspective. This edited volume offers a collection of papers dealing with different aspects of computational modelling of language and grammars, within a functional perspective at both the theoretical and application levels. As a result, this volume represents the first instance of contemporary functionally oriented computational treatments of a variety of important language and linguistic issues. This book presents current research on functionally oriented computational models of grammar, language processing and linguistics, concerned with a broadly functional computational linguistics that also contributes to our understanding of languages within a functional and cognitive linguistic, computational research agenda.
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Voice interaction with mobile devices has been focused on hands-free interaction or situations where visual interfaces are not applicable. In this paper we explore a subtler means of interaction -- speech recognition from continual, in the background, audio recording of conversations. We call this the 'continuous speech stream' and explore how it could be repurposed as user input. We analyse ten days of recorded audio from our participants, alongside corresponding interviews, to explore how systems might make use of extracts from this stream. Rather than containing directly actionable items, our data suggests that the continuous speech stream is a rich resource for identifying users' next actions, along with the interests and dispositions of those being recorded. Through design workshops we explored new interactions using the speech stream, and describe concepts for individual, shared and distributed use.
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Automultiscopic 3D displays allow a large number of viewers to experience 3D content simultaneously without the hassle of special glasses or head gear. Our display uses a dense array of video projectors to generate many images with high-angular density over a wide-field of view. As each user moves around the display, their eyes smoothly transition from one view to the next. The display is ideal for displaying life-size human subjects as it allows for natural personal interactions with 3D cues such as eye-gaze and spatial hand gestures. In this installation, we will explore "time-offset" interactions with recorded 3D human subjects.
Chapter
The main aim of the chapter is to describe how cognitive models, developed using the ACT-R cognitive architecture, can be integrated with the Unity game engine in order to support the intelligent control of virtual characters in both 2D and 3D virtual environments. ACT-R is a cognitive architecture that has been widely used to model various aspects of human cognition, such as learning, memory, problem-solving, reasoning and so on. Unity, on the other hand, is a very popular game engine that can be used to develop 2D and 3D environments for both game and non-game purposes. The ability to integrate ACT-R cognitive models with the Unity game engine thus supports the effort to create virtual characters that incorporate at least some of the capabilities and constraints of the human cognitive system.
Book
This book explores the philosophical and scientific arguments for free will skepticism and their implications. Skepticism about free will and moral responsibility has been on the rise in recent years. In fact, a significant number of philosophers, psychologists, and neuroscientists now either doubt or outright deny the existence of free will and/or moral responsibility—and the list of prominent skeptics appears to grow by the day. Given the profound importance that the concepts of free will and moral responsibility play in our lives—in understanding ourselves, society, and the law—it is important that we explore what is behind this new wave of skepticism. It is also important that we explore the potential consequences of skepticism for ourselves and society. This edited collection of new essays brings together an internationally recognized line-up of contributors, most of whom hold skeptical positions of some sort, to display and explore the leading arguments for free will skepticism and to debate their implications. It includes original contributions by Susan Blackmore, Thomas W. Clark, Mark Hallett, John-Dylan Haynes and Michael Pauen, Ted Honderich, Neil Levy, Thomas Nadelhoffer and Daniela Goya Tocchetto, Shaun Nichols, Derk Pereboom, Susan Pockett, Maureen Sie, Saul Smilansky, Galen Strawson, Manuel Vargas, Benjamin Vilhauer, and Bruce Waller.