Waiting for Tactile: Robotic and Virtual Experiences in the Fog

2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (3) ◽  
pp. 1-19
Author(s):  
Lucia Cascone ◽  
Aniello Castiglione ◽  
Michele Nappi ◽  
Fabio Narducci ◽  
Ignazio Passero
Keyword(s):  
Machine Learning ◽  
Direct Interaction ◽  
Social Robots ◽  
Partial Knowledge ◽  
Simulation Environment ◽  
Natural Interaction ◽  
The Past ◽  
Surrounding Environment ◽  
The Social ◽  
Virtual Experiences

Social robots adopt an emotional touch to interact with users inducing and transmitting humanlike emotions. Natural interaction with humans needs to be in real time and well grounded on the full availability of information on the environment. These robots base their way of communicating on direct interaction (touch, listening, view), supported by a range of sensors on the surrounding environment that provide a radially central and partial knowledge on it. Over the past few years, social robots have been demonstrated to implement different features, going from biometric applications to the fusion of machine learning environmental information collected on the edge. This article aims at describing the experiences performed and still ongoing and characterizes a simulation environment developed for the social robot Pepper that aims to foresee the new scenarios and benefits that tactile connectivity will enable.

Flourishing Isn’t Free: Paying Down Our Moral and Social Debt in Robotic Systems

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shannon Vallor
Keyword(s):  
Social Status ◽  
Risk Mitigation ◽  
Social Robotics ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
Social Robots ◽  
Sociotechnical Systems ◽  
Robotic Systems ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Social

The conversation about social robots and ethics has matured considerably over the years, moving beyond two inadequate poles: superficially utilitarian analyses of ethical ‘risks’ of social robots that fail to question the underlying sociotechnical systems and values driving robotics development, and speculative, empirically unfounded fears of robo-pocalypses that likewise leave those underlying systems and values unexamined and unchallenged. Today our perspective in the field is normatively richer and more empirically grounded. However, there is still work to be done. In the transition from risk-mitigation that accepts the social status quo, to deeper thinking about how to design different worlds in which we might flourish with social robots, we nevertheless have not reckoned with the moral and social debt already accumulated in existing robotics systems and our broader culture of sociotechnical innovation. We relish our creative and philosophical imaginings of a future in which we live well with robots, but without a serious reckoning with the past and present, and the legacies of harm and neglect that must be redressed and repaired in order for those futures to be possible and sustainable. This talk explores those legacies and their accumulated debts, and what it will take to liberate social robotics from them.

scholarly journals Sustainable Accountability:   a Dualist Vedic Perspective

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Samuel David Stewart-Jacks
Keyword(s):  
The Self ◽  
Ancient India ◽  
The Past ◽  
Critical Realist ◽  
Surrounding Environment ◽  
Academic Scholarship ◽  
The Social ◽  
Realist Ontology ◽  
Forms Of Knowledge ◽  
Relative Factors

<p>This thesis offers a theory of sustainable accountability informed by Vedic philosophy. Although Vedic philosophy is often described as the philosophy of ancient India, this thesis will explain how relative factors, such as time and place, do not exclude one from experiencing the taste of what is described as the ripened fruit of the tree that is the Vedic literatures. The implications the Vedas have for sustainability stem mainly from their alternative notions of the self and its needs. The Vedas hold that upon a correct evaluation of the needs of the self, an individual will be completely satisfied and will therefore not desire to live and consume in a way that is destructive to their surrounding environment and its inhabitants. Within the Vedic paradigm there are two main divisions of thought - the dualist and non-dualist schools of philosophy. Because they differ in their conceptions of the self, these schools differ markedly in their notions of accountability, welfare and theories of sustainability and social change. Within the social accounting literature, a non-dualist theory of sustainable accountability has been given by Saravanamuthu (2006), but a dualist opinion has not yet been presented. This thesis seeks to introduce dualist Vedic philosophy and its theory of sustainability, and describe how a system of accountability could be constructed upon such a philosophy. In the past, academic scholarship has frowned upon sacred forms of knowledge such as the Vedas, and has considered their claims to be unverifiable. Therefore this thesis also asserts, using arguments from the critical realist ontology, that sacred forms of knowledge such as the Vedas should be admissible in academic circles.</p>

scholarly journals Sustainable Accountability:   a Dualist Vedic Perspective

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Samuel David Stewart-Jacks
Keyword(s):  
The Self ◽  
Ancient India ◽  
The Past ◽  
Critical Realist ◽  
Surrounding Environment ◽  
Academic Scholarship ◽  
The Social ◽  
Realist Ontology ◽  
Forms Of Knowledge ◽  
Relative Factors

<p>This thesis offers a theory of sustainable accountability informed by Vedic philosophy. Although Vedic philosophy is often described as the philosophy of ancient India, this thesis will explain how relative factors, such as time and place, do not exclude one from experiencing the taste of what is described as the ripened fruit of the tree that is the Vedic literatures. The implications the Vedas have for sustainability stem mainly from their alternative notions of the self and its needs. The Vedas hold that upon a correct evaluation of the needs of the self, an individual will be completely satisfied and will therefore not desire to live and consume in a way that is destructive to their surrounding environment and its inhabitants. Within the Vedic paradigm there are two main divisions of thought - the dualist and non-dualist schools of philosophy. Because they differ in their conceptions of the self, these schools differ markedly in their notions of accountability, welfare and theories of sustainability and social change. Within the social accounting literature, a non-dualist theory of sustainable accountability has been given by Saravanamuthu (2006), but a dualist opinion has not yet been presented. This thesis seeks to introduce dualist Vedic philosophy and its theory of sustainability, and describe how a system of accountability could be constructed upon such a philosophy. In the past, academic scholarship has frowned upon sacred forms of knowledge such as the Vedas, and has considered their claims to be unverifiable. Therefore this thesis also asserts, using arguments from the critical realist ontology, that sacred forms of knowledge such as the Vedas should be admissible in academic circles.</p>

scholarly journals Cyber Bullying Detection using Machine Learning

2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (9) ◽  
pp. 144-151
Author(s):  
Jai Mehta
Keyword(s):  
Machine Learning ◽  
Social Networks ◽  
Naive Bayes ◽  
Naïve Bayes ◽  
Cyber Bullying ◽  
Efficient System ◽  
The Past ◽  
The People ◽  
The Social ◽  
Information And Communication

Abstract: Cyber bullying has been increasing at an unfathomable rate with the rise of the internet and the increasing radius of the social networks. This increasing amount of cyber bullying serves to be a threat to many people who are an active part of these social networks, especially the people using the social media websites for posting information and communication. These crimes have affected many people and have also resulted in suicides. Thus we need an efficient system to detect these bullying attacks and reduce their amount. In the past machine learning models have been constructed to address this problem, but those models have not been very successful. In this paper we will discuss the latest technologies like Naive Bayes, SVM, BERT models, CNN and LSTM that have been applied in this area and compare their results. Keywords: Cyber Bullying, Social Network, Machine Learning, Naive Bayes, SVM, CNN

Dowagers, Debs, Nuns and Babies: The Politics of Nostalgia and the Older Woman in the British Sunday Night Television Serial

2013 ◽  
Vol 10 (4) ◽  
pp. 769-784 ◽  
Author(s):  
Estella Tincknell
Keyword(s):  
Older Women ◽  
Social Role ◽  
Mature Female ◽  
Older Woman ◽  
Distinctive Features ◽  
The Past ◽  
Political Position ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Uk ◽  
Popular Television

The extensive commercial success of two well-made popular television drama serials screened in the UK at prime time on Sunday evenings during the winter of 2011–12, Downton Abbey (ITV, 2010–) and Call the Midwife (BBC, 2012–), has appeared to consolidate the recent resurgence of the period drama during the 1990s and 2000s, as well as reassembling something like a mass audience for woman-centred realist narratives at a time when the fracturing and disassembling of such audiences seemed axiomatic. While ostensibly different in content, style and focus, the two programmes share a number of distinctive features, including a range of mature female characters who are sufficiently well drawn and socially diverse as to offer a profoundly pleasurable experience for the female viewer seeking representations of aging femininity that go beyond the sexualised body of the ‘successful ager’. Equally importantly, these two programmes present compelling examples of the ‘conjunctural text’, which appears at a moment of intense political polarisation, marking struggles over consent to a contemporary political position by re-presenting the past. Because both programmes foreground older women as crucial figures in their respective communities, but offer very different versions of the social role and ideological positioning that this entails, the underlying politics of such nostalgia becomes apparent. A critical analysis of these two versions of Britain's past thus highlights the ideological investments involved in period drama and the extent to which this ‘cosy’ genre may legitimate or challenge contemporary political claims.

Disciplining Polenta: A Parody on the Politics of Saving Food

2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-11
Author(s):  
Zachary Nowak ◽  
Bradley M. Jones ◽  
Elisa Ascione
Keyword(s):  
Food Products ◽  
Social Value ◽  
Traditional Food ◽  
Traditional Foods ◽  
Time And Space ◽  
Historical Sources ◽  
Scholarly Literature ◽  
Identity Creation ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Social

This article begins with a parody, a fictitious set of regulations for the production of “traditional” Italian polenta. Through analysis of primary and secondary historical sources we then discuss the various meanings of which polenta has been the bearer through time and space in order to emphasize the mutability of the modes of preparation, ingredients, and the social value of traditional food products. Finally, we situate polenta within its broader cultural, political, and economic contexts, underlining the uses and abuses of rendering foods as traditional—a process always incomplete, often contested, never organic. In stirring up the past and present of polenta and placing it within both the projects of Italian identity creation and the broader scholarly literature on culinary tradition and taste, we emphasize that for so-called traditional foods to be saved, they must be continually reinvented.

Spatiotemporal Changes of Riverbed and Surrounding Environment in Yongding River (Beijing section) in the Past 40 Years

2020 ◽  
Vol 64 (4) ◽  
pp. 40407-1-40407-13 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ran Pang ◽  
He Huang ◽  
Tri Dev Acharya
Keyword(s):  
Economic Development ◽  
Water Conservation ◽  
Human Activities ◽  
Urban Areas ◽  
Water Volume ◽  
Cropland Area ◽  
The Past ◽  
Surrounding Environment ◽  
Spatiotemporal Changes ◽  
Yongding River

Abstract Yongding River is one of the five major river systems in Beijing. It is located to the west of Beijing. It has influenced culture along its basin. The river supports both rural and urban areas. Furthermore, it influences economic development, water conservation, and the natural environment. However, during the past few decades, due to the combined effect of increasing population and economic activities, a series of changes have led to problems such as the reduction in water volume and the exposure of the riverbed. In this study, remote sensing images were used to derive land cover maps and compare spatiotemporal changes during the past 40 years. As a result, the following data were found: forest changed least; cropland area increased to a large extent; bareland area was reduced by a maximum of 63%; surface water area in the study area was lower from 1989 to 1999 because of the excessive use of water in human activities, but it increased by 92% from 2010 to 2018 as awareness about protecting the environment arose; there was a small increase in the built-up area, but this was more planned. These results reveal that water conservancy construction, agroforestry activities, and increasing urbanization have a great impact on the surrounding environment of the Yongding River (Beijing section). This study discusses in detail how the current situation can be attributed to of human activities, policies, economic development, and ecological conservation Furthermore, it suggests improvement by strengthening the governance of the riverbed and the riverside. These results and discussion can be a reference and provide decision support for the management of southwest Beijing or similar river basins in peri-urban areas.

Same Address, Different Doors: Post-Heritage Deconstruction of the Heritage Household in Upstairs Downstairs in the 1970s and 2010s

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
William Abbiss
Keyword(s):  
Final Section ◽  
Social Structures ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Past ◽  
War Narrative ◽  
Critical History ◽  
The Social ◽  
Fourth Series ◽  
History Of ◽  
Multiple Episodes

This article offers a ‘post-heritage’ reading of both iterations of Upstairs Downstairs: the LondonWeekend Television (LWT) series (1971–5) and its shortlived BBC revival (2010–12). Identifying elements of subversion and subjectivity allows scholarship on the LWT series to be reassessed, recognising occasions where it challenges rather than supports the social structures of the depicted Edwardian past. The BBC series also incorporates the post-heritage element of self-consciousness, acknowledging the parallel between its narrative and the production’s attempts to recreate the success of its 1970s predecessor. The article’s first section assesses the critical history of the LWT series, identifying areas that are open to further study or revised readings. The second section analyses the serialised war narrative of the fourth series of LWT’s Upstairs, Downstairs (1974), revealing its exploration of female identity across multiple episodes and challenging the notion that the series became more male and upstairs dominated as it progressed. The third section considers the BBC series’ revised concept, identifying the shifts in its main characters’ positions in society that allow the series’ narrative to question the past it evokes. This will be briefly contrasted with the heritage stability of Downton Abbey (ITV, 2010–15). The final section considers the household of 165 Eaton Place’s function as a studio space, which the BBC series self-consciously adopts in order to evoke the aesthetics of prior period dramas. The article concludes by suggesting that the barriers to recreating the past established in the BBC series’ narrative also contributed to its failure to match the success of its earlier iteration.

Same Address, Different Doors: Post-Heritage Deconstruction of the Heritage Household in Upstairs Downstairs in the 1970s and 2010s

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
William Abbiss
Keyword(s):  
Final Section ◽  
Social Structures ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Past ◽  
War Narrative ◽  
Critical History ◽  
The Social ◽  
Fourth Series ◽  
History Of ◽  
Multiple Episodes

This article offers a ‘post-heritage’ reading of both iterations of Upstairs Downstairs: the LondonWeekend Television (LWT) series (1971–5) and its shortlived BBC revival (2010–12). Identifying elements of subversion and subjectivity allows scholarship on the LWT series to be reassessed, recognising occasions where it challenges rather than supports the social structures of the depicted Edwardian past. The BBC series also incorporates the post-heritage element of self-consciousness, acknowledging the parallel between its narrative and the production’s attempts to recreate the success of its 1970s predecessor. The article’s first section assesses the critical history of the LWT series, identifying areas that are open to further study or revised readings. The second section analyses the serialised war narrative of the fourth series of LWT’s Upstairs, Downstairs (1974), revealing its exploration of female identity across multiple episodes and challenging the notion that the series became more male and upstairs dominated as it progressed. The third section considers the BBC series’ revised concept, identifying the shifts in its main characters’ positions in society that allow the series’ narrative to question the past it evokes. This will be briefly contrasted with the heritage stability of Downton Abbey (ITV, 2010–15). The final section considers the household of 165 Eaton Place’s function as a studio space, which the BBC series self-consciously adopts in order to evoke the aesthetics of prior period dramas. The article concludes by suggesting that the barriers to recreating the past established in the BBC series’ narrative also contributed to its failure to match the success of its earlier iteration.

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