The Role of Development in Computational Systems

Author(s):  
R. Tateson
Author(s):  
Ben Kei Daniel

Regardless of any approach taken for examining social capital, researchers continuously converge on some key issues such as trust and yet diverge on several others about concrete and consistent indicators for measuring social capital. Many researchers believe that presence or absences of social capital can be solely linked to trusting relationships people build with each other as well as social institutions of civil engagement. It is not clearly known however, whether trust itself is a precondition for generating social capital or whether there are other intermediary variables that can influence the role of trust in creating social capital. In addition, similar to social capital, the definition of trust is problematic and it remains a nebulous concept and equally, with many dimensions. Interests in the analysis of trust are wide spread among many disciplines, notably policy analysis, economic development, reliability and security of distributed computational systems and many others. The variety of approaches currently employed to investigate trust and different interpretations of its role in fostering social capital has resulted into a diverse array of knowledge about the concept and its relationship to social capital. This Chapter provides a broader overview of work on trust. It discusses how researchers have used trust as a proxy for measuring social capital.


Author(s):  
Fernando Luís-Ferreira ◽  
Catarina Marques-Lucena ◽  
João Sarraipa ◽  
Ricardo Jardim-Goncalves

Emotions are what make us human and emotions are what make us different. A person can make a list of such expressions about the role of human emotions, as they play a central role in our lives, in our interactions with others and the surrounding environment. Emotions are in a broad sense the regulators of our interaction with the world as they play a central role in our perception of the world and in our knowledge construction. In another angle, sensations are our immediate detector of the surrounding environment as, since ever, we see, touch and smell what is around us, we ear friendly voices or run from predator’s sounds and taste food that keep us alive. Both emotions and sensations can be used to describe our living and our main interactions with the world. However, despite that important role of senses and emotions, there is a poor representation of sensorial information and lack of understanding of emotions from the side of computational systems. Subsequently it is noticeable the absence of support to acquire and fully represent human sensorial experience and lack of ability to represent, and appropriately react, from those systems to emotional activity. The proposed work consists in developing a framework that acquires knowledge about human emotions from self-reporting or the interaction with Internet objects and media. In particular, it intends to facilitate their emotions description at the Internet from proposed samples of sensorial information allowing a later management of that knowledge for the most diverse objectives, as an example, for searching objects or media through similarities of emotional and sensorial patterns.


2003 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 125-155 ◽  
Author(s):  
Terry Knight

The concept of emergence has its roots in 19th-century philosophy. Today it is central to many computational systems which retain the hallmarks of emergence laid out much earlier. The role of emergence in creative design and its unique embodiment in shape grammars have been emphasized by March, Stiny, and others. Shape grammars generate emergent shapes—shapes not predefined in a grammar. Emergent shapes are not only the output of a shape grammar computation; they can be the input for further computation. The history of emergence and its characterization in shape grammars are discussed here. Different sorts of shape emergence in grammars are then distinguished: anticipated, possible, and unanticipated. Unanticipated emergent shapes are shapes not premeditated by the author or user of a grammar. Generally, unanticipated shapes require on-the-spot definitions of rules to compute with them. However, for some interesting design problems, it is possible to know in advance what to do with unanticipated shapes, and to predefine rules accordingly. Special rules for computing with unanticipated shapes are proposed here. These rules allow for processes that have previously been handled extragrammatically—outside of grammars—to be handled within grammars. Examples of applications of these rules within a single grammar and across parallel grammars are given.


2010 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 7-15 ◽  
Author(s):  
Denis Noble

This article uses an integrative systems biological view of the relationship between genotypes and phenotypes to clarify some conceptual problems in biological debates about causality. The differential (gene-centric) view is incomplete in a sense analogous to using differentiation without integration in mathematics. Differences in genotype are frequently not reflected in significant differences in phenotype as they are buffered by networks of molecular interactions capable of substituting an alternative pathway to achieve a given phenotype characteristic when one pathway is removed. Those networks integrate the influences of many genes on each phenotype so that the effect of a modification in DNA depends on the context in which it occurs. Mathematical modelling of these interactions can help to understand the mechanisms of buffering and the contextual-dependence of phenotypic outcome, and so to represent correctly and quantitatively the relations between genomes and phenotypes. By incorporating all the causal factors in generating a phenotype, this approach also highlights the role of non-DNA forms of inheritance, and of the interactions at multiple levels.


2021 ◽  
Vol 4 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicole R. Holliday

This study tests the effects of intonational contours and filtering conditions on listener judgments of ethnicity to arrive at a more comprehensive understanding on how prosody influences these judgments, with implications for austomatic speech recognition systems as well as speech synthesis. In a perceptual experiment, 40 American English listeners heard phrase-long clips which were controlled for pitch accent type and focus marking. Each clip contained either two H* (high) or two L+H* (low high) pitch accents and a L-L% (falling) boundary tone, and had also previously been labelled for broad or narrow focus. Listeners rated clips in two tasks, one with unmodified stimuli and one with stimuli lowpass filtered at 400 Hz, and were asked to judge whether the speaker was “Black” or “White”. In the filtered condition, tokens with the L+H* pitch accent were more likely to be rated as “Black”, with an interaction such that broad focus enhanced this pattern, supporting earlier findings that listeners may perceive African American Language as having more variation in possible pitch accent meanings. In the unfiltered condition, tokens with the L+H* pitch accent were less likely to be rated as Black, with no effect of focus, likely due to the fact that listeners relied more heavily on available segmental information in this condition. These results enhance our understanding of cues listeners rely on in making social judgments about speakers, especially in ethnic identification and linguistic profiling, by highlighting perceptual differences due to listening environment as well as predicted meaning of specific intonational contours. They also contribute to our understanding of the role of how human listeners interpret meaning within a holistic context, which has implications for the construction of computational systems designed to replicate the properties of natural language. In particular, they have important applicability to speech synthesis and speech recognition programs, which are often limited in their capacities due to the fact that they do not make such holistic sociolinguistic considerations of the meanings of input or output speech.


2015 ◽  
Vol 21 (3) ◽  
pp. 307-312 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mitchell Whitelaw

Accretor, by the Dutch artists Erwin Driessens and Maria Verstappen, is a generative artwork that adopts and adapts artificial life techniques to produce intricate three-dimensional forms. This article introduces and analyzes Accretor, considering the enigmatic quality of the generated objects and in particular the role of materiality in this highly computational work. Accretor demonstrates a tangled continuity between digital and physical domains, where the constraints and affordances of matter inform both formal processes and aesthetic interpretations. Drawing on Arp's notion of the concrete artwork and McCormack and Dorin's notion of the computational sublime, the article finally argues that Accretor demonstrates what might be called a processual sublime, evoking expansive processes that span both computational and non-computational systems.


2012 ◽  
Vol 36 (1) ◽  
pp. 41-58 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael E. McCullough ◽  
Robert Kurzban ◽  
Benjamin A. Tabak

AbstractIn this response, we address eight issues concerning our proposal that human minds contain adaptations for revenge and forgiveness. Specifically, we discuss (a) the inferences that are and are not licensed by patterns of contemporary behavioral data in the context of the adaptationist approach; (b) the theoretical pitfalls of conflating proximate and ultimate causation; (c) the role of development in the production of adaptations; (d) the implications of proposing that the brain's cognitive systems are fundamentally computational in nature; (e) our preferred method for considering the role of individual differences in computational systems; (f) applications of our proposal to understanding conflicts between groups; (g) the possible implications of our views for understanding the operation of contemporary criminal justice systems; and (h) the question of whether people ever “genuinely” forgive.


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