Oliver Bendel, Author at ROBOPHILOSOPHY

November 18, 2022November 18, 2022

Proceedings of “How Fair is Fair? Achieving Wellbeing AI”

On November 17, 2022, the proceedings of “How Fair is Fair? Achieving Wellbeing AI” (organizers: Takashi Kido and Keiki Takadama) were published on CEUR-WS. The AAAI 2022 Spring Symposium was held at Stanford University from March 21-23, 2022. There are seven full papers of 6 – 8 pages in the electronic volume: “Should Social Robots in Retail Manipulate Customers?” by Oliver Bendel and Liliana Margarida Dos Santos Alves (3rd place of the Best Presentation Awards), “The SPACE THEA Project” by Martin Spathelf and Oliver Bendel (2nd place of the Best Presentation Awards), “Monitoring and Maintaining Student Online Classroom Participation Using Cobots, Edge Intelligence, Virtual Reality, and Artificial Ethnographies” by Ana Djuric, Meina Zhu, Weisong Shi, Thomas Palazzolo, and Robert G. Reynolds, “AI Agents for Facilitating Social Interactions and Wellbeing” by Hiro Taiyo Hamada and Ryota Kanai (1st place of the Best Presentation Awards) , “Sense and Sensitivity: Knowledge Graphs as Training Data for Processing Cognitive Bias, Context and Information Not Uttered in Spoken Interaction” by Christina Alexandris, “Fairness-aware Naive Bayes Classifier for Data with Multiple Sensitive Features” by Stelios Boulitsakis-Logothetis, and “A Thermal Environment that Promotes Efficient Napping” by Miki Nakai, Tomoyoshi Ashikaga, Takahiro Ohga, and Keiki Takadama. In addition, there are several short papers and extended abstracts. The proceedings can be accessed via ceur-ws.org/Vol-3276/.

November 2, 2022November 2, 2022

Metaverse Exhibition at Biennale Arte 2022

The 59th International Art Exhibition (Biennale Arte 2022) runs from 23 April to 27 November 2022. The main venues of the Biennale are Giardini and Arsenale. In the northern part of Arsenale, visitors will find many rooms with screens showing art projects around and from the Metaverse. The “1st Annual METAVERSE Art @VENICE”, an exhibition conceived by Victoria Lu, a famous art critic and curator of the Chinese artistic world, opened with gEnki, an interactive exhibition that exploits the potential of the Internet and virtual reality. “The exhibition offers a new model of ‘decentralized autonomous curatorship’, exploring various innovative and always different exhibition methods using all the main features of the ‘DAO’ (short for Distributed Autonomous Organization), therefore crowdfunding, co-construction, interconnection of platforms, high level of decentralization, all adapted to the curational concept.” (Flyer gEnki) The exhibition is very inspiring and shows how the Metaverse could become if it would not only follow commercial considerations. More information via annualmetaverseart.com.

November 1, 2022November 1, 2022

Accepted Papers of ACI’22

The conference program for ACI’22 will be available in the course of November. In the meantime, the website lists the accepted papers in alphabetical order. Among them are the papers “A Face Recognition System for Bears: Protection for Animals and Humans in the Alps” (Oliver Bendel and Ali Yürekkirmaz), “A Framework for Training Animals to Use Touchscreen Devices for Discrimination Tasks” (Jennifer Cunha and Corinne Renguette), “Politicising Animal-Computer Interaction: an Approach to Political Engagement with Animal-Centred Design” (Clara Mancini, Orit Hirsch-Matsioulas, and Daniel Metcalfe), and “TamagoPhone: A framework for augmenting artificial incubators to enable vocal interaction between bird parents and eggs” (Rebecca Kleinberger, Megha Vemuri, Janelle Sands, Harpreet Sareen, Janet M. Baker). ACI2022 will take place 5-8 December 2022, hosted by Northumbria University, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK.

October 12, 2022October 12, 2022

Progress with the Starline Project

Google has given an update on its Starline project in a blog post dated October 11, 2022. With this system, two people can hold a video conference in which the respective conversation partner is displayed as a 3D projection – a quasi-hologram. A display based on light field technology is used for this purpose. Several high-resolution cameras film the participants in real time. The company describes this process in a very non-technical or poetic way: “The technology works like a magic window, where users can talk, gesture and make eye contact with another person, life-size and in three dimensions. It is made possible through major research advances across machine learning, computer vision, spatial audio and light field display systems.” (Company News, 11 October 2022) The company hopes to improve hybrid working with Starline. Indeed, quasi-holograms would be interesting not only for concerts, but also for companies that allow and encourage homeworking or that are highly networked and distributed.

September 30, 2022October 3, 2022

Bruce Willis has a Digital Twin

According to the Telegraph, Bruce Willis “has become the first Hollywood star to sell his rights to allow a ‘digital twin’ of himself to be created for use on screen” (Telegraph, 28 September 2022). Instead of a digital twin, we can also speak of a new kind of avatar here. “Using deepfake technology, the actor appeared in a phone advert without ever being on set, after his face was digitally transplanted onto another performer.” (Telegraph, 28 September 2022) In a statement on the website of the responsible US firm Deepcake, Willis said: “I liked the precision of my character. It’s a great opportunity for me to go back in time. The neural network was trained on content of ‘Die Hard’ and ‘Fifth Element’, so my character is similar to the images of that time. With the advent of the modern technology, I could communicate, work and participate in filming, even being on another continent. It’s a brand new and interesting experience for me, and I grateful to our team.” (Website Deepcake) The actor will certainly find many imitators. The new avatars will soon be a natural part of advertising. Whether they will also be part of films has not yet been clarified. For most actors, including Bruce Willis, such a licensing would probably go too far.

September 21, 2022September 21, 2022

Programming Machine Ethics

The book “Programming Machine Ethics” (2016) by Luís Moniz Pereira and Ari Saptawijaya is available for free download from Z-Library. Luís Moniz Pereira is among the best-known machine ethicists. “This book addresses the fundamentals of machine ethics. It discusses abilities required for ethical machine reasoning and the programming features that enable them. It connects ethics, psychological ethical processes, and machine implemented procedures. From a technical point of view, the book uses logic programming and evolutionary game theory to model and link the individual and collective moral realms. It also reports on the results of experiments performed using several model implementations. Opening specific and promising inroads into the terra incognita of machine ethics, the authors define here new tools and describe a variety of program-tested moral applications and implemented systems. In addition, they provide alternative readings paths, allowing readers to best focus on their specific interests and to explore the concepts at different levels of detail.” (Information by Springer) The download link is eu1lib.vip/book/2677910/9fd009.

September 11, 2022September 11, 2022

Defining Tomorrow

Animal-computer interaction (ACI) “is a rapidly growing field, which focuses on the interaction between animals and computing-enabled technology and for which the International Conference on Animal-Computer Interaction is the main convention venue” (Website ACI2022). ACI2022 will take place 5-8 December 2022, hosted by Northumbria University, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK. The “Emerging Work” track reflects early stage efforts that either: “1) will be of interest to the ACI community and likely to generate insightful, instructional, and/or spirited discussion, and/or 2) is early enough that it could benefit greatly from community feedback on direction, design, methods, etc.” (Website ACI2022) In this track, the paper “A Face Recognition System for Bears: Protection for Animals and Humans in the Alps” by Oliver Bendel and Ali Yürekkirmaz was accepted. It fits very well with this year’s conference theme, “Defining Tomorrow”. “The theme acknowledges the rapid growth in technology for animals with new products coming onto the market, normalising the use of technology in many human-animal relationships, and asks: where should we go next?” (Website ACI2022)

September 5, 2022November 3, 2022

Plastic Waste in the Pacific Comes from the Fishing Industry

The Ocean Cleanup project has analyzed the plastic waste it has fished out of the sea. The results were published in a paper. From the abstract: “The subtropical oceanic gyre in the North Pacific Ocean is currently covered with tens of thousands of tonnes of floating plastic debris, dispersed over millions of square kilometres. A large fraction is composed of fishing nets and ropes while the rest is mostly composed of hard plastic objects and fragments, sometimes carrying evidence on their origin. In 2019, an oceanographic mission conducted in the area, retrieved over 6000 hard plastic debris items > 5 cm. The debris was later sorted, counted, weighed, and analysed for evidence of origin and age. Our results, complemented with numerical model simulations and findings from a previous oceanographic mission, revealed that a majority of the floating material stems from fishing activities. While recent assessments for plastic inputs into the ocean point to coastal developing economies and rivers as major contributors into oceanic plastic pollution, here we show that most floating plastics in the North Pacific subtropical gyre can be traced back to five industrialised fishing nations, highlighting the important role the fishing industry plays in the solution to this global issue.” (Abstract) In a final thesis at the University of Applied Sciences and Arts Northwestern Switzerland FHNW in 2019, a student described and evaluated six projects for the disposal of plastic waste in seas. An overview can be found here. The Ocean Cleanup was also discussed, beside the WasteShark that sticks out as a robot.