Having settled upon audio as the primary communicative channel, a first basic faculty required for a successful multi-party audioconferencing environment was the ability to identify the participants, particularly the current speaker. As discussed in the previous chapter, such identification is difficult in traditional audioconferencing environments. This problem, among many others, benefits fro...

Using concepts and tools of embodied cognitive science, we investigate the implications of embedding neural networks in a physical structure, the body of a robot. Through this embedding the loop from a network’s outputs to its subsequent inputs is closed. This closure enables an embedded network to actively generate its own input data instead of only passively processing predesigned input patte...

Computer mediated communication (CMC) is fundamentally different from other modes of informational exchange. The presence of those with whom one communicates is not completely known. Their identities are in question, easily created, and changed by CMC users themselves who are not constricted by geographical or political boundaries. CMC represents a new form of communication—a “cyborg discourse”...

Traditional semantic models are disembodied from the human perception and action. In this work, we attempt to address this problem by grounding semantic representations of words to the acoustic and visual modalities. Specifically we estimate multimodal word representations via the fusion of auditory and visual modalities with the text modality. We employ middle and late fusion of representation...

This paper explores the extent to which the rhetoric of the sovereign consumer and the use of the customer as a device of managerial control have been transferred to the subsidiaries of multinational retail firms operating in China. Based upon data drawn from over two hundred interviews conducted at UK and Japanese multinationals’ stores, in this rapidly internationalising context it was eviden...

facial expression. A disembodied voice would be a detriThis paper explores the expression of emotion in synment to a life-like quality of interaction that we would like thesized speech for an anthropomorphic robot. We have Kismet to have with people. Synchronized movements of adapted several key emotional correlates of human speech to the robot's speech synthesizer to allow the robot to speak t...

The rapid pace of productivity growth since the mid-1990s has been attributed to improvements in technology, particularly in the areas of information processing and communications. From e-mail and cell phones to inventory management and robotic manufacturing techniques, new ways of doing business—facilitated by the use of new types of capital equipment—have transformed the workplace. However, t...

work in social history of psychiatry (p. 38). It is certainly true that social historians have too often ignored or underestimated medical theories, but they have uncovered a great deal about medicine in action. However, since the writing and publication of textbooks, treatises etc. is not a disembodied, ahistorical activity, one might turn Kutzer's claim upside-down and regard social history a...

Physics- and computer-related disciplines are strongly male dominated in Western higher education. Feminist research has demonstrated how this can be understood as reflecting a strong privileging of mind rationality (over body/nature/emotions) these disciplines, which harmonises with broader notions masculinity transcendental disembodied. However, we demonstrate paper, being recognised legitima...