The issue Nineteenth century utilitarian philosophers considered happiness as the highest good (‘utility’ in their words) and claimed political priority for attempts to promote the greatest happiness for the greatest number. In reaction, many of their contemporaries cried out that happiness is not good at all, because it turns people into ‘contented cows’ and undermines social bonds. Modern psy...

These notes discuss self-awareness in humans and machines. The goal is to determine useful forms of machine self-awareness and also those that are on the road to human-level AI. This is a draft which is to be improved, and suggestions are solicited. There are a few formulas in this version. The final version will have more.

The purpose of this paper is to suggest that in many social and economic contexts, self-awareness of agents is of little consequence. The complexity of many such systems is very high. No matter how advanced the cognitive abilities of agents in abstract intellectual terms, it is as if they operate with relatively low cognitive ability within the system. This can be the case even when the emergen...

In this paper the authors present the BioCrystal – a biofeedback device that uses physiological data to evaluate user’s affective states in real-time and signals the states via an ambient display. The authors evaluated the BioCrystal during a 2-week, in situ multi-method study during which ten users collected over 115 hours of usable data. Users’ comments suggested high utility of such a biofee...

The creation of a work of art has been indicated to result from 'expressive awareness', achieved as the artist matches images and methods. This study examines how novices, who tend to express reproductively, acquire such expressive awareness over several weeks of practice of photography. We conducted case studies with two conditions: 1) one participant reflected only her own creative activities...

Many animals are self-aware. At any rate, I claim, the cumulative force of various empirical data and conceptual considerations makes it more reasonable to accept than to deny this thesis. Moreover, there are importantly different sorts of self-awareness. If my arguments are on the right track, then scientists and philosophers have significantly underestimated the case for animal self-awareness.

In order to be proactive to accidents, there is a need to limit systems’ threats and vulnerabilities by being able to perceive and comprehend them as early as possible. Under this notion, the concept of ‘risk Situation Awareness provision capability’ is introduced, indicating that the elements of a system, tangible or not, have an impact on the enhancement or degradation of the awareness, in re...

Energy education has been conducted to equip learners with relevant energy conservation knowledge for many years. However, learners seldom put the knowledge into practice and even have few ideas about how to reduce energy consumption. To this end, there is a need to address this issue to improve the efficiency of energy education. One of the strategies is digital game-based learning, which can ...

In this paper we present the BioCrystal – a biofeedback device that uses physiological data to evaluate user’s affective states in real-time and signals the states via an ambient display. We evaluated the BioCrystal during a 2week, in situ multi-method study during which ten users collected over 115 hours of usable data. Users’ comments suggested high utility of such a biofeedback device for se...

Introduction More and more eco-feedback technology is being implemented to support people’s self-awareness regarding water, heating or energy consumption. Although eco-feedback technologies have managed to raise awareness (e.g, using visualisations [7]) about consumption, many challenges still remain. For instance, people still experience disengagement using technology [16, 1] as it is di cult ...