We address the problem of affordance reasoning in diverse scenes that appear in the real world. Affordances relate the agent’s actions to their effects when taken on the surrounding objects. In our work, we take the egocentric view of the scene, and aim to reason about action-object affordances that respect both the physical world as well as the social norms imposed by the society. We also aim ...

This article investigates users’ perceptions of videoconferencing (VC) as a mode of communication in business meetings. The study demonstrates that affordance theory is a fruitful theoretical perspective for understanding what shapes users’ perceptions of how well VC works as a communication technology in business meetings. The article is based on observation and qualitative interviews with VC ...

We propose a theory of communicative interactions based on the idea that it is constitutive of interpersonal communication to create and manage a fragment of social reality. We define such a fragment in terms of joint commitments of the interactants, and analyze how these commitments are made in a conversation. We distinguish between three layers of joint commitments: those that regulate the em...

iv CHAPTER 1. GENERAL INTRODUCTION 1 Dissertation Organization 3 References 4 CHAPTER 2. CONCEPTUALIZING AFFORDANCES FROM A COGNITIVE VIEWPOINT 5 Abstract 5 Introduction 5 Overview of Article 5 Why Consider Affordances? 6 The Original Meaning of Affordance 7 Different Theoretical Views of Affordance 9 Our Perspective and Motivation 10 A Cognitive System Perspective 14 Working Memory 15 The Impa...

Autonomous agents must often detect affordances: the set of behaviors enabled by a situation. Affordance detection is particularly helpful in domains with large action spaces, allowing the agent to prune its search space by avoiding futile behaviors. This paper presents a method for affordance extraction via word embeddings trained on a tagged Wikipedia corpus. The resulting word vectors are tr...

The portability of a mobile device and the ubiquity of mobile Internet provide e-market users with more opportunities of access to e-commerce sites throughout a day. In this paper, we examine the access affordance of mobile technologies by analyzing the changes in purchase time dispersion of e-marketplace users after their adoption of mobile channel. By analyzing a large archival dataset includ...

Complex cognitive processes corresponding to human control behaviors cannot be easily inferred using (1) a logical rule-based model, (2) a statistical model, or (3) an analytical predictive model. Predicting human behaviors in complex and uncertain environments like emergency evacuation is considered almost impossible (at least NP hard) in systems theory. In this paper, we explore simulating hu...

Title of dissertation: From Form to Function: Detecting the Affordance of Tool Parts using Geometric Features and Material Cues Austin O. Myers, Doctor of Philosophy, 2016 Dissertation directed by: Professor Yiannis Aloimonos Department of Computer Science With recent advances in robotics, general purpose robots like Baxter are quickly becoming a reality. As robots begin to collaborate with hum...

The affordance perspective to technology research aims to offer a definition of technology that bridges between previous positivist and constructivist perspectives. To study technology from an affordance angle, it needs to be defined and extracted. This study aims to develop a better understanding of technology by conceptualizing and dimensionalizing technology affordances. To demonstrate the p...

Current application of work system simulation in participatory ergonomics (PE) design includes a variety of different simulation media. However, the actual influence of the media attributes on the simulation outcome has received less attention. This study investigates two simulation media: full-scale mock-ups and table-top models. The aim is to compare, how the media attributes of fidelity and ...