Mihai Nadin

Interface design: A semiotic paradigm

Design principles are semiotic by nature. To design means to structure systems of signs in such a way as to make possible the achievement of human goals: communication (as a form of social interaction), engineering (as a form of applied technical rationality), business (as a form of shared efficiency), architecture, art, education, etcetera. Design comes about in an environment traditionally called culture, currently identified as artificial (through a rather romantic distinction between natural and artificial), and acts as a bridge between scientific and humanistic praxes. A long this line of thinking, Simon (1982) stated, ‘Engineering, medicine, business, architecture, and painting are concerned not with the necessary but with the contingent not with how things are but how things might be in short, with design’. The object of semiotics is sign systems and their functioning within culture. For a long time (and for reasons whose presentation is beyond the scope of this article), one type of sign the symbol has been considered representative of all signs in human culture: ‘for most of us . . . the significant part of the environment consists mostly of strings of artifacts called “symbols” that we receive through eyes and ears in the form of written and spoken language and that we pour out into the environment as I am now doing by mouth or hand’ (Simon 1982). Actually, we perceive signs through all our senses, and we generate signs that address the same. The fact that some of these signs (visual, auditory) are more important should not prevent us from considering any other sign that can be used for representation, communication, and communication functions. But before dealing with these basic functions, we have to settle upon one of the many definitions of sign that have been advanced in the field of semiotics, and then apply it as consistently as possible. The definitions fall into two basic categories: 1. Adoption of one kind of sign usually pertaining to verbal language as a paradigm, with the understanding that every other sign is structurally equivalent. Artificial intelligence researchers are quite comfortable with this model. The Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure advanced

Anticipation and dynamics: Rosen's anticipation in the perspective of time

Anticipation relates to the perception of change. Therefore, dynamics is the context for defining anticipation processes. Since preoccupation with change is as old as science itself, anticipation-related questions go back to the first attempts to explain why and how things change. However, as a specific concept, anticipation insinuates itself in the language of science in the writings of Whitehead, Burgers, Bennett, Feynman, Svoboda, Rosen, Nadin and Dubois, i.e. since 1929. While Robert Rosens work is the main focus of this article, an attempt is made to advance a perspective for the broad field of studies that developed around the notion of anticipation. Of particular interest are the circumstances of epistemological and gnoseological significance, leading to the articulation of the early hypotheses regarding anticipatory processes. Of no less interest to the scientific community are questions pertinent to complexity, adaptivity, purposiveness, time and computability as they relate to our understanding of anticipation.

Stereo matching via selective multiple windows

Window-based correlation algorithms are widely used for stereo matching due to their computational efficiency as compared to global algorithms. In this paper, a multiple window correlation algorithm for stereo matching is presented which addresses the problems associated with a fixed window size. The developed algo- rithm differs from the previous multiple window algorithms by intro- ducing a reliability test to select the most reliable window among multiple windows of increasing sizes. This ensures that at least one window is large enough to cover a region of adequate intensity variations while at the same time small enough to cover a constant depth region. A recursive computation procedure is also used to allow a computationally efficient implementation of the algorithm. The outcome obtained from a standard set of images with known disparity maps shows that the generated disparity maps are more accurate as compared to two popular stereo matching local algorithms.

Not everything we know we learned

This is foremost a methodological contribution. It focuses on the foundation of anticipation and the pertinent implications that anticipation has on learning (theory and experiments). By definition, anticipation does not exhaust all the forms through which the future affects human activity. Accordingly, guessing, expectation, prediction, forecast, and planning will be defined in counter-distinction to anticipation. The background against which these distinctions are made is explicit in the operational thesis advanced: Anticipation and reaction can be considered only in their unity. The interrelation of anticipation and reaction corresponds to the integrated nature of the physical and the living. Finally, an agent architecture for a hybrid control mechanism is suggested as a possible implementation.

Integration of Motion Capture and EMG data for Classifying the Human Motions

Three dimensional motion capture facility is a powerful tool for quantitative and qualitative assessment of multi-joint external movements. Electro-myograph (EMG) signals give the physiologic information of muscles while doing motions. In this paper, our objective is to integrate these two different bio-medical data together and to extract precise and accurate feature information for classifying the human motions. When both forms of data are integrated and analyzed together; the information achieved will be immensely useful to quantify the complex human motions for medical reasons or sport performances. These biological quantifications of biomechanical data, are useful for gait analysis and several orthopedic applications, such as joint mechanics, prosthetic designs, and sports medicines. Vie different dimensionality reduction approaches such Integral of Absolute value and Weighted Singular Value Decomposition are used to extract the preliminary features from EMG and motion capture data respectively. On combining these feature vectors, fuzzy clustering such as Fuzzy c-means (FCM) is performed on these vectors that are mapped as the points in multi-dimensional feature space. We get the degree of memberships with every cluster for each mapped point. This extracted information is used as the final feature vectors for classifying the human motions.

Anticipation and the artificial: aesthetics, ethics, and synthetic life

If complexity is a necessary but not sufficient premise for the existence and expression of the living, anticipation is the distinguishing characteristic of what is alive. Anticipation is at work even at levels of existence where we cannot refer to intelligence. The prospect of artificially generating aesthetic artifacts and ethical constructs of relevance to a world in which the natural and the artificial are coexistent cannot be subsumed as yet another product of scientific and technological advancement. Beyond the artificial, the synthetic conjures the understanding of aesthetics and ethics no longer from the perspective of the How? type of question, but rather the Why? Given the current infatuation with synthetic biology (i.e., making life from non-life), there is a practical consequence to such considerations. Synthetic life, as any other form of life, implies the possibility of evolution. Anticipation, which is the underlying factor of evolution, is thus expected. At the level of human existence, anticipation is expressed, for instance (but not exclusively), in aesthetic forms and ethical values. This translates, in turn, into an argument for the role aesthetics and ethics play in the process. Consequently, to qualify as life, the synthesis of the physical and the living will have to efficiently handle ambiguity. Current computational facilities, regardless of their nature or performance, operate exclusively in the semiotic domain of the well defined non-ambiguous.

The anticipatory profile. An attempt to describe anticipation as process

Inductive class representation and the more comprehensive evolving transformation system (ETS) are congenial to the subject matter of anticipation. In substantiating this assertion, we examine the epistemological premises of a new form of representation, of interest to pattern recognition and Artificial Intelligence (AI), but even more to the study of living systems. Some concepts, such as classes, time and time scale, and generative processes are examined in detail with respect to their pertinence to anticipation. Finally, pattern generation and ETS programming are suggested.

Reassessing the Foundations of Semiotics: Preliminaries

What justifies a discipline is its grounding in practical activities. Documentary evidence is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for viability. This applies to semiotics as it applies to mathematics, physics, chemistry, computer science, and all other forms of questioning the world. While all forms of knowledge testify to the circularity of the epistemological effort, semiotics knowledge is doubly cursed. There is no knowledge that can be expressed otherwise than in semiotic form; knowledge of semiotics is itself expressed semiotically. Semiotics defined around the notion of the sign bears the burden of unsettled questions prompted by the never-ending attempt to define signs. This indeterminate condition is characteristic of all epistemological constructs, whether in reference to specific knowledge domains or semiotics. The alternative is to associate the knowledge domain of semiotics with the meta-level, i.e., inquiry of what makes semiotics necessary. In a world of action-reaction, corresponding to a rather poor form of causality, semiotics is not necessary. Only in acknowledging the anticipatory condition of the living can grounding for semiotics be found. This perspective becomes critical in the context of a semiotized civilization in which the object level of human effort is progressively replaced by representations and their associated interpretations.

One cannot not interact

As the digital becomes part of the underlying structure of human existence and activity (just as electricity was integrated in the infrastructure), human interaction will be less and less direct. Mediated through various interfaces, human interaction via all kinds of networks becomes increasingly an expression of the semiotic condition of the human being in the post-industrial age. Professionals dedicated to human–computer interaction (HCI, a more suitable acronym than CHI) and semioticians must realize that they would benefit mutually if they would collaborate better than they have until now. Therefore, this paper submits working hypotheses to HCI practioners and to semioticians dedicated to aspects of human interaction.

Anticipation and the Brain

We are our brains. The study argues for a theory of the brain based on the brain itself, not on theories generated to explain the world in some of its many aspects. Consequently, this study of the brain debunks those analogy assumptions, never confirmed by science, that still dominate brain science. The hypothesis advanced concerns the distributed nature of brain activity. It describes the role of interactions, the specific causality characteristic of brain related dynamics, and the broader questions of cognitive activity associated with awareness of change (usually subsumed as consciousness). Empirical evidence that brain processes are anticipatory in nature leads to the conclusion that reproducibility, as defined within the deterministic experimental method, cannot be expected. Significance for the performance of the living (reproduction, survival, evolutionary edge, etc.) informs brain processes and explains their non-deterministic nature.