Turing’s Menagerie: Talking Lions, Virtual Bats, Electric Sheep and Analogical Peacocks: Common Ground and Common Interest are Necessary Components of Engagement

This theoretical paper attempts to define some of the key components and challenges required to create embodied conversational agents that can be genuinely interesting conversational partners. Wittgenstein’s argument concerning talking lions emphasizes the importance of having a shared common ground as a basis for conversational interactions. Virtual bats suggests that–for some people at least–it is important that there be a feeling of authenticity concerning a subjectively experiencing entity that can convey what it is like to be that entity. Electric sheep reminds us of the importance of empathy in human conversational interaction and that we should provide a full communicative repertoire of both verbal and non-verbal components if we are to create genuinely engaging interactions. Also we may be making the task more difficult rather than easy if we leave out non-verbal aspects of communication. Finally, analogical peacocks highlights the importance of between minds alignment and establishes a longer term goal of being interesting, creative, and humorous if an embodied conversational is to be truly an engaging conversational partner. Some potential directions and solutions to addressing these issues are suggested.

Merritton Pen Centre Lions photographs, 1960.

Two black and white photographs of the Merritton Pen Centre Lions, dated 1960. One photograph is of the team, and the other one is of the pitching staff. The photograph of the team includes Bill Colbey (Lions Club), Jack McFadden, Bob Sunderland, Gary Blank, John MacDonald, John Davis (Coach), John Dempsey, Art Barclay, Frank Krsul, Percy Gilligan (Pen Centre), Terry Saxton, George Krusl, Dave Morris, Ian MacDonald (Mgr), Pete Holowchuk, Bernie Stubbert, Bill Hicks, Jim Thomson (Bat Boy), George Depitris (Property) and Charlie McGuire. Jim Hale is absent. The photograph of the pitching staff includes John Dempsey, Art Barclay and John MacDonald.

On lions, impala, and bigraphs: modelling interactions in Ubiquitous Computing

As ubiquitous systems have moved out of the lab and into the world the need to think more systematically about how there are realised has grown. This talk will present intradisciplinary work I have been engaged in with other computing colleagues on how we might develop more formal models and understanding of ubiquitous computing systems. The formal modelling of computing systems has proved valuable in areas as diverse as reliability, security and robustness. However, the emergence of ubiquitous computing raises new challenges for formal modelling due to their contextual nature and dependence on unreliable sensing systems. In this work we undertook an exploration of modelling an example ubiquitous system called the Savannah game using the approach of bigraphical rewriting systems. This required an unusual intra-disciplinary dialogue between formal computing and human- computer interaction researchers to model systematically four perspectives on Savannah: computational, physical, human and technical. Each perspective in turn drew upon a range of different modelling traditions. For example, the human perspective built upon previous work on proxemics, which uses physical distance as a means to understand interaction. In this talk I hope to show how our model explains observed inconsistencies in Savannah and ex- tend it to resolve these. I will then reflect on the need for intradisciplinary work of this form and the importance of the bigraph diagrammatic form to support this form of engagement. Speaker Biography Tom Rodden Tom Rodden (rodden.info) is a Professor of Interactive Computing at the University of Nottingham. His research brings together a range of human and technical disciplines, technologies and techniques to tackle the human, social, ethical and technical challenges involved in ubiquitous computing and the increasing used of personal data. He leads the Mixed Reality Laboratory (www.mrl.nott.ac.uk) an interdisciplinary research facility that is home of a team of over 40 researchers. He founded and currently co-directs the Horizon Digital Economy Research Institute (www.horizon.ac.uk), a university wide interdisciplinary research centre focusing on ethical use of our growing digital footprint. He has previously directed the EPSRC Equator IRC (www.equator.ac.uk) a national interdisciplinary research collaboration exploring the place of digital interaction in our everyday world. He is a fellow of the British Computer Society and the ACM and was elected to the ACM SIGCHI Academy in 2009 (http://www.sigchi.org/about/awards/).

Weak polygyny in California sea lions and the potential for alternative mating tactics

Female aggregation and male territoriality are considered to be hallmarks of polygynous mating systems. The development of genetic parentage assignment has called into question the accuracy of behavioral traits in predicting true mating systems. In this study we use 14 microsatellite markers to explore the mating system of one of the most behaviorally polygynous species, the California sea lion (Zalophus californianus). We sampled a total of 158 female-pup pairs and 99 territorial males across two breeding rookeries (San Jorge and Los Islotes) in the Gulf of California, Mexico. Fathers could be identified for 30% of pups sampled at San Jorge across three breeding seasons and 15% of sampled pups at Los Islotes across two breeding seasons. Analysis of paternal relatedness between the pups for which no fathers were identified (sampled over four breeding seasons at San Jorge and two at Los Islotes) revealed that few pups were likely to share a father. Thirty-one percent of the sampled males on San Jorge and 15% of the sampled males on Los Islotes were assigned at least one paternity. With one exception, no male was identified as the father of more than two pups. Furthermore, at Los Islotes rookery there were significantly fewer pups assigned paternity than expected given the pool of sampled males (p<0.0001). Overall, we found considerably lower variation in male reproductive success than expected in a species that exhibits behavior associated with strongly polygynous mating. Low variation in male reproductive success may result from heightened mobility among receptive females in the Gulf of California, which reduces the ability of males to monopolize groups of females. Our results raise important questions regarding the adaptive role of territoriality and the potential for alternative mating tactics in this species.

Regional differences in the spatial and temporal heterogeneity of oceanographic habitat used by Steller sea lions

Over the past three decades, the decline and altered spatial distribution of the western stock of Steller sea lions (Eumetopias jubatus) in Alaska have been attributed to changes in the distribution or abundance of their prey due to the cumulative effects of fisheries and environmental perturbations. During this period, dietary prey occurrence and diet diversity were related to population decline within metapopulation regions of the western stock of Steller sea lions, suggesting that environmental conditions may be variable among regions. The objective of this study, therefore, was to examine regional differences in the spatial and temporal heterogeneity of oceanographic habitat used by Steller sea lions within the context of recent measures of diet diversity and population trajectories. Habitat use was assessed by deploying satellite-depth recorders and satellite relay data loggers on juvenile Steller sea lions (n = 45) over a five-year period (2000–2004) within four regions of the western stock, including the western, central, and eastern Aleutian Islands, and central Gulf of Alaska. Areas used by sea lions during summer months (June, July, and August) were demarcated using satellite telemetry data and characterized by environmental variables (sea surface temperature [SST] and chlorophyll a [chl a]), which possibly serve as proxies for environmental processes or prey. Spatial patterns of SST diversity and Steller sea lion population trends among regions were fairly consistent with trends reported for diet studies, possibly indicating a link between environmental diversity, prey diversity, and distribution or abundance of Steller sea lions. Overall, maximum spatial heterogeneity coupled with minimal temporal variability of SST appeared to be beneficial for Steller sea lions. In contrast, these patterns were not consistent for chl a, and there appeared to be an ecological threshold. Understanding how Steller sea lions respond to measures of environmental heterogeneity will ultimately be useful for implementing ecosystem management approaches and developing additional conservation strategies.

Differential Expression of Immune Response Genes in Steller Sea Lions (Eumetopias jubatus): An Indicator of Ecosystem Health?

Characterization of the polygenic and polymorphic features of the Steller sea lion major histocompatibility complex (MHC) provides an ideal window for evaluating immunologic vigor of the population and identifying emergence of new genotypes that reflect ecosystem pressures. MHC genotyping can be used to measure the potential immunologic vigor of a population. However, since ecosystem-induced changes to MHC genotype can be slow to emerge, measurement of differential expression of these genes can potentially provide real-time evidence of immunologic perturbations. MHC DRB genes were cloned and sequenced using peripheral blood mononuclear leukocytes derived from 10 Steller sea lions from Southeast Alaska, Prince William Sound, and the Aleutian Islands. Nine unique DRB gene sequences were represented in each of 10 animals. MHC DRB gene expression was measured in a subset of six sea lions. Although DRB in genomic DNA was identical in all individuals, relative levels of expressed DRB mRNA was highly variable. Selective suppression of MHC DRB genes could be indicative of geographically disparate environmental pressures, thereby serving as an immediate and sensitive indicator of population and ecosystem health.

Feminist Tigers and Patriarchal Lions: Rhetorical Strategies and Instrument Effects in the Struggle for Definition and Control over Development in Nepal

This article offers an analysis of a struggle for control of a women’s development project in Nepal. The story of this struggle is worth telling, for it is rife with the gender politics and neo-colonial context that underscore much of what goes on in contemporary Nepal. In particular, my analysis helps to unravel some of the powerful discourses, threads of interest, and yet unintended effects inevitable under a regime of development aid. The analysis demonstrates that the employment of already available discursive figures of the imperialist feminist and the patriarchal third world man are central to the rhetorical strategies taken in the conflict. I argue that the trans-discursive or “borderland” nature of development in general and women’s development in particular result in different constructions of “development” goals, means and actors based not only on divergent cultural categories but on historically specific cultural politics. I argue further that the apolitical discourse of development serves to cloak its inherently political project of social and economic transformation, making conflicts such as the one that occurred in this case not only likely to occur but also likely to be misunderstood.

Lions-type compactness and Rubik actions on the Heisenberg group

In this paper we prove a Lions-type compactness embedding result for symmetric unbounded domains of the Heisenberg group. The natural group action on the Heisenberg group TeX is provided by the unitary group U(n) × {1} and its appropriate subgroups, which will be used to construct subspaces with specific symmetry and compactness properties in the Folland-Stein’s horizontal Sobolev space TeX. As an application, we study the multiplicity of solutions for a singular subelliptic problem by exploiting a technique of solving the Rubik-cube applied to subgroups of U(n) × {1}. In our approach we employ concentration compactness, group-theoretical arguments, and variational methods.