Special issue on robot vision

The International Journal of Robotics Research (IJRR) has a long history of publishing the state-of-the-art in the field of robotic vision. This is the fourth special issue devoted to the topic. Previous special issues were published in 2012 (Volume 31, No. 4), 2010 (Volume 29, Nos 2–3) and 2007 (Volume 26, No. 7, jointly with the International Journal of Computer Vision). In a closely related field was the special issue on Visual Servoing published in IJRR, 2003 (Volume 22, Nos 10–11). These issues nicely summarize the highlights and progress of the past 12 years of research devoted to the use of visual perception for robotics.

Editorial: Towards intuitive interaction theory

The Special Issue of Interacting with Computers, 2015 showcases the current state of the art in intuitive interaction research. Several papers have showcased new potential methods for both applying and assessing intuitive interaction during early and later phases of the design process. Diefenbach and Ullrich present a new, alternative framework for intuitive interaction, comprised of the four components of gut feeling, verbalizability. Fischer and colleagues paper also reported on an experiment in applying image schemas but in this case they aimed to find a more efficient way of discovering and applying them, in order to find ways to improve the design process as well as assessment of new interfaces. Still and co-researchers had a similar aim, that of establishing what levels and types of knowledge can be most easily and accurately elicited from users in order to be applied to new interfaces. Hespanhol and Tomitsch described strategies for intuitive interaction in public urban spaces. Macaranas and colleagues described an experiment which tested three different full body gestural interfaces to establish which types of mappings were more intuitive, one based on images schemas and two on different previously encountered features from other types of interfaces.

Special Issue: Intuitive Interaction [Edited]

Towards Intuitive Interaction Theory Intuitive interaction, or intuitive use, or even ‘intuitivity’, have long been buzzwords used by designers and marketers but until recently there was no research about what this might entail and how designers could encourage it. This century, work on intuitive interaction has been gaining pace and this special issue showcases the state of the art in intuitive interaction research worldwide. This editorial is intended to introduce readers to the concept and definitions of intuitive interaction, briefly discuss the short history of work in this field and highlight and discuss some of the main issues raised by the papers in the issue.

Automation of underground truck haulage

This paper reviews the state-of-the-art in the automation of underground truck haulage. Past attempts at automating LHDs and haul trucks are described and their particular strengths and weaknesses are listed. We argue that the simple auto-tramming systems currently being commercialised, that follow rail-type guides placed along the back, cannot match the performance, flexibility and reliability of systems based on modern mobile robotic principles. In addition, the lack of collision detection research in the underground environment is highlighted.

Damned to fame: The moral rights of the Beckett estate

The Company B production of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot raises important questions about copyright law, moral rights, and dramatic works. The playwright's nephew and executor, Edward Beckett, threatened to bring a legal action against the Sydney company for breach of contract on the grounds that unauthorised music appeared in the production. The Company B production denied that the contract made any such express provisions. The director Neil Armfield complained: 'In coming here with its narrow prescriptions, its dead controlling hand, the Beckett estate seems to me to be the enemy of art'. In the biography Damned to fame, James Knowlson documents a number of other proceedings taken by Beckett and his agents to control the productions of his work: 'He was often represented as a tyrannical figure, an arch-controller of his work, ready to unleash fiery thunderbolts onto the head of any bold, innovative director, unwilling to follow his text and stage directions to the last counted dot and precisely timed pause.' However, Knowlson notes that Beckett was inconsistent in his willingness to use legal action: 'It made a tremendous difference if he liked and respected the persons involved or if he had been able to listen to their reasons for wanting to attempt something highly innovative or even slightly different'. Famously, in 1988, Beckett brought legal action against a Dutch theatre company, which wanted to stage a production of Waiting for Godot, with women acting all the roles. His lawyer argued that the integrity of the text was violated because actresses were substituted for the male actors asked for in the text. The judge in the Haarlem court ruled that the integrity of the play had not been violated, because the performance showed fidelity to the dialogue and the stage directions of the play. By contrast, in 1992, a French court held a stage director was liable for an infringement of Beckett's moral right of integrity because the director had staged Waiting for Godot with the two lead roles played by women. In 1998, a United States production of Waiting for Godot with a racially mixed cast attracted legal threats amid accusations it had 'injected race into the play'. In the 2000 New York Fringe Festival, a company made light of this ongoing conflict between the Beckett estate and artistic directors. The work was entitled: The complete lost works of Samuel Beckett as found in an envelope (partially burned) in a dustbin in Paris labelled 'Never to be performed. Never. Ever. EVER! Or I'll sue! I'LL SUE FROM THE GRAVE!'. The plot concerned a fight between three producers and the Beckett estate. In the wake of such disputes, Beckett and later his estate sought to tighten production contracts to state that no additions, omissions or alterations should be made to the text of the play or the stage directions and that no music, special effects or other supplements should be added without prior consent.

Improving deep convultional neural networks with unsupervised feature learning

The latest generation of Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (DCNN) have dramatically advanced challenging computer vision tasks, especially in object detection and object classification, achieving state-of-the-art performance in several computer vision tasks including text recognition, sign recognition, face recognition and scene understanding. The depth of these supervised networks has enabled learning deeper and hierarchical representation of features. In parallel, unsupervised deep learning such as Convolutional Deep Belief Network (CDBN) has also achieved state-of-the-art in many computer vision tasks. However, there is very limited research on jointly exploiting the strength of these two approaches. In this paper, we investigate the learning capability of both methods. We compare the output of individual layers and show that many learnt filters and outputs of the corresponding level layer are almost similar for both approaches. Stacking the DCNN on top of unsupervised layers or replacing layers in the DCNN with the corresponding learnt layers in the CDBN can improve the recognition/classification accuracy and training computational expense. We demonstrate the validity of the proposal on ImageNet dataset.

Antibody treatments of inflammatory arthritis

Inflammatory arthropathies such as rheumatoid arthritis, ankylosing spondylitis, and psoriatic arthritis are extremely common in the community, with a prevalence of up to 5%, and they cause substantial morbidity. The development of anti-TNF agents for use initially in rheumatoid arthritis, and subsequently more broadly in inflammatory arthritis, represents the biggest advance in management of these conditions since the introduction of corticosteroid agents, and is a major vindication of public funded arthritis research. However, there are limitations of even these highly effective agents. A significant minority of patients with inflammatory arthritis do not respond to these anti-TNF agents, they are associated with substantial risk of toxicity, require parenteral administration, and are extremely expensive. New antibody treatments in development can be divided into anti-cytokine agents, cell-targeted therapies, co-stimulation inhibitors, and treatments aimed at preventing joint erosion consequent on inflammation. This review discusses the state of the art in the development of these agents for management of this common group of diseases.

From users to citizens: Some thoughts on designing for polity and civics

This paper presents an essay aimed at prompting broad discussion crucial in keeping the interaction design discourse fresh, critical, and in motion. We trace the changing role of people who have advanced from consumers to producers, from stationary office workers to mobile urban nomads, from passive members of the plebs to active instigators of change. Yet, interaction designers often still refer to them only as ‘users.’ We follow some of the historic developments from the information superhighway to the smart city in order to provide the backdrop in front of which we critically analyse three core areas. First, the issue of echo chambers and filter bubbles in social media results in a political polarisation that jeopardises the formation of a functioning public sphere. Second, pretty lights and colourful façades in media architecture are increasingly making way for situated installations and interventions fostering community engagement. And third, civic activism is often reduced to forms of slacktivism. We synthesise our discussion to propose ‘citizen-ability’ as an alternative goal for interaction designers to aspire to in order to create new polities and civics for a better quality of life.

Kansallista vai modernia : Taidegrafiikka osana 1930-luvun taidejärjestelmää

The theme of this doctoral thesis is the Finnish printmaking in the years 1930-1939. During this decade, there were approximately 100 artists making prints in Finland. Indeed, the period was an especially important one for printmaking. Associations for printmakers were founded in Helsinki and Turku, training in the field was launched, and the number of printmaking exhibitions increased considerably. Through their national organisations, Finnish printmakers participated in many exhibitions abroad, interaction with Nordic printmakers being especially intense. Thus, a firm basis for post-war developments was created. However, printmakers' activity- which had continued throughout the 1930s - declined notably after the Winter War broke out in the autumn of 1939. As a result, the period 1930-1939 forms a coherent and distinct unity in Finnish printmaking history. The study consists of two parts: the main text and an appendix in which the production of each printmaking artist active in the 1930s is examined separately. The study also includes a comprehensive list of the prints made in the course of the decade. One of the central themes is the printmakers' relationship to "Finnish nationalist" art and concepts of art in the 1930s. I analyse the various manifestations of this way of thinking in the visual arts of the period. Finnish fine art in the period between the world wars has usually been characterised as conservative, introverted and spiritually isolated from the modern European trends of the time. On the basis of this study, such a view is too simple. Many artists and printmakers adopted a modernistic notion of art that approached the newest in European modernism, including such trends as avant-garde classicism and general European new Objective Realism (Die neue Sachlichkeit). On the other hand, choosing Finnish nationalist motifs did not necessarily mean that the artist was opposed to modernism: modernist artists could still be interested in national themes. The relationship of 1930s printmaking to the world of nationalist ideas is examined in this doctoral thesis from several perspectives. Towards the end of the main text, I examine the issue from the point of view of selected artists. Another feature that emerged during the study and turned out to be surprisingly widespread was the close relationship of many artists to religious, theosophical and pantheistic views. I deal with this issue in greater detail through a few representative printmakers.

Modernismens förespråkare : Gösta Stenman och hans konstsalong

This dissertation, based on material from Stenman s vast private archive, examines the role played by Swedish-speaking Finnish art dealer Gösta Stenman (1888-1947) and his art gallery, Stenmans Konstsalong, in the Finnish and Swedish art worlds from 1911 to 1947. This archive is examined here for the first time. The analytical framework used for this empirical study derives from Pierre Bourdieu s sociological theories. An art-sociological approach allows for the inclusion of more mechanisms at work in the art world than are typically embraced in such inquiries. This approach provides a fuller understanding of how Stenman attained his standing and central role in the art world in Finland as well as Sweden; enabling us to appreciate how he came to occupy such a prominent position in current art historical writing. All of these issues constitute new areas of research. Taking his cues from the contemporary art world of Paris, Stenman became the year 1914 a modern art dealer like no other in the Nordic countries. This dissertation represents the first academic investigation into his operations, strategies, and objectives, offering insight into not only the art dealer himself but also the functioning of the art market one of the most vital aspects of the art world. A by-product of this work, is that the modern art market in Finland is portrayed, including essential issues related to its growth and development as well as how it altered the conditions under which art could be produced, exhibited and promoted and what this entailed for the art world at large, artists and patrons alike. This first systematic analysis of the operations of Stenman s Konstsalong offers greater understanding of the art worlds of Sweden and Finland in the early twentieth century. The work also looks at how an agent of the art market could move between the fields of art in Sweden and Finland. The manner in which Stenman promoted individual artists, including his relationships with Tyko Sallinen, Helene Schjerfbeck, Juho Mäkelä, Jalmari Ruokokoski, Siri Derkert, Esther Kjerner, Eva Bagge, and many others, also falls within this purview. Stenman s contract with Sallinen from 1913 stands out as a new phenomenon in Finnish art promotion, whereby an artistic career became established via a far-sighted, strategic promotional program. The case study of Stenman s promotion of Schjerfbeck in Sweden provides evidence of the increasingly advanced nature of Stenman s strategies. The title of the dissertation, The Promoter of Modernism, attempts to convey that Stenman was the consummate modernist, modern in his thoughts, his actions, and his approach to art. Keywords: Gösta Stenman, Stenmans konstsalong, Stenmans dotter, art market, modernism, collecting, Novembergruppen, Helene Schjerfbeck, Tyko Sallinen, Juho Mäkelä, Jalmari Ruokokoski, Wäinö Aaltonen, Siri Derkert, Åke Göransson, Esther Kjerner, Eva Bagge.

Kohti lyyristä abstraktismia : Anitra Lucanderin 1950-luvun modernismi

Towards Lyrical Abstraction Anitra Lucander s Modernism in the 1950s Anitra Lucander (1918-2000) was one of the early pioneers of abstract art in Finland. During the Second World War Finnish art and cultural life was isolated and stagnated and figurative art was still dominant after the war. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, new international abstract art movements started to come to Finland. Anitra Lucander was one of the artists of the younger generation after the war who took an interest in the abstract movements in the early 1950s. At the beginning of the 1950s, abstract art came to Finland primarily in the form of Concretism, but simultaneously, a more delicate abstract movement emerged, and Anitra Lucander was among those cultivating such conceptions in her art. In this thesis, I observe and analyze through Anitra Lucander s art this central movement in Finnish modern art that has not yet been extensively studied. I examine how Anitra Lucander s art connects with the style change in Finnish art. I scrutinize the factors that affected Lucander and turned her towards abstract expression, and the effect her art had on emergence of abstract art in Finland. I will also consider the development of her art, the reception and critique of her art and the effect the critique had on her position in the 1950s art world. Because of a lack of earlier studies, I will undertake basic research, relying on empirical primary source material, where the starting point is to place the phenomenon under examination in the historical and cultural context. The most significant study materials are the artist s paintings and graphics from 1948 to 1960, newspaper and magazine articles from the same era, archive sources and interviews with Lucander s relatives, fellow artists and friends. An interesting aspect of the topic is the fact that Anitra Lucander was the only woman among the important pioneers of early Finnish abstract art. Through Lucander s art, I also examine the position of female artists in the tradition of Modernism as well as in the Finnish art world of the 1950s. This theoretical background is provided by the studies of feminist art historians, such as Marsha Meskimmon, Gill Perry, Griselda Pollock and Anne Middleton Wagner. Lucander s position in the male-dominated Finnish art scene of the 1950s, and how she achieved her position, emerges as one of the central themes of the study. I will also observe whether gender is evident in Lucander s art and expression, as well as her reception and critique compared to the reception of her male colleagues art. From a woman s point of view, I reveal the masculine rhetoric and gendered attitudes in the critique of the era. As a theoretical and methodological frame of reference, I use discourse analysis. Anitra Lucander encountered modernistic, international art movements during her journeys to Paris in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Her art evolved from the geometric Concretism of the early decade towards more delicate and painterly abstract expression. After the mid-1950s, she had developed her signature expression; through Cubism and a collage technique, she developed in her painting a delicate, coloristic imagery, which can be characterized as Lyrical Abstraction. Lucander did not consider abstract expression to be categorical, but saw the abstract and the nonfigurative as equals: the line between the abstract and the figurative is very often fleeting in her art. Already in her own time, Lucander achieved a position as one of the most talented young artists of her generation and her work was included in significant exhibitions. This success can definitely be attributed to the fact that she embraced Modernism in its extreme form, abstraction, already at the beginning of her career and networked with male painters who shared her outlook and modernistic expression. For her, this was either a conscious or an unconscious method of adapting to the male-dominated Finnish art field in the 1950s. In spite of acclaim and attention, Lucander had to encounter the gendered attitudes in the critique of the time, and her art was often perceived through stereotypical views as overly feminine and dependent. However, with her art, Lucander played an important role in the breakthrough for colorism and abstract art in Finland in the 1950s.

Den framställande gesten : Om konstverkets presentation i den moderna konstutställningen

The Gesture of Exposure On the presentation of the work of art in the modern art exhibition The topic of this dissertation is the presentation of art works in the modern art exhibition as being the established and conventionalized form of art encounter. It investigates the possibility of a theorization of the art exhibition as a separate object for research, and attempts to examine the relationship between the art work and its presentation in a modern art exhibition. The study takes its point of departure in the area vaguely defined as exhibition studies, and in the lack of a general problematization of the analytical tools used for closer examination of the modern art exhibition. Another lacking aspect is a closer consideration of what happens to the work of art when it is exposed in an art exhibition. The aim of the dissertation is to find a set of concepts that can be used for further theorization The art exhibition is here treated, on the one hand, as an act of exposure, as a showing gesture. On the other hand, the art exhibition is seen as a spatiality, as a space that is produced in the act of showing. Both aspects are seen to be intimately involved in knowledge production. The dissertation is divided into four parts, in which different aspects of the art exhibition are analyzed using different theoretical approaches. The first part uses the archaeological model of Michel Foucault, and discusses the exhibition as a discursive formation based on communicative activity. The second part analyses the derived concepts of gesture and space. This leads to the proposition of three metaphorical spatialities the frame, the agora and the threshold which are seen as providing a possibility for a further extension of the theory of exhibitions. The third part extends the problematization of the relationship between the individual work of art and its exposure through the ideas of Walter Benjamin and Maurice Blanchot. The fourth part carries out a close reading of three presentations from the modern era in order to further examine the relationship between the work of art and its presentation, using the tools that have been developed during the study. In the concluding section, it is possible to see clearer borderlines and conditions for the development of an exhibition theory. The concepts that have been analysed and developed into tools are shown to be useful, and the examples take the discussion into a consideration of the altered premises for the encounter with the postmodern work of art.

Ruumiinkuvia! : Suomalainen performanssi- ja kehotaide 1980- ja1990-luvulla psykoanalyysin valossa

My PhD-thesis Body Images! Psychoanalytical Analysis of Finnish Performance and Body Art in the 1980s and 1990s considers Finnish performance and body art performed mainly by visual artists. In Part I, I chart the historical construction of performance art and its extension since the beginning of the 21st century. There are several wievs of the historical background of performance art. I introduce three different genealogies of performance art. One is Rose-Lee Goldberg s view. She connects performance art with the European avant-garde already at the beginning of the 20th century from futurists and dadaists to Russian avant-garde and the Bauhaus. I prefer to present performance art as contemporary art, which began to take shape in connection with visual arts in the 1950s and 1960s. The focus on the body is apparent in nearly all performance art. Nevertheless, throug the concept of body art I want to empasize the artist s body as the place of art. Body art (as part of performance art) functions as thematic and interpretive concept, which allows me to focus on performances where the questions of body image, narcissism, desire, language and pleasure are incorporated in particular intensive ways. In Part II, I explore the arrival of performance art in Finnish visual arts in the 1980s. I study the new generation s relation to earlier Finnish happenings (1960s) and performative actions in 1970 s. I briefly introduce performance groups of the 1980s art scene and consider their reception in media. The main focus is on the group Jack Helen Brut, in which I see many similarities to the so- called Theatre of Images. The goal of this part II is to provide historical context for the performance analysis that follows. In Part III, I develop the concept of body image which is my main theoretical term. The concept of body image is used according to Lacanian psychoanalytical theory, especially his considerations of mirror stages. My first mapping of body image, which I call imaginary body image, is based on Lacan s famous mirror stage article (1949). According to my reading, body image is narcistic and aggressive. The important concepts here are ego, imaginary, méconnaisance and alienation. In 1953 Lacan began to develop different version on mirror stage, in which he emphasized the primacy of symbolic dimension. It is not image, but language which constructs the foundations of body image. Central concepts in this chater are Other as language, ego-ideal, demand and desire. In the last chapter I connect the third version of the mirror stage to concepts of gaze, phantasy, real, jouissance and object a. In previous chapters I had considered body image in relation to ego. Now I explore it in relation to subject. In my reading the body image is fragile phenomen, which oscillates between yearning for coherence and phantasies of fragmented images. Part IV of the thesis begins with an introduction to the central concepts and debates in performace studies over the last few decades. Important concepts are presence, performativity and theatricality. The main substance of my thesis, however, is the performance analysis, which focuses on works by three Finnish artists and one Finnish group. The first analysis concerns the performance (1992) of Kimmo Schroderus. I discuss the relationship between narcissism and body art and the changes in demands projected on body images of men in recent decades in a Euro-American context. I also explore this performance in relation to the myth of Narcissus, which I reinterpret through Narcissus s aggression against his own body. The group Homo S is the main subject of the next analysis. I discuss the relationship between feminist art and performance art, especially in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s. Homo S is different from this early performance art because of its anarchism, humor and rejection of all ideals. Homo S characterizes its performance Body Body (1983) as liberating vulgar feminism . Sociality and performance of erotic relations between women are central in Body Body. Pia Lindman s performances are the subjects of my third analysis. I study three of her performances: Olen muoto (1993), 17 and in love (1994) and Arranged views (1995). I interpret these performances as efforts to disperse the imaginary and symbolic structures of the body image. She constructs the peculiar object a and phantasy space of her own. In the last analysis I move from questions of image and gaze to a study of language, sound and jouissance. I discuss at a general level the performance of orality and helplesness (Hilflosigkeit) in body art. The central elements in Pentti Otto Koskinen s performances are the ear, listening and receptive gestures and postions. Perseveraatio (1998) can be understood representing as submission to the super-ego s power, which compels one to enjoy. I examine particularly closely the performance Maissi on hyvää ei missään nimessä maissia (1995), which I interpret as the return of a baby s body image to the liminal site of choice: language or jouissance?

Roy Kenzie Kiyooka

Roy Kenzie Kiyooka Canadian, born 1926 Roy Kiyooka was born in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan in 1926. Throughout his career, he was known as a painter, photographer, sculptor, poet, musician, filmmaker and teacher. He studied at the Provincial Institute of Technology and Art in Calgary from 1946-49, and then at the Instituto Allende in Mexico in 1955. During the summers of 1958 - 1960 he attended the Emma Lake Workshops in Saskatchewan, where he worked closely with Barnett Newman and Clement Greenberg. In 1959 he executed his first series of abstract paintings, The Hoarfrost Series, which assume a disciplined minimal quality. In the late 1960's Kiyooka began to push beyond painting and created mixed media works, including collage, photography, film and poetry. Kiyooka’s art is born out of personal experience and through it he records his relationship to the surrounding landscape; a night in a motel, a trip to the coast, or hoarfrost on the trees. Through the unfolding of Kiyooka’s interior/exterior landscapes he shares his personal journeys with us all. The Art Gallery of Ontario's collection of Roy Kiyooka's work began with the purchase of two paintings; Barometer No. 2, in 1964 and Surya, in 1987.

Enhancing human action recognition with region proposals

Deep convolutional network models have dominated recent work in human action recognition as well as image classification. However, these methods are often unduly influenced by the image background, learning and exploiting the presence of cues in typical computer vision datasets. For unbiased robotics applications, the degree of variation and novelty in action backgrounds is far greater than in computer vision datasets. To address this challenge, we propose an “action region proposal” method that, informed by optical flow, extracts image regions likely to contain actions for input into the network both during training and testing. In a range of experiments, we demonstrate that manually segmenting the background is not enough; but through active action region proposals during training and testing, state-of-the-art or better performance can be achieved on individual spatial and temporal video components. Finally, we show by focusing attention through action region proposals, we can further improve upon the existing state-of-the-art in spatio-temporally fused action recognition performance.