What if we began to speculate that intelligent things have an ethical agenda? Could we then imagine ways to move past the moral divide ‘human vs. nonhuman’ in those contexts, where things act on our behalf? Would this help us better address matters of agency and responsibility in the design and use of intelligent systems? In this article, we argue that if we fail to address intelligent things as objects that deserve moral consideration by their relations within a broad social (...) context, we will lack a grip on the distinct ethical rules governing our interaction with intelligent things, and how to design for it. We report insights from a workshop, where we take seriously the perspectives offered by intelligent things, by allowing unforeseen ethical situations to emerge in an improvisatory manner. By giving intelligent things an active role in interaction, our participants seemed to be activated by the artifacts, provoked to act and respond to things beyond the artifact itself—its direct functionality and user experience. The workshop helped to consider autonomous behavior not as a simplistic exercise of anthropomorphization, but within the more significant ecosystems of relations, practices and values of which intelligent things are a part. (shrink)

Sri Aurobindo: the future -- Sri Aurobindo's contribution to humanity -- Sri Aurobindo's realisations -- Spirit & significance of Indian culture -- Sri Aurobindo's revelations.

On spiritualism through studies in Aurobindo Ghose, 1872-1950, as a way for peace.

Study on the origin, future and purpose of man; includes contributions to education made by Tagore, Gandhi, and Aurobindo.

On the ideology of Henry David Thoreau, 1817-1862, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, 1869-1948, and Vinoba Bhave, b. 1895; articles.

This article is written by a descendant of enslaved Africans and explores the theological significance of Black bodies. Black bodies have been commodified, controlled and coerced by White hegemony, often lacking agency and self-determination. Using personal experience and contextual analysis, this article, drawing on Black theology inspired reflections, argues that we need to rethink how we conceive of Black bodies ethically, if Black lives are to really matter. The rehabilitation of Black bodies is achieved through a theological reappraisal of holiness (...) and sacraments, underpinned by an embodied pneumatology, in which Black bodies are shown to be sacramental and worthy of mattering in a world underpinned by White supremacy. (shrink)

Barresi & Moore do not consider information about intentional relations available within emotional engagement with others and do not see that others are perceived in the second as well as the third person. Recognising second person information forces recognition of similarities and connections not otherwise available. A developmental framework built on the assumption of the complete separateness of self and other is inevitably flawed.

v. 1, pt. 1. Avatarhood and human evolution.

Humanity is at crossroads of evolution. Modernity has established its omnipresence through science and technology. The impact is so significant that now it has penetrated our genetic structure through biotechnological creations. This brings into question the very foundation of the ideological life on which the edifice of the social structure is built. These new modalities raise unprecedented issues, such as: what is our understanding of life in relation to biotechnological creations, where is the original biological life positioned in such circumstances, (...) why is life in a “state of indistinction” (as identified by Giorgio Agamben in the homo sacer), and is it a compromise at “being human”? (shrink)

Comparative study of yoga philosophy of Vemana, Telugu poet and Vijñānabhairava, Hindu Tantric text.

The theory-theory is not supported by evidence in the everyday actions of infants and toddlers whose lives a Theory of Mind is meant radically to transform. This paper reviews some of these challenges to the theory-theory, particularly from communication and deception. We argue that the theory’s disconnection from action is both inevitable and paradoxical. The mind–behaviour dualism upon which it is premised requires a conceptual route to knowing minds and disallows a real test of the theory through the study of (...) action. Taking engagement seriously avoids these problems and requires that both lay people and psychologists be participants rather than observers in order to know, and indeed to create, minds. (shrink)

Joint attention to an external object at the end of the first year is typically believed to herald the infant's discovery of other people's attention. I will argue that mutual attention in the first months of life already involves an awareness of the directednesss of attention. The self is experienced as the first object of this directedness followed by gradually more distal 'objects'. this view explains early infant affective self-consciousness within mutual attention as emotionally meaningful, rather than as bearing only (...) a spurious similarity to that in the second and third years of life. Such engagements precede and must inform, rather than derive from, conceptual representations of self and other, and can be better described as self-other conscious affects. (shrink)

At the heart of the social intelligence hypothesis is the central role of ‘social living’. But living is messy and psychologists generally seek to avoid this mess in the interests of getting clean data and cleaner logical explanations. The study of deception as intelligent action is a good example of the dangers of such avoidance. We still do not have a full picture of the development of deceptive actions in human infants and toddlers or an explanation of why it emerges. (...) This paper applies Byrne & Whiten’s functional taxonomy of tactical deception to the social behaviour of human infants and toddlers using data from three previous studies. The data include a variety of acts, such as teasing, pretending, distracting and concealing, which are not typically considered in relation to human deception. This functional analysis shows the onset of non-verbal deceptive acts to be surprisingly early. Infants and toddlers seem to be able to communicate false information (about themselves, about shared meanings and about events) as early as true information. It is argued that the development of deception must be a fundamentally social and communicative process and that if we are to understand why deception emerges at all, the scientist needs to get ‘back to the rough ground’ as Wittgenstein called it and explore the messy social lives in which it develops. (shrink)

In order to understand how infants come to understand others' intentions we need first to study how intentional engagements occur in early development. Engaging with intentions requires that they are, first of all, potentially available to perception and, second, that they are meaningful to the perceiver. I argue that in typical development it is in the infant's responses to others' infant-directed intentional actions that others' intentions first become meaningful. And that it is through the meaningful joining of intentions that understanding (...) continues to develop. I use three common arenas in the first year to illustrate this claim: infants' anticipatory adjustments to being picked up, infants' emerging compliance to others' directives, and infant teasing. Even by the age of two months infants adjust their postures appropriately, gazing at the adult's face as they approach with arms outstretched to pick them up. From the middle of the first year infants come to recognize the meanings of verbal directives and start to comply with them, being drawn further into the cultural worlds of their families. In the last quarter of the first year infants start to playfully tease and foil others' intentions in a variety of ways, actively redirecting the course of intentional engagements. Others' intentions are thus increasingly available to infants, allowing cooperation, challenge, and further elaboration. Joint intentional actions are best understood as the processes through which intention awareness develops rather than just as the products of such awareness. (shrink)

International monetary arrangements currently appear to have consequences that are incompatible with a global egalitarian conception of distributive justice. How can we create alternatives?

The study of the emergence of pretend play in developmental psychology has generally been restricted to analyses of children’s play with toys and everyday objects. The widely accepted criteria for establishing pretence are the child’s manipulation of object identities, attributes or existence. In this paper we argue that there is another arena for pretending—playful pretend teasing—which arises earlier than pretend play with objects and is therefore potentially relevant for understanding the more general emergence of pretence. We present examples of playful (...) pretend teasing in infancy before and around the end of the first year, involving pretend communicative gestures, mis-labelling and almost non-compliance with prohibitions. We argue that the roots of pretence not only lie earlier in human infancy than generally acknowledged, but also are rooted in playful emotional exchanges in which people recognise and respond to violations of communicative gestures and agreements. (shrink)

In spite of the remarkable progress made in the burgeoning field of social neuroscience, the neural mechanisms that underlie social encounters are only beginning to be studied and could —paradoxically— be seen as representing the ‘dark matter’ of social neuroscience. Recent conceptual and empirical developments consistently indicate the need for investigations, which allow the study of real-time social encounters in a truly interactive manner. This suggestion is based on the premise that social cognition is fundamentally different when we are in (...) interaction with others rather than merely observing them. In this article, we outline the theoretical conception of a second-person approach to other minds and review evidence from neuroimaging, psychophysiological studies and related fields to argue for the development of a second-person neuroscience, which will help neuroscience to really go social; this may also be relevant for our understanding of psychiatric disorders construed as disorders of social cognition. (shrink)

In the data collection phase, the digital images are captured using sensors that often contaminated by noise (undesired random signal). In digital image processing task, enhancing the image quality and reducing the noise is a central process. Image denoising effectively preserves the image edges to a higher extend in the flat regions. Several adaptive filters (median filter, Gaussian filter, fuzzy filter, etc.) have been utilized to improve the smoothness of digital image, but these filters failed to preserve the image edges (...) while removing noise. In this paper, a modified fuzzy set filter has been proposed to eliminate noise for restoring the digital image. Usually in fuzzy set filter, sixteen fuzzy rules are generated to find the noisy pixels in the digital image. In modified fuzzy set filter, a set of twenty-four fuzzy rules are generated with additional four pixel locations for determining the noisy pixels in the digital image. The additional eight fuzzy rules ease the process of finding the image pixels,whether it required averaging or not. In this scenario, the input digital images were collected from the underwater photography fish dataset. The efficiency of the modified fuzzy set filter was evaluated by varying degrees of Gaussian noise (0.01, 0.03, and 0.1 levels of Gaussian noise). For performance evaluation, Structural Similarity (SSIM), Mean Structural Similarity (MSSIM), Mean Square Error (MSE), Normalized Mean Square Error (NMSE), Universal Image Quality Index (UIQI), Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR), and Visual Information Fidelity (VIF) were used. The experimental results showed that the modified fuzzy set filter improved PSNR value up to 2-3 dB, MSSIM up to 0.12-0.03, and NMSE value up to 0.38-0.1 compared to the traditional filtering techniques. (shrink)

The entry of an external object or the ‘third element’ into the dyad is generally taken as necessary for evidence of an understanding of others' attention, leading to an equating of the terms joint attention and awareness of attention. This chapter considers meta-theoretical and methodological reasons for psychology's disregard of mutual attention in this context and provides an alternative account of the emergence and development of attention awareness. Through the course of the first year human infants show a range of (...) emotional reactions to mutual attention and an increasingly complex range of attempts to regain it when it is absent or retain it when it is present. Prior to the onset of joint attention involving distal objects, mutual attentional engagements expand from an awareness of the self as an ‘object’ of others' attention to an awareness of the infant's own actions and expressions as ‘objects’. Providing the most direct experience of others' attention, mutual attention not only also reveals an awareness of attention but is the basis upon which further appropriate development of attention awareness can occur. (shrink)

Research on this topic in Europe and North America has reached a new stage. Prior to 1970, historians told a story of progress in which modern individuals gradually gained mastery of emotions. After 1970 this older approach was put into doubt. Since 1990 research into the history of emotions has increasingly relied on a new methodology, based on the assumption that emotion is a domain of effort, and that it is possible to document variance between emotional standards, on the one (...) hand, and the greater or lesser success of individuals in conforming to them, on the other. Emotional standards are now assumed to display a history that is not progressive, but reflects distinctive features of each period. (shrink)

Critical algorithm scholarship has demonstrated the difficulties of attributing accountability for the actions and effects of algorithmic systems. In this commentary, we argue that we cannot stop at denouncing the lack of accountability for algorithms and their effects but must engage the broader systems and distributed agencies that algorithmic systems exist within; including standards, regulations, technologies, and social relations. To this end, we explore accountability in “the Generated Detective,” an algorithmically generated comic. Taking up the mantle of detectives ourselves, we (...) investigate accountability in relation to this piece of experimental fiction. We problematize efforts to effect accountability through transparency by undertaking a simple operation: asking for permission to re-publish a set of the algorithmically selected and modified words and images which make the frames of the comic. Recounting this process, we demonstrate slippage between the “complication” of the algorithm and the obscurity of the legal and institutional structures in which it exists. (shrink)

In recent years, a surge of interest came up with studies in terms of the influence of different types of meditation on the brain and body. Lacking the basic understanding as to why ancient cultures conceived this practice primarily in its various facets, most of these studies mainly focus on delineating the underlying mechanisms of influence in terms of wellbeing and the cognitive enhancement. Thus, they not only involve various definitional and taxonomical issues, but also methodological issues. In this concern, (...) here, we share a new perspective and also emphasize on few issues which are fundamental to meditation research that should be addressed in future studies. (shrink)

Broadening access to both computational and educational resources is crit- ical to diffusing machine learning (ML) innovation. However, today, most ML resources and experts are siloed in a few countries and organizations. In this article, we describe our pedagogical approach to increasing access to applied ML through a massive open online course (MOOC) on Tiny Machine Learning (TinyML). We suggest that TinyML, applied ML on resource-constrained embedded devices, is an attractive means to widen access because TinyML leverages low-cost and globally (...) accessible hardware and encourages the development of complete, self-contained applications, from data collection to deployment. To this end, a collaboration between academia and industry produced a four part MOOC that provides application-oriented instruction on how to develop solutions using TinyML. The series is openly available on the edX MOOC platform, has no prerequisites beyond basic programming, and is designed for global learners from a variety of backgrounds. It introduces real-world applications, ML algorithms, data-set engineering, and the ethi- cal considerations of these technologies through hands-on programming and deployment of TinyML applications in both the cloud and on their own microcontrollers. To facili- tate continued learning, community building, and collaboration beyond the courses, we launched a standalone website, a forum, a chat, and an optional course-project com- petition. We also open-sourced the course materials, hoping they will inspire the next generation of ML practitioners and educators and further broaden access to cutting-edge ML technologies. (shrink)

Academic misconduct in all its various forms is a challenge for degree-granting institutions. Whilst text-based plagiarism can be detected using tools such as Turnitin™, Plagscan™ and Urkund™, contract cheating and collusion can be more difficult to detect, and even harder to prove, often falling to no more than a ‘balance of probabilities’ rather than fact. To further complicate the matter, some students will make deliberate attempts to obfuscate cheating behaviours by submitting work in Portable Document Format, in image form, or (...) by inserting hidden glyphs or using alternative character sets which text matching software does not always accurately detect.Educators do not tend to think of academic misconduct in terms of criminality per se, but the tools and techniques used by digital forensics experts in law enforcement can teach us much about how to investigate allegations of academic misconduct. The National Institute of Standards and Technology’s Glossary describes digital forensics as ‘the application of computer science and investigative procedures involving the examination of digital evidence - following proper search authority, chain of custody, validation with mathematics, use of validated tools, repeatability, reporting, and possibly expert testimony.’. These techniques are used in criminal investigations as a means to identify the perpetrator of, or accomplices to, a crime and their associated actions. They are sometimes used in cases relating to intellectual property to establish the legitimate ownership of a variety of objects, both written and graphical, as well as in fraud and forgery. Whilst there have been some research articles and case studies that demonstrate the use of digital forensics techniques to detect academic misconduct as proof of concept, there is no evidence of their actual deployment in an academic setting.This paper will examine some of the tools and techniques that are used in law enforcement and the digital forensics field with a view to determining whether they could be repurposed for use in an academic setting. These include methods widely used to determine if a file has been tampered with that could be repurposed to identify if an image is plagiarised; file extraction techniques for examining meta data, used in criminal cases to determine authorship of documents, and tools such as FTK™ and Autopsy™ which are used to forensically examine single files as well as entire hard drives. The paper will also present a prototype of a bespoke software tool that attempts to repurpose some of these techniques into an automated process for detecting plagiarism and / or contract cheating in Word documents.Finally, this article will discuss whether these tools have a place in an academic setting and whether their use in determining if a student’s work is truly their own is ethical. (shrink)

Comparative study on Sankaracarya and Aurobindo Ghose, 1872-1950, exponents of Indic philosophy.