Embodied Computing

Practitioners and scholars explore ethical, social, and conceptual issues arising in relation to such devices as fitness monitors, neural implants, and a toe-controlled computer mouse. Body-centered computing now goes beyond the “wearable” to encompass implants, bionic technology, and ingestible sensors—technologies that point to hybrid bodies and blurred boundaries between human, computer, and artificial intelligence platforms. Such technologies promise to reconfigure the relationship between bodies and their environment, enabling new kinds of physiological interfacing, embodiment, and productivity. Using the term embodied computing to describe these devices, this book offers essays by practitioners and scholars from a variety of disciplines that explore the accompanying ethical, social, and conceptual issues. The contributors examine technologies that range from fitness monitors to neural implants to a toe-controlled mouse. They discuss topics that include the policy implications of ingestibles; the invasive potential of body area networks, which transmit data from bodily devices to the internet; cyborg experiments, linking a human brain directly to a computer; the evolution of the ankle monitor and other intrusive electronic monitoring devices; fashiontech, which offers users an aura of “cool” in exchange for their data; and the “final frontier” of technosupremacism: technologies that seek to read our minds. Taken together, the essays show the importance of considering embodied technologies in their social and political contexts rather than in isolated subjectivity or in purely quantitative terms. Contributors Roba Abbas, Andrew Iliadis, Gary Genosko, Suneel Jethani, Deborah Lupton, Katina Michael, M. G. Michael, Marcel O'Gorman, Maggie Orth, Isabel Pedersen, Christine Perakslis, Kevin Warwick, Elizabeth Wissinger

"Embodied technologies such as wearable tracking bracelets, ingestible sensors, embeddable prosthetics, and implantable microchips all stand to redefine the human experience and what it means to speak of technology and the body. No longer the speculative stuff of science fiction, embodied technologies have arrived and are being developed by a variety of industries at an alarming rate. Embodied technologies augment the body's phenomenological interaction with the world and depend on an agent's body to transmit energy and information. Varieties of wearable, ingestible, embeddable, and implantable technologies have become constitutive of new hybrid bodies, blurring the line separating the human from the technological. Yet, bodies constantly negotiate demands made by technology-both humanizing and dehumanizing. Embodied Technology: Wearables, Implantables, Embeddables, Ingestibles is a collection by key practitioners and theorists in the field and analyzes a variety of sociotechnical themes and devices as agents in dialogue with the human body and subjectivity"--

Computer science as an engineering discipline has been spectacularly successful. Yet it is also a philosophical enterprise in the way it represents the world and creates and manipulates models of reality, people, and action. In this book, Paul Dourish addresses the philosophical bases of human-computer interaction. He looks at how what he calls "embodied interaction"—an approach to interacting with software systems that emphasizes skilled, engaged practice rather than disembodied rationality—reflects the phenomenological approaches of Martin Heidegger, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and other twentieth-century philosophers. The phenomenological tradition emphasizes the primacy of natural practice over abstract cognition in everyday activity. Dourish shows how this perspective can shed light on the foundational underpinnings of current research on embodied interaction. He looks in particular at how tangible and social approaches to interaction are related, how they can be used to analyze and understand embodied interaction, and how they could affect the design of future interactive systems.

This book describes research in all aspects of the design, implementation, and evaluation of embodied conversational agents as well as details of specific working systems. Embodied conversational agents are computer-generated cartoonlike characters that demonstrate many of the same properties as humans in face-to-face conversation, including the ability to produce and respond to verbal and nonverbal communication. They constitute a type of (a) multimodal interface where the modalities are those natural to human conversation: speech, facial displays, hand gestures, and body stance; (b) software agent, insofar as they represent the computer in an interaction with a human or represent their human users in a computational environment (as avatars, for example); and (c) dialogue system where both verbal and nonverbal devices advance and regulate the dialogue between the user and the computer. With an embodied conversational agent, the visual dimension of interacting with an animated character on a screen plays an intrinsic role. Not just pretty pictures, the graphics display visual features of conversation in the same way that the face and hands do in face-to-face conversation among humans. This book describes research in all aspects of the design, implementation, and evaluation of embodied conversational agents as well as details of specific working systems. Many of the chapters are written by multidisciplinary teams of psychologists, linguists, computer scientists, artists, and researchers in interface design. The authors include Elisabeth Andre, Norm Badler, Gene Ball, Justine Cassell, Elizabeth Churchill, James Lester, Dominic Massaro, Cliff Nass, Sharon Oviatt, Isabella Poggi, Jeff Rickel, and Greg Sanders.

"This anthology of original historical essays examines how social relations are enacted in and through computing using the twin frameworks of abstraction and embodiment. The book highlights a wide range of understudied contexts and experiences, such as computing and disability, working mothers as technical innovators, race and community formation, and gaming behind the Iron Curtain"--

The 13th International Conference on Human–Computer Interaction, HCI Inter- tional 2009, was held in San Diego, California, USA, July 19–24, 2009, jointly with the Symposium on Human Interface (Japan) 2009, the 8th International Conference on Engineering Psychology and Cognitive Ergonomics, the 5th International Conference on Universal Access in Human–Computer Interaction, the Third International Conf- ence on Virtual and Mixed Reality, the Third International Conference on Internati- alization, Design and Global Development, the Third International Conference on Online Communities and Social Computing, the 5th International Conference on Augmented Cognition, the Second International Conference on Digital Human Mod- ing, and the First International Conference on Human Centered Design. A total of 4,348 individuals from academia, research institutes, industry and gove- mental agencies from 73 countries submitted contributions, and 1,397 papers that were judged to be of high scientific quality were included in the program. These papers - dress the latest research and development efforts and highlight the human aspects of design and use of computing systems. The papers accepted for presentation thoroughly cover the entire field of human–computer interaction, addressing major advances in the knowledge and effective use of computers in a variety of application areas.

Did you know that computation can be implemented with cytoskeleton networks, chemical reactions, liquid marbles, plants, polymers and dozens of other living and inanimate substrates? Do you know what is reversible computing or a DNA microscopy? Are you aware that randomness aids computation? Would you like to make logical circuits from enzymatic reactions? Have you ever tried to implement digital logic with Minecraft? Do you know that eroding sandstones can compute too?This volume reviews most of the key attempts in coming up with an alternative way of computation. In doing so, the authors show that we do not need computers to compute and we do not need computation to infer. It invites readers to rethink the computer and computing, and appeals to computer scientists, mathematicians, physicists and philosophers. The topics are presented in a lively and easily accessible manner and make for ideal supplementary reading across a broad range of subjects.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Internet and Distributed Systems held in Naples, Italy, in October 2019. The 47 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 145 submissions. This conference desires to look for inspiration in diverse areas (e.g. infrastructure & system design, software development, big data, control theory, artificial intelligence, IoT, self-adaptation, emerging models, paradigms, applications and technologies related to Internet-based distributed systems) to develop new ways to design and manage such complex and adaptive computation resources.