AI & SOCIETY

This essay presents and reflects upon the construction of a few experimental artworks, among them Caracolomobile, that looks for poetic, aesthetic and functional possibilities to bring computer systems to the sensitive universe of human emotions, feelings and expressions. Modern and Contemporary Art have explored such qualities in unfathomable ways and nowadays is turning towards computer systems and their co-related technologies. This universe characterizes and is the focus of these experimental artworks; artworks dealing with entwined subjective and objective qualities, weaving perceptions, sensations and concepts. One of them, Caracolomobile, features an art installation creating a set up for an artificial robot that recognizes humans’ affective states and answers them with movements and sounds. The robot was installed over an artificial mirror lake in an open indigo-blue space surrounded by mirrors. It perceives and discriminates human emotional states and expressions using an interface developed with a non-intrusive neural headset (The neural headset used was developed by Emotiv Systems: http://www.emotiv.com . Accessed 11 August 2011). This artwork raises questions and looks for answers inquiring about the preliminary steps for the creation of artefacts that would conduct one to poetically experiment with affect, emotion, sensations and feelings in computational systems. Other works in progress ask about the poetic possibilities of mixing computational autonomous processes and behavioural robotic procedures (Arkin 1998) to create artificial environments mixed with humans.

The article considers relations between the generations, with particular attention given to older workers, who also face the pressures of responsibilities to both parents and children. The situations in Norway and the UK are compared. The case is made for support structures, such as senior quality circles, at the threshold between employment and retirement.

Digital cultural assets are often thought to exist in separate spheres based on their two principal points of origin: digitized and born digital. Increasingly, advances in digital curation are blurring this dichotomy, by introducing so-called “collections as data,” which regardless of their origination make cultural assets more amenable to the application of new computational tools and methodologies. This paper brings together archivists, scholars, and technologists to demonstrate computational treatments of digital cultural assets using Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) techniques that can help unlock hard-to-reach archival content. It describes an extended, iterative study applied to digitized and datafied WWII-era records housed at the FDR Presidential Library, rich content that is regrettably under-utilized by scholars examining American responses to the Holocaust. Authors detail the benefits of interdisciplinary collaboration for evaluating user needs, identifying and applying tools and methodologies (including ML through object detection and AI through Named Entity Recognition or NER), and reaching the real-world outcome of public access to augmented data. They also discuss issues of digital representation, relational context, and interface design to enable new modes of public and scholarly access. While based on a case study, we believe that this work is a substantial contribution to revealing the strengths and weaknesses of using AI/ML systems in cultural organizations. We give particular care to lessons learned, and generalize the approach taken across broad classes of collections with a focus on responsive iterations, reproducibility, and the relevance of data and its structures to users.

Through an analysis of university students’ job-hunting logs, we have found that their introspection via rereading their log sometimes helps them discover themselves. Then we have built a system called PLASIU designed to support job-hunter’s creative decision-making based on the observations from their actual job-hunting process. This paper provides an overview of PLASIU and describes the findings from a user study using PLASIU.