Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Can Lethal Autonomous Weapons Be Just?, Noreen L. Herzfeld, Robert H. Latiff

Computer Science Faculty Publications

In 2018 the United States Department of Defense (DoD) created a new Joint Artificial Intelligence Center to study the adoption of AI by the military. Their strategy, outlined in a document entitled, “Harnessing AI to Advance Our Security and Prosperity,” proposes to accelerate the adoption of AI in the military by fostering a culture of experimentation and calculated risk taking, noting that AI will change the character of the future battlefield and, even more, the pace of battle. Is there any way to ensure that this future battlefield will be just? Can the age-old precepts of just warfare help guide …

Ready Raider One: Exploring The Misuse Of Cloud Gaming Services, Guannan Liu, Daiping Liu, Shuai Hao, Xing Gao, Kun Sun, Haining Wang

Computer Science Faculty Publications

Cloud gaming has become an emerging computing paradigm in recent years, allowing computer games to offload complex graphics and logic computation to the cloud. To deliver a smooth and high-quality gaming experience, cloud gaming services have invested abundant computing resources in the cloud, including adequate CPUs, top-tier GPUs, and high-bandwidth Internet connections. Unfortunately, the abundant computing resources offered by cloud gaming are vulnerable to misuse and exploitation for malicious purposes. In this paper, we present an in-depth study on security vulnerabilities in cloud gaming services. Specifically, we reveal that adversaries can purposely inject malicious programs/URLs into the cloud gaming services …

Budget Magic: The Gathering For Beginners, Todd W. Neller

Computer Science Faculty Publications

In this talk, Neller overviewed budget-friendly entry points to playing Magic: The Gathering (M:TG) after its first quarter-century of success. Noting the ways in which M:TG players have applied head-designer Mark Rosewater’s “restrictions breed creativity” lesson, he celebrated their creative formats that push back against expensive “pay to win” dynamics.

Getting Things Done For The Glory Of God, Todd W. Neller

Computer Science Faculty Publications

The seminar covered a fusion of David Allen’s Getting Things Done; Covey, Merrill and Merrill’s First Things First; and Matt Perman’s What’s Best Next books on time management, with a view to being a good steward of time and effort for the glory of God. More information is available at http://cs.gettysburg.edu/~tneller/resources/gtd/index.html

Web Archives At The Nexus Of Good Fakes And Flawed Originals, Michael L. Nelson

Computer Science Faculty Publications

[Summary] The authenticity, integrity, and provenance of resources we encounter on the web are increasingly in question. While many people are inured to the possibility of altered images, the easy accessibility of powerful software tools that synthesize audio and video will unleash a torrent of convincing “deepfakes” into our social discourse. Archives will no longer be monopolized by a countable number of institutions such as governments and publishers, but will become a competitive space filled with social engineers, propagandists, conspiracy theorists, and aspiring Hollywood directors. While the historical record has never been singular nor unmalleable, current technologies empower an unprecedented …

Mixed Logical And Probabilistic Reasoning In The Game Of Clue, Todd W. Neller, Ziqian Luo

Computer Science Faculty Publications

Neller and Ziqian Luo ’18 presented a means of mixed logical and probabilistic reasoning with knowledge in the popular deductive mystery game Clue. Using at-least constraints, we more efficiently represented and reasoned about cardinality constraints on Clue card deal knowledge, and then employed a WalkSAT-based solution sampling algorithm with a tabu search metaheuristic in order to estimate the probabilities of unknown card places.

Plentiful Possibilities For Pen, Pencil, And Paper Play, Todd W. Neller

Computer Science Faculty Publications

Neller presented games such as Dots and Boxes, Sprouts, Jotto, Chomp, and Pentominoes in order to illustrate the diversity of existing pencil and paper games. Additionally, he presented his own pencil and paper game design, Paper Penguins, and discussed the game design process.

Learning To Generate Natural Language Rationales For Game Playing Agents, Upol Ehsan, Pradyumna Tambwekar, Larry Chan, Brent Harrison, Mark O. Riedl

Computer Science Faculty Publications

Many computer games feature non-player charactert (NPC) teammates and companions; however, playing with or against NPCs can be frustrating when they perform unexpectedly. These frustrations can be avoided if the NPC has the ability to explain its actions and motivations. When NPC behavior is controlled by a black box AI system it can be hard to generate the necessary explanations. In this paper, we present a system that generates human-like, natural language explanations—called rationales—of an agent's actions in a game environment regardless of how the decisions are made by a black box AI. We outline a robust data collection …

The Birds Of A Feather Research Challenge, Todd W. Neller

Computer Science Faculty Publications

Neller presented a set of research challenges for undergraduates that allow an excellent formative experience of research, writing, peer review, and potential presentation and publication through a top-tier conference. The focus problem is the analysis of a newly-designed solitaire card game, Birds of a Feather, so potentials for discovery abound. Open access talk slides, research code, solvability data sets, research tutorial videos, and more are also available at http://cs.gettysburg.edu/~tneller/puzzles/boaf .

Amazons, Penguins, And Amazon Penguins, Todd W. Neller

Computer Science Faculty Publications

This talk discussed a family of games based on Amazons (1988), a distant relative of Go (area control) and Chess (queen-like movement), innovated with the introduction of move obstacles. Hey! That’s My Fish! (2003) restricted the addition of obstacles and added varying points for position visits. Introducing original related game designs (e.g. Amazon Penguins (2009) and Paper Pen-guins (2009)), we demonstrated how game mechanics are like genes that mutate, crossover, and invite evolution of new games.

Playful Ai Education, Todd W. Neller

Computer Science Faculty Publications

In this talk, Neller shared how games can serve as a fun means of teaching not only game-tree search in Artificial Intelligence (AI), but also such diverse topics as constraint satisfaction, logical reasoning, planning, uncertain reasoning, machine learning, and robotics. He observed that teachers teach best when they enjoy what they share and encouraged AI educators present to teach to their unique strengths and enthusiasms.

The Digital Musing Of A History Buff, Charles W. Kann

Computer Science Faculty Publications

Perhaps the best part of studying Computer Science (CS) is that it is not an isolated discipline; CS exists to produce systems and applications that support the business and interests of nearly every person in the world. Any area of inquiry is open to fanciful and meaningful exploration by computer scientists. In a very real sense, the world is the oyster of those who can use digital tools developed by CS.

In his talk, Dr. Kann will explore how he uses those digital tools to advance his enthusiasm for history. The talk will highlight some of the work he has …

Gecka3d: A 3d Game Engine For Commonsense Knowledge Acquisition, Erik Cambria, Tam Nguyen, Brian Cheng, Kenneth Kwok, Jose Sepulveda

Computer Science Faculty Publications

Commonsense knowledge representation and reasoning is key for tasks such as artificial intelligence and natural language understanding. Since commonsense consists of information that humans take for granted, gathering it is an extremely difficult task. In this paper, we introduce a novel 3D game engine for commonsense knowledge acquisition (GECKA3D) which aims to collect commonsense from game designers through the development of serious games. GECKA3D integrates the potential of serious games and games with a purpose. This provides a platform for the acquisition of reusable and multi-purpose knowledge and also enables the development of games that can provide entertainment value and …

Ai Education: Birds Of A Feather, Todd W. Neller

Computer Science Faculty Publications

Games are beautifully crafted microworlds that invite players to explore complex terrains that spring into existence from even simple rules. As AI educators, games can offer fun ways of teaching important concepts and techniques. Just as Martin Gardner employed games and puzzles to engage both amateurs and professionals in the pursuit of Mathematics, a well-chosen game or puzzle can provide a catalyst for AI learning and research. [excerpt]

Visualizing Fantasy Fiction: Design Of A Class In Digital Scholarship And Visualization, Including Research, Organization And Digital Visualization, That Does Not Require Programming Or It Support, Charles W. Kann

Computer Science Faculty Publications

This paper outlines a course to integrate digital visualizations into undergraduate research. These visualizations will include mapping and timelines of events, and the ability to hyperlink the events, characters, and story lines in a fantasy fiction story such as Lord of the Rings or A Game of Thrones. The digital scholarship will involve the methodology for collecting, organizing, and representing the data for the visualizations.

The topic for the visualizations in this paper is fantasy fiction; however the methods to develop these visualizations will be applicable to many academic disciplines, including the humanities and social sciences.

The paper outlines …

Digital Scholarship: Applying Digital Tools To Undergraduate Student Research Papers, A Proposal For A Freshman Seminar. Part I: Definition Of Student Research Methodology, Charles W. Kann

Computer Science Faculty Publications

There are many digital tools that can be used for research and presentation in nearly every college discipline, including the social sciences and humanities. These tools hold the promise to radically change both the process and products of research. But in their application these tools have failed miserably to live up to their promise.

This paper is based on the hypothesis that one reason these tools do reach their potential is that there is no systemic way to include them in research process, resulting in the tools being seen as ways to improve the final research product. This results in …

Methodology For Creating Digital Scholarship Projects, Charles W. Kann

Computer Science Faculty Publications

Colloquium talk describing a methodology for creating Digital Scholarship projects.

Static Saliency Vs. Dynamic Saliency: A Comparative Study, Tam Nguyen, Mengdi Xu, Guangyu Gao, Mohan Kankanhalli, Qi Tian, Shuicheng Yan

Computer Science Faculty Publications

Recently visual saliency has attracted wide attention of researchers in the computer vision and multimedia field. However, most of the visual saliency-related research was conducted on still images for studying static saliency. In this paper, we give a comprehensive comparative study for the first time of dynamic saliency (video shots) and static saliency (key frames of the corresponding video shots), and two key observations are obtained: 1) video saliency is often different from, yet quite related with, image saliency, and 2) camera motions, such as tilting, panning or zooming, affect dynamic saliency significantly.

Motivated by these observations, we propose a …

Hi, Magic Closet, Tell Me What To Wear!, Si Liu, Tam Nguyen, Jiashi Feng, Meng Wang, Shuicheng Yan

Computer Science Faculty Publications

In this demo, we present a practical system, "magic closet," for automatic occasion-oriented clothing pairing. Given a user-input occasion, e.g., wedding or shopping, the magic closet intelligently and automatically pairs the user-specified reference clothing (upper body or lower body) with the most suitable one from online shops. Two key criteria are explicitly considered for the magic closet system. One criterion is to dress properly, e.g., compared to suit pants, it is more decent to wear a cocktail dress for a banquet occasion. The other criterion is to dress aesthetically, e.g., a red T-shirt matches better with white pants than with …

Correlation Of Music Charts And Search Engine Rankings, Martin Klein, Olena Hunsicker, Michael Nelson

Computer Science Faculty Publications

We investigate the question whether expert rankings of real-world entities correlate with search engine (SE) rankings of corresponding web resources. We compare Billboards "Hot 100 Airplay" music charts with SE rankings of associated web resources. Out of nine comparisons we found two strong, two moderate, two weak and one negative correlation. The remaining two comparisons were inconclusive.

"Your Cell Will Teach You Everything": Old Wisdom, Modern Science, And The Art Of Attention, Noreen L. Herzfeld

Computer Science Faculty Publications

Here is a brief excerpt of the content:

A brother came to Scetis to visit Abba Moses and asked him "Father, give me a word." The old man said to him "Go, sit in your cell, and your cell will teach you everything." ¹ Among the Desert Fathers, Christian monks of the fourth and fifth centuries, it was customary for a novice to go to an elder and ask for "a word," a word of advice, of counsel, a word to take home and reflect on. What does this word of advice say to us today?

A Multitasking World

"Your …