Artificial Intelligence and Robotics Commons^™

Sin And Grace, Bruce D. Baker

SPU Works

The theological lens of sin and grace gives a broader and deeper viewpoint than mere ethics. Ethical analysis is of course useful and necessary, but ethics alone is not enough. Ethics apart from a robust, holistic understanding of humans as persons-in-communion will remain mired in reductionist thinking about human dignity and morality. Therefore, this final chapter addresses the ethical issues of AI through the lens of sin and grace.

Epilogue: A Litany For Faithful Engagement With Artificial Intelligence, Bruce D. Baker

SPU Works

A litany is a thoughtfully organized prayer for use in public worship by the church, or as a personal devotional practice by individuals. This seems a fitting way to close our reflection on AI, faith, and the future. Prayer will be essential to our faithful response to the new opportunities and challenges AI brings. Our hope is that this litany will serve as a practical guide to thoughtful invocation of the Holy Spirit in prayers for wisdom and discernment, and in the daily disciplines of spiritual growth.

21st Century Learning Skills And Artificial Intelligence, David Wicks, Michael Paulus

SPU Works

The chapter explores four concepts important for learning and AI in the twenty-first century—creativity, critical thinking, communication, and collaboration (the “4Cs”)—as well as reflections on the theological significance of creativity and community.

Automation And Apocalypse: Imagining The Future Of Work, Michael Paulus

SPU Works

This chapter provides an orientation to the history of technology, work, and the theology of work and then explores three visions of the future of work—a literary dystopia, a philosophical utopia, and a theological apocalypse—as resources for understanding the significance of work and imagining its future. In the first vision, found in Kurt Vonnegut’s speculative novel Player Piano, automation leads to the end of meaningful work and nearly renders humans obsolete. This dystopic vision reveals the value of human work but remains skeptical about our ability to preserve it against the advances of automation. The second vision comes from …

Introduction, Michael Paulus

SPU Works

Artificial intelligence is rapidly and radically changing our lives and world. This book is a multidisciplinary engagement with the present and future impacts of AI from the standpoint of Christian faith. It provides technological, philosophical, and theological foundations for thinking about AI, as well as a series of reflections on the impact of AI on relationships, behavior, education, work, and moral action. The book serves as an accessible introduction to AI as well as a guide to wise consideration, design, and use of AI by examining foundational understandings and beliefs from a Christian perspective.

The Significance Of Sonic Branding To Strategically Stimulate Consumer Behavior: Content Analysis Of Four Interviews From Jeanna Isham’S “Sound In Marketing” Podcast, Ina Beilina

Student Theses and Dissertations

Purpose:
Sonic branding is not just about composing jingles like McDonald’s “I’m Lovin’ It.” Sonic branding is an industry that strategically designs a cohesive auditory component of a brand’s corporate identity. This paper examines the psychological impact of music and sound on consumer behavior reviewing studies from the past 40 years and investigates the significance of stimulating auditory perception by infusing sound in consumer experience in the modern 2020s.

Design/methodology/approach:
Qualitative content analysis of audio media was used to test two hypotheses. Four archival oral interview recordings from Jeanna Isham’s podcast “Sound in Marketing” featuring the sonic branding experts …

Du Undergraduate Showcase: Research, Scholarship, And Creative Works: Abstracts, Emma Aggeler, Elena Arroway, Daisy T. Booker, Justin Bravo, Kyle Bucholtz, Megan Burnham, Nicole Choi, Spencer Cockerell, Rosie Contino, Jackson Garske, Kaitlyn Glover, Caroline Hamilton, Haley Hartmann, Madalyne Heiken, Colin Holter, Leah Huzjak, Alyssa Jeng, Cole Jernigan, Chad Kashiwa, Adelaide Kerenick, Emily King, Abigail Langeberg, Maddie Leake, Meredith Lemons, Alec Mackay, Greer Mckinley, Ori Miller, Guy Milliman, Katherine Miromonti, Audrey Mitchell, Lauren Moak, Megan Morrell, Gelella Nebiyu, Zdenek Otruba, Toni V. Panzera, Kassidy Patarino, Sneha Patil, Alexandra Penney, Kevin Persky, Caitlin Pham, Gabriela Recinos, Mary Ringgenberg, Chase Routt, Olivia Schneider, Roman Shrestha, Arlo Simmerman, Alec Smith, Tessa Smith, Nhi-Lac Thai, Kyle Thurmann, Casey Tindall, Amelia Trembath, Maria Trubetskaya, Zachary Vangelisti, Peter Vo, Abby Walker, David Winter, Grayden Wolfe, Leah York

DU Undergraduate Research Journal Archive

Abstracts from the DU Undergraduate Showcase.

Designing A Digital Interactive Emotion Measure (Diem) For Digital Media: Theoretical Foundations And Validation Protocols, Celeste Sangiorgio, Cassandra Berbary, Cory Crane, Caroline Easton

Frameless

Awareness of emotions is often a treatment target in psychotherapy, but it is difficult to assess emotions due to ambiguity in measurement or scale design. Lack of clarity in scale design may increase risk that participant interpretations of scale items may not align with emotion constructs those scales were designed to capture. Furthermore, emphasis on verbal or written cues leads to low scientific representation of patients who cannot read emotion scales (e.g., low literacy). Touch-screen applications provide a unique opportunity to create a visual emotion measure which has low barriers but can be used to assess a high level of …

Sex With Robots And Human-Machine Sexualities: Encounters Between Human-Machine Communication And Sexuality Studies, Marco Dehnert

Human-Machine Communication

Sex robots are a controversial topic. Understood as artificial-intelligence enhanced humanoid robots designed for use in partnered and solo sex, sex robots offer ample opportunities for theorizing from a Human-Machine Communication (HMC) perspective. This comparative literature review conjoins the seemingly disconnected literatures of HMC and sexuality studies (SeS) to explore questions surrounding intimacy, love, desire, sex, and sexuality among humans and machines. In particular, I argue for understanding human-machine sexualities as communicative sexuotechnical-assemblages, extending previous efforts in both HMC and SeS for more-than-human, ecological, and more fluid approaches to humans and machines, as well as to sex and sexuality. This …

The Symptom Of Ethics: Rethinking Ethics In The Face Of The Machine, David J. Gunkel

Human-Machine Communication

This essay argues that it is the machine that constitutes the symptom of ethics— “symptom” understood as that excluded “part that has no part” in the system of moral consideration. Ethics, which has been historically organized around a human or at least biological subject, needs the machine to define the proper limits of the moral community even if it simultaneously excludes such mechanisms from any serious claim on moral consideration. The argument will proceed in five steps or movements. The first part will define and characterize “the symptom” as it has been operationalized in the work of Slovenian philosopher Slavoj …

Assessing Photogrammetry Artificial Intelligence In Monumental Buildings’ Crack Digital Detection, Said Maroun, Mostafa Khalifa, Nabil Mohareb

Architecture and Planning Journal (APJ)

Natural and human-made disasters have significant impacts on monumental buildings, threatening them from being deteriorated. If no rapid consolidations took into consideration traumatic accidents would endanger the existence of precious sites. In this context, Beirut's enormous 4th of August 2020 explosion damaged an estimated 640 historical monuments, many volunteers assess damages for more than a year to prevent the more crucial risk of demolitions. This research aims to assist the collaboration ability among photogrammetry science, Artificial Intelligence Model (AIM) and Architectural Coding to optimize the process for better coverage and scientific approach of data specific to the crack disorders to …

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 …

Using Neural Networks To Model Guitar Distortion, Caleb Koch, Scott Hawley, Andrew Fyfe

Science University Research Symposium (SURS)

Guitar players have been modifying their guitar tone with audio effects ever since the mid-20th century. Traditionally, these effects have been achieved by passing a guitar signal through a series of electronic circuits which modify the signal to produce the desired audio effect. With advances in computer technology, audio “plugins” have been created to produce audio effects digitally through programming algorithms. More recently, machine learning researchers have been exploring the use of neural networks to produce audio effects that yield strikingly similar results to their analog counterparts. Recurrent Neural Networks and Temporal Convolutional Networks have proven to be exceptional at …

Creation Of A Neural Network For The American Sign Language To Russian Translation App, John T. Simmons

Capstone Projects

1. A large population of people utilize American Sign Language for their primary method of communication.
2. No commercially available product is available for these people for when they need to communicate with speakers of a foreign language.
3. We must investigate methods to make communication between these two parties easier and more accessible.
4. By using a neural network to classify images of American Sign Language letters, we can build a service to make translation of American Sign Language into foreign languages possible.

Learning Robot Motion From Creative Human Demonstration, Charles C. Dietzel

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis presents a learning from demonstration framework that enables a robot to learn and perform creative motions from human demonstrations in real-time. In order to satisfy all of the functional requirements for the framework, the developed technique is comprised of two modular components, which integrate together to provide the desired functionality. The first component, called Dancing from Demonstration (DfD), is a kinesthetic learning from demonstration technique. This technique is capable of playing back newly learned motions in real-time, as well as combining multiple learned motions together in a configurable way, either to reduce trajectory error or to generate entirely …

Generating Music With Sentiments, Chunhui Bao

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

In this thesis, I focus on the music generation conditional on human sentiments such as positive and negative. As there are no existing large-scale music datasets annotated with sentiment labels, generating high-quality music conditioned on sentiments is hard. I thus build a new dataset consisting of the triplets of lyric, melody and sentiment, without requiring any manual annotations. I utilize an automated sentiment recognition model (based on the BERT trained on Edmonds Dance dataset) to "label'' the music according to the sentiments recognized from its lyrics. I then train the model of generating sentimental music and call the method Sentimental …

Rotten With Prediction, Serena Raquel Hicks

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

This project focuses on the relationship between religion and technology as it is portrayed in Science Fiction (SF). This thesis explores the SF genre rhetorically by examining the 2002 movie Minority Report (MR), which signaled the importance of surveillance and the need to predict future crimes following 9/11. The events of 9/11 played a significant role in post 9/11 SF films, which reflect and critique our communal and cultural values. 9/11 created a new relationship between the U.S justice system, predictive technologies (PTs), and data gathering. Through the Bush Doctrine of “preemptive action,” the U.S government attempted to use Dataism, …

Human/Artificial Intelligence Coordination In Video Games, Michael Rodriguez

ART 108: Introduction to Games Studies

The emergence of video games has led to widespread inventions to enhance the reality of the experience. As a result, Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) was developed to create virtual experiences and attract a variety of players of video games. This paper will discuss video games in the context of Human-A.I. interaction and the importance of human coordination in video games. Unprecedented errors have been a common challenge in this relationship. An excellent example of these algorithms include population-based training and self-play, which have gained a lot of interest in video games. A.I. technology has surpassed human ability because they are simply …

Seen And Heard

In The Loop

IRL Programs Debut; Short & Sweet Pandemic Film Fest; New MS in Artificial Intelligence; Virtual Experts Talks; DePaul Trustee Producing Documentary; DemonHacks Hackathon

Technological Tethereds: Potential Impact Of Untrustworthy Artificial Intelligence In Criminal Justice Risk Assessment Instruments, Sonia M. Gipson Rankin

Faculty Scholarship

Issues of racial inequality and violence are front and center in today’s society, as are issues surrounding artificial intelligence (AI). This Article, written by a law professor who is also a computer scientist, takes a deep dive into understanding how and why hacked and rogue AI creates unlawful and unfair outcomes, particularly for persons of color.

Black Americans are disproportionally featured in criminal justice, and their stories are obfuscated. The seemingly endless back-to-back murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery, and heartbreakingly countless others have finally shaken the United States from its slumbering journey towards intentional criminal justice …

Convolutional Audio Source Separation Applied To Drum Signal Separation, Marius Orehovschi

Honors Theses

This study examined the task of drum signal separation from full music mixes via both classical methods (Independent Component Analysis) and a combination of Time-Frequency Binary Masking and Convolutional Neural Networks. The results indicate that classical methods relying on predefined computations do not achieve any meaningful results, while convolutional neural networks can achieve imperfect but musically useful results. Furthermore, neural network performance can be improved by data augmentation via transposition – a technique that can only be applied in the context of drum signal separation.

"Who Can Help Me?'': Knowledge Infused Matching Of Support Seekers And Support Providers During Covid-19 On Reddit, Manas Gaur, Kaushik Roy, Aditya Sharma, Biplav Srivastava, Amit Sheth

Publications

During the ongoing COVID-19 crisis, subreddits on Reddit, such as r/Coronavirus saw a rapid growth in user's requests for help (support seekers - SSs) including individuals with varying professions and experiences with diverse perspectives on care (support providers - SPs). Currently, knowledgeable human moderators match an SS with a user with relevant experience, i.e, an SP on these subreddits. This unscalable process defers timely care. We present a medical knowledge-infused approach to efficient matching of SS and SPs validated by experts for the users affected by anxiety and depression, in the context of with COVID-19. After matching, each SP to …

Data: The Good, The Bad And The Ethical, John D. Kelleher, Filipe Cabral Pinto, Luis M. Cortesao

Articles

It is often the case with new technologies that it is very hard to predict their long-term impacts and as a result, although new technology may be beneficial in the short term, it can still cause problems in the longer term. This is what happened with oil by-products in different areas: the use of plastic as a disposable material did not take into account the hundreds of years necessary for its decomposition and its related long-term environmental damage. Data is said to be the new oil. The message to be conveyed is associated with its intrinsic value. But as in …

Autonomous Vehicles And The Ethical Tension Between Occupant And Non-Occupant Safety, Jason Borenstein, Joseph Herkert, Keith Miller

The Journal of Sociotechnical Critique

Given that the creation and deployment of autonomous vehicles is likely to continue, it is important to explore the ethical responsibilities of designers, manufacturers, operators, and regulators of the technology. We specifically focus on the ethical responsibilities surrounding autonomous vehicles that these stakeholders have to protect the safety of non-occupants, meaning individuals who are around the vehicles while they are operating. The term “non-occupants” includes, but is not limited to, pedestrians and cyclists. We are particularly interested in how to assign moral responsibility for the safety of non-occupants when autonomous vehicles are deployed in a complex, land-based transportation system.

Understanding The Complex Ethical Landscape Of Artificial Intelligence Adoptions, Chrissann R. Ruehle

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Although Artificial Intelligence (AI) has existed since the 1950’s, it has experienced a series of expansions and declines over the years. Currently, AI is on an upward trajectory and has prompted the fourth industrial revolution as many scientists have noted. Some firms have rapidly embraced this technology and experienced growth while others have been slow to adopt. Naturally, this expansion often has societal impacts. The aim of this study is to explore ethical considerations that arise during the adoption of this technology. This research addressed three questions: 1. How do market and regulatory forces reportedly shape Artificial Intelligence adoptions? 2. …

From The Tree Of Knowledge And The Golem Of Prague To Kosher Autonomous Cars: The Ethics Of Artificial Intelligence Through Jewish Eyes, Nachshon Goltz, John Zeleznikow, Tracey Dowdeswell

Research outputs 2014 to 2021

This article discusses the regulation of artificial intelligence from a Jewish perspective, with an emphasis on the regulation of machine learning and its application to autonomous vehicles and machine learning. Through the Biblical story of Adam and Eve as well as Golem legends from Jewish folklore, we derive several basic principles that underlie a Jewish perspective on the moral and legal personhood of robots and other artificially intelligent agents. We argue that religious ethics in general, and Jewish ethics in particular, show us that the dangers of granting moral personhood to robots and in particular to autonomous vehicles lie not …

Human Supremacy As Posthuman Risk, Daniel Estrada

The Journal of Sociotechnical Critique

Human supremacy is the widely held view that human interests ought to be privileged over other interests as a matter of ethics and public policy. Posthumanism is the historical situation characterized by a critical reevaluation of anthropocentrist theory and practice. This paper draws on animal studies, critical posthumanism, and the critique of ideal theory in Charles Mills and Serene Khader to address the appeal to human supremacist rhetoric in AI ethics and policy discussions, particularly in the work of Joanna Bryson. This analysis identifies a specific risk posed by human supremacist policy in a posthuman context, namely the classification of …

From Ai With Love: Reading Big Data Poetry Through Gilbert Simondon’S Theory Of Transduction, Andrew Klobucar

Electronic Literature Organization Conference 2020

Computation initiated a far-reaching re-imagination of language, not just as an information tool, but as a social, bio-physical activity in general. Modern lexicology provides an important overview of the ongoing development of textual documentation and its applications in relation to language and linguistics. At the same time, the evolution of lexical tools from the first dictionaries and graphs to algorithmically generated scatter plots of live online interaction patterns has been surprisingly swift. Modern communication and information studies from Norbert Weiner to the present-day support direct parallels between coding and linguistic systems. However, most theories of computation as a model of …

Why Are We Like This?: Exploring Writing Mechanics For An Ai-Augmented Storytelling Game, Max Kreminski, Melanie Dickinson, Michael Mateas, Noah Wardrip-Fruin

Electronic Literature Organization Conference 2020

Why Are We Like This? (WAWLT) is a playful, co-creative, AI-augmented, improvisational storytelling game in which one or more players explore and influence an ongoing simulation which they then glean for narrative material. It uses the recently developed simulation technology of story sifting (the recognition of microstories in a chronicle of simulation events), via the Felt library, to afford a new kind of playful, social, and creative writing experience. In this paper, we discuss our primary design goals: (1) using computation and interaction design to support casual player creativity, and (2) foregrounding character subjectivity as a driver for …

Literature Review: How U.S. Government Documents Are Addressing The Increasing National Security Implications Of Artificial Intelligence, Bert Chapman

Libraries Faculty and Staff Scholarship and Research

This article emphasizes the increasing importance of artificial intelligence (AI) in military and national security policy making. It seeks to inform interested individuals about the proliferation of publicly accessible U.S. government and military literature on this multifaceted topic. An additional objective of this endeavor is encouraging greater public awareness of and participation in emerging public policy debate on AI's moral and national security implications..