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Summary 0HM150 - Advanced Cognitive Engineering
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Summary of all the lectures of the course Advanced Cognitive Engineering, including images!
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Lecture notes 0HM150 – Advanced CognitiveEngineering
Lecture 1 – Ubiquitous Computing, IoT, and the Extended Mind
(Wijnand IJsselsteijn, 4-2-21)
Focus on computing ‘beyond the desktop’, employing and leveraging our natural, bodily interaction
abilities and embedding computing within the social and physical contexts in which we live and work.
Embodied:
- Virtual reality
- Tangible computing
- Affective computing
Embedded:
- Ubiquitous computing
- Augmented reality
- Location-based systems
Focus on value-sensitive design, critical perspectives, and current debates in VR, data science and AI.
Different approaches:
User-centered: Taking user needs as a point of departure in developing technologies, such that they
will adhere to what users can do (their abilities and limitations) and what they would like to do. As
prospective users for input.
Value-centered: Take values as a central point of departure. That includes stakeholders that may not
have a voice in a user-centered approach. E.g. ecological effects of technologies, effects on future
generations, etc.
Human-Technology co-adaptation: How does human behavior and thinking change when confronted
with technology; how does technology adapt to humans?
“First we build our tools, then our tools build us” – Marshall McLuhan
The tools you use shape you mind and behavior, they affect you, and you become critically
dependent on them.
Technological advancement over the ages has increased exponentially.
How powerful are these tools?
- MacCready explosion: About the human impact on our environment. 10.000 years ago,
human population plus livestock and pets was approximately 0.1% of terrestrial vertebrate
biomass. Today, that is 98%.
- The Flynn Effect: IQ is up; using today’s test, the average IQ in 1932 would be 80 (instead of
100). Tested on vocabulary, verbal reasoning, spatial matching, mathematical progressions,
and so on.
o Flynn’s theory: Environmental changes resulting from modernizations – such as more
intellectually demanding work, greater use of technology and smaller families – have
meant that a much larger proportion of people are more accustomed to
, manipulating abstract concepts such as hypotheses and categories than a century
ago.
Technology has become an
extension of our intelligence and
physical power, in ways that you
don’t see anywhere else in the
animal kingdom.
Moore’s Law: If you look at the
number of transistors on an
integrated circuit, they tend to
DOUBLE every year – 18 months.
Exponential growth in computing
devices.
Size and price go down, power
goes up.
3 main waves in computing,
predicted by Alan Kay:
- Mainframe
- PC
- Ubiquitous computing
Ubiquitous computing: Doesn’t have to mean many
PC’s it is about many computers per person (e.g. in a
car). Also integrating computational power and
communicating/exchanging knowledge about the user
between the computers.
Main changes in computing over the last 3 decades,
according to Bill Buxton:
- Smaller, faster, cheaper, more of them,
networked, location/motion sensing,
input/output transducers.
Ubiquitous computing Internet of things (used interchangeably within these lectures)
- Cognitive disappearance: “The most profound technologies are those that disappear”
(Weiser, 1991)
o You don’t have to spend time attending to the computing device itself.
o E.g. electromotor
, - “People and environments augmented with computational resources that provide
information and services where and when desired” (Abowd & Mynatt, 2000)
- Integration = essential. Technologies integrated within our daily living and work
environments
Mark Weiser’s vision:
- Hundreds of computers embedded around us
- Ubicomp is not just anywhere anytime
- Form factors: tabs, pads, boards
- People will use then unconsciously
- “Disappearance is a consequence of human psychology afforded by the technology”
- Calm technology:
o Moves easily between periphery and center
o Enhanced peripheral reach, gives information without really attending to it
o Puts us ‘at home’, we don’t need to go out of our comfort zone, we can assess
information as it unfolds
Ubiquitous computing shouldn’t be a fight for your attention.
Calm computing: very intuitive and non-intrusive information. Example: dangling string that moves
faster when there is a lot of internet traffic
Ambient intelligence: ubiquity, awareness, intelligence, and natural interaction. The Philips vision of
ubiquitous computing, e.g. a mirror that not only reflects your image, but also shows the weather,
news, vital signs, etc.
How do we appropriate cognitive technologies?
Extended mind: the tools you use become part of the thinking process. Thinking = brains + body +
environment.
“My pencil and I are smarter than I am” – Albert Einstein
Is all this machine intelligence making us smarter or more stupid? How does the use of Google
impact our cognitive abilities (e.g. memory)? This is not a simple yes or no question, but it is
important to realize that we are changing, co-adapting to technology.
Stroop effect: Name the color of the word as fast as
you can
Experiment: answer 16 easy questions and 16 hard
questions. Read words beforehand. If you read the
name of a search engine (e.g. Google of Yahoo), your
reaction time becomes larger.
Other experiment: When people think input is being
saved (e.g. by a computer), they remember less.
When people think input is being erased, they
remember more.
Our brain is opportunistic/an optimizer, so whenever it doesn’t need to remember, it won’t.
Book: Andy Clark’s Natural Born Cyborgs
- Our brains are so well attuned to utilize technologies to our benefit, that that makes us
unique in relation to other creatures. Our brain does it naturally, it makes us natural born
cyborgs
, - It is our special character, as human beings, to be forever driven to create, co-opt, annex,
and exploit non-biological props and scaffoldings
o Using tools and technologies to enhance our own abilities and do that in a way that is
entirely fluid
- Blurs the boundary between user and technology. When do we ‘use’ tools and when do they
become part of who we are?
o Technology is already part of our thinking process, even though the technologies are
not necessarily part of our body (e.g. chips under skin)
Human-technology co-adaptation
- Our brain is opportunistic whenever possible
o Memory tools work like a transactive memory. We offload effort to technology (e.g.
Google, camera), remembering where to find stuff but not what it was that we tried
to remember
- As our worlds become smarter, and gets to know us better and better, it becomes harder and
harder to say where the world stops, and the person begins
- According to Clark, we are human-technology symbionts: thinking and reasoning systems
whose minds and selves are spread across biological brain and non-biological circuitry.
o We are co-adapting, our ways of thinking are changing, for better or for worse, and
we are utilizing cognitive technologies in very transparent ways that directly connect
to our thinking process. They become externalized cognitive representations that we
utilize and that are ready to hand whenever we need them.
o Merges of humans and technologies
Note taking by hand helps remembering information because you are restructuring it.
You need to have some information from rote learning available to be able to find other information,
e.g. know how to ask a question, to know where to find the information, to assess information and
boil it down to its essence, etc.
Lecture 2 – Gestures, Tangibles, and Other Reality-Based
Interactions (Wijnand IJsselsteijn, 9-2-21)
Some perceptual criteria of reality
- Static depth information is provided via several independent mechanisms that are consistent
with each other and the observer’s viewpoint.
o Several independent mechanisms: e.g., linear perspective, interposition, texture
density gradients, binocular disparity, etc.
A depth cue that gets more effective as space increases, is aerial perspective (= blue-ish/grey-ish haze
that you get when you look far into the distance, sort of fogged-out). That indicates that it is far
away.
In natural perception, all these cues work together. They are signaling the same types of information
and they work consistently; they don’t conflict.
However, when you are looking at a display (e.g. computer), some of these cues conflict with each
other. For example, in a 3D cinema display, there are binocular disparities that tell you that an object
is close by or further away in space. But at the same time, you have the focusing mechanism of your
eye telling you that the image is sharpest at the screen pane. So, there is a discrepancy between your
binocular process and the convergence of your eyes, and the accommodative distance that the lens
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