Division of Information and Intelligent Systems

Online virtual worlds, electronic environments where people can work and interact in a somewhat realistic manner, have great potential as sites for research in the social, behavioral, and economic sciences, as well as in human-centered computer science. This article uses Second Life and World of Warcraft as two very different examples of current virtual worlds that foreshadow future developments, introducing a number of research methodologies that scientists are now exploring, including formal experimentation, observational ethnography, and quantitative analysis of economic markets or social networks.

Semantic or cultural systems are sets of concepts connected by meaningful relationships, and they exhibit properties similar to those of populations of biological organisms. Drawing upon ideas from evolutionary biology and methods from information technology, this article explores the potential for research and engineering on the evolution of semantic systems. Such work in cultural genetics requires two things: (1) a rigorous but evolving taxonomic system to categorize cultural artifacts, elements, and clusters, and (2) a set of hypotheses about the processes that cause evolutionary change. This article illustrates systematic approaches to cultural taxonomy with data on the popular ideology of the space program, science fiction motion pictures, nanotechnology books, and nanotechnology research grants. It offers hypotheses derived from evolutionary and population biology that might be useful in explaining cultural evolution.

Introduction Ovarian cancer recurs in most High Grade Serous Ovarian Cancer (HGSOC) patients, including initial responders, after standard of care. To improve patient survival, we need to identify and understand the factors contributing to early or late recurrence and therapeutically target these mechanisms. We hypothesized that in HGSOC, the response to chemotherapy is associated with a specific gene expression signature determined by the tumor microenvironment. In this study, we sought to determine the differences in gene expression and the tumor immune microenvironment between patients who show early recurrence (within 6 months) compared to those who show late recurrence following chemotherapy. Methods Paired tumor samples were obtained before and after Carboplatin and Taxol chemotherapy from 24 patients with HGSOC. Bioinformatic transcriptomic analysis was performed on the tumor samples to determine the gene expression signature associated with differences in recurrence pattern. Gene Ontology and Pathway analysis was performed using AdvaitaBio’s iPathwayGuide software. Tumor immune cell fractions were imputed using CIBERSORTx. Results were compared between late recurrence and early recurrence patients, and between paired pre-chemotherapy and post-chemotherapy samples. Results There was no statistically significant difference between early recurrence or late recurrence ovarian tumors pre-chemotherapy. However, chemotherapy induced significant immunological changes in tumors from late recurrence patients but had no impact on tumors from early recurrence patients. The key immunological change induced by chemotherapy in late recurrence patients was the reversal of pro-tumor immune signature. Discussion We report for the first time, the association between immunological modifications in response to chemotherapy and the time of recurrence. Our findings provide novel opportunities to ultimately improve ovarian cancer patient survival.

Summary A digital library must focus on access and service, not buildings and volumes. Libraries will support users in their searching and acquiring of information, and their organization will reflect services rather than physical location. Technology, law and economics are all becoming more important for libraries, requiring new expertise in library staff. Perhaps the most important issues for the long term will be the ability of libraries to cooperate in the delivery of new services.

In this chapter, the evolution of the hardware of underwater manipulators will be described by introducing an electromechanical arm of SAUVIM, and some theoretical issues with the arm control system will be discussed, addressing the required robustness in different situations that the manipulator may face during intervention missions. An advanced user interface will then be briefly discussed, which helps to cope with the communication limits and provides a remote programming environment where the interaction with the manipulator is limited only to a very high level. An application example with SAUVIM will be presented before conclusions.

A major series of conferences, workshops, and research projects has established the crucial importance of convergence across all fields of science and technology. Central to this unification at the present time are the NBIC fields: nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology and new technologies based on cognitive science. This book provides an overview of this crucial phase change in human culture, beginning with four chapters offering an overview, followed by four chapters about nanobioconvergence, two about the ways in which information infrastructure can promote convergence, four chapters on cognitive technologies, and four addressing the social and ethical implications of this profound revolution.

While there are many dimensions of medical ethics, the one that has received the most discussion in the context of the new information and communications technologies is privacy. The classical way to conceptualize medical ethics is to frame these as a coherent set of principles formally established to guide the actions of the members of a particular well-defined profession. The National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH)-led effort to place psychiatry on a more solid scientific basis may have very substantial societal consequences. The primary goal of medical science is to improve prevention and treatment, and across all of the sciences the rhetoric of progress raises hopes for beneficial technological applications. The revolutions associated with computer technologies are many and profound, offering new hopes for doctors, patients, and all the related professions. As healthcare information technology becomes ubiquitous, its designers and users will need to think deeply about many ethical issues.

This essay introduces the opportunity for theory development and even empirical research on some aspects of astrosociology through today's online virtual worlds. The examples covered present life on other planets or in space itself, in a manner that can be experienced by the user and where the user's reactions may simulate to some degree future human behavior in real extraterrestrial environments: Tabula Rasa, Anarchy Online, Entropia Universe, EVE Online, StarCraft and World of Warcraft. Ethnographic exploration of these computerized environments raises many questions about the social science both of space exploration and of direct contact with extraterrestrials.

A bewildering array of sciences, theories, and methodologies offer researchers many difficult choices when studying emotion or designing affective technologies. Thus, clarity of focus is a prime virtue of good work, as illustrated in the Aylett and Paiva (2012) article. The social sciences remain fundamentally undecided about how to conceptualize human variations, including how to measure culture and personality, and even about whether these two commonly used words have real meaning. This disagreement is pronounced in human-centered computing, because cognitive and rational-choice perspectives are technically easiest to apply, and these make little room for culture and personality. The article employs a modular approach, which can inspire researchers following alternative conceptualizations to substitute their own preferred choices.

Research on religion can advance understanding of social cognition by building connections to sociology, a field in which much cognitively oriented work has been done. Among the schools of sociological thought that address religious cognition are: structural functionalism, symbolic interactionism, conflict theory, phenomenology, and, most recently, exchange theory. The gulf between sociology and cognitive science is an unfortunate historical accident.

The papers in this special section focus on hybrid human-artificial intelligene (AI) for multimedia computing. Multimedia computing has experienced a tremendous growth in the last decades, with applications ranging from multimedia information retrieval and analysis to multimedia compression and communication. However, the increasing volume and complexity of multimedia data driven by the large-scale spread of various new devices and sensors is posing a serious challenge to traditional multimedia computing algorithms. Artificial intelligence (AI), in particular deep learning techniques, has improved the performance of multimedia computing algorithms for many tasks, including computer vision and natural language processing. But unlike humans, AI is poor at solving tasks across multiple domains or in dealing with an uncontrolled dynamic environment. Hybrid Human-Artificial Intelligence (HH-AI) is an emerging field that aims at combining the benefits of human intelligence, such as semantic association, inference, and generalization with the computing power of AI.