Papers by David Harris Smith
Graphics Interface, 2015
Virtual worlds, avatars and cybersex are becoming more commonplace and acceptable. Virtual enviro... more Virtual worlds, avatars and cybersex are becoming more commonplace and acceptable. Virtual environments such as Second Life™ allow for the construction and exploration of virtual selves or agents that are bounded only by imagination and fantasy of their participants. However, they are also informed by the attitudes, limits and agendas of the real life participants that invade these worlds. For people with disabilities, virtual environments may allow the crossing of boundaries of taboo subjects such as disability and sex, and intimate technologies. The Intimate Interface System (IIS) was designed to support and encourage intimacy and cybersex discovery for people with disabilities in an inclusive manner. It is composed of a virtual world component replete with customizable avatars, animations and sound combine with physical devices including a vibrating chair and a pressure pad. Results were derived from an initial focus group with four persons with motoric disabilities. Notions of p...
To play is human. Play is a social act of often-unclear boundaries. The delineation of playing as... more To play is human. Play is a social act of often-unclear boundaries. The delineation of playing as a special conditional form of doing or acting in the world relies upon registers of seriousness, authenticity, consequence and import, yet these registers are multivocal. Play can materialize and relativize banal affective and social relations. Play can imagine, insist on the possibility of, or suppress, difference. Play may provoke shock or distraction, conceal or reveal intention. Play may be encouraged or denied, rewarded or punished, feared, disdained, addictive, fatal. [2] What becomes possible as a result of play in specific contexts? What socio-cultural relations are inscribed in the various sites of play? Are there limits to the social power of play, or limits to the social contexts in which playful acts may be asserted? Or is the very delineation of some actions as Smith & Guevara Fun and Games 2
This paper describes a new research project that aims to develop an autonomous and responsive soc... more This paper describes a new research project that aims to develop an autonomous and responsive social robot designed to help children cope with painful procedures in hospital emergency departments. While this is an application domain where psychological interventions have been previously demonstrated to be effective at reducing pain and distress using a variety of devices and techniques, in recent years, social robots have been trialled in this area with promising initial results. However, until now, the social robots that have been tested have generally been teleoperated, which has limited their flexibility and robustness, as well as the potential to offer personalized, adaptive procedural support. Using co-design techniques, this project plans to define and validate the necessary robot behaviour together with participant groups that include children, parents and caregivers, and healthcare professionals. Identified behaviours will be deployed on a robot platform, incorporating AI re...
Abstract:This article describes a case study investigation of the "Love Your City, Share You... more Abstract:This article describes a case study investigation of the "Love Your City, Share Your Stories" digital storytelling initiative in Hamilton, Canada, led by the Hamilton Public Library, McMaster University Library, and the City of Hamilton. Results suggest that digital storytelling is a viable mechanism by which memory institutions, such as libraries, can engage and lead their communities. These initiatives also offer opportunities for collaboration among institutions. However, libraries must heed a variety of challenges and concerns that can potentially limit or constrain these benefits. Recommendations are provided for organizational actions that memory institutions can take to overcome such challenges.Résumé:Cet article décrit une étude de cas portant sur le projet de narration numérique « Love Your City, Share Your Stories », initiative menée à Hamilton, au Canada, et dirigée par la bibliothèque publique de Hamilton, la bibliothèque de l'Université McMaster e...
Creativity is intrinsic to Humanities and STEM disciplines. In the activities of artists and engi... more Creativity is intrinsic to Humanities and STEM disciplines. In the activities of artists and engineers, for example, an attempt is made to bring something new into the world through counterfactual thinking. However, creativity in these disciplines is distinguished by differences in motivations and constraints. For example, engineers typically direct their creativity toward building solutions to practical problems, whereas the outcomes of artistic creativity, which are largely useless to practical purposes, aspire to enrich the world aesthetically and conceptually. In this essay, an artist (DHS) and a roboticist (GS) engage in a cross-disciplinary conceptual analysis of the creative problem of artificial consciousness in a robot, expressing the counterfactual thinking necessitated by the problem, as well as disciplinary differences in motivations, constraints, and applications. We especially deal with the question of why one would build an artificial consciousness and we consider how...
EDULEARN21 Proceedings, 2021
Electronic Workshops in Computing, 2013
Proceedings of the Annual Conference of CAIS / Actes du congrès annuel de l'ACSI, 2016
This paper describes a case study investigation of the “Love Your City, Share Your Stories” digit... more This paper describes a case study investigation of the “Love Your City, Share Your Stories” digital storytelling initiative in Hamilton, Ontario. Data collection involved one-on-one interviews, document review, and participant observations with governance stakeholders from the Hamilton Public Library, McMaster University Library, and the City of Hamilton. Cet article décrit l'étude du cas de l’initiative numérique "Aimez votre ville, partagez vos histoires" à Hamilton, en Ontario. La collecte des données comprenait des entrevues en tête-à-tête, l'examen de documents, et l’observation participante auprès des membres de la direction de la Bibliothèque publique de Hamilton, de la bibliothèque universitaire de l’université McMaster, et de la ville de Hamilton.
Proceedings of the Tenth Workshop on Computational Approaches to Subjectivity, Sentiment and Social Media Analysis, 2019
In 2014, a chatty but immobile robot called hitchBOT set out to hitchhike across Canada. It simil... more In 2014, a chatty but immobile robot called hitchBOT set out to hitchhike across Canada. It similarly made its way across Germany and the Netherlands, and had begun a trip across the USA when it was destroyed by vandals. In this work, we analyze the emotions and sentiments associated with words in tweets posted before and after hitchBOT's destruction to answer two questions: Were there any differences in the emotions expressed across the different countries visited by hitchBOT? And how did the public react to the demise of hitch-BOT? Our analyses indicate that while there were few cross-cultural differences in sentiment towards hitchBOT, there was a significant negative emotional reaction to its destruction, suggesting that people had formed an emotional connection with hitchBOT and perceived its destruction as morally wrong. We discuss potential implications of anthropomorphism and emotional attachment to robots from the perspective of robot ethics.
International Journal of Social Robotics, 2019
The objective of this paper is to discuss and demonstrate in a case study the application of soci... more The objective of this paper is to discuss and demonstrate in a case study the application of social media as a tool for acceptance, sociability and interaction in human–robot interaction (HRI). By adopting the concept of mediatization as discussed in media and communication studies, we aim to propose an extended usage of social media in the design of robots but also in collecting data on their acceptance and sociability. We aim to provide a starting point for ongoing studies into the extension of HRI evaluation frameworks, which provide additional ways to measure HRI based on a media and communication studies approach. Our discussion is supported by results of an HRI public engagement project, which included a social media strategy. The project was designed around a hitchhiking robot, called hitchBOT , which was dependent on the public’s engagement and support in its hitchhiking objectives. The robot’s social media strategies included accounts and profiles on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and a website. The aim was to use social media in order to engage not only with those people finding hitchBOT on the side of the road, but also a wider international audience. The robot’s social media accounts provided a tool to communicate hitchBOT’s origins, personality, goals, and travels. Our use of social media to communicate hitchBOT ’s personality and to instill trust, interest and emotional engagement constituted a novel contribution to the design of social robots and to the scope and scale of evaluation in HRI.
Proceedings of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 2016
This paper describes a case study investigation of a city‐wide digital storytelling initiative le... more This paper describes a case study investigation of a city‐wide digital storytelling initiative led by two libraries and one municipal cultural department in Hamilton, Canada. Data collection involved one‐on‐one interviews, document review, and participant observations with governance stakeholders from the two libraries and municipal cultural department involved in the case study. Using activity theory as a conceptual framework, data were analyzed using grounded theory techniques. A variety of factors – motivations, goals, actions, tools, rules, divisions of labour, tensions and contradictions – were found to influence the implementation of the digital storytelling initiative under investigation. Importantly, activity theory provided a robust, holistic framework for understanding and describing the phenomenon of digital storytelling initiatives led by memory institutions.
JAMA cardiology, Jan 21, 2016
The clinical practice guidelines for heart failure recommend the use of validated risk models to ... more The clinical practice guidelines for heart failure recommend the use of validated risk models to estimate prognosis. Understanding how well models identify individuals who will die in the next year informs decision making for advanced treatments and hospice. To quantify how risk models calculated in routine practice estimate more than 50% 1-year mortality among ambulatory patients with heart failure who die in the subsequent year. Ambulatory adults with heart failure from 3 integrated health systems were enrolled between 2005 and 2008. The probability of death was estimated using the Seattle Heart Failure Model (SHFM) and the Meta-Analysis Global Group in Chronic Heart Failure (MAGGIC) risk calculator. Baseline covariates were collected from electronic health records. Missing covariates were imputed. Estimated mortality was compared with actual mortality at both population and individual levels. One-year mortality. Among 10 930 patients with heart failure, the median age was 77 year...
The International Journal of the Image, 2012
Journal of Gaming & Virtual Worlds, 2015
Video game playing has been associated with improvements in cognitive abilities that predict succ... more Video game playing has been associated with improvements in cognitive abilities that predict success in STEM fields, and therefore understanding this relationship is important. In two experiments, we used a virtual Morris Water Maze (VMWM) with and without proximal cues to measure spatial learning as a total of 82 video game experts and novices completed a search task across several trials. We measured the participants' path lengths and tested their mental rotation abilities. The results showed that proximal cues improved overall performance. With no visible cues, experts exhibited better performance than novices when their memory for the general location of the platform was probed. With visible cues, video game experts travelled shorter path lengths than novices to the exact location of the hidden platform. Mental rotation ability correlated with overall maze performance only when no cues were visible, and only novices' scores correlated with path length in this condition.
... Avatar: No people can say who is it, behind the avatar, but this little bit of human being yo... more ... Avatar: No people can say who is it, behind the avatar, but this little bit of human being you can see in the written word, it is ... involvementsix. Within the anonymous conditions of identity disintegration, ... sex-worker allows for an abbreviated social negotiation about the kind of ...
Leonardo, 2017
In the early morning hours of 1 August 2015, as it waited for its next ride on a Philly park benc... more In the early morning hours of 1 August 2015, as it waited for its next ride on a Philly park bench, unknown assailants destroyed hitchBOT. Arms torn from its body, legs broken, gutted of its electronics, it was left discarded in a park, minus its smiley-face LED head. Around the world headlines announced the death of a much-loved robot, children and adults shed tears, haters hated on Philadelphia, cartoonists and musicians paid tribute, journalists wrote obituaries and the publicly minded rallied to support a rebuild. The authors share the story of the life and times of their creation, hitchBOT the hitchhiking robot.
2012 15th International Conference on Interactive Collaborative Learning (ICL), 2012
ABSTRACT The study explores how students, who had completed the AP calculus course, applied their... more ABSTRACT The study explores how students, who had completed the AP calculus course, applied their knowledge, mathematizing a situation simulated in the Second Life Virtual Environment.
International Journal of Engineering Pedagogy (iJEP), 2013
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Papers by David Harris Smith