As part of the Digital Library's transition to Open Access, new features for researchers are available in the Premium Edition. Click here to learn more.
Gradients of intimacy and creating shelter: An interview with Erin Kissane
How might we use nature as an inspiration for creating online communities?
Agents on the Canvas in tldraw — Steve Ruiz, tldraw
Revenge of the Dilettantes
Book club and AI adventures, age of bespokeness, study groups, new rules of engagement
Revenge of the Dilettantes
Book club and AI adventures, age of bespokeness, study groups, new rules of engagement
AI experienced through AI co-created tools
AI co-created tools and social spaces as a new medium
Revisiting creative behaviour as an epistemic process: lessons from 12 computational artists and designers | Proceedings of the 35th Australian Computer-Human Interaction Conference
As part of the Digital Library's transition to Open Access, new features for researchers are available in the Premium Edition. Click here to learn more.
Ninety Days on Lobsters: how a programming community talked about AI
An artifact shared with Radius.
Flâneur
Flâneur is a type of urban male "stroller", "lounger", "saunterer", or "loafer". This French term was popularized in the 19th century and has some nuanced additional meanings. Traditionally depicted as male, a flâneur is an ambivalent figure of urban affluence and modernity, representing the ability to wander detached from society, for an entertainment from the observation of the urban life. Flânerie is the act of strolling, with all of its accompanying associations. A near-synonym of the noun is boulevardier.
Designing Imaginative Environments by Nathan Fowkes
Join industry veteran Nathan Fowkes on a deep dive into the hows and whys of designing environments for entertainment. From creating mood with color and light, to exploring different biomes and weather, to crafting architecture and props, he will teach you how to design amazing environments that make your work stand out from the crowd.
OpenPoke: Recreating Poke's Architecture
How Poke's orchestrated multi-agent system works, what OpenPoke replicates, and the lessons for builders shipping AI assistants.
Achieving playfulness in strategy game design
On a recent podcast episode, Brett “BrickroadDX” Lowey and I discussed the property of “playfulness” in strategy game design, and a lot of conversation over on my stream and…
Roam: Why I Love It and How I Use It | Nat Eliason
Author, writer, and creator sharing insights on learning, writing, philosophy, entrepreneurship, and more.
Screen As Room: An Architectural Perspective on User Interfaces — Christoph Locher · Interaction Designer
With the use of video games as social spaces being observed for several years and the increased focus put on virtual social spaces due to the scarceness of physical social spaces in the last months, the concept of “spatial interfaces” is once again at the center of discussions. I want to add an alternative perspective to this, looking at the properties of physical spaces as metaphors, rather than models, for interfaces and exploring seven of them in more detail.
Screen As Room: An Architectural Perspective on User Interfaces — Christoph Locher · Interaction Designer
With the use of video games as social spaces being observed for several years and the increased focus put on virtual social spaces due to the scarceness of physical social spaces in the last months, the concept of “spatial interfaces” is once again at the center of discussions. I want to add an alternative perspective to this, looking at the properties of physical spaces as metaphors, rather than models, for interfaces and exploring seven of them in more detail.
Environments Hub: A Community Hub To Scale RL To Open AGI
RL environments are the playgrounds where agents learn. Until now, they’ve been fragmented, closed, and hard to share. We are launching the Environments Hub to change that: an open, community-powered platform that gives environments a true home.Environments define the world, rules and feedback loop of state, action and reward. From games to coding tasks to dialogue, they’re the contexts where AI learns, without them, RL is just an algorithm with nothing to act on.
"What's my model inside of?": Exploring the role of environments for grounded natural language understanding
In contrast to classical cognitive science which studied brains in isolation, ecological approaches focused on the role of the body and environment in shaping cognition. Similarly, in this thesis we adopt an ecological approach to grounded natural language understanding (NLU) research. Grounded language understanding studies language understanding systems situated in the context of events, actions and precepts in naturalistic/simulated virtual environments. Where classic research tends to focus on designing new models and optimization methods while treating environments as given, we explore the potential of environment design for improving data collection and model development. We developed novel training and annotation approaches for procedural text understanding based on text-based game environments. We also drew upon embodied cognitive linguistics literature to propose a roadmap for grounded NLP research, and to inform the development of a new benchmark for measuring the progress of large language models on challenging commonsense reasoning tasks. We leveraged the richer supervision provided by text-based game environments to develop Breakpoint Transformers, a novel approach to modeling intermediate semantic information in long narrative or procedural texts. Finally, we integrated theories on the role of environments in collective human intelligence to propose a design for AI-augmented "social thinking environments" for knowledge workers like scientists.
