Kyoto University of Art and Design

Pleasant touching is an important aspect of social interactions that is widely used as a caregiving technique. To address the problems resulting from a lack of available human caregivers, previous research has attempted to develop robots that can perform this kind of pleasant touch. However, it remains unclear whether robots can provide such a pleasant touch in a manner similar to humans. To investigate this issue, we compared the effect of the speed of gentle strokes on the back between human and robot agents on the emotional responses of human participants (n = 28). A robot or a human stroked on the participants’ back at two different speeds (i.e., 2.6 and 8.5 cm/s). The participants’ subjective (valence and arousal ratings) and physiological (facial electromyography (EMG) recorded from the corrugator supercilii and zygomatic major muscles and skin conductance response) emotional reactions were measured. The subjective ratings demonstrated that the speed of 8.5 cm/s was more pleasant and arousing than the speed of 2.6 cm/s for both human and robot strokes. The corrugator supercilii EMG showed that the speed of 8.5 cm/s resulted in reduced activity in response to both human and robot strokes. These results demonstrate similar speed-dependent modulations of stroke on subjective and physiological positive emotional responses across human and robot agents and suggest that robots can provide a pleasant touch similar to that of humans.

Urgent steps are needed to slow and cease ecologically, culturally and socially destructive systems and redistribute power to those with place-based knowledge and sensitivity to contextual conditions. Place-Based Responsibility enacts this practice by coalescing knowledge holders with long histories of participation in this work – those living and working in ways that express care for place. Together, we ask what are our responsibilities, reciprocities and commitments to land? How can we as individuals and as collectives take up the responsibility of contributing to the places where we are? Within Emily Carr University, a group of faculty, students, and community members have begun to enact these guiding questions as a series of public roundtable discussions, a place-based collective of graduate students, and an undergraduate course “Practicing Neighbourly Responsibility.” This paper reflects on these actions, and imagines future iterations of this work.

Although the insufficient labor standards in the Arabian Gulf countries are hypervisible, laws have not improved to the benefit of workers. In this article, I examine art practices from Gulf-based artists that address this invisibility by replicating the conditions of the laborer in their artworks, a process I term “total replication.” In contrast to the art historian Schaffer’s argument that art must subvert hierarchies, I show how artworks that replicate work conditions also have the potential to create appreciatory visibilities. I argue that these artworks contain subversive messages in such a way that they become consumable in the context of the Arabian Gulf’s art scene.

Abstract Although we know that rainfall interception (the rain caught, stored, and evaporated from aboveground vegetative surfaces and ground litter) is affected by rain and throughfall drop size, what was unknown until now is the relative proportion of each throughfall type (free throughfall, splash throughfall, canopy drip) beneath coniferous and broadleaved trees. Based on a multinational data set of >120 million throughfall drops, we found that the type, number, and volume of throughfall drops are different between coniferous and broadleaved tree species, leaf states, and timing within rain events. Compared with leafed broadleaved trees, conifers had a lower percentage of canopy drip (51% vs. 69% with respect to total throughfall volume) and slightly smaller diameter splash throughfall and canopy drip. Canopy drip from leafless broadleaved trees consisted of fewer and smaller diameter drops (D50_DR, 50th cumulative drop volume percentile for canopy drip, of 2.24 mm) than leafed broadleaved trees (D50_DR of 4.32 mm). Canopy drip was much larger in diameter under woody drip points (D50_DR of 5.92 mm) than leafed broadleaved trees. Based on throughfall volume, the percentage of canopy drip was significantly different between conifers, leafed broadleaved trees, leafless broadleaved trees, and woody surface drip points (p ranged from <0.001 to 0.005). These findings are partly attributable to differences in canopy structure and plant surface characteristics between plant functional types and canopy state (leaf, leafless), among other factors. Hence, our results demonstrating the importance of drop‐size‐dependent partitioning between coniferous and broadleaved tree species could be useful to those requiring more detailed information on throughfall fluxes to the forest floor.

With the increasing volume of data to be analysed, one of the challenges in Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is to make web services efficient in processing large-scale data. Parallel execution and cloud technologies are the keys to speed-up the service invocation. In SOA, service providers typically employ policies to limit parallel execution of the services based on arbitrary decisions. In order to attain optimal performance improvement, users need to adapt to the services policies. A composite service is a combination of several atomic services provided by various providers. To use parallel execution for greater composite service efficiency, the degree of parallelism (DOP) of the composite services need to be optimized by considering the policies of all atomic services. We propose a model that embeds service policies into formulae to calculate composite service performance. From the calculation, we predict the optimal DOP for the composite service, where it attains the best performance. Extensive experiments are conducted on real-world translation services. We use several measures such as mean prediction error (MPE), mean absolute deviation (MAD) and tracking signal (TS) to evaluate our model. The analysis results show that our proposed model has good prediction accuracy in identifying optimal DOPs for composite services.

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