Olimpia, Hadaly, Rachael, Faustine, Samantha, Albertine…. All loving machines, like we say "washing machines" or "answering machines," machines that you may love and that have the potential of loving you back. All fictitious, of course. As emotions are starting to make their way into computing—think of the pervasive use of emoticons, or more interestingly, of IBM's Watson which, in its text-analysis tool, attempts to give an idea of what it calls "personality insights" of the writer and the "emotions and communication (...) style of the text". Think also of what is called "Affective Computing", a research area in its infancy that has focused so far on detection of... (shrink)

In a conversation I was having with a friend the other day, I was telling her that, in all likelihood, the journal SubStance will survive its founders. It is not the possibility of survival that I ruminated about for the next few days. After all, there are many a journal that survived, some of them for centuries. But it is the word "survive" that kept busying itself in my mind. Why do we use metaphors of life and death to talk (...) about just about everything? Look around you and you'll see how pervasive it is, from what we say of the "lifespan" of an institution to the trite "Live TV," just to name a couple of examples that immediately come to mind. And not to forget, of course, the just as pervasive efforts in... Read More. (shrink)