It is a matter of fact that Europe is facing more and more crucial challenges regarding health and social care due to the demographic change and the current economic context. The recent COVID-19 pandemic has stressed this situation even further, thus highlighting the need for taking action. Active and Assisted Living technologies come as a viable approach to help facing these challenges, thanks to the high potential they have in enabling remote care and support. Broadly speaking, AAL can be referred (...) to as the use of innovative and advanced Information and Communication Technologies to create supportive, inclusive and empowering applications and environments that enable older, impaired or frail people to live independently and stay active longer in society. AAL capitalizes on the growing pervasiveness and effectiveness of sensing and computing facilities to supply the persons in need with smart assistance, by responding to their necessities of autonomy, independence, comfort, security and safety. The application scenarios addressed by AAL are complex, due to the inherent heterogeneity of the end-user population, their living arrangements, and their physical conditions or impairment. Despite aiming at diverse goals, AAL systems should share some common characteristics. They are designed to provide support in daily life in an invisible, unobtrusive and user-friendly manner. Moreover, they are conceived to be intelligent, to be able to learn and adapt to the requirements and requests of the assisted people, and to synchronise with their specific needs. Nevertheless, to ensure the uptake of AAL in society, potential users must be willing to use AAL applications and to integrate them in their daily environments and lives. In this respect, video- and audio-based AAL applications have several advantages, in terms of unobtrusiveness and information richness. Indeed, cameras and microphones are far less obtrusive with respect to the hindrance other wearable sensors may cause to one’s activities. In addition, a single camera placed in a room can record most of the activities performed in the room, thus replacing many other non-visual sensors. Currently, video-based applications are effective in recognising and monitoring the activities, the movements, and the overall conditions of the assisted individuals as well as to assess their vital parameters. Similarly, audio sensors have the potential to become one of the most important modalities for interaction with AAL systems, as they can have a large range of sensing, do not require physical presence at a particular location and are physically intangible. Moreover, relevant information about individuals’ activities and health status can derive from processing audio signals. Nevertheless, as the other side of the coin, cameras and microphones are often perceived as the most intrusive technologies from the viewpoint of the privacy of the monitored individuals. This is due to the richness of the information these technologies convey and the intimate setting where they may be deployed. Solutions able to ensure privacy preservation by context and by design, as well as to ensure high legal and ethical standards are in high demand. After the review of the current state of play and the discussion in GoodBrother, we may claim that the first solutions in this direction are starting to appear in the literature. A multidisciplinary debate among experts and stakeholders is paving the way towards AAL ensuring ergonomics, usability, acceptance and privacy preservation. The DIANA, PAAL, and VisuAAL projects are examples of this fresh approach. This report provides the reader with a review of the most recent advances in audio- and video-based monitoring technologies for AAL. It has been drafted as a collective effort of WG3 to supply an introduction to AAL, its evolution over time and its main functional and technological underpinnings. In this respect, the report contributes to the field with the outline of a new generation of ethical-aware AAL technologies and a proposal for a novel comprehensive taxonomy of AAL systems and applications. Moreover, the report allows non-technical readers to gather an overview of the main components of an AAL system and how these function and interact with the end-users. The report illustrates the state of the art of the most successful AAL applications and functions based on audio and video data, namely lifelogging and self-monitoring, remote monitoring of vital signs, emotional state recognition, food intake monitoring, activity and behaviour recognition, activity and personal assistance, gesture recognition, fall detection and prevention, mobility assessment and frailty recognition, and cognitive and motor rehabilitation. For these application scenarios, the report illustrates the state of play in terms of scientific advances, available products and research project. The open challenges are also highlighted. The report ends with an overview of the challenges, the hindrances and the opportunities posed by the uptake in real world settings of AAL technologies. In this respect, the report illustrates the current procedural and technological approaches to cope with acceptability, usability and trust in the AAL technology, by surveying strategies and approaches to co-design, to privacy preservation in video and audio data, to transparency and explainability in data processing, and to data transmission and communication. User acceptance and ethical considerations are also debated. Finally, the potentials coming from the silver economy are overviewed. (shrink)

Myślą przewodnią jest twierdzenie, że prawosławie pełniło i pełni nadal istotną rolę w życiu społeczności mołdawskich Gagauzów. Celem niniejszego tekstu jest ukazanie roli prawosławia, która zmieniała się w czasie, oraz omówienie wybranych zagadnień związanych z prawosławiem przy uwzględnieniu obecnego stanu rzeczy, dokonane w oparciu o obserwacje własne i literaturę przedmiotu. W toku rozważań zostaną przedstawione bądź zasygnalizowane takie zagadnienia jak: tło historyczne, znaczenie duchowieństwa, religijność, prawosławne święta, cmentarze, świątynie, prawosławie w przestrzeni publicznej oraz struktura organizacyjna cerkwi prawosławnej.

Artykuł dotyczy dość mało popularnych, aksjologicznych teorii choroby. Autor opisuje cztery drogi, które mogą doprowadzić do uznania choroby za moralne zło. Wśród tych dróg, reprezentowanych przez różnych autorów, znajdują się: droga fenomenologiczna, kantowska, psychiatryczna i quasi-historyczna. Po zaprezentowaniu ich głównych cech i inspiracji, artykuł rozważa pewne obiekcje, które można im stawiać oraz stara się wskazać możliwe rozwiązania. W podsumowaniu autor umiejscawia aksjologiczne teorie choroby na ogólnej mapie bioetyki.

In most consumer brand engagement scales, indicators of CBE refer to behaviors that are related to social media or online brand communities. CBE also occurs beyond the Internet context in real-life settings. This paper reports the development and validation process of a CBE scale beyond the Internet behavior context. The results of three studies support the content validity, internal consistency, reliability, and nomological validity of the scale. Moreover, the results indicate that brand engagement measured by the CBE scale affects important (...) aspects of brand-related consumer constructs. Consumers with a high level of brand engagement reflected greater brand loyalty, consumer satisfaction with a product, and perceived value of a brand. The author discusses the usefulness of this scale for marketing and psychological research. (shrink)

The goal of the paper is to review existing work on consciousness within the frameworks of Predictive Processing, Active Inference, and Free Energy Principle. The emphasis is put on the role played by the precision and complexity of the internal generative model. In the light of those proposals, these two properties appear to be the minimal necessary components for the emergence of conscious experience—a Minimal Unifying Model of consciousness.

The Minister of Health and Social Welfare outlined in 1969 a program of medical rehabilitation development and recognized medical rehabilitation as an integral part of medical treatment. These decisions ended the voluntary approach of the National Health Service to problems of rehabilitation.

The discussion of the nature of consciousness seems to have stalled, with the “hard problem of consciousness” in its center, well-defined camps of realists and eliminativists at two opposing poles, and little to none room for agreement between. Recent attempts to move this debate forward by shifting them to a meta-level have heavily relied on the notion of “intuition”, understood in a rather liberal way. Against this backdrop, the goal of this paper is twofold. First, we want to highlight how (...) the ontological and epistemological status of intuitions restricts the arguments in the debate on consciousness that rely on them. Second, we want to demonstrate how the deadlock in those debates could be resolved through a study of a particular, “positive” kind of intuitions. We call this approach “The Canberrish Plan for Consciousness” as it adopts elements of the methodological “Canberra Plan”. (shrink)

“Morphological computation” is an increasingly important concept in robotics, artificial intelligence, and philosophy of the mind. It is used to understand how the body contributes to cognition and control of behavior. Its understanding in terms of "offloading" computation from the brain to the body has been criticized as misleading, and it has been suggested that the use of the concept conflates three classes of distinct processes. In fact, these criticisms implicitly hang on accepting a semantic definition of what constitutes computation. (...) Here, I argue that an alternative, mechanistic view on computation offers a significantly different understanding of what morphological computation is. These theoretical considerations are then used to analyze the existing research program in developmental biology, which understands morphogenesis, the process of development of shape in biological systems, as a computational process. This important line of research shows that cognition and intelligence can be found across all scales of life, as the proponents of the basal cognition research program propose. Hence, clarifying the connection between morphological computation and morphogenesis allows for strengthening the role of the former concept in this emerging research field. (shrink)

Bruineberg and colleagues criticisms' have been received but downplayed in the free energy principle (FEP) literature. We strengthen their points, arguing that Friston blanket discovery, even if tractable, requires a full formal description of the system of interest at the outset. Hence, blanket metaphysics is futile, and we postulate that researchers should turn back to heuristic uses of Pearl blankets.

The target article highlights the sources of open-endedness of human communication. However, the authors' perspective does not account for the structure of particular communication systems. To this end, we extend the authors' perspective, in the spirit of evolutionary extended synthesis, with a detailed account of the sources of constraints imposed upon expression in the course of child development.

Despite the large interest in the human ability to perceive space present in neuroscience, cognitive science and psychology, as well as philosophy of mind, the issues regarding egocentric space representation received relatively less attention. In this paper I take up a unique phenomenon related to this faculty: the “spatial purport” of perceptual experiences. The notion was proposed by Rick Grush to describe the subjective, qualitative aspects of egocentric representations of spatial properties and relations. Although Grush offered an explanation of the (...) mechanism giving rise to appearance of spatial purport, his model had considerable shortcomings. In the paper I thoroughly analyze both the notion of spatial purport and Grush’s explanation of the mechanism at its core in order to develop his theory using the insights provided by the predictive processing theory of mind, and more particularly by the active inference framework. The extended account I offer, named Predictive and Hierarchical Skill Theory, explains phenomena that escaped Grush’s model and furthers the research on egocentric space representation from the perspective of both neuroscience and philosophy of mind. (shrink)

W artykule przeanalizowano historyczne okoliczności narodzin i rozwoju logicznego empiryzmu. Jego główne założenia przedstawiono na tle stanowisk krytycznych, wobec tego nurtu. Podstawowym wnioskiem, jaki można wyciągnąć z przedstawionej a artykule analizy jest teza, że nurt ten nie powinien być rozpatrywany, jako tradycyjnie pojmowana szkoła filozoficzna. Ujmowanie go w ten sposób było podstawową przyczyną ahistoryczności jego dotychczasowej krytyki. Bliższe prawdzie jest stwierdzenie, że logiczny empiryzm, ukształtowany w określonych realiach historycznych, jest specyficzną postawą naukową czy też zbiorem postulatów metodologicznych, ukształtowanych w obliczu (...) kryzysu głównych dziedzin życia publicznego lat 20 i 30 XX wieku. (shrink)

W niniejszym artykule proponujemy przegląd stanowisk wobec „ucieleśnienia” jako kategorii metodologicznej w humanistyce i naukach społecznych, rozważając, jak różnie bywa to pojęcie używane i co stanowi trzon „podejścia ucieleśnionego”. Teksty zebrane w niniejszym zbiorze egzemplifikują te historycznie rozbieżne tradycje, dając obraz badań nad ucieleśnieniem jako samodzielnego pola refleksji.

À travers une analyse de l'oeuvre de Charles-Georges Le Roy, présenté par l'historiographie traditionnelle comme l'un des premiers observateurs du comportement animal en milieu naturel, l'article se propose de mettre au jour l'usage que cette« éthologie» empirique des Lumières faisait d'un corpus élaboré et hautement structuré de savoirs anthropologiques. Au-delà d'un constat trivial d'une projection anthropomorphique sur les animaux des caractéristiques universellement reconnues comme humaines, on s'interroge sur le recours, dissimulé par une méthodologie déclarative d'allure empirique, à une anthropologie de (...) sens commun, historiquement et ethnologiquement variable. À l'occasion de cette étude de cas contextuellement située, on pose la question plus générale de l'interaction entre les données empiriques que l'éthologie animale accumule et les représentations anthropologiques qui sont implicitement mobilisées dans l'interprétation des observations éthologiques. (shrink)

Résumé Claude Lévi-Strauss a souvent souligné l’importance que revêtait pour lui la découverte précoce du marxisme dont l’inspiration l’aurait ensuite constamment accompagné dans son travail d’anthropologue. Cette affirmation est devenue un leitmotiv des travaux consacrés à Lévi-Strauss, sans que personne ne se soit soucié d’en vérifier le bien-fondé. De nombreux indices attestent pourtant que Lévi-Strauss s’est livré à une mystification autobiographique. Afin d’en saisir la signification, l’article se propose de reconstituer le contexte du milieu intellectuel parisien des années 1950, lorsque (...) cette mystification a vu le jour, et d’expliquer les raisons qui ont poussé Lévi-Strauss à entretenir cette fiction encore une trentaine d’années plus tard. Le but de cet argument est de montrer que la ruse autobiographique habilement mise en scène, loin de n’être qu’un obstacle herméneutique, peut également devenir une ressource qui aide à lever le voile sur des pans oubliés de l’histoire. (shrink)

"Voici porté un regard inaccoutumé sur la science sociale. Depuis son émergence au XIXe siècle, celle-ci nourrit une double ambition : édifier une connaissance objective de la société ; mettre en oeuvre cette connaissance pour remédier aux déficiences de la société. Souvent tenues pour complémentaires, ces deux aspirations se révèlent parfois difficiles à concilier. Quand l'empressement à refaire la société prend le pas sur le désir de la connaître, les théories académiques se muent en grandes visions du monde, au risque (...) de rompre le lien entre les faits avérés et les conjectures explicatives. Pour s'en convaincre il suffit de démonter les rouages méconnus de la plus puissante synthèse jamais constituée à l'origine de la science sociale et aujourd'hui encore revendiquée comme fondatrice : l'oeuvre d'Émile Durkheim. Confrontée aux données disponibles à l'époque et replacée surgi le fond des grands débats qui enflammaient alors les esprits, elle révèle son principal ressort : la promesse d'un salut séculier accompli par les seules ressources de la raison. C'est que la science sociale naissante emprunta au christianisme, par l'intermédiaire de la philosophie, ses deux idées directrices : la conviction que le monde humain est affecté par un mal qui altère l'ordre légitime des choses ; l'espoir que ce mai pourra être un jour abrogé. Quelles sont les contreparties de cette aspiration rédemptrice?"--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

For a half a century, Claude Lévi-Strauss multiplied statements about the demographic situation of humanity and its anthropological consequences. Those statements, often seen as shocking, were interpreted as a kind of aberration which defied rational understanding. Current opinion held was that the analysis of such idiosyncratic ideas overstepped the competence of anthropologists and historians. In fact, as shown in my text based on newly discovered archival materials, quite the opposite is true. Firstly, Lévi-Strauss became interested in demography very early in (...) his career. Secondly, his conception of demographic trends and their effects was based on scholarly knowledge. Thirdly, far from being an idiosyncratic extravagance, his demography corresponded to widely shared concerns, central to the cultural policies of UNESCO, in which Lévi-Strauss was involved as Secretary general of the International Social Science Council (from 1952 to 1961). These facts are necessary if one is to grasp the cosmological outlook underlying the works of Claude Lévi-Strauss. The principles of Lévi-Straussian cosmology, in which demography plays an important role, are not reducible to the axioms of his structural theory. Without taking this cosmological infrastructure into account we are unable to correctly understand the moral message that Lévi-Strauss endeavoured to deliver, which concerned the extreme dangers humanity could face in the near future. (shrink)

For a half a century, Claude Lévi-Strauss multiplied statements about the demographic situation of humanity and its anthropological consequences. Those statements, often seen as shocking, were interpreted as a kind of aberration which defied rational understanding. Current opinion held was that the analysis of such idiosyncratic ideas overstepped the competence of anthropologists and historians. In fact, as shown in my text based on newly discovered archival materials, quite the opposite is true. Firstly, Lévi-Strauss became interested in demography very early in (...) his career. Secondly, his conception of demographic trends and their effects was based on scholarly knowledge. Thirdly, far from being an idiosyncratic extravagance, his demography corresponded to widely shared concerns, central to the cultural policies of UNESCO, in which Lévi-Strauss was involved as Secretary general of the International Social Science Council (from 1952 to 1961). These facts are necessary if one is to grasp the cosmological outlook underlying the works of Claude Lévi-Strauss. The principles of Lévi-Straussian cosmology, in which demography plays an important role, are not reducible to the axioms of his structural theory. Without taking this cosmological infrastructure into account we are unable to correctly understand the moral message that Lévi-Strauss endeavoured to deliver, which concerned the extreme dangers humanity could face in the near future. (shrink)

The population, molecular and submolecular (quantum) levels of oncogenesis are considered. The quantum description takes into account the nonlocal Einstein- Podolsky-Rosen correlations, interactions at-the-distance, quantum entanglement and macroscopic quantum coherence. In this approach, cancerogenesis is initiated by destruction of the quantum entanglement of the DNA molecules due to mutation, which leads to appearance of an oncogen and a local decoherence of the organism. In the genetic approach a cancer is the gene disease, whereas in the quantum approach — a disease (...) of the living system. On the basis of the Humphreys criteria, an attempt of the ontological classification of bio- and ontogenesis is made. Those phenomena can be considered in terms of the coherent, synchronic and holistic emergence. (shrink)

This paper provides a formal analysis of the grammatical encoding of temporal information in Hausa (Chadic, Afro-Asiatic), thereby contributing to the recent debate on temporality in languages without overt tense morphology. By testing the hypothesis of covert tense against recently obtained empirical data, the study yields the result that Hausa is tenseless and that temporal reference is pragmatically inferred from aspectual, modal and contextual information. The second part of the paper addresses the coding of future in particular. It is shown (...) that future time reference in Hausa is realized as a combination of a modal operator and a Prospective aspect marker, involving the modal meaning components of intention and prediction as well as event time shifting. The discussion relates directly to recent approaches to other seemingly tenseless languages such as St’át’imcets (Matthewson, Linguist Philos 29:673–713, 2006) or Paraguayan Guaraní (Tonhauser, Linguist Philos 34:257–303, 2011b) and provides further evidence for the suggested analyses of the future markers in these languages. (shrink)

This paper provides a formal semantic analysis of past interpretation in Medumba, a graded tense language. Based on original fieldwork, the study explores the empirical behavior and meaning contribution of graded past morphemes in Medumba and relates these to the account of the phenomenon proposed in Cable for Gĩkũyũ. Investigation reveals that the behavior of Medumba gradedness markers differs from that of their Gĩkũyũ counterparts in meaningful ways and, more broadly, discourages an analysis as presuppositional eventuality or reference time modifiers. (...) Instead, the Medumba markers are most appropriately analyzed as quantificational tenses. It also turns out that Medumba, though belonging to the typological class of graded tense languages, shows intriguing similarities to genuinely tenseless languages in allowing for temporally unmarked sentences and exploiting aspectual and pragmatic cues for reference time resolution. The more general cross-linguistic implication of the study is that the set of languages often subsumed under the label “graded tense” does not in fact form a natural class and that more case-by-case research is needed to refine this category. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to investigate the concept of minority up to the temporary stabilization of its meaning in Polish concluded in the adoption of the March constitution of 1921. The history of the concept of national minority bore an imprint on the accommodation to the new political, territorial, and discursive circumstances after transition from empire to nation-state. The idea itself was well anchored in the liberal tradition, but the nationalist right also took it on board to protect (...) the cultural hegemony of the Poles in the areas where they were a minority. Tackling the nexus of the emerging nation-state and the ensuing logic of minoritization sheds light on tiered visions of citizenship essential for understanding the 1921 debate. For this purpose, I use various available sub-corpora of texts—political leaflets, press, and parliamentary debates from the period 1788–1922. (shrink)

This article appraises the political writings of three Polish Marxists from the early 20th century, Kazimierz Kelles-Krauz, Stanisław Brzozowski and Rosa Luxemburg. In the specific peripheral conditions and because of the entanglement of different struggles in the Polish Kingdom under Tsarist rule around the 1905 Revolution, it was no longer possible for Marxists and political theorists to refer to any firm political ground: whether the organic unity of the nation, class antagonisms, or laws of history. The construction of revolutionary subjects (...) in Luxemburg, the political rethinking of national community and the realistic ‘agonistic’ conception of democracy in Kelles-Krauz, and Brzozowski’s anti-essentialist Marxism, with its mobilizing power and politically constructed subjects of social change, are peculiar, peripheral forms of political Marxism, today worth looking at one more time. (shrink)

The First International Workshop brings together researchers from the theoretical ends of the logic programming and artificial intelligence communities to discuss their mutual interests. Logic programming deals with the use of models of mathematical logic as a way of programming computers, where theoretical AI deals with abstract issues in modeling and representing human knowledge and beliefs. One common ground is nonmonotonic reasoning, a family of logics that includes room for the kinds of variations that can be found in human reasoning. (...) Topics covered: Stable Semantics. Default Logic. AutoEpistemic Logic. Truth Maintenance Systems. Implementation Issues. Diagnosis. Applications. Inheritance Reasoning. Logics of Belief. Inconsistency and Non-Monotonicity. (shrink)