Throughout history, creature-based content has been a highly valued source of entertainment. With the introduction of evolved virtual creatures (or EVCs) by Karl Sims in 1994, a new source of creature content became available. Despite their immediate appeal, however, EVCs still lag far behind their natural counterparts: Neither their morphology nor their behavior is sufficiently complex. This dissertation presents three contributions to address this problem. First, the ESP system, which combines a human-designed syllabus with encapsulation and conflict-resolution mechanisms, is used to approximately double the state of the art in behavioral complexity for evolved virtual creatures. Second, an extension to ESP is presented that allows full morphological adaptation to continue beyond the initial skill. It produces both a greater variety of solutions and solutions with higher fitness. Third, a muscle-drive system is demonstrated to embody a significant degree of physical intelligence. It increases morphological complexity and reduces demands on the brain, thus freeing resources for more complex behaviors. Together, these contributions bring evolved virtual creatures, in both action and form, a significant step closer to matching the entertainment value of creatures from the real world. / text

While online virtual worlds draw increasingly wider audiences of players and scholars alike, offline games continue to evolve into more complex and socially layered forms as well. This dissertation argues that virtual worlds need not exist as online, digital environments alone and probes three genres of non-digital gaming for evidence of the virtual: tabletop role-playing games, murder-mystery events, and localized alternate reality games. More broadly, then, this dissertation is about deliberate make-belief: practiced by adults, taken seriously by participants, engaged with for long hours at a time, performed in public, and integrated into everyday social relationships. Drawing on scholars who study games as social activities (McGonigal 2006, Montola 2012) and social institutions (Goffman 1974, Searle 1995), I present three ethnographic case studies that illustrate how complex forms of social gaming can conjure and sustain environments best understood as analog virtual worlds. Through the widespread use of mobile technologies and the concerted efforts of innovators, game spaces are increasingly permeating our everyday lives on- and offline. This dissolving boundary demands anthropologists to revisit questions of how, where, and with whom we play games. Dovetailing Martin Heidegger’s notions of worlding and poiesis to the semiotics of C.S. Peirce, this dissertation investigates how new forms of social gaming demonstrate the same qualities of shared intentionality, intersubjectivity, and performance essential to the production of new social meaning and cultural forms. Following, I situate the bold ethnographic case studies of make-belief in dialogue with scholars who figure exclusively online virtual worlds (Castronova 2005, Taylor 2006, Boellstorff 2008) and argue that analyzing both on- and offline virtual worlds together can help scholars better understand the fundamental nature of social interaction and shared intentionality, those everyday mechanisms that both sustain personal relationships on the one hand and maintain our broadest and most serious social institutions on the other.

Client devices operating at the edges on the Internet, in homes, cars, offices, and elsewhere, are highly heterogeneous in terms of their hardware configurations, form factors, and capabilities, ranging from small sensors to wearable and mobile devices, to the stationary ones like smart TVs and desktop machines. With recent and future advances in wireless networking allowing all such devices to interact with each other and with the cloud, it becomes possible to combine and augment capabilities of individual devices via services running at the edge - in edge clouds - and/or via services running in remote datacenters. The virtual platform approach to combining and enhancing such devices developed in this research makes possible the creation of innovative end user services, using low-latency communications with nearby devices to create for each end user exactly the platform needed for current tasks, guided by permissions and policies controlled by remote, cloud-resident social network services (SNS). To end users, virtual platforms operate beyond the limitations of individual devices, as natural extensions of those devices that offer improved functionality and performance, with ease-of-use provided by cloud-level global context and knowledge.

published_or_final_version / abstract / Architecture / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

Purpose: This paper explores the use of blogs as a platform for providing reference service, and discusses Lyceum, an open source software project from ibiblio.org, for this purpose. Design/methodology/approach: The following topics are explored: the evolution of libraries' uses of blogs, the advantages of conducting the reference transaction as a collaborative effort, and the use of blogs as an environment that fosters collaboration. The argument is made that blogs may be used to good effect in reference services Findings: It is argued that blogs may be used to good effect in reference services. Lyceum, an open source blogosphere application, is discussed as an environment for blog-based reference service. Originality/value: To date, blogs are not being used by a library reference services, and by few online reference service unaffiliated with libraries. This paper will be useful to libraries and other reference services interested in conducting the reference transaction as a community effort.

Research has repeatedly shown that computer-mediated communications (CMC) lead to higher levels of disclosure of personal information (Tidwell and Walther 2002). Recent studies have examined the role of increasingly common social media and social network services (SNS) on disclosure in a variety of contexts (Mazer et al. 2007; Tufekci 2008). The combination of personal demographic data, taste preferences, public disclosure of friend networks and now increasing usage of tools for instantly updating status (e.g., Twitter, Facebook) has, we believe, fundamentally altered users' understanding of the temporality of information and its (semi-)permanence. This study investigates users' willingness to disclose information with respect to how long ago that information may have been created or captured. Users were more willing to share items as time passed. Potentially, a "Later Button" should be put into practice to address this latent willingness (40% of sharing scenarios) to disclose information at a later date.

Purpose: This paper explores the use of blogs as a platform for providing reference service, and discusses Lyceum, an open source software project from ibiblio.org, for this purpose. Design/methodology/approach: The following topics are explored: the evolution of libraries' uses of blogs, the advantages of conducting the reference transaction as a collaborative effort, and the use of blogs as an environment that fosters collaboration. The argument is made that blogs may be used to good effect in reference services Findings: It is argued that blogs may be used to good effect in reference services. Lyceum, an open source blogosphere application, is discussed as an environment for blog-based reference service. Originality/value: To date, blogs are not being used by a library reference services, and by few online reference service unaffiliated with libraries. This paper will be useful to libraries and other reference services interested in conducting the reference transaction as a community effort.

This 105-page report is deposited with permission of the Digital Library Federation which retains copyright. It is freely available in html and pdf formats at the DLF Web site or may be purchased in softcover edition for $20 from DLF. / This report, commissioned by DLF, provides an overview of a diverse set of more than thirty digital library aggregation services, organizes them into functional clusters, and then evaluates them more fully from the perspective of an informed user. Most of the services under review rely wholly or partially on the Protocol for Metadata Harvesting of the Open Archives Initiative (OAI-PMH). Each service is annotated with its organizational affiliation, subject coverage, function, audience, status, and size. Critical issues surrounding each of these elements are presented in order to provide the reader with an appreciation of the nuances inherent in seemingly straightforward factual information, such as "audience" or "size." Each service is then grouped into one of five functional clusters: open access e-print archives and servers; cross-archive search services and aggregators; from digital collections to digital library environments; from peer-reviewed "referratories" to portal services; specialized search engines. This publication was deposited with permission of the publisher (Digital Library Federation Council on Library and Information Resources Washington, DC.).

This thesis proposes a new genre of theater that combines participatory and interactive narratives with virtual reality technologies and traditional theatrical elements to create a form that is capable of responding to the growing desire for interactive entertainment mediums. A series of participatory narrative events, including traditional theater productions, interactive narrative/drama and role-playing games, are analyzed for their potentialities and limitations. These elements are then used to respond to scholarly writings concerning the problems of participatory narrative forms. From this analysis conclusions are drawn about the necessary elements needed to create this new genre of theater, termed interactive virtual theater, or IVT. The elements are then synthesized into a hypothetical picture of what the IVT of the future might look like.

The notion of finite type invariants of virtual knots, introduced by Goussarov, Polyak and Viro, leads to the study of the space of diagrams with directed chords mod 6T (also known as the space of arrow diagrams), and weight systems on it. It is well known that given a Manin triple together with a representation we can construct a weight system. In the first part of this thesis we develop combinatorial formulae for weight systems coming from standard Manin triple structures on the classical Lie algebras and these structures' defining representations. These formulae reduce the problem of finding weight systems in the defining representations to certain counting problems. We then use these formulae to verify that such weight systems, composed with the averaging map, give us the weight systems found by Bar-Natan on (undirected) chord diagrams mod 4T. In the second half of the thesis we present results from computations done jointly with Bar-Natan. We compute, up to degree 4, the dimensions of the spaces of arrow diagrams whose skeleton is a line, and the ranks of all classical Lie algebra weight systems in all representations. The computations give us a measure of how well classical Lie algebras capture the spaces of arrow diagrams up to degree 4, and our results suggest that in degree 4 there are already weight systems which do not come from the standard Manin triple structures on classical Lie algebras.