The IT artifact is at the core of the information systems (IS) discipline and yet most IS research does not directly theorize the IT artifact or its nomological network (Benbasat and Zmud 2003; Orlikowski and Iacono 2001). This research seeks to answer a repeated call for more direct engagement with the IT artifact and its nomological net with affordance theory adopted as the basis for this theoretical work. An exploratory case study was conducted to answer the research question, how do the material properties of health information systems enable and constrain the work practices of clinicians? The study was conducted at a large urban acute care hospital in the Midwestern United States with registered nurses working on inpatient care units as the clinicians of interest. Through interviews with nurses and other clinical stakeholders and the observation of nurse’s work practices on three patient care units in the hospital, theoretical insights were developed on the nature of affordances for information systems research. IS affordances are defined in this study as relationships between abilities of an individual and features of an information systems within the context of the environment in which they function. The concepts of an affordance range and an affordance threshold are proposed as theoretical constructs in the nomological network of affordances that help to explain the use of information systems as a function of the difficulty of acting on IS affordances. The relationship between affordances and constraints is theorized and linked to the affordance range and threshold with the assertion that constraints are closely associated with the difficulties experienced by users in acting on IS affordances. The challenge of studying IS affordances in all their complexity is discussed with the suggestion that researchers take the user’s perspective of affordances to alleviate the need for repeated decomposition. Finally, the role of information systems in facilitating social interaction is emphasized through the concept of affordances for sociality. The contribution of this research to the IS field is a more nuanced understanding of the nature of the IT artifact and its relationship to the users of that technology.

In this thesis, we studied how physical affordances of the environment, such as traversibility for a mobile robot, can be learned. In particular, we studied how the physical properties of the environment, as acquired from range images obtained from a 3D laser scanner mounted on a mobile robot platform, can specify the traversibility affordance. A physics based simulation environment is used during exploration trials, where the traversibility affordances and the relevant features for each behavior are learned through physical interactions with the environment. The prediction accuracy in perceiving the traversibility affordances of the world, which includes several spherical, cylindrical and box shaped objects, is found to be 94 percent. Furthermore, it is observed that the robot uses only 1.1 percent of extracted features while perceiving the affordances. This in turn saves the time 76.6 percent in scanning and 81percent in feature processing. The robot is later tested in a simulated cluttered environment, surrounded by walls. It is able to successfully traverse in the environment, by selecting its behaviors based on the affordances provided, and performing them. The robot was able to avoid from the box shaped objects, and push-roll the spherical ones without making any object detection. In the last set of experiments, the trained affordance-based behavior selection scheme is partially veried in the real world with the Kurt3D robot.

This thesis studies how an autonomous robot can learn affordances from its interactions with the environment and use these affordances in planning. It is based on a new formalization of the concept which proposes that affordances are relations that pertain to the interactions of an agent with its environment. The robot interacts with environments containing different objects by executing its atomic actions and learns the different effects it can create, as well as the invariants of the environments that afford creating that effect with a certain action. This provides the robot with the ability to predict the consequences of its future interactions and to deliberatively plan action sequences to achieve a goal. The study shows that the concept of affordances provides a common framework for studying reactive control, deliberation and adaptation in autonomous robots. It also provides solutions to the major problems in robot planning, by grounding the planning operators in the low-level interactions of the robot.

Researchers are still far from thoroughly understanding and building accurate computational models of the mechanisms in human mind that give rise to cognitive processes such as emergence of concepts and language acquisition. As a new attempt to give an insight into this issue, in this thesis, we are concerned about developing a computational model that leads to the emergence of concepts. Specically, we investigate how a robot can acquire verb and object concepts through learning affordances, a notion first proposed by J. J. Gibson in 1986. Using the affordance formalization framework of Sahin et al. in 2007, a humanoid robot acquires concepts through interactions in an embodied environment. For the acquisition of verb concepts, we take an alternative approach to the literature, which generally links verbs to specific behaviors of the robot, by linking them to specific effects that different behaviors may generate. We show how our robot can learn effect prototypes, represented in terms of feature changes in the perception vector of the robot, through demonstrations made by a human supervisor. As for the object concepts, we use the affordance relations of objects to create object concepts based on their functional relevance. Additionally, we show that the extracted eect prototypes corresponding to verb concepts can also be utilized to discover stable and variable properties of objects which can be associated to stable and variable affordances. Moreover, we show that the acquired concepts provide a suitable basis for communication with humans or other agents, for example to understand and imitate others&#039 / behaviors or for goal specication tasks. These capabilities are demonstrated in simple interaction games on the iCub humanoid robot platform.

One view to cognition is that the symbol manipulating brain interprets the symbols of language based on the sensori-motor experiences of the agent. Such symbols, for example, what we refer to as nouns and verbs, are generalizations that the agent discovers through interactions with the environment. Given that an important subset of nouns correspond to objects (and object concepts), in this thesis, how function and appearance-based object concepts can be created through affordances has been studied. For this, a computational system, which is able to create object concepts through simple interactions with the objects in the environment, is proposed. Namely, the robot applies a set of built-in behaviors (such as pushing, lifting, grasping) on a set of objects to learn their aordances, through which objects affording similar functions are grouped into object concepts. Moreover, the thesis demonstrates that the discovered object concepts are beneficial for learning new tasks by analyzing the learning performance of learning a new task with and without object concepts.

We propose a developmental framework that enables the robot to learn affordances through interaction with the environment in an unsupervised way and to use these affordances at different levels of robot control, ranging from reactive response to planning. Inspired from Developmental Psychology, the robot&rsquo / s discovery of action possibilities is realized in two sequential phases. In the first phase, the robot that initially possesses a limited number of basic actions and reflexes discovers new behavior primitives by exercising these actions and by monitoring the changes created in its initially crude perception system. In the second phase, the robot explores a more complicated environment by executing the discovered behavior primitives and using more advanced perception to learn further action possibilities. For this purpose, first, the robot discovers commonalities in action-effect experiences by finding effect categories, and then builds predictors for each behavior to map object features and behavior parameters into effect categories. After learning affordances through self-interaction and self-observation, the robot can make plans to achieve desired goals, emulate end states of demonstrated actions, monitor the plan execution and take corrective actions using the perceptual structures employed or discovered during learning. Mobile and manipulator robots were used to realize the proposed framework. Similar to infants, these robots were able to form behavior repertoires, learn affordances, and gain prediction capabilities. The learned affordances were shown to be relative to the robots, provide perceptual economy and encode general relations. Additionally, the affordance-based planning ability was verified in various tasks such as table cleaning and object transportation.

Peer review is a complex collaborative activity, which may engage English language learners in reading, writing, listening, and speaking and carry many potential benefits for their language learning (Hu, 2005). While many research studies focused on peer review practices of adult language learners in academic settings in the USA or abroad in language classes (Grami, 2010; Zhao, 2010), little attention was paid to adolescent L2 writers participating in peer review in face-to-face K-12 and online contexts. This multiple case study aimed at describing and explaining peer review practices of four adolescent ELLs in face-to-face and online contexts from the ecological perspective. In particular, I aimed at exploring (a) four adolescent ELLs' perceptions of peer review in face-to-face and online contexts, (b) affordances they chose to employ during peer review in face-to-face and online contexts, and (c) revisions the participants chose to make due to peer review in face-to-face and online contexts. The multiple observations, semi-structured interviews, researcher's and participants' e-journals, and written artifacts yielded data for within-case and cross-case analysis. The findings of the study afforded situating adolescent ELLs' peer review practices in the face-to-face and online contexts as a part of L2 literacy, redefining L2 literacy and peer review in L2, and discussing the important role of peer review in adolescent ELLs' literacy development. The implications of the study provided teachers with suggestions on how to enhance adolescent ELLs' peer review practices. Further, I elaborated on the lessons learned about technology use for peer review in K-12 contexts. Finally, I addressed possible future research directions based on the findings of the study.

The research engages the use of social media sites for musicians with a focus on Facebook. It determines which are the advantages the platform makes available for musicians, allowing them to employ Do It Yourself strategies of production, audience relationship management and self-management. The importance of audience response and demographics allow any musician integrate keen insight into the content delivery and thus, optimize their management accordingly. This thesis will establish the affordances that engage what aspects and uses of Facebook are changing the way amateurs operate. The research appropriates the context of professionalism to the variable of knowledgeability, know-how, and Stebbins’ (1977) seven variables (confidence, perseverance, continuation commitment, preparedness and self-conception) in order to note a definition of the modern amateur in contrast to professionals.

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Using ecological task analysis as a conceptual framework, this study sought to describe the experiences of choice in physical activity contexts for adults with mobility impairments. Experiences of 3 female and 2 male participants with mobility impairments, ages 18-23 years were explored using the phenomenological research methods of interviews, written stories, and field notes. Thematic analysis revealed three themes: (a) Interpreting the setting described participants interpretation of the environment, person, and task when making movement choices; (b) It just felt right described how participants actively engaged in a process of analyzing alternatives and choosing among them; and (c) Implications of choices made described participants evaluations of good and bad choices and what could be learned. The implications of this exploratory study include enhanced understanding of the assumptions surrounding choice, and appreciation for the multiple layers of affordances and constraints that influence choices in physical activity contexts.