This thesis examines romantic relationships between human and artificially intelligent characters in the science-fiction films Ex Machina (2014), Her (2013) and “Be Right Back” (2013) from anthology series Black Mirror. The purpose of the thesis is to examine these relationships in relation to norms concerning corporeality, gender, sexuality and romance, exploring how the portrayal of these relationships and the characters in them subvert and/or reinforce those norms. A descriptive coding method was used followed by analytical coding to determine which theoretical concepts would be applied to which scenes. The theoretical framework consists mainly of Judith Butler’s theories on gender-performativity and Donna Haraway’s cyborg-figuration, and other theoretical concepts that were not used as extensively. The analysis showed that the films occasionally reinforce the norms in question due to cis- and heteronormative tendencies within the romantic relationships and due to normative aspects within the construction of the characters. A few examples of this is depicting a heteronormative, vocalized femininity and sexualized, normatively female bodies as well as partly establishing stereotypical, gendered dynamics in the romantic relationships. However, the study also showed that these films construction of the characters and their romantic relationships manages to subvert the above-mentioned norms. They do so by highlighting how corporeality is integral to the social construction of gender and not separate from that process, by critiquing monogamy being the normative type of romantic relationship and by exposing the male characters’ objectifying gaze towards female characters’ bodies. Through these transgressive examples and several others like them, the films display the subversive potential of science-fiction.

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The future workplace may not be a place just for human workers but will likely be filled with artificial intelligence, robots and agents being colleagues instead of tools. In some industries where a shortage of personal is a central issue, digitalization in various fields can be explored as a mean to help. This study aims to discover different aspects regarding a social agent that has been implemented at a dental clinic with a purpose to preform different tasks that is normally regarded as human tasks. By conducting interviews and observations it was possible to shine light at a variation of underlying factors to take in to consideration when implementing such an agent at a workplace.  The study showed that even if an agent is capable to help people with their questions and tasks many users chose other alternatives that did not include getting help from the agent but instead meant that they used other alternatives.

<p>In this thesis a new concept called domain knowledge management for informationproviding dialogue systems is introduced. Domain knowledge management includes issues related to representation and use of domain knowledge as well as access of background information sources, issues that previously have been incorporated in dialogue management.</p><p>The work on domain knowledge management reported in this thesis can be divided in two parts. On a general theoretical level, knowledge sources and models used for dialogue management, including domain knowledge management, are studied and related to the capabilities they support. On a more practical level, domain knowledge management is examined in the contexts of a dialogue system framework and a specific instance of this framework, the ÖTRAF system. In this system domain knowledge management is implemented in a separate module, a Domain Knowledge Manager.</p><p>The use of a specialised Domain Knowledge Manager has a number of advantages. The first is that dialogue management becomes more focused as it only has to consider dialogue phenomena, while domain-specific reasoning is handled by the Domain Knowledge Manager. Secondly, porting of a system to new domains is facilitated since domain-related issues are separated out in specialised domain knowledge sources. The third advantage with a separate module for domain knowledge management is that domain knowledge sources can be easily modified, exchanged, and reused.</p> / Report code: LiU-Tek-Lic-2001:27.

Reasoning about temporal and spatial information is a common task in computer science, especially in the field of artificial intelligence. The topic of this thesis is the study of such reasoning from a computational perspective. We study a number of different qualitative point based formalisms for temporal reasoning and provide a complete classification of computational tractability for different time models. We also develop more general methods which can be used for proving tractability and intractability of other relational algebras. Even though most of the thesis pertains to qualitative reasoning the methods employed here can also be used for quantitative reasoning. For instance, we introduce a tractable and useful extension to the quantitative point based formalism STP. This extension gives the algebra an expressibility which subsumes the largest tractable fragment of the augmented interval algebra and has a faster and simpler algorithm for deciding consistency. The use of disjunctions in temporal formalisms is of great interest not only since disjunctions are a key element in different logics but also since the expressibility can be greatly enhanced in this way. If we allow arbitrary disjunctions, the problems under consideration typically become intractable and methods to identify tractable fragments of disjunctive formalisms are therefore useful. One such method is to use the independence property. We present an automatic method for deciding this property for many relational algebras. Furthermore, we show how this concept can not only be used for deciding tractability of sets of relations but also to demonstrate intractability of relations not having this property. Together with other methods for making total classifications of tractability this goes a long way towards easing the task of classifying and understanding relational algebras. The tractable fragments of relational algebras are sometimes not expressive enough to model real-world problems and a backtracking solver is needed. For these cases we identify another property among relations which can be used to aid general backtracking based solvers to finnd solutions faster. / Article I is a revised and extended version of the following three papers: 1. Mathias Broxvall and Peter Jonsson. Towards a Complete Classification of Tractability in Point Algebras for Nonlinear Time. In Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming (CP-99), pp. 129-143, Alexandria, VA, USA, Oct, 1999. 2. Mathias Broxvall and Peter Jonsson. Disjunctive Temporal Reasoning in Partially Ordered Time Structures. In Proceedings of the Seventeenth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-2000), pp. 464-469, Austin, Texas, USA, Aug, 2000. 3. Mathias Broxvall. The Point Algebra for Branching Time Revisited. In Proceedings of the Joint German/Austrian Conference on Artificial Intelligence (KI-2001), pp. 106-121, Vienna, Austria, Sep, 2001. --- Article II is a revised and extended version of the following paper: Mathias Broxvall, Peter Jonsson and Jochen Renz: Refinements and Independence: A Simple Method for Identifying Tractable Disjunctive Constraints. In Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming (CP-2000), pp. 114-127, Singapore, Sep, 2000.

Jag börjar allt mer inse vattnets betydelse för sjöfarten. Så lär kung Gustav V ha sagt en gång i samband med dop av ett fartyg. Uttalandet har senare kommit att bli ett sätt uttrycka att något är så uppenbart att det knappast ens behöver sägas. Vilken betydelse har datorer för tänkandet? Frågan är relevant att ställa i en tid när datorer gör intrång på allt fler områden och har blivit en så naturligt integrerad del av våra liv att användningen av dem sällan ifrågasätts. Svaret på frågan är dock inte lika uppenbart som den om vattnets betydelse för sjöfarten. Denna masteruppsats i yrkeskunnande och professionsutveckling rör sig i gränslandet mellan maskiner och människor och handlar om hur datorer och datoranvändning påverkar det mänskliga tänkandet och den mänskliga kunskapen. Utgångspunkten är den brittiske matematikern Alan Turings arbete och hans berömda artikel från 1950, med titeln Computing machinery and intelligens, där han definierar ett test (Turingtestet) avsett att kunna avgöra maskiners tankeförmåga. Den traditionella tolkningen av artikeln är att Turing menade att det en dag kommer att vara möjligt att bygga en maskin som kan imitera allt mänskligt beteende perfekt (Turingmaskinen), vilket har gett upphov till forskningsområdet artificiell intelligens. I praktiken har dock maskiner inte kunnat ersätta människor på det sätt som man trott och som många fortfarande tror. Närmandet mellan människor och maskiner tar sig andra uttryck. Utvecklingen går snarare i en riktning som gjort att människor genom att använda maskiner anpassar sig till och allt mer börjar likna dem. Vi förvandlas till Turingmänniskor med succesivt minskande utrymme att utöva vårt omdöme och ta ansvar, när maskinerna ställer sig i vägen för det mänskliga sinnet och känslan.

Lic.-avh. Västerås : Mälardalens högskola, 2004. / S. 29-33: Bibliografi.

In Sweden, the 1970s saw widespread public concerns about data privacy. The use of computers in the 1970 census sparked debate, and in 1973 Sweden's data privacy law, datalagen, came into force. In 1980, a parliamentary delegation was tasked with investigating further options for political action. In the years around 1980, computers, and how they should be used, was a topic of hot political and public debate. One particularly influential voice in this debate was professor Lars Kristiansson. He shared his visions of the future in debate articles, radio and television interviews, and books. Moreover, he co-hosted two educational series in Swedish public service television. Kristiansson took it on himself to educate Swedish citizens on the perils of a future, Big Brother-like society. Kristiansson frequently expressed his concerns in drastic terms. He repeatedly associated computers in general, and microcomputers in particular, with the atomic bomb. In this thesis, I set out to interpret Kristiansson's visions of the future computer society, including his atomic bomb metaphor. His work is placed in a context of contemporary ideas, such as those of the Cold War and the 1960s popular left-wing movements, as well as his own academic and professional background. The atomic bomb metaphor was, in this interpretation, shaped both by Kristiansson's personal experience and by widespread popular ideas of an imminent "intelligence explosion". Much of Kristiansson's criticism, directed against the computerized society of the future, concerned what he viewed as a conflation of theory and reality. The criticism was originally directed against a naïve positivism, as Kristiansson warned his engineering students against confusing mathematical models with physical reality. This criticism of positivism evolved into a warning against a society shaped by governmental computer models, but the examples, including some illustrations, were largely retained from his teaching materials.

Detta arbete undersöker hur vida agenter inom artificiell intelligens kan realistiskt distribuera en svensk tallskog. Landskapets mark där simuleringen kommer att ta plats är formad efter en referensskogs mark. I miljön kommer det även att finnas vindzoner som hjälper agenterna att färdas runt och sprida flera träd.Resultatet visar att det är möjligt att skapa en svensk tallskog med agenter då simuleringen hade kvaliteter som liknar referensskogens. De kvaliteter som undersökts är täthetszoner och vart dessa hamnade. Simuleringen skapade täthetszoner för träden som var lika i antal som de som kunde mätas i referensskogen. Det gick att dra slutsatsen att zonerna inte behövde ligga exakt som i referensskogen. Med det sagt är agenterna dock inte bra för att återskapa en skog efter en referensbild.I framtida arbeten skulle det vara intressant att kolla hur agenter kan återskapa skogar med flera trädarter samt annan vegetation. Marken skulle då kunnat få mer uppmärksamhet och dess tillstånd för att avgöra hur vida träd och andra växter kan växa där.

I en värld karakteriserad av förändring och globalisering och med nya ekonomiska och globala konkurrenter som konkurrerar om samma kunder och resurser ökar trycket på organisationernas konkurrenskraft. Dessutom står organisationer inför ytterligare utmaningar på grund av en ständigt ökande mängd data och den allt större utmaningen att analysera data och hålla data säkert. Framgångsrika företag präglas av att deras intellektuella kapital utnyttjas på ett effektivt sätt. 1, 2 Således har den mest värdefulla tillgång som en organisation har idag blivit sina medarbetares kunskap.3 Baserat på den teoretiska ramen och noggrann granskning samt analys av intervjuer och observationer har detta resulterat i tre viktiga områden: artificiell intelligens, blockchain och industri 4.0. Analysen visade att de vetenskapliga artiklarna och litteraturen har olika perspektiv, olika definitioner och bygger på olika teorier men kärnan är att de alla verkar komma fram till samma resultat och slutsats, även om de har olika synpunkter och perspektiv. Slutsatsen är att organisationskulturen påverkar kunskapshantering och spridning av information på grund av dess direkta inverkan på individen. Rekommendationen är därför en fortsatt insats för att ge anställda verktyg för att bättre kunna kommunicera och dela med sig av kunskap. För att ytterligare stärka arbetstagarnas motivation rekommenderas dessutom en ökad närvaro av ledningen på affärsgolvet.