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

This dissertation, Making Sense of Digital Content Moderation from the Margins, examines how content creators who are marginalized by race, sexuality, gender, ethnicity, and disability understand their experiences of content moderation on the social media platform TikTok. Using critical interface and narrative-based inquiry methods with six marginalized content creators on TikTok, I argue that marginalized creators navigate the opaque content moderation infrastructure of TikTok by drawing on their embodied experiences. The key research questions ask how these content creators interpret TikTok's platform policies and processes through their interactions on the app and how these interpretations influence content creation on TikTok and how creators feel about moderation in the absence of platform transparency about how content is moderated. To answer these questions, I conducted narrative-driven interviews with six TikTok creators and analyzed these stories alongside online testimonials in eight Change.org petitions. My analysis revealed that lack of transparency around TikTok's algorithmic curation and moderation contributes to content creators feeling alienated, exploited, frustrated, and unwelcome on the platform and influences content creators to adapt their content to avoid moderation, oftentimes by self-censoring themselves and aspects of their marginalized identities. Over time, the accumulation of content moderation micro-interactions diminishes the ability of marginalized content creators to trust content moderation processes. My analysis also shows how TikTok's user experience design and opaque content moderation practices contribute to an affective platform environment in which creators are compelled to speak out and across creator networks about such gaps in experience and platform policy. I conclude with a discussion of how my findings about content moderation and transparency contribute to conversations in writing-related scholarship, especially as it pertains to writing assessment, technical communication, and algorithmic research methodologies. / Doctor of Philosophy / In recent years, marginalized content creators on TikTok have sounded the alarm about the way that the platform's content moderation and algorithmic recommendation disadvantages marginalized creators. This dissertation, Making Sense of Digital Content Moderation from the Margins, examines how content creators who are marginalized by race, sexuality, gender, ethnicity, and disability understand their experiences of content moderation on the social media platform TikTok. The key research questions ask how these content creators interpret TikTok's platform policies and processes through their interactions on the app and how these interpretations influence content creation on TikTok and how creators feel about moderation in the absence of platform transparency about how content is moderated. To answer these questions, I conducted narrative-driven interviews with six TikTok creators and analyzed these stories alongside online testimonials. My analysis revealed that lack of transparency around TikTok's algorithmic curation and moderation contributes to content creators feeling alienated, exploited, and unwelcome on the platform and influences content creators to adapt their content to avoid moderation, oftentimes by self-censoring themselves and aspects of their marginalized identities. Moreover, I found that TikTok isolates user experiences of biased content moderation which compels creators to speak out and across creator networks about discriminatory experiences of platform policy.

Background: Companies have lately been engaging their business activities onto social mediaand its platforms. They are taking advantage of the opportunities provided by social media and they are starting to realize the importance of content marketing. Problem Discussion: Content marketing has been researched previously research. However, the research regarding B2B content marketing and the differences between B2B and B2C content is still rather limited. The question lingers whether the same principles apply to firms working with B2B as well. Moreover, a clear framework or guide regarding the way that content should be created does not yet exist – a guide including the aspects may be taken into account when creating content and implementing content marketing. Purpose: The purpose of this study is to understand and describe how companies deal with the content creation process, within content marketing through social media. Research Question: How do companies handle content creation for content marketing through social media? Methodology: This thesis has taken a qualitative and abductive approach on the study. It hasbeen based on a multiple-case study, where semi-structured interviews took place with sevenfirms working with content marketing and content creation - in a B2B context. Conclusion: All seven firms have a uniform understanding of content marketing, aligned withprevious research. The study concludes that there are similarities between the ways that companies handle content marketing. Furthermore, the study concludes that there are general traits that needs to always be taken into consideration when creating content s.a. long term planning, providing value to the customer, well thought out message and choosing the right channels for content distribution.

Multiple resources currently exist that provide tips, tricks, and hints on gaining greater success, or increasing one’s chances for success, in the field of live content creation. However, these resources often lack depth, detail, large sample size, or significant research on the topic. The purpose of this thesis is twofold: to aggregate and optimize the very best methods for live content creators to employ as they begin a streaming career, and how best to implement these methodologies for maximum success in the current streaming market. Through analysis of a set of semi-structured interviews, popular literature, and existing, ancillary research, repeating patterns will be identified to be used as the basis for a structured plan that achieves the stated objectives. Further research will serve to reinforce as well as optimize the common methodologies identified within the interview corpus.

A large part of any game development process consists of content creation, which costs both time and effort. Procedural generation techniques exist to help narrative generation, but they are scattered and require extensive manual labour to set up. On top of that, Serious Games content created with these techniques tend to be uninteresting and lack variety which can ultimately lead to the Serious Games missing their intended purpose. This paper delivers a prototype for a modular tool that aims to solve these problems by combining existing narrative generation techniques with common sense database knowledge and player adaptivity techniques. The prototype tool implements Ceptre as a core module for the generation of stories and ConceptNet as a commonsense knowledge database. Two studies have been conducted with content created by the tool. One study tested if generation rules created by commonsense can be used to flesh out stories, while the other one evaluated if adapted stories yield better scores. The results of the first test state that adding rules retrieved through common sense knowledge did not improve story quality, but they can however be used to extend stories without compromising story quality. It also shows that ideally, an extensive natural language processing module should be used to present the stories rather than a basic implementation. The statistically insignificant result of the second test was potentially caused by the compromises taken when conducting the test. Reconduction of this test using real game data, rather than data from the compromised personality test, might be preferable.

abstract: Digital media refers to any form of media which depends on electronic devices for its creation, distribution, view, and storage. Digital media analytics involves qualitative and quantitative analysis from the business to understand users’ behaviors. This technique brings disruptive changes to many industries and its path of economic disruption is getting wider and wider. Under the context of the increasingly popular digital media market, this dissertation investigates what are the best content delivery strategy and the new cultural phenomenon: Internet Water Army. The first essay proposes a theory-guided computational approach that consolidates distinct data sources spanning unstructured text, image, and video data, systematically measures modes of persuasion, and unveils the multimedia content design strategies for crowdfunding projects. The second essay studies whether using the Internet Water Army helps sales and under what conditions it helps. This study finds that the Internet water army helps product sales at both post-level and fans-level. The effect is largely reflected by changing the number of emotional fans. Furthermore, the earlier to purchase the water armies, more haters, likers, and neutral fans it can attract. The last essay builds a game model to study the trade- off between honestly promoting the product according to their evaluation and catering to the consumer’s prior belief on the product quality to stay on the market as long as possible. It provides insights on the optimum usage of promotion on social media and demonstrate how conventional wisdom about negative reviews will hurt business may be misleading in the presence of social media. These three studies jointly contribute to the crowdfunding and social media studies literature by elucidating the content delivery strategy, and the impact and purchasing strategy of the Internet Water Army. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Business Administration 2020

Zero-shot video generation involves generating videos of concepts (action classes) that are not seen in the training phase. Even though the research community has explored conditional video generation for long high-resolution videos, zero-shot video remains a fairly unexplored and challenging task. Most recent works can generate videos for action-object or motion-content pairs, where both the object (content) and action (motion) are observed separately during training, yet results often lack spatial consistency between foreground and background and cannot generalize to complex scenes with multiple objects or actions. In this work, we propose Concept2Vid that generates zero-shot videos for classes that are completely unseen during training. In contrast to prior work, our model is not limited to a predefined fixed set of class-level attributes, but rather utilizes semantic information from multiple videos of the same topic to generate samples from novel classes. We evaluate qualitatively and quantitatively on the Kinetics400 and UCF101 datasets, demonstrating the effectiveness of our proposed model. / Master of Science / Humans are able to generalize unseen scenarios without explicit feedback. They can be thought of as self-learning Artificial Intelligence agents that can collect data from various modalities (video, audio, text) found in surrounding environments, to develop new knowledge and acclimate to unseen situations without explicit feedback. Many recent studies have learned how to perform this process for images, but very few have been able to extend it to videos. Videos provide rich multi-modal data, such as text, audio, and images, and hence are composed of multifaceted knowledge that can introduce more complex temporal and spatial constraints. Leveraging videos in combination with text and audio data can assist intelligent systems to learn similar to how humans do. Zero-shot video generation (ZSVG) involves generating videos of concepts that are not seen in the training phase of a machine learning model. Generating a zero-shot video requires a multitude of temporal and spatial dependencies. In generating a video, not only does the model need temporal coherence but also the understanding of object properties. Current approaches for ZSVG are not well suited due to these challenges. We propose Concept2Vid which generates zero-shot videos for classes that are completely unseen during training. In contrast to prior work, our model is not limited to a predefined fixed set of class descriptions, but rather utilizes semantic information from multiple videos of the same topic to generate samples from novel classes. We evaluate qualitatively and quantitatively on the Kinetics400 and UCF101 datasets, demonstrating the effectiveness of our proposed model.

As one of the earliest attempts to apply immersive technology in environmental communication, this design research project tries to answer the following research question: how do we communicate the connections between food-related behaviors and environmental impacts through immersive storytelling? During the project, an immersive story called "Trik’s' Party" for dome shows and a journey map of an immersive visitor experience are created. These design outcomes and this paper are built on the knowledge of scientific findings, communication methods, content creations, and service design. To support the creation process, new sketching, storyboarding and prototyping methods were developed for dome content creations. The core message of this paper is that effective environmental communication is not just about informing the public about facts and data from scientific studies. It is also about giving individuals and communities the knowledge, tools and spaces to develop a vision of their own future. Immersive storytelling is one of the methods for creating these spaces. It has a large potential to raise public empathy with other people and their future-self when the long-term and abstract impacts of the environmental problems become more visible and comprehensible in an imaginary space.

Within contemporary performance arenas young people are fast becoming part of the vanguard of contemporary performance. Performativity, convergence and openness of form are key animating concepts in the landscape of Theatre for Young People (TYP). To ignore what is taking place in the making of performance for and by young people is to ignore the new possibilities in meaning-making and theatrical form. In this period of rapid technological change young people are embracing and manipulating technology (sound, image, music) to represent who they are and what they want to say. Positioned as &quotcultural catalysts", &quotthe new pioneers" and &quotfirst navigators" young people are using mediatised culture and digital technologies with ease, placing them at the forefront of a shift in cultural production. Performance commentators (Schnechner 2002; Shusterman 2000; Auslander 1999; Hill and Paris 2001; Phelan 1993 and Kershaw 1992) believe that there has been a profound shift in the nature of making theatre and performance works. The forces of globalisation, the new economy and advancements in new media technologies have affected young people's making of performance. Three key concepts animate contemporary young people's performance devising and presenting processes. These concepts can be defined as: performativity, convergence and openness of form. These three categories can be harnessed under the umbrella concept of deterritorialisation. The processes of deterritorialisation allows for the synthesis of new cultural and performance genres by fragmenting and hybridising traditional cultural categories and forms including the use of new media technologies. Almost half of all TYP performances now incorporate the technologies of reproduction. The relationship between live and mediated forms, the visceral and the virtual is allowing young people to navigate and make meaning of cultural codes and cultural forms as well as to engage in an open dialogue with their audiences. This thesis examines the way young people are using elements of deterritorialisation to become producers of new performance genres.

Nowadays people got used to short text answers, likes and shares. Anyone can feel it by entering popular forums or social networks. Modern platforms such as Twitter or Facebook contribute to this situation with their symbols per message limitations. The quality of content produced in such conditions is not high. According to Knight and Burn (2005): “The rapid growth of the Internet and the lack of enforceable standards regarding the information it contains has led to numerous information quality problems.” The possible solution to this problem is called mobile digital storytelling. It replaces traditional communication mechanisms (text, photos) with a digital narrative, thus making a stronger impact on user. Besides, it allows creating interesting content at any location with the help of mobile phone. However, it is hard to make a high quality story from scratch without prior experience. Viewing through previously created high quality content provides such experience. At the same time, reusing this content would allow creating story by combining and rearranging instead of producing from scratch. But state of the art mobile digital storytelling applications don’t provide any possibilities for content reuse. In addition, the influence of content reuse on the story creation process was not studied. Hence, in this work the researcher will explore and try to develop alternative ways to support content reuse in mobile digital storytelling (mDS). For this purpose a mechanism called RecSM (a recommendation system using content from Social Media) is introduced. The main goal of development is to create RecSM for mobile digital storytelling application. The influence of RecSM on mobile content reuse as well as the influence of reuse on storytelling process is the main study goals. The thesis is based on research conducted in Linnaeus University, Sweden. The research is divided into two main parts: gathering requirements for RecSM and the case study. 10 users are involved in both activities. Initial requirements for RecSM are defined after conducting research in the topic but final requirements are determined with the help of users. Based on them the RecSM is developed and added to a mobile digital storytelling application. A case study in Teleborg Castle (Vaxjo, Sweden) follows afterwards. Participants create stories about their castle experience with the help of mDS or mDS-RecSM application. The data for further research is retrieved through field notes, personal interviews and a survey. Then stories and answers of people that used mDS with and without recommender are compared and analyzed. Based on the study outcomes it is concluded that developed RecSM supports content reuse in mobile digital storytelling.