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Too often buildings around the world are completely demolished or gutted only for another building to take its place less than thirty years later, despite the strength of its original design intent. This human fascination with replacing the old with the new has led to a disastrous climatic situation. According to the EPA, in 2018 more than 90 percent of total construction and demolition debris generation in the U.S. alone came from demolition, and around 145 million tons of it was sent to landfills. Building design and redesign decisions must become even more conscientious when it comes to planning for the future, not only in the materials that are chosen, but how they are connected. Designers must plan on how projects not only get built, but also how they will inevitably be taken apart. / Master of Architecture / Too often buildings around the world are completely demolished or gutted only for another building to take its place less than thirty years later, despite construction standards in place to ensure buildings may withstand a hundred years of use. This human fascination with replacing the old with the new has led to a disastrous climatic situation. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, in 2018 more than 90 percent of total construction and demolition debris generation in the U.S. alone came from demolition, and around 145 million tons of it was sent to landfills. There is only so much land left to bury more trash, and most of it is poisoning the planet's resources, especially thanks to the exorbitant amount of plastic that is continuously created and discarded. This thesis seeks to study an underutilized building within a city, and discover ways to redesign it in a conscientious way that will offer future occupants opportunities to remodel or upgrade the structure with as little waste as possible. This idea of deconstruction is utilized in not only the materials that are chosen, but how they are connected, as well as in how the existing components are discarded or repurposed.

Embodied Conversational Agents (i.e., avatars; ECAs) are appearing in increasingly many everyday contexts, such as e-commerce, occupational training, and airport security. Also common to a typical person's daily life is persuasion. Whether being persuaded or persuading, the ability to change another person's attitude or behavior is a thoroughly researched topic. However, little is known about ECAs' ability to persuade and whether basic persuasion principles from human-human interactions will hold in human-ECA interactions. This work investigates this question. First, a broad review of persuasion literature, which serves as an inventory of manipulations to test in ECA contexts, is presented. This literature review serves an inventory to guide future Persuasive ECA work. The ECA literature is then reviewed. Two preliminary studies exploring the effects of physical attractiveness, voice quality, argument quality, common ground, authority, and facial similarity are presented. Finally, the culminating study testing the effectiveness of ECAs to elicit self-disclosure in automated interviewing is presented and discussed. The findings of that automated interviewing study suggest that ECAs may replace humans in automated interviewing contexts. The findings also suggest that ECAs that are manipulated to look like their interviewees are able to induce greater likeability, establish more rapport, and elicited more self-referencing language than ECAs that do not look like the interviewees.

A field of research that is quickly becoming more prominent is the one related to embodied cognition, which states there is an important association between physical activity and cognition. However, research on the application of embodied cognition to education is still at its infancy. More research needs to be done to understand how motion can contribute to student learning, and even further, research is needed on how learning technologies might support physical activity while learning. This research sits at the intersection of embodied cognition, learning technologies, mobile devices, and mathematics education. It implements a novel learning technology platform created at WPI, called the Wearable Learning Cloud Platform (WLCP). Thanks to a child friendly app thats connect to the central web based system, the experience of elementary school children playing physically active games might be improved. This research also analyzes the importance of motor action in students’ math learning: By using three different conditions of a game called the Tangrams Race requiring different levels of physical activity (i.e. embodiment), we compared differences between fine and gross motor actions in regards to learning. Results indicated that physically active mobile games can and do improve math learning. Results also show marginal significant effect in favor of the physically active mobile games (p<0.1, Partial Eta Sq.=0.1) over traditional tutoring systems on a computer.

O presente trabalho visa motivar e defender o disjuntivismo epistemológico, a tese de que a percepção é estado factivo e racionalmente fundado. Essa variação de disjuntivismo é apresentada como uma dissolução do paradoxo cético da subdeterminação. Diante do problema cético do sonho, o disjuntivismo epistemológico é tomado conjuntamente com uma concepção enactivista da percepção, cuja tese central é que estados perceptuais são constituídos pelas ações do agente no ambiente. A conjunção dessas duas teses promove uma concepção corporificada da racionalidade, segundo a qual estados percpetuais racionalmente fundados são obtidos pelo exercício de habilidades do indivíduo no ambiente. Essa tese é ameaçada pela intuição supostamente plausível de que indivíduos em cenários céticos poderiam ser racionais, ainda que não possuíssem meios corpóreos para interação com seu em torno. Argumenta-se contra essa intuição pela crítica à maneira como cenários céticos são concebidos. Por fim, aplica-se o enactivismo radical ao autoconhecimento, promovendo um meio termo entre um modelo perceptual de autoconhecimento e um modelo racionalista. / This work is intended to motivate and defend epistemological disjunctivism, the view that perception is a factive and rationally grounded state. This version of disjunctivism is presented as a dissolution of the underdetermination skeptical paradox. Facing the dream skeptical problem, epistemological disjunctivism is taken in conjunction with an enactive conception of perception, whose core thesis is that perceptual states are constituted by one’s actions in the environment. The conjunction of these two theses promotes an embodied notion of rationality, according to which rationally grounded perceptual states are achieved by the exercise of one’s abilities in the environment. That view is threatened by the apparently plausible intuition that individuals in skeptical scenarios could be rational even if they lacked the bodily means to interact with their surroundings. This intuition is defeated by a critique to the way skeptical scenarios are conceived. Lastly, radical enactivism is applied to self-knowledge, attaining a middle ground between the perceptual and the rationalist models of self-knowledge.

<p>Cognitive science has traditionally viewed the mind as essentially disembodied, that is, the nature of mind and cognition is neither affected by the ¡Èsystem¡É it is implemented in nor affected by the environment that the system is situated in. But since the mid-1980s a new approach emerged in artificial intelligence that emphasized the importance of embodiment and situatedness and since then terms like embodied cognition, embodied intelligence have become more and more apparent in discussions of cognition. As embodied cognition has increased in interest so have the notions of embodiment and situatedness and they are not always compatible. This report has found that there are, at least, four notions of embodiment in the discussions of embodied cognition: software embodiment, physical embodiment, biological embodiment and human(oid) embodiment.</p>

O presente trabalho visa motivar e defender o disjuntivismo epistemológico, a tese de que a percepção é estado factivo e racionalmente fundado. Essa variação de disjuntivismo é apresentada como uma dissolução do paradoxo cético da subdeterminação. Diante do problema cético do sonho, o disjuntivismo epistemológico é tomado conjuntamente com uma concepção enactivista da percepção, cuja tese central é que estados perceptuais são constituídos pelas ações do agente no ambiente. A conjunção dessas duas teses promove uma concepção corporificada da racionalidade, segundo a qual estados percpetuais racionalmente fundados são obtidos pelo exercício de habilidades do indivíduo no ambiente. Essa tese é ameaçada pela intuição supostamente plausível de que indivíduos em cenários céticos poderiam ser racionais, ainda que não possuíssem meios corpóreos para interação com seu em torno. Argumenta-se contra essa intuição pela crítica à maneira como cenários céticos são concebidos. Por fim, aplica-se o enactivismo radical ao autoconhecimento, promovendo um meio termo entre um modelo perceptual de autoconhecimento e um modelo racionalista. / This work is intended to motivate and defend epistemological disjunctivism, the view that perception is a factive and rationally grounded state. This version of disjunctivism is presented as a dissolution of the underdetermination skeptical paradox. Facing the dream skeptical problem, epistemological disjunctivism is taken in conjunction with an enactive conception of perception, whose core thesis is that perceptual states are constituted by one’s actions in the environment. The conjunction of these two theses promotes an embodied notion of rationality, according to which rationally grounded perceptual states are achieved by the exercise of one’s abilities in the environment. That view is threatened by the apparently plausible intuition that individuals in skeptical scenarios could be rational even if they lacked the bodily means to interact with their surroundings. This intuition is defeated by a critique to the way skeptical scenarios are conceived. Lastly, radical enactivism is applied to self-knowledge, attaining a middle ground between the perceptual and the rationalist models of self-knowledge.

O presente trabalho visa motivar e defender o disjuntivismo epistemológico, a tese de que a percepção é estado factivo e racionalmente fundado. Essa variação de disjuntivismo é apresentada como uma dissolução do paradoxo cético da subdeterminação. Diante do problema cético do sonho, o disjuntivismo epistemológico é tomado conjuntamente com uma concepção enactivista da percepção, cuja tese central é que estados perceptuais são constituídos pelas ações do agente no ambiente. A conjunção dessas duas teses promove uma concepção corporificada da racionalidade, segundo a qual estados percpetuais racionalmente fundados são obtidos pelo exercício de habilidades do indivíduo no ambiente. Essa tese é ameaçada pela intuição supostamente plausível de que indivíduos em cenários céticos poderiam ser racionais, ainda que não possuíssem meios corpóreos para interação com seu em torno. Argumenta-se contra essa intuição pela crítica à maneira como cenários céticos são concebidos. Por fim, aplica-se o enactivismo radical ao autoconhecimento, promovendo um meio termo entre um modelo perceptual de autoconhecimento e um modelo racionalista. / This work is intended to motivate and defend epistemological disjunctivism, the view that perception is a factive and rationally grounded state. This version of disjunctivism is presented as a dissolution of the underdetermination skeptical paradox. Facing the dream skeptical problem, epistemological disjunctivism is taken in conjunction with an enactive conception of perception, whose core thesis is that perceptual states are constituted by one’s actions in the environment. The conjunction of these two theses promotes an embodied notion of rationality, according to which rationally grounded perceptual states are achieved by the exercise of one’s abilities in the environment. That view is threatened by the apparently plausible intuition that individuals in skeptical scenarios could be rational even if they lacked the bodily means to interact with their surroundings. This intuition is defeated by a critique to the way skeptical scenarios are conceived. Lastly, radical enactivism is applied to self-knowledge, attaining a middle ground between the perceptual and the rationalist models of self-knowledge.