This paper presents an interpretivist case study of an NGO innovation in China based on the Chinese twitter-like microblogging platform Weibo. We investigate the performativity of social media in generating innovative sociomaterial practices of an NGO campaign, embedded in a context where civil society is under-developed and politically restricted. We propose a situated perspective of technolog...

Mobile technology promises to enhance and better support students’ learning. The exploration and adoption of appropriate pedagogies that enhance learning is crucial for the wider adoption of mobile learning. An increasing number of studies have started to address how existing learning theory can be used to underpin and better frame mobile learning activities. In particular, there are a number o...

We propose an algorithm that can be used to identify automatically the subset of street segments of a road network map that corresponds to a junction. The main idea is to use turn-compliant locomotion affordances, i.e., restricted patterns of supported movement, in order to specify junctions independently of their data representation, and in order to motivate tractable individuation and classif...

The perception of affordances in unknown environments is an essential prerequisite for autonomous humanoid robots. In our previous work we developed a perceptual pipeline for the extraction of affordances for loco-manipulation actions based on a simplified representation of the environment starting from RGB-D camera images. The feasibility of this approach has been demonstrated in various examp...

This paper presents a formal model for gameplay based upon the affordances available to the player that are linked to game objects. It has been constructed via an extensive analysis of major first-person games 1998-2008, although it is argued it may extend to all diegetic games. Gameplay can be understood as a network of allowed actions, that can be summarised as a small number of archetypal af...

The concept of affordances, with its emphasis to the interactions between the robot and the environment, is highly relevant for epigenetic robotics. However, the use of the concept in robotics has been rather rudimentary, mostly confined to an inspiration source. In this paper, we present a new formalization of the concept, based partially on the recent formalizations proposed in Ecological Psy...

Abstract A central issue in postphenomenology is how to explain the multistability of technologies: can it be that specific technologies used for a wide variety purposes (the “multi”), while not all “stability”)? For example, table purpose sleeping, having dinner at, or even staging fencing match, but baking cake. One explanation offered literature (material) design technology puts constraints ...

The popularity of new media channels in recent decade has offered fertile ground for electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM) communication. By enabling interaction between organizations and customers, eWOM communication may increase organizations’ capability of customer engagement (CE). Despite the acknowledged importance of eWOM as an important new channel for customer engagement in tourism industry, ...

The current endeavour focuses on the notion of positive versus negative polarity preference of verbs for their direct objects. This preference has to be distinguished from a verb’s own prior polarity for the same verb, these two properties might even be inverse. Polarity preferences of verbs are extracted on the basis of a large and dependencyparsed corpus by means of statistical measures. We o...

This paper introduces a formalization of the dynamics between sensorimotor interaction and homeostasis, integrated in a single architecture to learn object affordances of consummatory behaviours. We also describe the principles necessary to learn grounded knowledge in the context of an agent and its surrounding environment, which we use to investigate the constraints imposed by the agent’s inte...