This paper investigates how healthcare professionals articulate the relationship between patient experience and “evidence”, creating hybrid forms of knowledge. We propose a Bakhtinian dialogical framework to theorise this process. Drawing on ethnographic work from patient involvement initiatives in England, we show how patient experiences are rearticulated by professionals who add their own int...

An important theme in modern research on productivity has been that technological progress may be embodied in capital in the sense that traditional measures of TFP growth reflect unmeasured improvements in the quality of capital inputs as well as pure disembodied technological progress. It is commonly believed that an implication of this embodiment hypothesis is that there should be a negative ...

The problems of conventional speech recognition approaches include incomplete linguistic knowledge and inability to deal with underspecification. These issues can be addressed by understanding the constraints of speech to predict speech tendencies. We believe that understanding what constraints exist requires an embodied view of speech and that the traditional disembodied view of speech is the ...

Barsalou’s (1999, 2003) perceptual symbol systems hypothesis describes how semantic knowledge is grounded in sensorimotor experience. According to the theory, knowledge is acquired through sensorimotor simulations. This challenges the classical view supported by the disembodied cognition hypothesis, which generally favours an abstract and symbolic system. We propose a unified perspective, in wh...

In his article "The Racial Formation of Chatbots" Mark C. Marino introduces electronic literature known as chatbot or conversation agent. These programs are all around us from automated help centers to smartphones (e.g., Siri). These conversation agents are often represented as text or disembodied voices. However, when programmers give them a body or the representation of a body (partial or ful...

The salmon louse is a marine ectoparasitic copepod on salmonid fishes. Its lifecycle consists of eight developmental stages, each separated by a molt. In crustaceans and insects, molting and reproduction is controlled by circulating steroid hormones such as 20-hydroxyecdysone. Steroid hormones are synthesized from cholesterol through catalytic reactions involving a 7,8-dehydrogenase Neverland a...

A corporate memory is an explicit, disembodied, and persistent representation of knowledge and information in an organization. Competence management is an essential part of a corporate memory. In this paper we introduce a Competence Manager, which allows managing and publishing competencies and other relevant resources about a set of topics. The knowledge base in the Competence Manager is imple...

The empirical study of language has historically relied heavily upon concrete word stimuli. By definition, concrete words evoke salient perceptual associations that fit well within feature-based, sensorimotor models of word meaning. In contrast, many theorists argue that abstract words are "disembodied" in that their meaning is mediated through language. We investigated word meaning as distribu...

In order to be truly autonomous, agents need the ability to learn from and adapt to the environment and other agents. This chapter introduces key concepts of machine learning and how they apply to agent and multi-agent systems. Rather than present a comprehensive survey, we discuss a number of issues that we believe are important in the design of learning agents and multi-agent systems. Specifi...