Computation Media Research

CM 202 provides an overview of computational media research strategies. It includes case studies of how particular projects were defined and completed and how interdisciplinary concerns have been successfully integrated. Considers the expressive and authorial affordances of different system architecture approaches.

Grading

Project 1 (Knowledge Representation and HTN Planning): 33%
Project 2 (Neural Networks): 33%
Class Participation: 33%

Office Hours

Monday 2:00-3:00, Thursday 3:00-4:00
E2, 373

Safe Space

It is important that we all work together to help foster an environment in which students feel safe asking questions, posing their opinions, and sharing their work for critique. If at any time you feel this environment is being threatened—by anybody, including the professor—speak up and make your concerns heard. If you do not feel comfortable speaking about it in person, you may leave private feedback, anonymously if you wish, using the discussion forum. If you feel uncomfortable broaching this topic with the professor in any way or for any reason, you should feel free to voice your concerns to the department Chair or the Dean's office. 

DRC Statement

UC Santa Cruz is committed to creating an academic environment that supports its diverse student body. If you are a student with a disability who requires accommodations to achieve equal access in this course, please submit your Accommodation Authorization Letter from the Disability Resource Center (DRC) to me privately during my office hours or by appointment, preferably within the first two weeks of the quarter. At this time, I would also like us to discuss ways we can ensure your full participation in the course. I encourage all students who may benefit from learning more about DRC services to contact DRC by phone at 831-459-2089, or by email at drc@ucsc.edu.

Schedule

Week 1

January 9

Class introduction 

January 11

Computational Media Research. What does it mean to combine computing, humanities and arts?

Week 2

January 16

Introduction to HTN programming. 

Material to watch and read before class

The planning section of the Udacity course on Knowledge-Based AI. You’ll need to create an account to sign into Udacity and view this course content, but it’s free (the wonderful world of free MOOC content). The Planning section consists of 27 videos, which might at first scare you, but each one is quite short, and a number of them are little quizzes interspersed to help you test your understanding. So end-to-end all the planning videos are only about 27 minutes long.

The planning videos will introduce you to predicate-based representations of domains, operators, and, at the end, the higher-level tasks of HTN planning. After this high-level introduction, to more deeply understand the SHOP2 HTN planning model, read this paper:

SHOP2: An HTN Planning System. Dana Nau, Tsz-Chiu Au, Okhtay Ilghami, Ugur Kuter, J. William Murdock, Dan Wu, Fusun Yaman.

Directions for download

Download the GUI interface version of JSHOP2.

Directions for running it can be found in the README file. Note that the directions to set the classpath are wrong. Instead, you’ll want to set the classpath as follows:

Windows: JSHOP2_DIRECTORY\antlr.jar;JSHOP2_DIRECTORY\bin.build\JSHOP2.jar;.

Unix: JSHOP2_DIRECTORY/bin/antlr.jar:JSHOP2_DIRECTORY/bin/JSHOP2.jar:.

In the paths above, change JSHOP2_DIRECTORY to the directory path for whatever directory you’ve put JSHOP in.

January 18

Readings on interdisciplinary technical practice. Continuing discussion of HTN Planning.

Readings

Toward a Critical Technical Practice: Lessons Learned in Trying to Reform AI. Philip E. Agre. This is a chapter in Geof Bowker, Les Gasser, Leigh Star, and Bill Turner, eds, Bridging the Great Divide: Social Science, Technical Systems, and Cooperative Work, Erlbaum, 1997.

Towards A Performative Aesthetics of Interactivity. Simon Penny. Fibreculture Journal, Issue 19, 2001.  

Week 3

Rhetoric and interpretation: how simulations encode points of view and are situated in networks of human meaning making.

January 21

Practice with defining HTN planning domains.  

Here is a simple planning domain (Hello World) with instructions for how you make a new domain.

January 25

Continuing lecture and discussion on HTN planning. 

Week 4

January 30

The Rhetoric of Video Games
Bogost, Ian. “The Rhetoric of Video Games." The Ecology of Games: Connecting Youth, Games, and Learning. Edited by Katie Salen. The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Series on Digital Media and Learning. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2008. 117–140. doi: 10.1162/dmal.9780262693646.117.

Game-O-Matic: Generating Videogames that Represent Ideas
Mike Treanor, Bryan Blackford, Michael Mateas and Ian Bogost Procedural Content Generation Workshop at Foundations of Digital Games 2012.

From Mechanics to Meaning
Adam Summerville, Chris Martens,Sarah Harmon, Michael Mateas, Joseph Osborn, Noah Wardrip-Fruin, Arnav Jhala. Accepted for publication in IEEE Transactions on Games.

February 1

Discussion and group problem solving on HTN projects. 

Week 5

Social Simulation

February 6

HTN Projects - in class discussion and problem solving

February 8

Chapter 7: Dramaturgical Theorizing
Turner, Jonathan H. From Theoretical sociology : a concise introduction to twelve sociological theories. Los Angeles : SAGE Publications, 2014.

Social Story Worlds With Comme il Faut
McCoy, Joshua; Treanor, Mike; Samuel, Ben; Reed; Aaron A.; Mateas, Michael & Wardrip-Fruin, Noah.  IEEE Transactions on Computational Intelligence and AI in Games, Vol. 6, No. 2, June 2014.

Versu—A Simulationist Storytelling System
Evans, Richard & Short, Emily. IEEE Transactions on Computational Intelligence and AI in Games, Vol. 6, No. 2, June 2014.

Prom Week
This game was made with the Comme il Faut system in the second reading.

Week 6

Ideology: the invisible biases that structure the world.

February 13

Out of town, no class. 

February 15

HTN Projects - In class discussion and problem solving

Week 7

February 20

Chapter 1: Should Ideologies Be Ill-Reputed?
Chapter 2: Overcoming Illusions: How Ideologies Came To Stay
Michael Freeden. Ideology: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press, 2003.

Generation of Ideologically-Biased Documentary Histories
Mateas, M.; Vanouse, P.; Domike, S. From Proceedings of the Seventh National Conference on Artificial Intelligence. July 31–August 2, 2000, Austin, Texas. Published by The AAAI Press, Menlo Park, California.

Computational and Cognitive Infrastructures of Stigma: Empowering Identity in Social Computing and Gaming
D. Fox Harrell . Proceedings of the 7th ACM Conference on Creativity and Cognition (C&C 2009), Berkeley, California, October 26-30, 2009, pp. 49-58.

February 22

Introduction to Neural Networks - History 

Week 8

February 27

Chapter 2: The Structure of the Theory
Andrew Ortony, Gerald Clore and Allan Collins. The Cognitive Structure of Emotions. Cambridge University Press, 1988.

Computationally Modeling Human Emotion
Stacy Marsella and Jonathan Gratch. Communications of the ACM, Vol. 57, No. 12, December 2014.

How Emotion is Made and Measured
Kirsten Boehner, Rogério DePaula, Paul Dourish, Phoebe Sengers. International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, Vol. 65, Issue 4, April 2007. 

March 1

Notes from Neural Network lectures.

Week 9

Data Bias: machine learning, public policy and ethics. 

March 6

Here is the assignment that gives some exposure to deep learning by having you build a convnet using Keras. 

March 8

How we transferred or biases into our machiens and what we can do about it. 
You are Not so Smart Podcast, Episode 115. David McRaney

Machine Bias
Julia Angwin, Jeff Larson, Surya Mattu and Lauren Kirchner, ProPublica, May 23, 2016.

ProPublica Responds to Company’s Critique of Machine Bias Story
Julia Angwin and Jeff Larson, ProPublica, July 29, 2016.

Attacking Machine Learning with Adversarial Examples
OpenAI Blog Post. 

Week 10

March 13

Seminar: Dominic Kao
Building Education Environments of the Future
Time: 11:30
Place: E2-475

Class will be held after the seminar from 12:30-1:15.
Place: E2-215
This will be a code clinic for the assignment. 

March 15

Seminar: Eddie Melcer
Learning With the Body: Exploring the Design Space of Embodied Educational Games
Time: 11:30
Place: E2-215

Class will be held after the seminar from 12:30-1:15. 
Place: E2-399