Shifting Ontology in an Era of Acceleration and Quantified Humanity

The idea that we are swept along in unforeseen consequences of our capitalist ideals of continuous progress stands in stark contrast to Kelly’s (1966) consideration of the active role that human activity plays in human evolution. The cumulative change of humanity behaving differently, and divergent behaviour changing humanity, produce acceleration, and for Kelly this acceleration is ontological. In this paper I explore three moments of accelerated change, associated with the ontologies of object, relation and trace. Object ontology encouraged the dehumanised subject, relational ontology a calculated embodied subject and trace ontology the responsible subject.Currently we find ourselves somewhere between the calculated embodied and the responsible subject, cognitively related to others, but not yet prepared to experience the other as me differed and deferred from myself.

Trademarks in the Light of the Thomas Theorem: a model of a social object ontology

The paper considers the reasons for the existence of trademarks as a social phenomenon. The authors reveal three dominant functional explanations: rationalistic, stratification and semantic. A rationalistic model describes a trademark in terms of identifying the source of the goods (the trademark allows the consumer to identify the goods of a particular manufacturer). The stratification explanation defines the function of the trademark in terms of demonstratively maintaining social differentiation and the distribution of prestige. The semantic approach focuses on the trademark as a mental cell in the consumer’s memory archive, which contains information about the product and its associations. All three approaches are characterized by common problems of functional explanation, namely: the logical circle and internal connection with the homeostatic image of the social system. To overcome these problems, the authors propose an approach to the social ontology of trademarks based on the well-known “Thomas theorem”, which allows to establish causal relationships between the subjective and objective world on the basis of the postulation of equality between reality and perception at the level of formation of human actions. The authors demonstrate the explanatory power of the “Thomas theorem” on example of self-fulfilling prophecies that can be observed in the practice of using trademarks, considering the rationalistic, prestigious and semantic functions of trademarks through the prism of this principle.

Large-Scale Coarse-to-Fine Object Retrieval Ontology and Deep Local Multitask Learning

Object retrieval plays an increasingly important role in video surveillance, digital marketing, e-commerce, etc. It is facing challenges such as large-scale datasets, imbalanced data, viewpoint, cluster background, and fine-grained details (attributes). This paper has proposed a model to integrate object ontology, a local multitask deep neural network (local MDNN), and an imbalanced data solver to take advantages and overcome the shortcomings of deep learning network models to improve the performance of the large-scale object retrieval system from the coarse-grained level (categories) to the fine-grained level (attributes). Our proposed coarse-to-fine object retrieval (CFOR) system can be robust and resistant to the challenges listed above. To the best of our knowledge, the new main point of our CFOR system is the power of mutual support of object ontology, a local MDNN, and an imbalanced data solver in a unified system. Object ontology supports the exploitation of the inner-group correlations to improve the system performance in category classification, attribute classification, and conducting training flow and retrieval flow to save computational costs in the training stage and retrieval stage on large-scale datasets, respectively. A local MDNN supports linking object ontology to the raw data, and an imbalanced data solver based on Matthews’ correlation coefficient (MCC) addresses that the imbalance of data has contributed effectively to increasing the quality of object ontology realization without adjusting network architecture and data augmentation. In order to evaluate the performance of the CFOR system, we experimented on the DeepFashion dataset. This paper has shown that our local MDNN framework based on the pretrained NASNet architecture has achieved better performance (14.2% higher in recall rate) compared to single-task learning (STL) in the attribute learning task; it has also shown that our model with an imbalanced data solver has achieved better performance (5.14% higher in recall rate for fewer data attributes) compared to models that do not take this into account. Moreover, MAP@30 hovers 0.815 in retrieval on an average of 35 imbalanced fashion attributes.

TEORIA FISICA E SUA REALIFICAZIONE. CASO DI STUDIO: LA CAUSALITÀ

I will discuss realism of classical and quantum theories, assessing the untenability of the object ontology, and proposing its substitution with the notion of system used in operational theories, notion that represents a theoretical connection between two events. Within operational theories the distinction between theory and objective reality is well defined: the theory provides the mathematical description of systems and events, and predicts the joint probability of the events; objective reality is identified with the collection of events that actually occurred. I then analyse some cases of realification of the theory – namely the fallacy of identifying theory with reality. In particular, the cases of the notion of causality and causal connection between events are analysed, emphasising their purely theoretical nature, contrarily to the widespread connotation of objectivity. I re-establish the role of causality in physics as a theorem of quantum theory, and hence also of classical theory (which is a restriction of quantum theory), showing how it represents a probabilistic generalisation of the same concept used in special relativity, and discussing why such notion may trivialise in the classical case. I end with a critique of David Albert’s Past Hypothesis about the nature of time, and of the resulting Block Universe vision of space-time, to reaffirm Reality of Time.

Academic Subject Problem: Epistemological Crisis and Its Overcoming

The paper focuses on the analysis of ontological, epistemological and pedagogical terms of changes in education, first of all – on the status of an academic subject. From the ontological perspective, they are related to transfer from “object” ontology to communication-and-activity one, in terms of epistemological approach – from naturalism to transcendentalism, whereas with regard to pedagogical perspective – from autocratic-disciplinary organization of the academic process to a student-oriented pattern. The first part of the article describes academic subject’s functions in the process of educational reproduction. An academic subject is interpreted not so much from the perspective of the knowledge it contains, but as a complex linguistic code which organizes and regulates educational interaction. Its basics and structure, a mechanism of constituting educational reality are described, as well as the design specifics that hamper changes in education. The authors dwell on the distinction between an academic and scholarly subject. Part two of the article contains criticism of an academic subject practice in the university education. The central event here is attributed to differentiation and diversification of the form of academic subject, disintegration of its integrity into local autonomous linguistic fields. The conclusion formulates the idea how to overcome an academic subject crisis, which heart is discursive transformation of its representation practice. Based on Gilles Deleuze’s ideas, the authors consider the transformation of discursive practices in which an academic subject is embodied to be the condition for education change.

A learning object ontology repository to support annotation and discovery of educational resources using semantic thesauri

Open educational resources are currently becoming increasingly available from a multitude of sources and are consequently annotated in many diverse ways. Interoperability concerns that naturally arise can often be resolved through the semantification of metadata descriptions, while at the same time strengthening the knowledge value of resources. SKOS can be a solid linking point offering a standard vocabulary for thematic descriptions, by referencing semantic thesauri. We propose the enhancement and maintenance of educational resources’ metadata in the form of learning object ontologies and introduce the notion of a learning object ontology repository that can help towards their publication, discovery and reuse. At the same time, linking to thesauri datasets and contextualized sources interrelates learning objects with linked data and exposes them to the Web of Data. We build a set of extensions and workflows on top of contemporary ontology management tools, such as WebProtégé, that can make it suitable as a learning object ontology repository. The proposed approach and implementation can help libraries and universities in discovering, managing and incorporating open educational resources and enhancing current curricula.