An elucidation of ideas and insights generated by the paradigm of "early vision," presented in the form of dialogues.

Inventing Peace revolves around the question of how we look at the world, but do not see it when there is so much war, injustice, suffering and violence. What are the ethical and moral consequences of looking, but not seeing, and, most of all, what has become of the notion of peace in all this? In the form of a written dialogue, Wim Wenders and Mary Zournazi consider this question as one of the fundamental issues of our times as well as the need to reinvent a visual and moral language for peace. Inspired by various cinematic, philosophical, literary and artistic examples, Wenders and Zournazi reflect on the need for a change of perception in the everyday as well as in the creation of images. In its unique style and method, Inventing Peace demonstrates an approach to peace through sacred, ethical and spiritual means, to provide an alternative to the inhumanity of war and violence. Their book might help to make peace visible and tangible in new and unforeseen ways.

Buddhist philosophy of Anicca (impermanence), Dukkha (suffering), and

Inventing Peace revolves around the question of how we look at the world, but do not see it when there is so much war, injustice, suffering and violence. What are the ethical and moral consequences of looking, but not seeing, and, most of all, what has become of the notion of peace in all this? In the form of a written dialogue, Wim Wenders and Mary Zournazi consider this question as one of the fundamental issues of our times as well as the need to reinvent a visual and moral language for peace. Inspired by various cinematic, philosophical, literary and artistic examples, Wenders and Zournazi reflect on the need for a change of perception in the everyday as well as in the creation of images. In its unique style and method, Inventing Peace demonstrates an approach to peace through sacred, ethical and spiritual means, to provide an alternative to the inhumanity of war and violence. Their book might help to make peace visible and tangible in new and unforeseen ways.

Reading this book will make you less sure of yourself—and that’s a good thing. In The Invisible Gorilla, Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons, creators of one of psychology’s most famous experiments, use remarkable stories and counterintuitive scientific findings to demonstrate an important truth: Our minds don’t work the way we think they do. We think we see ourselves and the world as they really are, but we’re actually missing a whole lot. Chabris and Simons combine the work of other researchers with their own findings on attention, perception, memory, and reasoning to reveal how faulty intuitions often get us into trouble. In the process, they explain: • Why a company would spend billions to launch a product that its own analysts know will fail • How a police officer could run right past a brutal assault without seeing it • Why award-winning movies are full of editing mistakes • What criminals have in common with chess masters • Why measles and other childhood diseases are making a comeback • Why money managers could learn a lot from weather forecasters Again and again, we think we experience and understand the world as it is, but our thoughts are beset by everyday illusions. We write traffic laws and build criminal cases on the assumption that people will notice when something unusual happens right in front of them. We’re sure we know where we were on 9/11, falsely believing that vivid memories are seared into our minds with perfect fidelity. And as a society, we spend billions on devices to train our brains because we’re continually tempted by the lure of quick fixes and effortless self-improvement. The Invisible Gorilla reveals the myriad ways that our intuitions can deceive us, but it’s much more than a catalog of human failings. Chabris and Simons explain why we succumb to these everyday illusions and what we can do to inoculate ourselves against their effects. Ultimately, the book provides a kind of x-ray vision into our own minds, making it possible to pierce the veil of illusions that clouds our thoughts and to think clearly for perhaps the first time.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 4th IEEE Tutorial and Research Workshop on Perception and Interactive Technologies for Speech-Based Systems, PIT 2008, held in Kloster Irsee, Germany, in June 2008. The 37 revised full papers presented together with 1 invited keynote lecture were carefully selected from numerous submissions for inclusion in the book. The papers are organized in topical sections on multimodal and spoken dialogue systems, classification of dialogue acts and sound, recognition of eye gaze, head poses, mimics and speech as well as combinations of modalities, vocal emotion recognition, human-like and social dialogue systems, and evaluation methods for multimodal dialogue systems.

Perception and analogy explores ways of seeing scientifically in the eighteenth century. The book examines how sensory experience is conceptualised during the period, drawing novel connections between treatments of perception as an embodied phenomenon and the creative methods employed by natural philosophers. Covering a wealth of literary, theological, and pedagogical texts that engage with astronomy, optics, ophthalmology, and the body, it argues for the significance of analogies for conceptualising and explaining new scientific ideas. As well as identifying their use in religious and topographical poetry, the book addresses how analogies are visible in material culture through objects such as orreries, camera obscuras, and aeolian harps. It makes the vital claim that scientific concepts become intertwined with Christian discourse through reinterpretations of origins and signs, the scope of the created universe, and the limits of embodied knowledge.

In The Gatekeeper: Narrative Voice in Plato’s Dialogues Margalit Finkelberg offers the first narratological analysis of all of Plato’s transmitted dialogues. The book explores the dialogues as works of literary fiction, giving special emphasis to such topics as narrative levels, focalization, narrative frame, and metalepsis. The main conclusion of the book is that in Plato the plurality of the speakers’ opinions is not accompanied by a plurality of points of view. Only one perspective is available, that of the narrator. Contrary to the widespread view, Plato’s dialogues cannot be considered multivocal, or “dialogic” in Bakhtin’s sense. By skillful use of narrative voice, Plato unobtrusively regulates the readers’ reception and response. The narrator is the dialogue’s gatekeeper, a filter whose main function is to control how the dialogue is received by the reader by sustaining a certain perspective of it.

The construction of a natural interactive human-computer interaction has become an integral component of intelligent system development, constituting a core subject within the field of human-computer interaction. Grounded in the utilization of human perception theories, this study proposes a robust method for speech emotion recognition and a model for inferring user emotional state changes, thereby achieving a hu-man-computer interaction experience characterized by both listening and articulating, and conveying sentiments effectively. Simultaneously, focusing on the audio-visual modalities within human-computer interaction, this research explores methods for con-structing interactive feedback in auditory and visual modalities within real hu-man-computer dialog scenarios. This aims to synchronize textual, verbal, and visual expressions in human-computer interaction, enhancing its naturalness, improving user experience, and augmenting satisfaction and pleasure during interaction. The research contributions are as follows: Introducing a method that robustly identifies user emotional states in real hu-man-computer speech dialogue scenarios through the utilization of local and global attention mechanisms. This method generates robust and distinguishable representa-tions of speech emotion, thereby enhancing the robustness and accuracy of speech emotion recognition systems in authentic dialogue scenarios.