Every day, millions of people gather on online game servers to collaborate in real time toward shared goals. What may seem like frivolous activity may, when investigated more closely, provide revolutionary opportunities to advance the science of teamwork. Teamwork is an important part of modern society, however, collaboration between people is often made difficult due to differing ideals, opinions, and personality types. We leverage a popular self-hosted multiplayer online game environment to design a framework for developing and deploying tasks that elicit different kinds of teamwork. We propose to use these to capture fine-scale details of individual and group performance across environments. The game in which we implement this system, Minecraft, is ideal because it is heavily modifiable and already enjoys a vast user base of surprising gender, age, and ethnic diversity. We heavily modify the game in order to introduce new mechanics that facilitate collaboration, monitor activity, and manipulate group composition, all to provide the groundwork for deeper quantitative insights into effective teams.

I've spent many years referencing Wikipedia's list of cognitive biases whenever I have a hunch that a certain type of thinking is an official bias but I can't recall the name or details. It's been an invaluable reference for helping me identify the hidden flaws in my own thinking. Nothing else I've come across seems to be both as comprehensive and as succinct. However, honestly, the Wikipedia page is a bit of a tangled mess. Despite trying to absorb the information of this page many times over the years, very little of it seems to stick.

Using humanoid robots to study human behavior.

According to a tweet from Newman, sales increased by 74 percent when the update was released and overall player count nearly doubled for a period, "which is the opposite of what many said would happen," he tweeted. Typically when updates roll out, like last year's that introduced randomly assigned skin color and faces, there'd be a slow but steady increase over months, rather than a sudden uptick. Newman tells Kotaku that outside of Steam sales, he's never witnessed these types of numbers before.

Somewhere in the middle of the night in a Central African rainforest, a chimpanzee gives birth. Soon after, as the sun rises, mother and newborn sit there, dazed, amid a coffee klatch of friends and relatives. Inevitably, at some point, virtually every member of the group will come over, pull the kid's legs apart and sniff: Boy or girl? It's the most binary question in biology, producing an answer that is set in stone. Biologists have long known about exceptions to the boring, staid notion that organisms are, and remain, either female or male. Now our culture is inching toward recognizing that the permanent, cleanly binary nature of gender is incorrect.

Facepunch is aware that some players don't enjoy the idea of playing Rust as a woman, creator Garry Newman says. He shared one recent player complaint on Twitter that reads, in part, "I got a dirty woman ... and everytime [sic] I see her I wanna threw [sic] up." "We understand this causes you distress and makes you not want to play the game anymore," Newman says. "Technically nothing has changed, since half the population was already living with those feelings. The only difference is that whether you feel like this is now decided by your SteamID instead of your real life gender." Facepunch is continually updating Rust and this isn't the end of the character model changes.

A mixed reality project is researching how humans interact with virtual humans over smartphones and video-based chat services. Characters created by USC's ICT Mixed Reality Lab have realistic voices and faces which can nod and smile to help the user feel like they are engaging in the conversation. The aim of the project is to improve the persuasiveness of artificial intelligence and help humans to be better guided by robots into making decisions.

This work presents a general-purpose character reasoning model intended for usage by autonomous team actors that are acting as believable characters (e.g., human team actors fall into this category). The idea is that selecting a cast of believable characters can predetermine a solution to an unexpected challenge that the team may be facing in a rescue mission. This approach in certain cases proves more efficient than an alternative approach based on rational decision making and planning, which ignores the question of character believability. This point is illustrated with a simple numerical example in a virtual world paradigm.

To deceive involves corrupting the predictions or explanations of others. A deeper understanding of how this works thus requires modeling how human abduction and prediction operate. This paper proposes that most human abduction and prediction are carried out via analogy, over experience and generalizations constructed from experience. I take experience to include cultural products, such as stories. How analogical reasoning and learning can be used to make predictions and explanations is outlined, along with both the advantages of this approach and the technical questions that it raises. Concrete examples involving deception and counter-deception are used to explore these ideas further.

With advancements in technology, smartphones can already serve as memory aids. Electronic calendars are of great use in time-based memory tasks. In this project, we enter the mixed reality realm for helping dementia patients. Dementia is a general term for a decline in mental ability severe enough to interfere with daily life. Memory loss is an example. Here, mixed reality refers to the merging of real and virtual worlds to produce new episodic memory visualisations where physical and digital objects co-exist and interact in real-time. Cognitive models are approximations of a patient's mental abilities and limitations involving conscious mental activities (such as thinking, understanding, learning, and remembering). External representations of episodic memory help patients and caregivers coordinate their actions with one another. We advocate distributed cognition, which involves the coordination between individuals, artefacts and the environment, in four main implementations of artificial intelligence technology in the Kognit storyboard: (1) speech dialogue and episodic memory retrieval; (2) monitoring medication management and tracking an elder's behaviour (e.g., drinking water); (3) eye tracking and modelling cognitive abilities; and (4) serious game development towards active memory training. We discuss the storyboard, use cases and usage scenarios, and some implementation details of cognitive models and mixed reality hardware for the patient. The purpose of future studies is to determine the extent to which cognitive enhancement technology can be used to decrease caregiver burden.