New Podcast Episode: The Rise And Fall of ATR

My new podcast episode is available.

My new podcast epidote of the Human-Robot Interaction Podcast is now available. The Rise And Fall Of ATR explores the history of The Advanced Telecommunications Institute International in Japan. I interview Takayuki KandaMichita Imai and Dylan F. Glas about their work at ATR and their lives afterwards.

New Episode of the HRI Podcast available.

New HRI Podcast episode about ATR is available.

The new HRI Podcast episode entitled “Humans and/or Robots at ATR” is now available. Here is the abstract:

The Advance Telecommunication Research Institute International in Japan is a major contributor to Human-Robot Interaction. I interview Takayuki KandaMichita Imai and Dylan F. Glas about their work on robots at ATR. How was Robovie developed and what is the goal of the Erika android? In two episodes we will have a closer look at the people working at ATR and the robots they created. We will also discuss what it means to work for a research lab like ATR in Japan.

The Design History of Robert M. Pirsig’s Books

I published my article on the history of Robert Pirsig’s books at the Humanities Commons.

UPDATE: New Editions have become available.

I admire Rober Pirsig’s work on the Metaphysics of Quality as described in his two books Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and Lila. Robert passed away in 2017 I started to collect all the English editions of his books. I wrote an article entitle “The Design History of Robert M. Pirsig’s Books” in which I analysed all these books and their covers. The book proposal for Zen was rejected by 122 publishers. My article was rejected by only nine journals but this was done sequentially, which took almost a year. It seems like Pirsig’s curse is upon this manuscript. Academic publishing remains difficult and I recently interviewed Anton Angelo about it.

It is time to take a new approach and hence I decided to publish the article in the Humanities Commons. Please enjoy the article. High resolution scans of all the book covers are available over at the Open Science Framework. I also published the scans of all the covers over at Flickr. Have a look at the Zen and Lila albums.

The-Design-History-of-Robert-M-Pirsigs-Books

Continue reading “The Design History of Robert M. Pirsig’s Books”

Ask your librarian

In this In this podcast episode we discuss the evolving landscape of academic publishing.

Publishing scientific papers and books is a difficult task. The arrival of the internet has the potential to dramatically change the business models, but also the review and publishing process. I discussed the changing world of publishing with Anton Angelo, Data Librarian at the University of Canterbury. We discussed Open Access, Print-on-Demand and the changing roles of libraries. We even spotted some dangerous predators in the publishing jungle. And in case of any trouble, always ask you librarian!