Academic literature on the topic 'Action'

This paper examines the validity of human intention for action, specifically focusing on unintentional actions that are unaffected by bias. Through the observation of a substantial number of individuals, estimated to be over 100, we investigate the power of human actions and their corresponding intentions. Given the underlying similarities in general thought processes and intentions among humans, it becomes possible to establish common patterns by observing a significant sample size. While this research provides observational results indicating a one-second validity of human intentions, it is important to note that these findings have not been scientifically proven. Nevertheless, this study contributes to the ongoing discourse by shedding light on participant expressions and experiences, furthering our understanding of human intentionality and action.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to elaborate on the concept of action by addressing actions and roles in the practice of action research, illustrated by dilemmas in an action research project on information systems development in public sector. The main ambition with action research is being able to solve organisational problems through intervention and to contribute to scientific knowledge. The main emphasis has so far been on the “research part”. Here the authors focus on the “action part” of action research to generate rigorous research, to solve local problems and to deal with evident dilemmas in action research. Design/methodology/approach This is a qualitative case study. The empirical illustrations of this paper originate from an action research project that focused the two e-service development initiatives analysed below. The analysis is structured using key aspects and phases proposed by Avison et al. (2001). As a result of the analysis, the concept of action is elaborated. The action elements action, actor, motive, space and time are analysed together with different roles. This goes beyond the existing action research literature. Findings The conclusions show that there is a need to understand actions and roles within action research projects – not separating action from research. Research is also seen as action. The practice of action research is also discussed as context-bounded interactive social action: action research as a recurrent, interactive and dynamic activity. It is also identified that the understanding of roles, actions and interaction can help handle dilemmas in action research. Research Limitations/implications The authors contribute to the body of knowledge concerning action research in the information systems research field and in general by exploring the need to study the concept of action (e.g. situations and elements), to be explicit concerning the different phases, roles and responsibilities and management of different dilemmas in action research. A limitation of this study is that the inter-organisational development character in this study adds an extra dimension into the practice of actions research only partially highlighted. Another limitation is focus on public agencies. However, this is not critical for the results on action elements and the action research dilemmas that are studied. Practical Implications The understanding of roles, actions and interaction can solve the dilemmas and challenges linked to the practice of action research in the information systems field, but such understanding can help discover and handle dilemmas in action research. Originality/value The originality in this research is an illustration of and a perspective of action research as a context-bounded interactive social action: action research as a recurrent, interactive and dynamic activity. The value is that this knowledge can help handle dilemmas in action research.

In action theory, emotional actions are standardly treated as exceptions—cases where the “normal” springs of action are not functioning properly. My aim here is to argue that this is not so. We have plenty of evidence—beautifully brought together in the present special issue—that emotions play a crucial and often constitutive role in all the important phases of action preparation and initiation. Most of our actions are less stupid than, say, Zidane’s head-butt (a paradigmatic emotional action), but all of our actions have emotional components. Actions can be more or less emotional, but they are never completely nonemotional.

This thesis investigates how a robot can use action generation mechanisms to recognize the action of an observed actor in an on-line manner i.e., before the completion of the action. Towards this end, Dynamic Movement Primitives (DMP), an action generation method proposed for imitation, are modified to recognize the actions of an actor. Specifically, a human actor performed three different reaching actions to two different objects. Three DMP'
s, each corresponding to a different reaching action, were trained using this data. The proposed method used an object-centered coordinate system to define the variables for the action, eliminating the difference between the actor and the robot. During testing, the robot simulated action trajectories by its learned DMPs and compared the resulting trajectories against the observed one. The error between the simulated and the observed trajectories were integrated into a recognition signal, over which recognition was done. The proposed method was applied on the iCub humanoid robot platform using an active motion capture device for sensing. The results showed that the system was able to recognize actions with high accuracy as they unfold in time. Moreover, the feasibility of the approach is demonstrated in an interactive game between the robot and a human.

We think less than we think. My thesis moves from this suspicion to show that standard accounts of intentional action can't explain the whole of agency. Causalist accounts such as Davidson's and Bratman's, according to which an action can be intentional only if it is caused by a particular mental state of the agent, don't work for every kind of action. So-called automatic actions, effortless performances over which the agent doesn't deliberate, and to which she doesn't need to pay attention, constitute exceptions to the causalist framework, or so I argue in this thesis. Not all actions are the result of a mental struggle, painful hesitation, or the weighting of evidence. Through practice, many performances become second nature. Think of familiar cases such as one's morning routines and habits: turning on the radio, brushing your teeth. Think of the highly skilled performances involved in sport and music: Jarrett's improvised piano playing, the footballer's touch. Think of agents' spontaneous reactions to their environment: ducking a blow, smiling. Psychological research has long acknowledged the distinctiveness and importance of automatic actions, while philosophy has so far explained them together with the rest of agency. Intuition tells us that automatic actions are intentional actions of ours all the same (I have run a survey which shows that this intuition is widely shared): not only our own autonomous deeds for which we are held responsible, but also necessary components in the execution and satisfaction of our general plans and goals. But do standard causal accounts deliver on the intentionality of automatic actions? I think not. Because, in automatic cases, standard appeals to intentions, beliefs, desires, and psychological states in general ring hollow. We just act: we don't think, either consciously or unconsciously. On the reductive side, Davidson's view can't but appeal to, at best, unconscious psychological states, the presence and causal role of which is, I argue, inferred from the needs of a theory, rather than from evidence in the world. On the non-reductive side, Bratman agrees, with his refutation of the Simple View, that we can't just attach an intention to every action that we want to explain. But Bratman’s own Single Phenomenon View, appealing to the mysterious notion of 'motivational potential', merely acknowledges the need for refinement without actually providing one. So I propose my own account of intentional action, the 'guidance view', according to which automatic actions are intentional: differently from Davidson and Bratman, who only offer necessary conditions in order to avoid the problem of causal deviance, I offer a full-blown account: E's phi-ing is intentional if and only If phi-ing is under E's guidance. This account resembles one developed by Frankfurt, with the crucial difference that Frankfurt – taking 'acting with an intention' and 'acting intentionally' to be synonymous – thinks that guidance is sufficient only for some movement being an action, but not for some movement being an intentional action. I argue that, on the other hand, Frankfurt's concept of guidance can be developed so that it is sufficient for intentional action too. In Chapter One I present and defend my definition of ‘automatic action’. In Chapter Two I show that such understanding of automatic actions finds confirmation in empirical psychology. In Chapter Three I show that Davidson's reductive account of intentional action does not work for automatic actions. In Chapter Four I show that the two most influential non-reductive accounts of intentional action, the Simple View and Bratman's Single Phenomenon View, don't work either. And in Chapter Five I put forward and defend my positive thesis, the 'guidance view'. Also, in the Appendix I present the findings of my survey on the intentionality of automatic actions.

nÃo hÃ
In this article, was analyzed the capacity of valuation and forecast on the main stock investment funds in the Brazilian market, using the Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM), the Fama e French (1993) factor model and the Carhart (1997) four-factor model. According to the results, we have a better performance of the CAPM vis-Ã-vis the factor models, even for the investment funds that over perform the market. This result can be seen as an evidence of the necessity to develop a factor model a la Fama and French, but specific for investment funds.
Neste estudo foi analisada a capacidade de apreÃamento e previsÃo de retorno para os principais fundos de investimento em aÃÃes no mercado brasileiro, utilizando o modelo Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM), o modelo de trÃs fatores desenvolvido por Fama e French (1993) e o modelo de quatro fatores apresentado por Carhart (1997). Os resultados mostram uma melhor performance do CAPM vis-Ã-vis os demais modelos de fatores usados, mesmo para fundos de investimento que tenham âsuperado o mercadoâ. Esta pode ser uma evidÃncia da necessidade de se derivar um modelo de fatores a la Fama e French, mas especÃfico para fundos de investimento.

Social interaction is an essential part of the human experience and actions are the primary means by which humans interact with the surrounding world. The ability to recognize and understand other people’s actions is necessary for an efficient interaction with other agents. Our motor system can promptly and accurately coordinate these forms of interactions in our daily activity. However, how the brain is able to produce such appropriate output has yet to be fully understood. The present work aims at unveiling the processes taking place in the motor system while observing actions of interactive agents and action calling for an (interactive) involvement of the observer. The core argument is to explore the flexibility of the motor system when preparing identical and non-identical responses in complex realistic situations, and to test the automaticity of these processes by directly investigating the role played by visuospatial attention during action observation. The introductory section of this thesis will first provide an overview of the state of the art regarding the mechanism that could be at the basis of the comprehension of other’s actions, that is the ‘mirror mechanism’ (Chapter 1). Mirror neurons are neural cells which activate both during the execution of an action and during the observation of the same action performed by another individual. From their first discovery in the premotor cortex of the macaque brain in the early nineties (Di Pellegrino, Fadiga, Fogassi, Gallese and Rizzolatti, 1992), these visuomotor neurons have been extensively studied both in primates and in humans. Chapter 1 will review evidence on the existence of such mirror mechanism and on its basic properties and anatomy, with a particular focus on the human literature concerned with the Action Observation System (AOS). Convergent evidence suggests that actions are coded in the observer’s brain in such a way that resembles the actual execution of the action. As a result, an embodied simulation (i.e., from the inside) would allow to understand the observed action through the onlooker’s own motor experience. However, to simulate the actions of other people is not always the best strategy to interact with them. Indeed, we are often required to perform actions which differ from those observed. Chapter 2 will summarize recent neurophysiological findings suggesting that the human brain is able to overcome the imitative bias in favor of non-identical responses which are appropriate to the context requirements. A particular focus will be given to the literature on complementary actions, namely a type of social interactions in which the involved agents have to perform incongruent responses to reach a common goal. Put simply, it seems that while the human motor system is prone to simulate other’s action, this imitative tendency can be modulated according to the context. However, whether top-down factors might play a role in determining the embodied simulation is still controversial. In Chapter 3 a review of the literature in which the automaticity of the visuo-motor transformation has been questioned will be presented. Overall, it emerges that top-down factors, such as visuospatial attention, may influence the motor simulation of observed actions. The second part of the present thesis concerns the experimental work I undertook. Chapter 4 provides a description of the general methodology common to the experimental studies conducted with transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) coupled with electromyographic (EMG) registration to measure corticospinal excitability modulations during action observation. In the first experiment (Chapter 5) a novel paradigm to study complementary actions at the level of multiple effectors will be described. Participants were presented with a soccer player kicking a ball toward them, thus implicitly requiring their response as to parry the approaching ball. Control conditions showing lateral kicks, mimicked kicks, and the ball still in penalty area were also included. This paradigm was adopted to investigate the time-course of imitative and complementary responses in lower and upper limbs. In a subsequent experiment presented in Chapter 6, a similar paradigm was adopted, but crucially it included a condition in which the imitative and the complementary responses were simultaneously elicited in the observers’ motor system. This allowed to disentangle the contribution of different levels of motor coding – namely, kinematic, predictive and response coding – during action observation. Chapters 7 and 8 will report on two experiments aimed at clarifying the influence of spatial attention allocation during observation of actions eliciting (or not) a complementary response. In particular, in Chapter 7 participants were presented with action sequences evoking a complementary gesture, such as picking up a mug placed in the video foreground, when an individual was inviting them to do so. Notably, the observed and required actions were mismatched in order to investigate the observers’ spontaneous unfolding of different motor activations. Crucially, spatial attention allocation toward specific parts of the visual scene was manipulated by means of the sudden appearance of a red dot, and responses were recorded both at a behavioral (eye-tracking) and at a neurophysiological level. In a further experiment (Chapter 8), the allocation of attention toward parts of the visual scene was modulated by means of the actor’s gaze direction, which represents a more ecologically-valid manipulation. This experimental work shows the role of spatial attention in simulation and reciprocity, thus promoting a more complete and integrated understanding on the role of top-down factors in action observation. A general discussion (Chapter 9), contextualizing the results obtained by the studies presented in the present thesis will follow. Taken together, these studies will help to better define how the motor system flexibly and dynamically modulates its activity during the course of action observation. Moreover, the present work could broadening our view on action observation processes in social contexts, towards the definition of a more complete account.
Le interazioni sociali rappresentano un aspetto essenziale dell’esperienza umana, e le azioni rappresentano il mezzo principale attraverso cui gli esseri umani interagiscono con il mondo circostante. L’abilità di riconoscere e comprendere le azioni altrui è necessaria per garantire un’efficace interazione con altri individui. Nella vita quotidiana il sistema motorio è in grado di coordinare queste forme di interazione sociale con prontezza e accuratezza. Tuttavia, come il nostro cervello sia capace di produrre risposte così appropriate deve essere ancora pienamente compreso. L’obiettivo della presente tesi consiste nell’indagare i processi che hanno luogo nel sistema motorio durante l’osservazione di azioni, e in particolare nel caso di azioni che richiedono un coinvolgimento (interattivo) dell’osservatore. L’argomento principale che verrà trattato riguarda proprio la flessibilità del sistema motorio nel preparare azioni simili o dissimili rispetto a quanto osservato in situazioni realistiche. Inoltre, il presente lavoro ha lo scopo di verificare l’automaticità di questi processi, esaminando direttamente il ruolo giocato dall’attenzione visuospaziale durante l’osservazione di azioni. La parte introduttiva della presente tesi fornirà una panoramica sullo stato dell’arte riguardo il meccanismo che potrebbe essere alla base della comprensione delle azioni altrui, ossia il ‘meccanismo specchio’ (Capitolo 1). I neuroni specchio sono cellule neurali che si attivano sia durante l’esecuzione, che durante l’osservazione di una stessa azione compiuta da un altro individuo. Dalla loro prima scoperta nella corteccia premotoria della scimmia (Macaca nemestrina) all’inizio degli anni Novanta (Di Pellegrino, Fadiga, Fogassi, Gallese and Rizzolatti, 1992), questi neuroni visuo-motori sono stati estensivamente studiati sia nei primati che nell’uomo. Nel Capitolo 1 verrà quindi presentata una rassegna delle prove a favore dell’esistenza di tale meccanismo specchio, nonché sulle sue proprietà e basi anatomiche. Una particolare attenzione verrà data alla letteratura relativa agli studi condotti sull’uomo, approfondendo le evidenze riguardanti il Sistema di Osservazione dell’Azione (AOS) acquisite tramite l’uso di diverse metodologie. Risultati convergenti suggeriscono che le azioni vengano codificate nel cervello dell’osservatore in modo tale da replicare l’effettiva esecuzione dell’azione. Pertanto, una simulazione incarnata (dall’interno) permetterebbe di comprendere le azioni osservate tramite l’esperienza motoria propria dell’osservatore. Tuttavia, simulare le azioni altrui non è sempre la migliore strategia per interagire con essi. Spesso, invece, è necessario mettere in atto azioni che differiscono da quelle osservate. Nel Capitolo 2 saranno riassunte evidenze in ambito neurofisiologico che suggeriscono come il cervello umano sia in grado di superare il bias imitativo in favore di risposte dissimili, che sono tuttavia appropriate alle esigenze dettate dal contesto. Un’attenzione particolare verrà data alla letteratura riguardante le azioni complementari, un tipo di interazioni sociali nelle quali gli individui coinvolti devono eseguire azioni dissimili o opposte a quelle osservate, al fine di perseguire uno scopo comune. Riassumendo, il sistema motorio umano risulta essere incline a simulare le azioni altrui, ciò nonostante questa tendenza imitativa pare possa essere modulata in funzione del contesto in cui l’azione avviene. Tuttavia, qualora fattori top-down abbiano un ruolo nel determinare la simulazione incarnata è ancora un argomento dibattuto. Nel Capitolo 3 verrà presentata una rassegna della letteratura in cui l’automaticità della trasformazione visuo-motoria è stata messa in discussione. Complessivamente, emerge come fattori top-down, quali l’attenzione visuospaziale, possano influenzare il processo di simulazione motoria delle azioni osservate. Nella seconda parte della tesi verrà descritto il lavoro sperimentale da me svolto. Il Capitolo 4 fornirà una generale descrizione della metodologia adottata e comune a tutti gli studi in cui è stata utilizzata la stimolazione magnetica transcranica (TMS) accoppiata con la registrazione elettromiografica (EMG) per misurare modulazioni dell’eccitabilità corticospinale durante l’osservazione di azioni. Nel primo esperimento (Capitolo 5) è stato utilizzato un nuovo paradigma per lo studio delle azioni complementari che coinvolge effettori multipli. Ai partecipanti è stata presentata un’azione ritraente un calciatore lanciare una palla verso di loro, richiedendo implicitamente una loro risposta al fine di parare la palla in avvicinamento. Ulteriori condizioni di controllo in cui calci laterali, calci mimati, o in cui la palla veniva presentata ferma in area di rigore sono state utilizzate. Questo paradigma è stato adottato per studiare l’andamento temporale dell’insorgere delle risposte imitative e complementari in effettori inferiori e superiori. In un successivo esperimento presentato nel Capitolo 6 è stato adottato un paradigma simile, tuttavia esso includeva una condizione nella quale le risposte imitative e complementari venivano simultaneamente elicitate nel sistema motorio dell’osservatore. Ciò ha permesso di disambiguare il contributo di differenti livelli di codifica motoria – nello specifico, cinematico, predittivo e di codifica della risposta – in funzione durante l’osservazione di azioni. I Capitoli 7 e 8 riguarderanno invece due esperimenti aventi lo scopo di chiarificare l’influenza dell’attenzione spaziale durante l’osservazione di azioni capaci di elicitare o meno una risposta complementare. In particolare, nel Capitolo 7, ai partecipanti venivano mostrate sequenze di azioni che potevano evocare una risposta complementare, quale afferrare una tazza posizionata in primo piano, quando una persona li invitava a farlo. Va notato che il movimento osservato presentava caratteristiche muscolari diverse da quello richiesto, al fine di studiare lo spontaneo manifestarsi di attivazioni motorie differenti negli osservatori. Un aspetto cruciale è che l’allocazione dell’attenzione spaziale verso specifiche parti della scena visiva veniva manipolata tramite la rapida presentazione di un pallino rosso, e le risposte sono state registrate sia a livello comportamentale (eye-tracking) che neurofisiologico. In un successivo esperimento (Capitolo 8), l’allocazione di risorse attentive verso parti della scena visiva è stata modulata tramite la direzione dello sguardo dell’attore, utilizzando quindi una manipolazione che presenta una migliore validità ecologica. Questo lavoro sperimentale ha indagato il ruolo dell’attenzione nei processi di simulazione e reciprocità, promuovendo così la definizione di una più completa e integrata comprensione del ruolo di fattori top-down nell’osservazione di azioni. Seguirà una discussione generale (Capitolo 9) volta a contestualizzare i risultati ottenuti dagli studi presentati in questa tesi. Nel complesso, questi studi aiuteranno a definire meglio come il sistema motorio sia in grado di modulare la sua attività in maniera flessibile e dinamica durante l’osservazione di azioni. Inoltre, il presente lavoro di ricerca può contribuire ad ampliare la nostra conoscenza dei processi in atto durante l’osservazione di azioni in contesti sociali, in direzione di una più completa definizione del fenomeno.

In this paper, we propose an uncertainty-aware representation Learning (UARL) method for action segmentation. Most existing action segmentation methods exploit continuity information of the action period to predict frame-level labels, which ignores the temporal ambiguity of the transition region between two actions. Moreover, similar periods of different actions, e.g., the beginning of some actions, will confuse the network if they are annotated with different labels, which causes spatial ambiguity. To address this, we design the UARL to exploit the transitional expression between two action periods by uncertainty learning. Specially, we model every frame of actions with an active distribution that represents the probabilities of different actions, which captures the uncertainty of the action and exploits the tendency during the action. We evaluate our method on three popular action prediction datasets: Breakfast, Georgia Tech Egocentric Activities (GTEA), and 50Salads. The experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves the performance with state-of-the-art.

Urban traffic light control is an important and challenging real-world problem. By regarding intersections as agents, most of the Reinforcement Learning (RL) based methods generate actions of agents independently. They can cause action conflict and result in overflow or road resource waste in adjacent intersections. Recently, some collaborative methods have alleviated the above problems by extending the observable surroundings of agents, which can be considered as inactive cross-agent communication methods. However, when agents act synchronously in these works, the perceived action value is biased and the information exchanged is insufficient. In this work, we propose a novel Multi-agent Communication and Action Rectification (MaCAR) framework. It enables active communication between agents by considering the impact of synchronous actions of agents. MaCAR consists of two parts: (1) an active Communication Agent Network (CAN) involving a Message Propagation Graph Neural Network (MPGNN); (2) a Traffic Forecasting Network (TFN) which learns to predict the traffic after agents' synchronous actions and the corresponding action values. By using predicted information, we mitigate the action value bias during training to help rectify agents' future actions. In experiments, we show that our proposal can outperforms state-of-the-art methods on both synthetic and real-world datasets.

Recognizing human actions in video clips has been an important topic in computer vision. Sufficient labeled data is one of the prerequisites for the good performance of action recognition algorithms. However, while abundant videos can be collected from the Internet, categorizing each video clip is tedious and even time-consuming. Active learning is one way to alleviate the labeling labor by allowing the classifier to choose the most informative unlabeled instances for manual annotation. Among various active learning algorithms, uncertainty sampling is arguably the most widely-used strategy. Conventional uncertainty sampling strategies such as entropy-based methods are usually tested under accuracy. However, in action recognition Average Precision (AP) is an acknowledged evaluation metric, which is somehow ignored in the active learning community. It is defined as the area under the precision-recall curve. In this paper, we propose a novel uncertainty sampling algorithm for action recognition using expected AP. We conduct experiments on three real-world action recognition datasets and show that our algorithm outperforms other uncertainty-based active learning algorithms.

The problem of action reversibility studies whether effects of a given action can be reversed (or undone) by a sequence of (other) actions. For example, actions whose effects can be reversed cannot lead to dead-ends. In the usual settings, the problem of action reversibility is PSPACE-complete, that is, as hard as deciding plan existence. In this paper, we focus on subclasses of the action reversibility problem, universal and uniform action reversibility, where the former considers all states in which the action in question is applicable, while the latter requires a single reverting action sequence, independent of the considered states. Specifically, we study the relations between projection abstractions and the subclasses of the action reversibility problem and we show that universal uniform reversibility of a given action can be decided on projection consisting of only the variables present in the schema of the action in question.

A disciplined approach to "Learn from Experience" is critical to the enduring ability of the Inter- American Development Bank (IDB) and its regional partners to make effective knowledge-based decisions and optimize development outcomes. In order to achieve the desired results, learning before, during, and after everything we do must be `part of the way we work' at the IDB -not something extra. The IDB has developed several methodological tools that will help Bank personnel and their regional stakeholders identify, capture, and as applicable, share their knowledge for re-use by others. These methods to mainstream learning from our individual and collective experience in every phase of our project cycle include the Peer Assist, After Action Review, Knowledge Capture Interview, and In Action Review.

This document describes the After Action Review (AAR), which is one of the methods used within the Bank's cycle to learn from experience. Specifically, it is a `learning after doing' technique that helps teams identify and share what worked and what hasn't worked at the achievement of a specific goal, the completion of a significant phase, the resolution of an issue or the close of the project.