User-facing communication about privacy (e.g., privacy policies, privacy tools’ user interfaces) is frequently ignored and often ineffective. In contrast to these arguably staid interfaces, artworks often focus on provocation, engagement, and critical interpretation. For decades, artists have created privacy art—artistic media in galleries relating to the surveillance and privacy of individuals. What are artists saying about privacy, and how? Crucially, what lessons might they have for designing privacy-focused user interfaces? To this end, we compiled over 800 privacy artworks, qualitatively analyzing a sample. Common topics spanned artistic media (from paintings to immersive installations) and eras. Artworks built upon familiar concepts (e.g., cameras, homes) to speculate on society’s future and present personal information (e.g., artist, viewer, public). We discuss lessons for making non-artistic privacy communication more engaging and powerful through directing attention (e.g., lighting, collage) and setting a tone (e.g., unsettling, fun, mundane).

Summary form only given. Recent results from the ethological literature challenge some widely held views about the development of animal behavior and offer new directions for research into the organization of synthetic behavior systems. The process of development is often seen as one of continual refinement, with infantile behaviors representing the primitive precursors of adult behavior. While this notion is intuitively pleasing, there are two ways in which it may be incorrect. First, Coppinger (Coppinger and Smith 1990) argues that infantile behaviors are just as well adapted as adult behaviors, but adapted to the challenges that the organism faces during its early life and early social context. In his view, development is best understood as a process of, 'swapping' elements in the behavioral repertoire rather than refining them; the adult version of a behavior, in other words, is a distinct replacement for its juvenile counterpart, not an outgrowth of it. The second problem with the traditional view of behavioral development is that infantile behaviors are often expressed in an entirely different motivational context than their adult counterparts. Indeed, infantile behaviors that satisfy a particular motivational system such as hunger may be controlled by entirely different motivational systems. Hall and Willams have shown, for example, that during the first several weeks of life, a rat pup's suckling rate is independent of how hungry it is. That is, rat pups suckle because they are innately motivated to do so, not because they are hungry. Similarly, Hogan (Hogan 1999) suggests that during the first 48 hours of a chick's life, the amount that it pecks has nothing to do with its level of hunger. Leyhausen (Lorenz and Leyhausen 1973) has shown that the behaviors that make up the sequence of predatory behaviors in cats are refined through play, often well before the cat ever makes 'the connection' between the acquisition of prey and a subsequent reduction in hunger. What is going on here? In the first two cases, the juvenile behaviors act as 'fail-safe' mechanisms to ensure that the creature's needs are met without needing an innate or learned connection between the behaviors and the critical motivational systems that they act to satisfy. In the latter case, behaviors that will be critically important in adulthood are initially expressed and refined in a context in which the costs of failure are low, i.e. the creature's life doesn't depend on how well they perform the behavior at that given moment. Both of these concerns suggest that by re-examining our assumptions about development in animals, we may be able to glean generally useful organizing principles for the design of adaptive computational systems.

The ViscousDisplay explores the exchange of social information through transient public interfaces. Shaped by principles of 'underground public art', the ViscousDisplay is conceived as a novel mobile communication medium, where messages can be shared in public spaces. Inspired by biological learning systems; the ViscousDisplay learns gestural motions and colors that form along traces of a participant's movements and maps this information onto a flexible display. Because it is made up of inexpensive materials, the ViscousDisplay is also a disposable artifact which may be collected in public spaces. It combines multi-modal sensing, learning algorithms, and a pliable silicone display.

The ability to learn is a potentially compelling and important quality for interactive synthetic characters. To that end, we describe a practical approach to real-time learning for synthetic characters. Our implementation is grounded in the techniques of reinforcement learning and informed by insights from animal training. It simplifies the learning task for characters by (a) enabling them to take advantage of predictable regularities in their world, (b) allowing them to make maximal use of any supervisory signals, and (c) making them easy to train by humans.We built an autonomous animated dog that can be trained with a technique used to train real dogs called "clicker training". Capabilities demonstrated include being trained to recognize and use acoustic patterns as cues for actions, as well as to synthesize new actions from novel paths through its motion space.A key contribution of this paper is to demonstrate that by addressing the three problems of state, action, and state-action space discovery at the same time, the solution for each becomes easier. Finally, we articulate heuristics and design principles that make learning practical for synthetic characters.

This paper presents ways of approaching the design of successful character-based interactive installations. We rationalize our arguments within the context of both Disney's "illusion of life" and Daniel Dennett's "intentional stance". We present six perspectives from which intentional characters can be viewed: as interactors on a variety of time scales; as reciprocal interactors with each other, as entities exhibiting a dynamic expressive range, as creatures with life cycles; as a combination of allusions to existing media, and as a collection of well-balanced components. By conceptualizing characters in these ways, creators can generate installations that enable participants to read the desires, beliefs, and actions of the characters. This approach forms the basis of a successful character-based interactive installation.