Kaush V Kalidindi | University of Twente (original) (raw)

Conference Presentations by Kaush V Kalidindi

This paper identifies the shortcomings of Giere's (2006) scientific perspectivism regarding the p... more This paper identifies the shortcomings of Giere's (2006) scientific perspectivism regarding the problem of theory choice and proposes a framework to address them by acknowledging the limits of human subjectivity. Giere's perspectivism calls into question science's distinctness from other ways of grasping the world and shatters the hierarchization of theories, allowing for a pluralistic and a non-linear understanding of knowledge. This introduces a certain relativism that makes it implausible for a scientist to choose one perspective over others given that every perspective has the same value. How then do we explain the ways in which scientists choose

The emergence of technologies that blur the categorical distinction between humans and machines q... more The emergence of technologies that blur the categorical distinction between humans and machines questions the centrality and supremacy of the liberal humanist subject. This development calls for a reconceptualization of the machine against its traditional instrumental conception as a passive resource that furthers human progress. The following essay explores the need to separate the machine from its anthropocentric ontologies, and introduces an alternate multicentered framework, based on new materialist and post-phenomenoligcal perspectives, to foster an inclusive post-human future that extends subjectivity and autonomy to machines and non-human others.

Papers by Kaush V Kalidindi

This essay is a response to the recent emergence of the AirTag, a crowd-sourced location tracki... more This essay is a response to the recent emergence of the AirTag, a crowd-sourced location tracking device, and its imbibing of individual users with the ability to practice personal surveillance. ny providing users with surveilling abilities that are otherwise limited to authoritative institutions, AirTags, I argue, create a space where individuals are not just the surveilled, but can themselves practice surveillance, and sometimes even back at the same authorities that surveil them. Such practices where individuals gaze back at the authorities are characterized in surveillance literature as “sousveillance”. 1 In this essay, I will investigate how the emergence of AirTags as a sousveillance technology changes conceptions of power and privacy. To make the case for my thesis, I will first explain what constitutes as a sousveillance practice. I will then briefly introduce the technology underlying AirTags and illustrate how they operate as sousveillance technologies. In doing so, I will elaborate on the ways in which they change structures of power and notions of privacy. Lastly, I will address possible challenges to my arguments and suggest potential areas for future research

Machine learning and Generative Adversarial Neural Networks have enabled the production of dee... more Machine learning and Generative Adversarial Neural Networks have enabled the production of deepfakes. Deepfakes are embedded in contexts, so they may destabilize the ability of individuals to acquire true information from videos. Deepfakes may also cause individuals to have a low trust in otherwise trustworthy institutions, and this may cause harm to collective epistemic processes. Additionally, digital technologies allow for modern forms of sexual and gender-based violence. It is more common among women and lesbian, gay, bisexual, intersex, and trans persons, and its impact on society is similar to traditional forms of sexual and gender-based violence. Artificial intelligence, deepfake technology, and its use in society will continue to have detrimental effects, so regulation is necessary to combat disinformation and distrust. The EU has launched several initiatives to counter disinformation, but they lack clear terms, have unclear legal foundations, and inconsistent political mandates.

This paper illustrates how the ambiguity of the brain-dead body manifests in various medical prac... more This paper illustrates how the ambiguity of the brain-dead body manifests in various medical practices and evaluates how this ambiguity is addressed by those who are responsible for the brain-dead body’s fate. The first section breaks down the ambiguity of the brain-dead body to unfolding at three levels: ontological (i.e., its resistance to be theoretically defined in binary terms), hermeneutic (i.e., its simultaneous demonstration of signs of life and death as clashing with one’s empirical interpretation of the brain-dead body) and contextual (i.e., the intersubjective realization of the multiplicity of interpretations of the brain-dead body). The second section problematizes the denial of the ambiguity in curative care practices and assesses two alternate contexts in which the ambiguities can unfold differently, namely, palliative and Japanese medical practices. In this comparative assessment, we outline the plausibility of acknowledging the three ambiguities in various contexts, and whether or not such an acknowledgement is a desirable outcome. We conclude that the ontological ambiguity should be recognized rather than obliterated, and studied in further detail; that the hermeneutical ambiguity should unfold naturally for any attempt of haltering it would result in harmful effects for the relatives; and that the contextual ambiguity should neither be suppressed nor unconditionally embraced, but rather resolved through open communication.

The aim of this paper is to investigate the role of technology in a pluralist society, and it doe... more The aim of this paper is to investigate the role of technology in a pluralist society, and it does so by extending Philip Brey’s (2018) framework for assessing technologies’ contribution to the quality of society with a pluralist conception of a good society. In particular, I will illustrate why a pluralist theory of values is needed when assessing the role of technology in a good society and then sketch out what such a theory may look like by drawing on literature from political philosophy. I will then assess whether and how technologies can contribute to the realization of value-pluralism in practice. Lastly, I will outline methods of technology development that can be instrumental in promoting value-pluralism at individual and societal levels.

Can the metaverse ever be a safe space? Can platform providers meaningfully prevent forms of di... more Can the metaverse ever be a safe space? Can platform providers meaningfully prevent forms of discrimination and violent behavior native to the physical world from seeping into this new reality? Meta claims that it is its primary goal to ensure safety in the metaverse and that they have the necessary tools to attain that objective.6 Although there is a (questionably) functioning infrastructure dedicated to preventing and handling inappropriate behavior on the internet, managing the same in virtual realities can be a highly challenging task, and is not as easily achievable as platform providers claim it to be. Accordingly, this essay investigates the problem of harassment in the metaverse through Tsjalling Swierstra’s framework of technomoral change7 to bring to surface the challenges underlying its regulation. In particular, this essay argues that the metaverse’s introduction of new ontologies of the body, space, and identity coupled with its novel approach to social interactions destabilize accepted notions of harm, trust, accountability, and what qualifies as acceptable behavior, making it challenging for providers to ensure safety. To further strengthen the argument, the latter part of the essay employs mediation analysis, as developed by Peter-Paul Verbeek , to assess solutions developed by platform providers to combat violent behavior and bring to surface their underlying shortcomings.

This essay is a response to the situatedness of prominent technological visions in specific epist... more This essay is a response to the situatedness of prominent technological visions in specific epistemic communities, their potential to spread across societies, and a historical colonial trend of western ideologies influencing and shaping technology development in non-western contexts. This essay thereby aims to outline different norms and strategies that Technology Assessment can adopt in the identification and pursuit of technological visions in ways that do not enact a neo-colonial epistemic violence. In particular, this essay draws on post-colonial literature from subaltern studies to identify how technological visions enact an epistemic violence and then develop two norms namely, i) maintenance of vision heterogeneity and ii) enabling local construction of technological visions. These norms serve as high-level guidelines that can help TA practices in the operationalization of technological visions. Lastly, this essay suggests possible strategies that can be constructed based on these two norms in the context of particular technologies and their corresponding visions.

The new class of neural network architectures introduced in 2014, called generative adversarial n... more The new class of neural network architectures introduced in 2014, called generative adversarial networks (GANs), can be used to mimic any distribution in any domain: images, music, speech, prose etc. We propose a pipeline SDCGAN to produce paintings from extremely small datasets using a combination of VAE, DCGAN and image translation frameworks.

A review of Word Embedding Models through a deconstructive approach reveals their several shortco... more A review of Word Embedding Models through a deconstructive approach reveals their several shortcomings and inconsistencies. These include instability of the vector representations, a distorted analogical reasoning, geometric incompatibility with linguistic features, and the inconsistencies in the corpus data. A new theoretical embedding model, 'Derridian Embedding,' is proposed in this paper. Contemporary embedding models are evaluated qualitatively in terms of how adequate they are in relation to the capabilities of a Derridian Embedding.

Sen’s capability approach to assessing human development branches life into a set of functionings... more Sen’s capability approach to assessing human development branches life into a set of functionings and values an individual’s capability to function. This approach evaluates enrichment of life through instrumental and intrinsic views of freedom; the former values only the end-state that was chosen by the individual while the latter values the freedom to choose between available states. While determining “what was chosen and achieved” is simple, the estimation of “what could have been chosen is” is highly problematic owing to data limitations. Therefore, the practical application of the intrinsic view of freedom remains to be a hurdle for the capability approach. In this paper, I will offer a possible solution to the problem of accommodating the intrinsic view of freedom in the practical application of Amartya Sen’s capability approach. In formulating the solution, I shall employ concepts of information retrieval proposed by Karen Spärck Jones.

This essay introduces a shift in the modern commonplace towards a functionality-centered lifestyl... more This essay introduces a shift in the modern commonplace towards a functionality-centered lifestyle with the rise of Information Technology. This paper draws parallels from Tanizaki's Praise of Shadows to further illustrate the mechanisms of the aforementioned shift, claims its relevance in the modern world, and suggests its implications on the future of aesthetics.

One of W. J. T. Mitchell’s counter-theses on visual culture reveals certain non-visual phenomena ... more One of W. J. T. Mitchell’s counter-theses on visual culture reveals certain non-visual phenomena that the field demands attention to. An investigation on these non-visual phenomena and why they are given attention by visual culture points out the following: the encompassing perimeters of the visual culture in contrast to those of art history and aesthetics; A sensorial shift that could overturn the hegemony of sight; and the possible emergence of a new field of sensorial cultural studies.
This paper analyzes the aforementioned sensorial shift in the light of new technological advancements in Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality.

The need for maximizing the performance of processors opened doors for a new approach which empha... more The need for maximizing the performance of processors opened doors for a new approach which emphasizes parallelism. This paper discusses how various architectures, like Superscalars and VLIWs, implement this parallelism and presents a case study on Intel’s Itanium processor that uses EPIC (Explicitly Parallel Instruction Computing)

Drafts by Kaush V Kalidindi

THE_CYBERNETIC _SUBJECT 'Noema' responds to the call by displacing AI from the position of an ins... more THE_CYBERNETIC _SUBJECT 'Noema' responds to the call by displacing AI from the position of an instrumental object to that of an autonomous subject. "Our machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves frighteningly inert"-Donna Haraway [4] Why view them as Subjects? Proponents of the predominant utilitarianism would call the "subjectivization" of any inanimate object to be the most futile initiative and they are not wrong in their judgements. Having internalized the mechanisms of capitalism, one would have no logical reason to not make use of objects that were produced to be made use of.

Given a grayscale image of dimensions 256x256, our model aims to produce a colored image correspo... more Given a grayscale image of dimensions 256x256, our model aims to produce a colored image corresponding to the input. This paper describes the process of constructing an appropriate model, the difficulties we faced, and the final model that we selected as being most efficient. We used a feed-forward convolutional neural network with three two-dimensional convolutional layers, this being the most computationally feasible given our computational limitations. The output layer has three feature maps, representing RGB (red, green and blue) feature sets. The model was tested extensively on a diverse range of images, but eventually we chose to focus on a specific category to enable our model to specialize in that category. 2 | P a g e