Hasil untuk "Fossil man. Human paleontology"

Jordan Aiko Deja, Isidro Butaslac, Nicko Reginio Caluya et al.

Robots are moving beyond industrial settings into creative, educational, and public environments where interaction is open-ended and improvisational. Yet much of human-AI-robot interaction remains framed around performance and efficiency, positioning humans as supervisors rather than collaborators. We propose a re-framing of AI interaction with robots as scaffolding: infrastructure that enables humans to shape robotic behaviour over time while remaining meaningfully in control. Through scenarios from creative practice, learning-by-teaching, and embodied interaction, we illustrate how humans can act as executive directors, defining intent and steering revisions, while AI mediates between human expression and robotic execution. We outline design and evaluation implications that foreground creativity, agency, and flow. Finally, we discuss open challenges in social, scalable, and mission-critical contexts. We invite the community to rethink interacting with Robots and AI not as autonomy, but as sustained support for human creativity.

Shuo Niu, Dylan Clements, Marina Margalit Nemanov et al.

GenAI's ability to produce text and images is increasingly incorporated into human-AI co-creation tasks such as storytelling and video editing. However, integrating GenAI into these tasks requires enabling users to retain control over editing individual story elements while ensuring that generated visuals remain coherent with the storyline and consistent across multiple AI-generated outputs. This work examines a paradigm of creative decomposition and linking, which allows creators to clearly communicate creative intent by prompting GenAI to tailor specific story elements, such as storylines, personas, locations, and scenes, while maintaining coherence among them. We implement and evaluate StoryComposerAI, a system that exemplifies this paradigm for enhancing users' sense of control and content consistency in human-AI co-creation of digital stories.

Steve Benford, Eike Schneiders, Juan Pablo Martinez Avila et al.

As robots enter the messy human world so the vital matter of safety takes on a fresh complexion with physical contact becoming inevitable and even desirable. We report on an artistic-exploration of how dancers, working as part of a multidisciplinary team, engaged in contact improvisation exercises to explore the opportunities and challenges of dancing with cobots. We reveal how they employed their honed bodily senses and physical skills to engage with the robots aesthetically and yet safely, interleaving improvised physical manipulations with reflections to grow their knowledge of how the robots behaved and felt. We introduce somatic safety, a holistic mind-body approach in which safety is learned, felt and enacted through bodily contact with robots in addition to being reasoned about. We conclude that robots need to be better designed for people to hold them and might recognise tacit safety cues among people.We propose that safety should be learned through iterative bodily experience interleaved with reflection.

Ri-Zhao Qiu, Shiqi Yang, Xuxin Cheng et al.

Training manipulation policies for humanoid robots with diverse data enhances their robustness and generalization across tasks and platforms. However, learning solely from robot demonstrations is labor-intensive, requiring expensive tele-operated data collection which is difficult to scale. This paper investigates a more scalable data source, egocentric human demonstrations, to serve as cross-embodiment training data for robot learning. We mitigate the embodiment gap between humanoids and humans from both the data and modeling perspectives. We collect an egocentric task-oriented dataset (PH2D) that is directly aligned with humanoid manipulation demonstrations. We then train a human-humanoid behavior policy, which we term Human Action Transformer (HAT). The state-action space of HAT is unified for both humans and humanoid robots and can be differentiably retargeted to robot actions. Co-trained with smaller-scale robot data, HAT directly models humanoid robots and humans as different embodiments without additional supervision. We show that human data improves both generalization and robustness of HAT with significantly better data collection efficiency. Code and data: https://human-as-robot.github.io/

Toni Bürgin

Abstract Around the middle of the nineteenth century, Italian palaeontologists began to investigate fossils of fishes and reptiles from the Middle Triassic outcrops in the vicinity of Monte San Giorgio (Canton Ticino, Switzerland). In 1924, researchers from the University of Zurich started their scientific excavations on the Swiss side. The many fish fossils found since then have often stood in the shadow of the more spectacular and mostly larger fossils of various aquatic reptiles. Beginning around 1980 the fish fossils in the collection of the Palaeontological Institute and Museum of Zurich University have subsequently been brought out of this shadow. The picture presently emerging is that of a species rich fish fauna located in six different fossiliferous beds of Anisian and Ladinian age with a few chondrichthyan, some coelacanth and a wealth of different actinopterygian taxa, many of them well preserved. The ongoing work not only results in taxonomic and systematic novelties, but gives also new insights into their palaeobiology, palaeoecology and palaeobiogeography.

Matías Alberto Armella, Guido Ezequiel Alonso, Daniel Alfredo García-López et al.

The fossils of the India Muerta Formation (Neogene, Tucumán Province, Northwestern Argentina) include several vertebrate groups, mainly metatherian, xenarthran, and notoungulate mammals. Nevertheless, these remains have been scarcely mentioned in the literature, being mostly noted in faunistic lists, without a focus on taxonomic or morphological aspects. Additionally, most of the biostratigraphic or paleobiogeographic considerations, which are based merely on lithostratigraphic inferences, have suggested a correlation mainly with the Andalhuala (Late Miocene–Pliocene) and the Corral Quemado (Pliocene) formations, both units corresponding to the Santa María sedimentary basin of the Calchaquí valleys of Northwestern Argentina. Here, we present a study of a notoungulate assemblage recently recovered from levels of the India Muerta Formation, clarifying the geological context and correlating fossil levels with western outcrops. Our study identifies remains grouped systematically as two toxodontids, one mesotheriid, and four hegetotheriids, some of which represent the first records for the unit and/or the region. The sedimentological analysis suggests that this fauna developed in a paleoenvironment corresponding to a complex of braided to meandering fluvial systems. Based on these new data, the fossiliferous levels of the India Muerta Formation reinforce a Late Miocene (Tortonian) age. Consequently, our chronological proposal leads to a closer correlation between the India Muerta Formation and the Las Arcas and Chiquimil formations, which immediately underlie the Andalhuala Formation in western valleys. These inferences agree with previous radioisotopic analyses and, hence, the evidence yielded by the presence of these newly documented notoungulates stands as our most reliable basis for stratigraphic correlation.

Mikołaj K. Zapalski

Maria Edenilce P. Batista, Antônio Álamo F. Saraiva, Flaviana J. De Lima et al.

We describe a new genus of Leliacladus Batista & L.Kunzmann with the type species Leliacladus (Brachyphyllum) castilhoi (Duarte, 1985) Batista & L.Kunzmann gen. nov. et comb. nov., a rare fossil conifer that has been described from the Aptian (Lower Cretaceous) Romualdo Formation of the Araripe Basin, northeastern Brazil. We decided to leave this new fossil-genus unasigned to any existing family as it does not display sufficient number of anatomical characters. We re-studied the type material of the type species as well as we described additional new material from the Aptian Crato Formation of the same basin. The more recently found fossil materials include large portions of leafy shoots excavated from laminated lacustrine limestones. In contrast to the type material, the new material shows the replacement of organic matter by iron oxide, which is suitable for investigating anatomical features of the wood and leaves. The material allowed for a reappraisal of the systematic position of the fossil plant. Together, the morphological and anatomical characters revealed sufficient evidence to separate the conifer from Brachyphyllum and accommodate it in a new fossil-genus. Leliacladus gen. nov. is defined by the presence of comparatively thick and short claviform lateral branches, and the absence of thinner ultimate order branches with gradual tapering axes. The wood is characterized by dense tracheids with uniseriate pitting in the radial walls and cross-fields that possess one or two large pits. The rays are one to three cells high. The epidermises of the densely and helically arranged scale leaves show non-papillate cyclocytic stomatal complexes slightly sunken that are mostly scattered and randomly arranged across the abaxial surface. This combination of characters suggests the material belongs to the conifer families Podocarpaceae or Cheirolepidiaceae. The arrangement of the sparsely branched, but woody shoots of Leliacladus castilhoi gen. nov. et comb. nov. suggest a hypothetical candelabra-like growth habit of the plant, and the remarkable thickness of the axes suggests a hypothetical xeromorphic adaptation to the semiarid paleoenvironment.

Hyo Jin Do, Rachel Ostrand, Justin D. Weisz et al.

While humans increasingly rely on large language models (LLMs), they are susceptible to generating inaccurate or false information, also known as "hallucinations". Technical advancements have been made in algorithms that detect hallucinated content by assessing the factuality of the model's responses and attributing sections of those responses to specific source documents. However, there is limited research on how to effectively communicate this information to users in ways that will help them appropriately calibrate their trust toward LLMs. To address this issue, we conducted a scenario-based study (N=104) to systematically compare the impact of various design strategies for communicating factuality and source attribution on participants' ratings of trust, preferences, and ease in validating response accuracy. Our findings reveal that participants preferred a design in which phrases within a response were color-coded based on the computed factuality scores. Additionally, participants increased their trust ratings when relevant sections of the source material were highlighted or responses were annotated with reference numbers corresponding to those sources, compared to when they received no annotation in the source material. Our study offers practical design guidelines to facilitate human-LLM collaboration and it promotes a new human role to carefully evaluate and take responsibility for their use of LLM outputs.

Sergio. Martín Serrano, Rubén Izquierdo, Iván García Daza et al.

In the field of autonomous driving research, the use of immersive virtual reality (VR) techniques is widespread to enable a variety of studies under safe and controlled conditions. However, this methodology is only valid and consistent if the conduct of participants in the simulated setting mirrors their actions in an actual environment. In this paper, we present a first and innovative approach to evaluating what we term the behavioural gap, a concept that captures the disparity in a participant's conduct when engaging in a VR experiment compared to an equivalent real-world situation. To this end, we developed a digital twin of a pre-existed crosswalk and carried out a field experiment (N=18) to investigate pedestrian-autonomous vehicle interaction in both real and simulated driving conditions. In the experiment, the pedestrian attempts to cross the road in the presence of different driving styles and an external Human-Machine Interface (eHMI). By combining survey-based and behavioural analysis methodologies, we develop a quantitative approach to empirically assess the behavioural gap, as a mechanism to validate data obtained from real subjects interacting in a simulated VR-based environment. Results show that participants are more cautious and curious in VR, affecting their speed and decisions, and that VR interfaces significantly influence their actions.

JORDI AGUSTÍ , PEDRO PIÑERO

In this paper, we present a detailed survey on the rodent fauna from the site of Barranco de los Conejos (Guadix-Baza Basin, southern Spain). Its rodent fauna is composed of three arvicolines (Orcemys giberti, Manchenomys oswaldoreigi, and Tibericola vandermeuleni) and two murids (Castillomys rivas and Apodemus atavus). The three arvicoline species present ever-growing molars. Orcemys giberti and Manchenomys oswaldoreigi can be considered as descendants of local Mimomys species (Mimomys medasensis and Mimomys tornensis, respectively), while Tibericola vandermeuleni is an eastern inmigrant. Loosening of roots in Orcemys giberti and Manchenomys oswaldoreigi is explained as an adaptation to a fossorial way of life, in relation to the Early Pleistocene glacial–interglacial dynamics, which led to cooler and drier conditions. This environmental change would also explain the dispersal of Tibericola from the eastern Mediterranean.

Parag Khanna, Elmira Yadollahi, Mårten Björkman et al.

Despite great advances in what robots can do, they still experience failures in human-robot collaborative tasks due to high randomness in unstructured human environments. Moreover, a human's unfamiliarity with a robot and its abilities can cause such failures to repeat. This makes the ability to failure explanation very important for a robot. In this work, we describe a user study that incorporated different robotic failures in a human-robot collaboration (HRC) task aimed at filling a shelf. We included different types of failures and repeated occurrences of such failures in a prolonged interaction between humans and robots. The failure resolution involved human intervention in form of human-robot bidirectional handovers. Through such studies, we aim to test different explanation types and explanation progression in the interaction and record humans.

Elena Merlo, Edoardo Lamon, Fabio Fusaro et al.

By incorporating ergonomics principles into the task allocation processes, human-robot collaboration (HRC) frameworks can favour the prevention of work-related musculoskeletal disorders (WMSDs). In this context, existing offline methodologies do not account for the variability of human actions and states; therefore, planning and dynamically assigning roles in human-robot teams remains an unaddressed challenge.This study aims to create an ergonomic role allocation framework that optimises the HRC, taking into account task features and human state measurements. The presented framework consists of two main modules: the first provides the HRC task model, exploiting AND/OR Graphs (AOG)s, which we adapted to solve the allocation problem; the second module describes the ergonomic risk assessment during task execution through a risk indicator and updates the AOG-related variables to influence future task allocation. The proposed framework can be combined with any time-varying ergonomic risk indicator that evaluates human cognitive and physical burden. In this work, we tested our framework in an assembly scenario, introducing a risk index named Kinematic Wear.The overall framework has been tested with a multi-subject experiment. The task allocation results and subjective evaluations, measured with questionnaires, show that high-risk actions are correctly recognised and not assigned to humans, reducing fatigue and frustration in collaborative tasks.

P. Manning

Exciting new studies in human evolution are appearing rapidly, transforming scientific understanding of how the human community took form. A 2018 article by archaeologist Eleanor Scerri and colleagues, for example, identifies key debates on this topic. They ask: When and how did Homo sapiens become a species? How important were subgroups and migration in human evolution? And while Scerri cannot yet propose a specific date or place for the origin of Homo sapiens, she reveals certain misunderstandings in earlier thinking about human populations, then points to new directions in interpretation. Scerri argues that paleontology shows varied physical populations with varied material culture, geographically spread through Africa. She notes genetic evidence suggesting that the lineage for Homo sapiens traces back to 500 ka (where “ka,” in this essay, means “thousand years ago”); she also suggests human admixture with other hominin populations in Africa.

Tomasz Kaliściak

In Search of the Nietota Flower. „Fossil Literature” and Paleobotany The article focuses on the issues of paleontology, the science of plant fossils, with particular emphasis on paleobotanical threads devoted to fossil vegetation, which in the 19th century was closely related to philology, represented both by the science of literature and language. The author extracts the notions of “fossil literature” (Adam Mickiewicz) and “fossil poetry” (Ralph Waldo Emerson), pointing to their particular relationship with “paleobotany of the unconscious” (Kazimierz Wyka), presented from the psychoanalytic perspective (Eduard von Hartmann, Carl Gustav Jung, Charles Baudouin) as an archetype of collective, interspecies memory, reaching back to some common ancestor and root cause reminding us of the eternal coexistence of the organic and the inorganic, plant and animal, human and non-human. The author also draws attention to the ecological and ecocritical aspects of the fossil literature, which he perceives as the trace fossils of human life activity (ichnofossils), which make up the meta-layer of the Anthropocene.

Mattia Antonio Baiano, Leonardo Sebastián Filippi

The Late Cretaceous theropod fauna of South America is composed of Abelisauridae, Noasauridae, Spinosauridae, Carcharodontosauridae, Megaraptora, and Coelurosauria. These groups include mostly small (Noasauridae and Coelurosauria) and medium- to large-sized taxa (Carcharodontosauridae, Abelisauridae, and Megaraptora). Some of these lineages are predominantly Gondwanic (Abelisauridae, Noasauridae, Carcharodontosauridae, Megaraptora) and poorly represented in Laurasian landmasses. Particularly, several theropods have been reported from Patagonia, known either due to distinct anatomical features or due to their high degree of preservation, such as Carnotaurus, Skorpiovenator, Giganotosaurus, Megaraptor, Alvarezsaurus, and Unenlagia. here we describe a new incomplete tibia (MAU-PV-CM-653) from the Sierra Barrosa Formation (middle Coniacian, Upper Cretaceous), Patagonia, Argentina. MAU-PV-CM-653 shows an anteroposteriorly reduced cnemial crest that is strongly curved laterally. Finally, the tibia lacks a proximal extension of the fibular crest. These traits are reminiscent of tetanuran morphology and, together with the stratigraphic provenance of MAU-PV-CM-653, they allow us to assign it to an allosauroid theropod, thus improving the Allosauroidea global record for the middle Late Cretaceous.

Sebastián Apesteguía, Pablo Ariel Gallina, Paula Muzzopappa

El Área de Paleontología de la Fundación Azara funciona en la Universidad Maimónides. En 17 años se ha afianzado con solidez en las publicaciones, los encuentros de colegas y en los medios. En la faceta de exploración ha aportado más de 10 nuevas localidades paleoherpetológicas, algunas tan importantes como el Área Paleontológica de La Buitrera, La Bonita, La Escondida, El Pueblito y el campo de Violante, todas en la provincia de Río Negro, y Bajada Colorada en la provincia de Neuquén. Fuera del país ha aportado las nuevas localidades icnológicas de Tunasniyoj y Ruditayoj (Bolivia) y explorado por primera vez la localidad de Yamana en Ecuador. En la etapa de investigación se han aportado cerca de 50 nuevas especies paleoherpetológicas y visiones novedosas como la existencia de serpientes 70 millones de años más antiguas de las conocidas, la relación entre esfenodontes jurásicos al sur del desierto pangéico, las sucesiones en las faunas de dinosaurios sudamericanos, la presencia de picos y mandíbulas cuadradas entre los titanosaurios y la extinción de los terópodos carcarodontosáuridos y su coincidencia con la extinción de los saurópodos rebaquisáuridos. Desde la formación de recursos humanos se han concretado con temas propios unas 10 tesis doctorales y otras tantas tesinas formando un grupo de investigadores hoy distribuido por el país. Finalmente, desde la divulgación, se han llevado a cabo series de ficción, programas informativos y publicado una decena de libros además de iniciado o retomado publicaciones seriadas sobre temas de ciencias naturales.

CHASE DORAN BROWNSTEIN

The evolutionary history of gars, an ancient group of ray-finned fishes, is excellently documented in the fossil record. These fishes are notable for how little the anatomy of extant species differs from that of their earliest known relatives from over 150 million years ago. As such, the low species richness of the gar crown group is thought to reflect the diversity of this clade over most of their history. Here, I describe the skeleton of a new gar species from the Eocene Willwood Formation of Wyoming, USA. Numerous features, including a shortened skull, ornamented external cranial bones, and microteeth ally the new species with Cuneatini, an obscure clade of gars restricted to the Eocene of southwestern North America. Yet, Cuneatus maximus sp. nov. is more than twice as large as its closest relatives. The holotype of the new species preserves a partial palate, providing new information about the anatomy of this poorly known cranial region in cuneatins. Phylogenetic analysis of gars with the new species C. maximus included implies a diversification of cuneatins in North America following the Cretaceous/Paleogene extinction. The presence of large-bodied stem-gars in the Eocene Willwood Formation also suggests that the fish fauna of this region was reminiscent of present-day ones from the American southeast. The discovery of C. maximus emphasizes the propensity of the fossil record to significantly increase the diversity and biogeographic range of even the most depauperate lineages.

Jianglin Fu, Shikai Li, Yuming Jiang et al.

Unconditional human image generation is an important task in vision and graphics, which enables various applications in the creative industry. Existing studies in this field mainly focus on "network engineering" such as designing new components and objective functions. This work takes a data-centric perspective and investigates multiple critical aspects in "data engineering", which we believe would complement the current practice. To facilitate a comprehensive study, we collect and annotate a large-scale human image dataset with over 230K samples capturing diverse poses and textures. Equipped with this large dataset, we rigorously investigate three essential factors in data engineering for StyleGAN-based human generation, namely data size, data distribution, and data alignment. Extensive experiments reveal several valuable observations w.r.t. these aspects: 1) Large-scale data, more than 40K images, are needed to train a high-fidelity unconditional human generation model with vanilla StyleGAN. 2) A balanced training set helps improve the generation quality with rare face poses compared to the long-tailed counterpart, whereas simply balancing the clothing texture distribution does not effectively bring an improvement. 3) Human GAN models with body centers for alignment outperform models trained using face centers or pelvis points as alignment anchors. In addition, a model zoo and human editing applications are demonstrated to facilitate future research in the community.

Ayça Takmaz, Jonas Schult, Irem Kaftan et al.

Segmenting humans in 3D indoor scenes has become increasingly important with the rise of human-centered robotics and AR/VR applications. To this end, we propose the task of joint 3D human semantic segmentation, instance segmentation and multi-human body-part segmentation. Few works have attempted to directly segment humans in cluttered 3D scenes, which is largely due to the lack of annotated training data of humans interacting with 3D scenes. We address this challenge and propose a framework for generating training data of synthetic humans interacting with real 3D scenes. Furthermore, we propose a novel transformer-based model, Human3D, which is the first end-to-end model for segmenting multiple human instances and their body-parts in a unified manner. The key advantage of our synthetic data generation framework is its ability to generate diverse and realistic human-scene interactions, with highly accurate ground truth. Our experiments show that pre-training on synthetic data improves performance on a wide variety of 3D human segmentation tasks. Finally, we demonstrate that Human3D outperforms even task-specific state-of-the-art 3D segmentation methods.