Author: Ada Hoffmann

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Can*Con 2015 notes!

A big hello to everyone I met at Can*Con 2015 in Ottawa these past 3 days – both the people I met for the first time, and those who recognized me from elsewhere. (Sorry I couldn’t stay for the Sunday programming – I’m literally typing this on the train back home because I live quite a ways from Ottawa these days and have some work obligations on Monday.)

I promised book/story recommendations to everyone at the autism panel, and then we ran out of time for me to list more than a few – so, for the benefit of Derek Newman-Stille and everyone else who was interested, here’s a quick list of Stories With Well Written Autistic Characters Who Do Things Besides Being Autistic. (I think it’s very important, in addition to saying “here’s what we want more of,” to point out the people who have already been doing it.)

First, I will start with a few mainstream SF novels. Fitz Wahram in “2312” by Kim Stanley Robinson is an autistic person who does lots of cool things like being a future politician, solving a mystery, and having a romance with another (not autistic, but not neurotpical) character. Similarly, Kio Masada from “This Alien Shore” by C.S. Friedman is an autistic computer expert who comes from a planet where everyone is non-neurotypical in some way, and where their entire culture is structured around this. Both of these authors (IMO) write their characters very well.

Rose Lemberg has several short stories out this year, in her Birdverse setting, with well-realized autistic characters. “Grandmother nai-Leylit’s Cloth of Winds” contains a minimally verbal autistic child who is treated with respect by their family, while a major plot point in “Geometries of Belonging” involves an autistic teenager who successfully resists a family that wants to force them to be cured. Both of these were published in Beneath Ceaseless Skies.

Meda Kahn writes very hard-hitting short stories about autistic adults dealing with prejudice and institutionalization. Her stories “Difference of Opinion” and “That’s Entertainment” were both published in Strange Horizons.

Erika Hammerschmidt’s book, “Kea’s Flight”, centers around a group of autistic and otherwise non-neurotypical children being raised together on a spaceship.

Luna Lindsey’s short stories “Touch of Tides” and “Meltdown in Freezer Three” both have well-written protagonists in various places on the autism spectrum who do interesting jobs and have adventures.

Tina Gower’s short story “Twelve Seconds” is an interesting subversion of cure stories, starring an autistic man who works at a police department and who both benefits and suffers from the treatments and accomodations available to him.

Except for this last one and the two big books in the first paragraph, all of these were written by authors who are openly autistic themselves.

If you want more than this, the full list of books and stories I have reviewed – both positive and negative – is available here. If you want EVEN MORE, you might want to have a look at my Autistic Book List.

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My Can*Con 2015 Schedule

Yep, I’ll be at Can*Con 2015 in Ottawa this coming weekend. I sadly won’t be able to stay to the end of the weekend due to work obligations, but you should be able to catch me Friday night or most of the time Saturday. I’ll be around.

Saturday, 10:00 AM: Amazing Short Fiction You Really Ought To Be Reading. The internet has given short fiction a real shot in the arm, and forms up to novella are making a big come-back. Panelists discuss remarkable works you’re missing out on. Nathan Burgoine, Ada Hoffmann, Amy Sisson, Amal El-Mohtar (m)

Saturday, 12:00 PM: Computational Creativity. Ada Lovelace said that a computer can’t create anything new. Today’s AI researchers are challenging that assumption by creating computer systems that can paint pictures, write poetry, compose music, and more. Are these computers creative, or does the creativity belong to their programmers? What would a computer have to do to be “really” creative? In this talk, we will see paintings made by robots, hear music improvised by them, and other cool things that challenge our notions of both art and intelligence. Ada Hoffmann

Saturday, 1:00 PM: Autism and its Portrayal in Fiction, TV, and Movies. What is autism and how accurately or inaccurately is it portrayed in the various fictional media. Ada Hoffmann, Leo Valiquette, Derek Newman-Stille (m), Robin Riopelle, Jennifer Carole Lewis

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Creative AI, part 4: Games

Game design is a very complex field, incorporating a huge number of both artistic and technical specialties. Could a computer design its own games? The answer, surprisingly, is yes – or a qualified yes.

Technically, computers already create many parts of the video games that you enjoy. It’s called procedural content generation. Computers can fill in certain parts of a game on their own, based on certain rules, to avoid making the programmer do everything by hand.

Most procedural content generation is pretty formulaic. For example, a computer might procedurally generate textures. Or a Roguelike game, given some rules about the size of rooms and what monsters might spawn in them, might randomly generate rooms and randomly place monsters. (Minecraft and many other games randomly generate terrain, too.) Computers can use fractals and other computer graphics rules to make settings full of trees, mountains, and other natural forms which all look detailed and different from each other, instead of making a human artist manually paint absolutely everything.

Procedural generation can be more complex than this go. For example, there’s the Director AI in Left 4 Dead which not only creates levels but adjusts their difficulty, based on the players’ current state, to keep the pace of the game exciting. And difficulty/pace is only one of many variables that a computer could use to guide its decisions, making them, arguably, artistic decisions, rather than random/meaningless ones.

So much for generating parts of games, but could a computer design a whole game? Arguably, yes. One big project in this vein is Michael Cook’s ANGELINA, which handles everything from level design to a game’s aesthetics and graphics to generating new game mechanics to make playable games. Whether or not people want to play these games is another question – but it should be noted that ANGELINA has taken part in game design competitions with humans, and was not the worst in the bunch.

Video games are very much not my thing, but if you want to know more about computers that design their own games, you can start with Michael Cook’s blog; a lot of other relevant researchers in that field are linked to from there.

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Creative AI, part 3: Stories

How do you teach a computer to write a story? At first, the task seems impossible – to understand everything about the world that could be represented in a story, the computer would have to know as much as you or me. However, several research groups are up to the challenge.

Early groups worked by creating story templates that could be selected between, modified slightly, or filled in with words or concepts from a list. (You or I can also do this sort of thing, if we have a free afternoon, with some simple string manipulation functions. It’s not hard, and is a lot like a very carefully crafted Mad Lib.) However, the more interesting task in computational creativity is to make a system that can understand the characters involved in a story, figure out what they would do, and fit that into a storylike structure without a predefined instruction about how the story should go.

Systems that write stories – TALESPIN, MINSTREL, and MEXICA among them – typically take a single topic, like talking animals or Aztec warriors, and are programmed with a large knowledge base about objects, social reasoning, the actions that can be taken by an agent in this setting, etc.

Unfortunately (based on my not very thorough current searching) it’s much easier to find computer scientists talking about the details of these systems and exactly what knowledge they encode (details which are probably beyond the scope of these posts) than to find examples of the stories they make. The programs that exist today are quite interesting, able to calculate relatively advanced concepts like why people take specific actions, what basic actions are available or unavailable to a specific person, and what might be the consequence of that action. But the examples I can find are all a bit disappointing in a specific way:

The jaguar knight went hunting with the tlatoani. The fisherman hated the tlatoani. The fisherman attacked the tlatoani. The tlatoani attacked the fisherman. The jaguar knight made prisoner the fisherman. (from MEXICA by Iván Román and Rafael Pérez y Pérez)

It seems that, while current computers can represent a logical sequence of events for a story, describing the story in evocative, interesting, emotionally deep, or immersive ways is still a long way off.

This is no problem for certain applications, though. The storytelling advances made by these programs are useful for certain commercial applications in sports, finance, or elsewhere. Programs analyzing data in these fields can automatically generate stories based on their data, which make the most pertinent points easily comprehensible to humans:

Store 9, your sales of Item 6 are far below the other stores in your region. If you are able to up your sales of this product by only 5 units a day, you will be able to increase your profits next month by $1,123. The sales of this product for other stores in your region seem to indicate that this is completely achievable. (example from Narrative Science‘s website)

Computer programs can also automatically generate usable news stories about sports, finance, and other formulaic topics. Not exciting, perhaps; but also not terrible for a practice that grew out of Mad Libs.

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Creative AI, part 2: Music

Although I love music and have some musical training, computer-generated music is very much NOT my area of research, so this will be brief. Don’t confused “brief” with a lack of material, though; computer music researchers are doing AWESOME things.

One very well-established computer musician is named Emmy. Programmed by David Cope (and short for Experiments in Musical Intelligence), Emmy can analyze music by humans and then generate new music designed to sound similar. Continue reading “Creative AI, part 2: Music”

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Autism News, 2015/10/06

Everyone’s still talking about NeuroTribes by Steve Silberman. Here are some more reviews:

A woman named Anna Stubblefield was convicted of raping a nonspeaking disabled man in the UK. Although the man in question is capable of communicating using AAC, his testimony was not used in the trial. If you can deal with the triggers that are inherent in this topic, there is some worthwhile analysis of the case

Meanwhile, science!

The U.S. Department of Education criticized overreliance on ABA in developing education plans for autistic students

Donald Trump attributed autism to the use of vaccines in a US presidential primary debate.

There was some drama at Autcom, a conference for autistic people, because of Autcom’s failure to meet or take seriously people’s access needs, including needs that they’d promised to take seriously in previous years. If you want to read about the drama, here are some good posts:

Misc:

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Autism News, 2015/09/06

This autistic linkspam episode has some links that should have gone in the last one except I forgot to check my feed reader again before posting. 😛 I blame the post-LARP brain that I had that day. Anyway, here are more links.

  • Last news post I linked to a petition about Sharon Joy Kochmeister. Here’s Evil Autie explaining some complications to that case that I didn’t know about [TW abuse]
  • Also here’s a follow-up to Dani and Emma’s post about imposing behaviourism on oneself [TW more abuse]

Meanwhile, there’s been a lot of buzz about a book called NeuroTribes. It’s by an NT author who has extensively researched the history of autistic community and activism.

Also:

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August updates

I’m back at home, piecing together the next steps for my academic work before the new school year starts, and being way way too obsessive about my LARP. It’s also been way too long since I had any writing news for you. BUT!

After the longest dry spell evar, I’ve suddenly made two new poem sales. YAY! (Seriously, according to the Grinder I think I went over 6 months without a non-reprint acceptance. Of course, it’s because I had hardly anything out on submission. Still.)

Both of them are critter poems, and both went to poetry markets I adore. One (the one with the octopi) will be in Strange Horizons. The other (the Hallucigenia sparsa one) will be in an upcoming issue of Liminality.

For those of you who like Twitter, I put together a Twitter list of autistic SFF authors.

Finally, the Invisible anthology – put together by Jim C. Hines, and containing an essay by me (in addition to many other wonderful diverse people) – appeared on the Hugo longlist for Best Related Work. This is quite splendid, and I’m glad the anthology got as much attention as it did. Jim posted saying all the Invisible authors should go do something nice for ourselves, so I bought myself something from iTunes. ^_^

I’m not in it, but if you liked Invisible, you might also consider reading Invisible 2.

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Autism News, 2015/08/24

To start with:

Dating and sex:

Pan-disability posts:

Misc:

Sad Things:

  • Kerima Cevik on how we respond inappropriately to hate crimes against autistic people [TW, um, descriptions of hate crimes?]
  • Sharisa Kochmeister, an autism activist and non-speaking person, was recently put into a nursing home against her will and denied access to the devices that allow her to communicate. Here is a petition to free her
  • Jim Jacobson on his inner autistic child [TW for… I actually don’t know? like I don’t know how to tell if this is literally about Dissociative Identity Disorder or if it is a metaphor? But either way, it’s difficult and important?]