Inclusion4EU: Co-Designing a Framework for Inclusive Software Design and Development.

Digital technology is now pervasive, however, not all groups have uniformly benefitted from technological changes and some groups have been left behind or digitally excluded. Comprehensive data from the 2017 Current Population Survey shows that older people and persons with disabilities still lag behind in computer and internet access. Furthermore unique ethical, privacy and safety implications exist for the use of technology for older persons and people with disabilities and careful reflection is required to incorporate these aspects, which are not always part of a traditional software lifecycle. In this paper we present the Inclusion4EU project that aims to co-design a new framework, guidelines and checklists for inclusive software design and development with end-users from excluded categories, academics with expertise in human-computer interaction and industry practitioners from software engineering.

Discussion on the Relationship between Computation, Information, Cognition, and Their Embodiment.

Three special issues of Entropy journal have been dedicated to the topics of "Information-Processing and Embodied, Embedded, Enactive Cognition". They addressed morphological computing, cognitive agency, and the evolution of cognition. The contributions show the diversity of views present in the research community on the topic of computation and its relation to cognition. This paper is an attempt to elucidate current debates on computation that are central to cognitive science. It is written in the form of a dialog between two authors representing two opposed positions regarding the issue of what computation is and could be, and how it can be related to cognition. Given the different backgrounds of the two researchers, which span physics, philosophy of computing and information, cognitive science, and philosophy, we found the discussions in the form of Socratic dialogue appropriate for this multidisciplinary/cross-disciplinary conceptual analysis. We proceed as follows. First, the proponent (GDC) introduces the info-computational framework as a naturalistic model of embodied, embedded, and enacted cognition. Next, objections are raised by the critic (MM) from the point of view of the new mechanistic approach to explanation. Subsequently, the proponent and the critic provide their replies. The conclusion is that there is a fundamental role for computation, understood as information processing, in the understanding of embodied cognition.

Cognition as Morphological/Morphogenetic Embodied Computation In Vivo.

Cognition, historically considered uniquely human capacity, has been recently found to be the ability of all living organisms, from single cells and up. This study approaches cognition from an info-computational stance, in which structures in nature are seen as information, and processes (information dynamics) are seen as computation, from the perspective of a cognizing agent. Cognition is understood as a network of concurrent morphological/morphogenetic computations unfolding as a result of self-assembly, self-organization, and autopoiesis of physical, chemical, and biological agents. The present-day human-centric view of cognition still prevailing in major encyclopedias has a variety of open problems. This article considers recent research about morphological computation, morphogenesis, agency, basal cognition, extended evolutionary synthesis, free energy principle, cognition as Bayesian learning, active inference, and related topics, offering new theoretical and practical perspectives on problems inherent to the old computationalist cognitive models which were based on abstract symbol processing, and unaware of actual physical constraints and affordances of the embodiment of cognizing agents. A better understanding of cognition is centrally important for future artificial intelligence, robotics, medicine, and related fields.