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Children today are more connected and active on the Internet. Their extensive use of online social networks, which ultimately could have perplexing effects on the recognition of their identity and personality, has caused grave social concerns. In addition there is a lack of actual physical communication among children due to their preoccupation with the online self. To address these issues, an interactive robotic toy called Petimo was developed. We believe this introduction of new physical dimension improves safety and enjoyment of children in the social networking arena. As a proof-of-concept, a 3D virtual world called Petimo World is developed. It incorporates basic features of traditional online social networks to provide children collaborative interaction and enjoyment with their friends. The concept of Petimo could be extended to any social network to create childrens applications to promote physical interaction and enhance enjoyment and safety issues in social networks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Computer technology has become exceedingly integrated with modern culture, which prompted us to introduce and explore the avenues of integrating aesthetics with technology, familiar ground of modern society. With the intention of promoting aesthetic sensibilities generated in poetry, we introduce a poetry generating system called "Poetry Mix-up" which encourages users to experience the creation of a "remixed" variety of poetry by sending a simple SMS. In this system, WordNet-based Word Sense Disambiguating (WSD) and topic summarizing algorithms are implemented to understand the input short messages which will be categorized into several main topics. Based on the topics and the content of the input message, the system creates a new poem by mixing existing poem lines. The preliminary user study shows that Poetry Mix-up could be a new form of social and cultural communication in the digital era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]