Gray areas inside black boxes: Tracing actor-networks and ethics in professional design practice

In this study, I analyze professional designers’ experiences of exercising agency and enacting ethics in design practice. This research is based on a focus group and a series of individual interviews with design and technology practitioners at technology companies and design consultancies. First, based on grounded theory analysis, I present a thematic analysis of ethical issues in professional design practice and the mitigating strategies used by designers. Second, based on actor-network theory (ANT), I present three vignettes to describe the human and nonhuman networks of professional designers and how they increase agency and ethics in design. The contributions of this work include an application of actor-network theory to professional design practice, an empirical account of the human and nonhuman networks of professional design practice, and descriptions of how agency and ethical responsibility are distributed and shared across humans and nonhumans

Advancements in Adversarially-Resilient Consensus and Safety-Critical Control for Multi-Agent Networks

The capabilities of and demand for complex autonomous multi-agent systems, including networks of unmanned aerial vehicles and mobile robots, are rapidly increasing in both research and industry settings. As the size and complexity of these systems increase, dealing with faults and failures becomes a crucial element that must be accounted for when performing control design. In addition, the last decade has witnessed an ever-accelerating proliferation of adversarial attacks on cyber-physical systems across the globe. In response to these challenges, recent years have seen an increased focus on resilience of multi-agent systems to faults and adversarial attacks. Broadly speaking, resilience refers to the ability of a system to accomplish control or performance objectives despite the presence of faults or attacks. Ensuring the resilience of cyber-physical systems is an interdisciplinary endeavor that can be tackled using a variety of methodologies. This dissertation approaches the resilience of such systems from a control-theoretic viewpoint and presents several novel advancements in resilient control methodologies. First, advancements in resilient consensus techniques are presented that allow normally-behaving agents to achieve state agreement in the presence of adversarial misinformation. Second, graph theoretic tools for constructing and analyzing the resilience of multi-agent networks are derived. Third, a method for resilient broadcasting vector-valued information from a set of leaders to a set of followers in the presence of adversarial misinformation is presented, and these results are applied to the problem of propagating entire knowledge of time-varying Bezier-curve-based trajectories from leaders to followers. Finally, novel results are presented for guaranteeing safety preservation of heterogeneous control-affine multi-agent systems with sampled-data dynamics in the presence of adversarial agents.PHDAerospace EngineeringUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/168102/1/usevitch_1.pd

Data ethics : building trust : how digital technologies can serve humanity

Data is the magic word of the 21st century. As oil in the 20th century and electricity in the 19th century: For citizens, data means support in daily life in almost all activities, from watch to laptop, from kitchen to car, from mobile phone to politics. For business and politics, data means power, dominance, winning the race. Data can be used for good and bad, for services and hacking, for medicine and arms race. How can we build trust in this complex and ambiguous data world? How can digital technologies serve humanity? The 45 articles in this book represent a broad range of ethical reflections and recommendations in eight sections: a) Values, Trust and Law, b) AI, Robots and Humans, c) Health and Neuroscience, d) Religions for Digital Justice, e) Farming, Business, Finance, f) Security, War, Peace, g) Data Governance, Geopolitics, h) Media, Education, Communication. The authors and institutions come from all continents. The book serves as reading material for teachers, students, policy makers, politicians, business, hospitals, NGOs and religious organisations alike. It is an invitation for dialogue, debate and building trust! The book is a continuation of the volume “Cyber Ethics 4.0” published in 2018 by the same editors

Changing Time - Shaping World

A World of Changemakers - how can a hybrid arts lecture series concept in e-learning create attitudes and shape skills as a playful and critical thinking navigator in an uncertain world? To re-create meaning is an interdisciplinary cross-sectional task of our zeitgeist in a civil society. The international contributors represent key roles in relevant philosophical, technical or economic debates, non-university community art & design projects or companies

Changing Time - Shaping World: Changemakers in Arts & Education

A World of Changemakers - how can a hybrid arts lecture series concept in e-learning create attitudes and shape skills as a playful and critical thinking navigator in an uncertain world? To re-create meaning is an interdisciplinary cross-sectional task of our zeitgeist in a civil society. The international contributors represent key roles in relevant philosophical, technical or economic debates, non-university community art & design projects or companies

Human-Machine Communication: Complete Volume. Volume 2

This is the complete volume of HMC Volume 2

Changing Time - Shaping World

A World of Changemakers - how can a hybrid arts lecture series concept in e-learning create attitudes and shape skills as a playful and critical thinking navigator in an uncertain world? To re-create meaning is an interdisciplinary cross-sectional task of our zeitgeist in a civil society. The international contributors represent key roles in relevant philosophical, technical or economic debates, non-university community art & design projects or companies

Making mathematics matter: professional development improving outcomes in high-poverty environments

This research study is a mixed – methods quantitative and qualitative study that analyzed data from an intensive, long – term professional development project named, Project : Making Mathematics Matter. (PM3) carried out in two low – performing, high – poverty districts. Two of the districts served as treatment districts and ALL teachers (general education, special education, ELL) who taught mathematics to students in grades 4-8 participated in a four-year PM3 mathematical intervention. Three elements identified in the research as effective components in mathematics professional development served as foundational for this project. They were: teachers attended monthly institutes focused on deepening the pedagogical, content knowledge for teaching mathematics; teachers received on-site coaching from an experienced mathematics educator to support implementation of new instructional strategies; and teachers participated in monthly, collegial, grade band meetings facilitated by their coach. This studys analyses focused around three areas: 1. increased pedagogical knowledge for teaching mathematics as measured by the Learning Mathematics for Teaching (LMT) assessment (Hill, Schilling, & Ball, 2004); 2. improved mathematics instructional quality as measured by the SAMPI Classroom Observational Protocol; 3. increased mathematics performance of students as measured on the state-wide MEAP test. Research findings were: 1. LMT data collected at the beginning, middle, and end of PM3 showed treatment teachers significantly increased their pedagogical, content knowledge for teaching mathematics over their matched-comparison teachers; 2. Analyses of SAMPI data demonstrated teachers significantly improved the quality of their classroom instruction; 3. Analyzing sets of MEAP student scale scores by grade and year, there was a significant interaction between district of the student and the year, during and following treatment teachers participation in PM3. Where in 2005, all sets of treatment scale scores were significantly different and lower than comparison scores, as the years of treatment teacher participation in PM3 increased many sets of compared sets of MEAP scores were no longer significantly different. This study suggests a connection between the increased content knowledge of teachers, the improved quality of classroom instruction, and the increased mathematics achievement of their students in high – poverty, low ndash performing districts