3,032 research outputs found

    Researching animal research: What the humanities and social sciences can contribute to laboratory animal science and welfare

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    Every year around 80 million scientific procedures are carried out on animals globally. These experiments have the potential to generate new understandings of biology and clinical treatments. They also give rise to ongoing societal debate.This book demonstrates how the humanities and social sciences can contribute to understanding what is created through animal procedures - including constitutional forms of research governance, different institutional cultures of care, the professional careers of scientists and veterinarians, collaborations with patients and publics, and research animals, specially bred for experiments or surplus to requirements.Developing the idea of the animal research nexus, this book explores how connections and disconnections are made between these different elements, how these have reshaped each other historically, and how they configure the current practice and policy of UK animal research

    Multidisciplinary perspectives on Artificial Intelligence and the law

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    This open access book presents an interdisciplinary, multi-authored, edited collection of chapters on Artificial Intelligence (‘AI’) and the Law. AI technology has come to play a central role in the modern data economy. Through a combination of increased computing power, the growing availability of data and the advancement of algorithms, AI has now become an umbrella term for some of the most transformational technological breakthroughs of this age. The importance of AI stems from both the opportunities that it offers and the challenges that it entails. While AI applications hold the promise of economic growth and efficiency gains, they also create significant risks and uncertainty. The potential and perils of AI have thus come to dominate modern discussions of technology and ethics – and although AI was initially allowed to largely develop without guidelines or rules, few would deny that the law is set to play a fundamental role in shaping the future of AI. As the debate over AI is far from over, the need for rigorous analysis has never been greater. This book thus brings together contributors from different fields and backgrounds to explore how the law might provide answers to some of the most pressing questions raised by AI. An outcome of the Católica Research Centre for the Future of Law and its interdisciplinary working group on Law and Artificial Intelligence, it includes contributions by leading scholars in the fields of technology, ethics and the law.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

    Protecting Privacy in Indian Schools: Regulating AI-based Technologies' Design, Development and Deployment

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    Education is one of the priority areas for the Indian government, where Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies are touted to bring digital transformation. Several Indian states have also started deploying facial recognition-enabled CCTV cameras, emotion recognition technologies, fingerprint scanners, and Radio frequency identification tags in their schools to provide personalised recommendations, ensure student security, and predict the drop-out rate of students but also provide 360-degree information of a student. Further, Integrating Aadhaar (digital identity card that works on biometric data) across AI technologies and learning and management systems (LMS) renders schools a ‘panopticon’. Certain technologies or systems like Aadhaar, CCTV cameras, GPS Systems, RFID tags, and learning management systems are used primarily for continuous data collection, storage, and retention purposes. Though they cannot be termed AI technologies per se, they are fundamental for designing and developing AI systems like facial, fingerprint, and emotion recognition technologies. The large amount of student data collected speedily through the former technologies is used to create an algorithm for the latter-stated AI systems. Once algorithms are processed using machine learning (ML) techniques, they learn correlations between multiple datasets predicting each student’s identity, decisions, grades, learning growth, tendency to drop out, and other behavioural characteristics. Such autonomous and repetitive collection, processing, storage, and retention of student data without effective data protection legislation endangers student privacy. The algorithmic predictions by AI technologies are an avatar of the data fed into the system. An AI technology is as good as the person collecting the data, processing it for a relevant and valuable output, and regularly evaluating the inputs going inside an AI model. An AI model can produce inaccurate predictions if the person overlooks any relevant data. However, the state, school administrations and parents’ belief in AI technologies as a panacea to student security and educational development overlooks the context in which ‘data practices’ are conducted. A right to privacy in an AI age is inextricably connected to data practices where data gets ‘cooked’. Thus, data protection legislation operating without understanding and regulating such data practices will remain ineffective in safeguarding privacy. The thesis undergoes interdisciplinary research that enables a better understanding of the interplay of data practices of AI technologies with social practices of an Indian school, which the present Indian data protection legislation overlooks, endangering students’ privacy from designing and developing to deploying stages of an AI model. The thesis recommends the Indian legislature frame better legislation equipped for the AI/ML age and the Indian judiciary on evaluating the legality and reasonability of designing, developing, and deploying such technologies in schools

    Digitalization and Development

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    This book examines the diffusion of digitalization and Industry 4.0 technologies in Malaysia by focusing on the ecosystem critical for its expansion. The chapters examine the digital proliferation in major sectors of agriculture, manufacturing, e-commerce and services, as well as the intermediary organizations essential for the orderly performance of socioeconomic agents. The book incisively reviews policy instruments critical for the effective and orderly development of the embedding organizations, and the regulatory framework needed to quicken the appropriation of socioeconomic synergies from digitalization and Industry 4.0 technologies. It highlights the importance of collaboration between government, academic and industry partners, as well as makes key recommendations on how to encourage adoption of IR4.0 technologies in the short- and long-term. This book bridges the concepts and applications of digitalization and Industry 4.0 and will be a must-read for policy makers seeking to quicken the adoption of its technologies

    Software Design Change Artifacts Generation through Software Architectural Change Detection and Categorisation

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    Software is solely designed, implemented, tested, and inspected by expert people, unlike other engineering projects where they are mostly implemented by workers (non-experts) after designing by engineers. Researchers and practitioners have linked software bugs, security holes, problematic integration of changes, complex-to-understand codebase, unwarranted mental pressure, and so on in software development and maintenance to inconsistent and complex design and a lack of ways to easily understand what is going on and what to plan in a software system. The unavailability of proper information and insights needed by the development teams to make good decisions makes these challenges worse. Therefore, software design documents and other insightful information extraction are essential to reduce the above mentioned anomalies. Moreover, architectural design artifacts extraction is required to create the developer’s profile to be available to the market for many crucial scenarios. To that end, architectural change detection, categorization, and change description generation are crucial because they are the primary artifacts to trace other software artifacts. However, it is not feasible for humans to analyze all the changes for a single release for detecting change and impact because it is time-consuming, laborious, costly, and inconsistent. In this thesis, we conduct six studies considering the mentioned challenges to automate the architectural change information extraction and document generation that could potentially assist the development and maintenance teams. In particular, (1) we detect architectural changes using lightweight techniques leveraging textual and codebase properties, (2) categorize them considering intelligent perspectives, and (3) generate design change documents by exploiting precise contexts of components’ relations and change purposes which were previously unexplored. Our experiment using 4000+ architectural change samples and 200+ design change documents suggests that our proposed approaches are promising in accuracy and scalability to deploy frequently. Our proposed change detection approach can detect up to 100% of the architectural change instances (and is very scalable). On the other hand, our proposed change classifier’s F1 score is 70%, which is promising given the challenges. Finally, our proposed system can produce descriptive design change artifacts with 75% significance. Since most of our studies are foundational, our approaches and prepared datasets can be used as baselines for advancing research in design change information extraction and documentation

    Mapping the Focal Points of WordPress: A Software and Critical Code Analysis

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    Programming languages or code can be examined through numerous analytical lenses. This project is a critical analysis of WordPress, a prevalent web content management system, applying four modes of inquiry. The project draws on theoretical perspectives and areas of study in media, software, platforms, code, language, and power structures. The applied research is based on Critical Code Studies, an interdisciplinary field of study that holds the potential as a theoretical lens and methodological toolkit to understand computational code beyond its function. The project begins with a critical code analysis of WordPress, examining its origins and source code and mapping selected vulnerabilities. An examination of the influence of digital and computational thinking follows this. The work also explores the intersection of code patching and vulnerability management and how code shapes our sense of control, trust, and empathy, ultimately arguing that a rhetorical-cultural lens can be used to better understand code\u27s controlling influence. Recurring themes throughout these analyses and observations are the connections to power and vulnerability in WordPress\u27 code and how cultural, processual, rhetorical, and ethical implications can be expressed through its code, creating a particular worldview. Code\u27s emergent properties help illustrate how human values and practices (e.g., empathy, aesthetics, language, and trust) become encoded in software design and how people perceive the software through its worldview. These connected analyses reveal cultural, processual, and vulnerability focal points and the influence these entanglements have concerning WordPress as code, software, and platform. WordPress is a complex sociotechnical platform worthy of further study, as is the interdisciplinary merging of theoretical perspectives and disciplines to critically examine code. Ultimately, this project helps further enrich the field by introducing focal points in code, examining sociocultural phenomena within the code, and offering techniques to apply critical code methods

    “So what if ChatGPT wrote it?” Multidisciplinary perspectives on opportunities, challenges and implications of generative conversational AI for research, practice and policy

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    Transformative artificially intelligent tools, such as ChatGPT, designed to generate sophisticated text indistinguishable from that produced by a human, are applicable across a wide range of contexts. The technology presents opportunities as well as, often ethical and legal, challenges, and has the potential for both positive and negative impacts for organisations, society, and individuals. Offering multi-disciplinary insight into some of these, this article brings together 43 contributions from experts in fields such as computer science, marketing, information systems, education, policy, hospitality and tourism, management, publishing, and nursing. The contributors acknowledge ChatGPT’s capabilities to enhance productivity and suggest that it is likely to offer significant gains in the banking, hospitality and tourism, and information technology industries, and enhance business activities, such as management and marketing. Nevertheless, they also consider its limitations, disruptions to practices, threats to privacy and security, and consequences of biases, misuse, and misinformation. However, opinion is split on whether ChatGPT’s use should be restricted or legislated. Drawing on these contributions, the article identifies questions requiring further research across three thematic areas: knowledge, transparency, and ethics; digital transformation of organisations and societies; and teaching, learning, and scholarly research. The avenues for further research include: identifying skills, resources, and capabilities needed to handle generative AI; examining biases of generative AI attributable to training datasets and processes; exploring business and societal contexts best suited for generative AI implementation; determining optimal combinations of human and generative AI for various tasks; identifying ways to assess accuracy of text produced by generative AI; and uncovering the ethical and legal issues in using generative AI across different contexts

    Archaeological palaeoenvironmental archives: challenges and potential

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    This Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) sponsored collaborative doctoral project represents one of the most significant efforts to collate quantitative and qualitative data that can elucidate practices related to archaeological palaeoenvironmental archiving in England. The research has revealed that archived palaeoenvironmental remains are valuable resources for archaeological research and can clarify subjects that include the adoption and importation of exotic species, plant and insect invasion, human health and diet, and plant and animal husbandry practices. In addition to scientific research, archived palaeoenvironmental remains can provide evidence-based narratives of human resilience and climate change and offer evidence of the scientific process, making them ideal resources for public science engagement. These areas of potential have been realised at an imperative time; given that waterlogged palaeoenvironmental remains at significant sites such as Star Carr, Must Farm, and Flag Fen, archaeological deposits in towns and cities are at risk of decay due to climate change-related factors, and unsustainable agricultural practices. Innovative approaches to collecting and archiving palaeoenvironmental remains and maintaining existing archives will permit the creation of an accessible and thorough national resource that can service archaeologists and researchers in the related fields of biology and natural history. Furthermore, a concerted effort to recognise absences in archaeological archives, matched by an effort to supply these deficiencies, can produce a resource that can contribute to an enduring geographical and temporal record of England's biodiversity, which can be used in perpetuity in the face of diminishing archaeological and contemporary natural resources. To realise these opportunities, particular challenges must be overcome. The most prominent of these include inconsistent collection policies resulting from pressures associated with shortages in storage capacity and declining specialist knowledge in museums and repositories combined with variable curation practices. Many of these challenges can be resolved by developing a dedicated storage facility that can focus on the ongoing conservation and curation of palaeoenvironmental remains. Combined with an OASIS + module designed to handle and disseminate data pertaining to palaeoenvironmental archives, remains would be findable, accessible, and interoperable with biological archives and collections worldwide. Providing a national centre for curating palaeoenvironmental remains and a dedicated digital repository will require significant funding. Funding sources could be identified through collaboration with other disciplines. If sufficient funding cannot be identified, options that would require less financial investment, such as high-level archive audits and the production of guidance documents, will be able to assist all stakeholders with the improved curation, management, and promotion of the archived resource

    AI: Limits and Prospects of Artificial Intelligence

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    The emergence of artificial intelligence has triggered enthusiasm and promise of boundless opportunities as much as uncertainty about its limits. The contributions to this volume explore the limits of AI, describe the necessary conditions for its functionality, reveal its attendant technical and social problems, and present some existing and potential solutions. At the same time, the contributors highlight the societal and attending economic hopes and fears, utopias and dystopias that are associated with the current and future development of artificial intelligence

    Microcredentials to support PBL

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