Creative Industry: Fact or Fiction?

In the late 1990's there was a growing realisation that for many 'post industrial' economies and especially the UK, not only had they become dominated by traditional 'service' businesses (banking, finance, retail, logistics, law and other professional service firms) but that the most rapidly growing group of these 'knowledge based' firms were in an ill defined sector that depended on creativity for their source of competitive advantage such as fashion, design, architecture, advertising and PR, books, music, film and TV production, theatre, online communities, video games, museum and gallery exhibitions and other print and screen based media. Many of these firms were young and rapidly growing, there were some large scale businesses in media and advertising but the majority stayed small and had a high attrition rate. In the UK they represented about 8% of GDP but crucially were growing at twice the rate of the economy as a whole. From a policy point of view they attracted a lot of interest - was this the holy grail of the future 'knowledge economy'? Now nearly 10 years on from the UK's declaration of 'cool Britannia' under Tony Blair's New Labour project, it is worth reflecting on what we really know about the 'Creative Industries and Creative Business'. Are they fact or fiction? and what might be the implications for education in the arts and management

Design skills for environmental risk communication. Design in and design of an interdisciplinary workshop

Effective environmental risk management and risk reduction requires an inherently interdisciplinary and cross-sector approach to communication design. The challenging global impact of this area can only be addressed by increasing skills capacity in communication design across disciplines, a challenge which itself requires the design and delivery of new expert training. This paper reports on the design of and findings from an interdisciplinary, problem-based workshop to build risk communication skills, held at the World Bank’s Understanding Risk 2018 conference, Mexico City. The workshop combined high competence interdisciplinary participants (including designers) with detailed real-world scenarios in a 24-hour ‘pressure cooker’ working environment, designed by a team of interdisciplinary young professionals. The results show engagement from participants across the disciplines involved, who produced outcomes with a community education and user-centred focus. The workshop highlighted that more direct, critical, engagement from the design community is needed in educating about, and delivering, environmental risk communication

Worker and workplace Artificial Intelligence (AI) coexistence: Emerging themes and research agenda

Workplace Artificial Intelligence (AI) helps organisations increase operational efficiency, enable faster-informed decisions, and innovate products and services. While there is a plethora of information about how AI may provide value to workplaces, research on how workers and AI can coexist in workplaces is evolving. It is critical to explore emerging themes and research agendas to understand the trajectory of scholarly research in this area. This study's overarching research question is how workers will coexist with AI in workplaces. A search protocol was employed to find relevant articles in Scopus, ProQuest, and Web of Science databases based on appropriate and specific keywords and article inclusion and exclusion criteria. We identified four themes: (1) Workers' distrust in workplace AI stems from perceiving it as a job threat, (2) Workplace AI entices worker-AI interactions by offering to augment worker abilities, (3) AI and worker coexistence require workers' technical, human, and conceptual skills, and (4) Workers need ongoing reskilling and upskilling to contribute to a symbiotic relationship with workplace AI. We then developed four propositions with relevant research questions for future research. This review makes four contributions: (1) it argues that an existential argument better explains workers' distrust in AI, (2) it gathers the required skills for worker and AI coexistence and groups them into technical, human, and conceptual skills, (3) it suggests that technical skills benefit coexistence but cannot outweigh human and conceptual skills, and (4) it offers 20 evidence-informed research questions to guide future scholarly inquiries

An interdisciplinary approach to the study of colour in portuguese manuscript illuminations

Dissertação apresentada para obtenção do Grau de Doutor em Conservação e Restauro, especialidade Teoria, História e Técnicas, pela Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Faculdade de Ciências e TecnologiaThis dissertation explores the materials used and practice undertaken by medievalist illuminators to produce some remarkable Portuguese illuminations from the 12th and 13th centuries. New techniques and applications were also explored to better characterize the paints’ composition. In the first part of this dissertation a methodology to study the illuminations of nine Lorvão scriptorium manuscripts, selected as representative and for being suitable for an analytical study, was developed and used to characterize the Lorvão’s scriptorium medieval palette. Further studies were performed in two very important dated manuscripts: Apocalypse and Book of Birds. Comparing them with other Portuguese or European copies it was concluded that the Lorvão Apocalypse differs from other contemporaneous Beatus Commentaries, either on the uniqueness of the colours used –orange, red and yellow- or on iconographic choices; and the Book of Birds was found to have many similarities with the copy made on Santa Cruz monastery. Based on medieval written sources, a database of paint reconstructions was built and characterized by HPLC-DAD, UV-VIS, μ-FTIR, μ-EDXRF, μ-Raman and μ-spectrofluorimetry. It allowed an easier description of the manuscripts’ paints components by non-invasive techniques: binders, organic and inorganic pigments. The last ones were found singly applied or in a mixture of two or three pigments, such as the orange paint of the Apocalypse or the blue paint of the Book of Birds. When mixtures were found, EDXRF analysis was used to quantify the inorganic paint components. The red lead degradation product in most of orange paint applied on Lorvão Apocalypse’s folia was recognized as galena, using μ-Raman and XRD techniques. The second part of this dissertation outcomes from the study of red organic colorants that could be expected in medieval illumination manuscripts, based on madder, lac dye and cochineal. Their main chromophores: alizarin, purpurin, acid laccaic A and carminic acid, were photochemically and photophysically characterized. Photodegradation studies were performed in homogeneous (alizarin, purpurin and carminic acid) and heterogeneous media. Based on this study, the use of microspectrofluorimetry as a new technique to identify red colorants was applied on red lake paint reconstructions, on the Book of Birds, on millenary Andean textiles (a collaboration with Museum of Fine Arts, Boston) and applied on impressionists’ (Vincent van Gogh or Pissarro) paintings’ cross-sections (a collaboration with Red Lakes international project). It revealed that it is possible to characterize red lake pigments and paints based on alizarin, purpurin and eosin (weak, medium and strong emitters) and that can also be used as a semi-quantitative method for madder lake pigments, enabling the determination of purpurin lake ratio in a mixture of purpurin and alizarin.FCT and Feder for funding this work through the projects POCTI/EAT/33782/2000, POCI/QUI/55672/2004 and PTDC/EAT/65445/2006, and also the PhD grant SFRH/BD/36130/200

ALMA: ALgorithm Modeling Application

As of today, the most recent trend in information technology is the employment of large-scale data analytic methods powered by Artificial Intelligence (AI), influencing the priorities of businesses and research centers all over the world. However, due to both the lack of specialized talent and the need for greater compute, less established businesses struggle to adopt such endeavors, with major technological mega-corporations such as Microsoft, Facebook and Google taking the upper hand in this uneven playing field. Therefore, in an attempt to promote the democratization of AI and increase the efficiency of data scientists, this work proposes a novel no-code/low-code AI platform: the ALgorithm Modeling Application (ALMA). Moreover, as the state of the art of such platforms is still gradually maturing, current solutions often fail into encompassing security/safety aspects directly into their process. In that respect, the solution proposed in this thesis aims not only to achieve greater development and deployment efficiency while building machine learning applications but also to build upon others by addressing the inherent pitfalls of AI through a ”secure by design” philosophy.Atualmente, a tendência mais recente no domínio das tecnologias de informação e a utilização de métodos de análise de dados baseados em Inteligência Artificial (IA), influenciando as prioridades das empresas e centros de investigação de todo o mundo. No entanto, devido à falta de talento especializado no mercado e a necessidade de obter equipamentos com maior capacidade de computação, negócios menos estabelecidos têm maiores dificuldades em realizar esse tipo de investimentos quando comparados a grandes empresas tecnológicas como a Microsoft, o Facebook e a Google. Deste modo, na tentativa de promover a democratização da IA e aumentar a eficiência dos cientistas de dados, este trabalho propõe uma nova plataforma de no-code/low- code: “THe Algorithm Modeling Application” (ALMA). Por outro lado, e visto que a maioria das soluções atuais falham em abranger aspetos de segurança relativos ˜ a IA diretamente no seu processo, a solução proposta nesta tese visa não só alcançar maior eficiência na construção de soluções baseadas em IA, mas também abordar as questões de segurança implícitas ao seu uso

American Cities in Post- Apocalyptic Science Fiction

Visions of the American city in post-apocalyptic ruin permeate literary and popular fiction, across print, visual, audio and digital media. American Cities in Post-Apocalyptic Science Fiction explores the prevalence of these representations in American culture, drawing from a wide range of primary and critical works from the early-twentieth century to today. Beginning with science fiction in literary magazines, before taking in radio dramas, film, video games and expansive transmedia franchises, Robert Yeates argues that post-apocalyptic representations of the American city are uniquely suited for explorations of contemporary urban issues. Examining how the post-apocalyptic American city has been repeatedly adapted and repurposed to new and developing media over the last century, this book reveals that the content and form of such texts work together to create vivid and immersive fictional spaces in ways that would otherwise not be possible. Chapters present media-specific analyses of these texts, situating them within their historical contexts and the broader history of representations of urban ruins in American fiction. Original in its scope and cross-media approach, American Cities in Post-Apocalyptic Science Fiction both illuminates little-studied texts and provides provocative new readings of familiar works such as Blade Runner and The Walking Dead, placing them within the larger historical context of imaginings of the American city in ruins