The organization and management of the Virtual Astronomical Observatory

The U.S. Virtual Astronomical Observatory (VAO; http://www.us-vao.org/) has been in operation since May 2010. Its goal is to enable new science through efficient integration of distributed multi-wavelength data. This paper describes the management and organization of the VAO, and emphasizes the techniques used to ensure efficiency in a distributed organization. Management methods include using an annual program plan as the basis for establishing contracts with member organizations, regular communication, and monitoring of processes.Comment: 9 pages, 3 figures. SPIE Conference 8449: Modeling, Systems Engineering, and Project Management for Astronomy

The impact of Artificial Intelligence on Design Thinking practice: Insights from the Ecosystem of Startups

Design Thinking (DT) is spreading out in the managerial community as an alternative way to innovate products and services respect to the classical stage-gate model mostly linked to technology-push innovative patterns. At the same time few disruptive technologies – like Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning – are impacting the ways companies manage their knowledge and activate innovation and design processes. What is the impact that AI is exerting on DT practices? What are the main changes that DT is undergoing? These questions are analyzed in this paper, where the aim consists in increasing the understanding of the transformation that is occurring in DT and more general in innovation practices. Through a qualitative case study analysis made on startups offering AI based solutions supporting multiple or individual DT phases, the article pinpoints few main changes: i) a facilitation in blending the right mix of cultures and creative attitudes in innovation teams; ii) the empowerment of the research phase where statistical significance is gained and user analysis are less observer-biased; iii) the automatization of the prototyping and learning phases

From Smart Cities To Playable Cities. Towards Playful Intelligence In The Urban Environment

In the last decade, we have seen the rise of urban play as a tool for community building, and city-making and Western society is actively focusing on play/playfulness and intelligent systems as a way to approach complex challenges and emergent situations. In this paper, we aim to initiate a dialogue between game scholars and architects. Like many creative professions, we believe that the architectural practice may benefit significantly from having more design methodologies at hand, thus improving lateral thinking. We aim at providing new conceptual and operative tools to discuss and reflect on how games and smart systems facilitate long-term the shift from the Smart Cities to the Playable one, where citizens/players have the opportunity to hack the city and use the smart city’s data and digital technology for their purposes to reactivate the urban environment

Developing Responsible Research and Innovation for Robots

The file attached to this record is the author's final peer reviewed version. The Publisher's final version can be found by following the DOI link.This paper develops a framework for responsible research and innovation (RRI) in robot design for roboticists from a study of the processes involved in the design and engineering of a range of robots including standard manufacturing robots, humanoid robots, environmental scanning robots and robot swarms. The importance of an iterative approach to design, the nature of transitions between design phases, and issues of uncertainty and complexity are examined for their ethical content. A cycle of RRI thinking based on reconnoitre, realisation, reflection, response and review is described which aligns with the general characterisation of robot engineering processes. Additionally the importance of supporting communities, knowledge bases and tools for assessment and analysis is noted

Informatics solutions for large ocean optics datasets

Ocean Optics XXI, Glasgow, Scotland October 8-12 2012Lack of observations that span the wide range of critical space and time scales continues to limit many aspects of oceanography. As ocean observatories and observing networks mature, the role for optical technologies and approaches in helping to overcome this limitation continues to grow. As a result the quantity and complexity of data produced is increasing at a pace that threatens to overwhelm the capacity of individual researchers who must cope with large high-resolution datasets, complex, multi-stage analyses, and the challenges of preserving sufficient metadata and provenance information to ensure reproducibility and avoid costly reprocessing or data loss. We have developed approaches to address these new challenges in the context of a case study involving very large numbers (~1 billion) of images collected at coastal observatories by Imaging FlowCytobot, an automated submersible flow cytometer that produces high resolution images of plankton and other microscopic particles at rates up to 10 Hz for months to years. By developing partnerships amongst oceanographers generating and using such data and computer scientists focused on improving science outcomes, we have prototyped a replicable system. It provides simple and ubiquitous access to observational data and products via web services in standard formats; accelerates image processing by enabling algorithms developed with desktop applications to be rapidly deployed and evaluated on shared, high-performance servers; and improves data integrity by replacing error-prone manual data management processes with generalized, automated services. The informatics system is currently in operation for multiple Imaging FlowCytobot datasets and being tested with other types of ocean imagery.This research was supported by grants from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, NSF, NASA, and ONR (NOPP)

Experiential AI: A transdisciplinary framework for legibility and agency in AI

Experiential AI is presented as a research agenda in which scientists and artists come together to investigate the entanglements between humans and machines, and an approach to human-machine learning and development where knowledge is created through the transformation of experience. The paper discusses advances and limitations in the field of explainable AI; the contribution the arts can offer to address those limitations; and methods to bring creative practice together with emerging technology to create rich experiences that shed light on novel socio-technical systems, changing the way that publics, scientists and practitioners think about AI.Comment: 10 pages, 3 appendice

Network Shapes Design Activities. ICT Supporting Open and Shared Design Processes

The network paradigm refers to individuals as being continually involved in processes of sharing and being able to organize into creative communities of practice and knowledge. Some of these communities are developing and act creatively in the digital spaces of the net. They explore and push forward the ICT technology boundaries: everyday we observe on the Internet flourishing sources and authorities, new ways to organize information and public heritage worked out by different people and organizations that show much more richness everyday and become more and more interesting. Current researches on “creativity support tools” investigate the creative process as situated cognition activity in physical and technological spaces made up of tools such as creativity labs for innovation and frameworks for knowledge intensive activities. (E.g. L3D lab in Chicago, Fraunhofer Institutes in Germany). Research is revealing that creativity spaces should be differently designed for each creative action, which manages a particular kind of knowledge and needs to be supported by specific tools. Design activity is linked to the design space in which it occurs. It is a knowledge transfer process based on tools, from pencil to cognitive maps: knowledge comes steadily into shape until it becomes a designed artifact. It is a creative and cooperative action itself, presenting the same attributes as network communities. The ongoing research is hosted at Politeca, a Design Knowledge Centre at Politecnico di Milano focusing on network tools placed into design spaces, exploring which kind of support they can provide in design processes. The aim of research is to verify the need and test the use of tools in design contexts by two different design communities: the design student community (in faculty labs and courses) and the practitioner community (knowledge at work in different design teams). The paper describes the first phase of experiments. We study design activities “in situ” through participant observation methods derived from ethno methodology; we are creating a sort of “designers’ observatory” from which we will able to explore design processes from the point of view of both designers and researchers. In order to turn research findings into actions, forthcoming phases will verify emerging needs of knowledge by allowing designers to try out their work directly with a series of ICT design tools, and then providing for them a custom framework of tools to use. Network tools are technology to act on and experience knowledge, consistently with our ideas that sharing heightens knowledge and that design activity involves sharing expertise. Proceeding from this, we aim to shape toolkits for design activities in order to enhance creative sharing and to contribute to the development of a knowledge base for design made up of a dialogue between resources and experiences