23 research outputs found
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Excellentia Eminentia Effectio
"In these pages you will learn about the fascinating research endeavors that each of our faculty members is undertaking. We have divided their research into the broad categories of health, sustainability, information, and systems. While we recognize the imperfect nature of categorizing research that, by its very nature may be interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary, we nonetheless believe it will be helpful as a way to see the depth and breadth of our research endeavors within each grouping. As you read the profiles on these pages, I know you will begin to appreciate that, taken as a whole, the research spectrum at Columbia Engineering is exceptional and that, as our professors go about their work, they are at the cusp of making breakthroughs that will have a major impact on the way we live our lives today and tomorrow.
Scientific, Health and Social Aspects of the Food Industry
This book presents the wisdom, knowledge and expertise of the food industry that ensures the supply of food to maintain the health, comfort, and wellbeing of humankind. The global food industry has the largest market: the world population of seven billion people. The book pioneers life-saving innovations and assists in the fight against world hunger and food shortages that threaten human essentials such as water and energy supply. Floods, droughts, fires, storms, climate change, global warming and greenhouse gas emissions can be devastating, altering the environment and, ultimately, the production of foods. Experts from industry and academia, as well as food producers, designers of food processing equipment, and corrosion practitioners have written special chapters for this rich compendium based on their encyclopedic knowledge and practical experience. This is a multi-authored book. The writers, who come from diverse areas of food science and technology, enrich this volume by presenting different approaches and orientations
Life Expansion: Toward an Artistic, Design-Based Theory of the Transhuman / Posthuman
The thesisâ study of life expansion proposes a framework for artistic, design-based
approaches concerned with prolonging human life and sustaining personal identity. To
delineate the topic: life expansion means increasing the length of time a person is alive and
diversifying the matter in which a person exists. For human life, the length of time is
bounded by a single century and its matter is tied to biology. Life expansion is located in
the domain of human enhancement, distinctly linked to technological interfaces with
biology.
The thesis identifies human-computer interaction and the potential of emerging and
speculative technologies as seeding the promulgation of human enhancement that approach
life expansion. In doing so, the thesis constructs an inquiry into historical and current
attempts to append human physiology and intervene with its mortality. By encountering
emerging and speculative technologies for prolonging life and sustaining personal identity
as possible media for artistic, design-based approaches to human enhancement, a new axis
is sought that identifies the transhuman and posthuman as conceptual paradigms for life
expansion.
The thesis asks: What are the required conditions that enable artistic, design-based
approaches to human enhancement that explicitly pursue extending human life? This
question centers on the potential of the studyâs proposed enhancement technologies in their
relationship to life, death, and the human condition. Notably, the thesis investigates artistic
approaches, as distinct from those of the natural sciences, and the borders that need to be
mediated between them.
The study navigates between the domains of life extension, art and design,
technology, and philosophy in forming the framework for a theory of life expansion. The
critical approach seeks to uncover invisible borders between these interconnecting forces
by bringing to light issues of sustaining life and personal identity, ethical concerns,
including morphological freedom and extinction risk. Such issues relate to the thesisâ
interest in life expansion and the use emerging and speculative technologies.
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The study takes on a triad approach in its investigation: qualitative interviews with
experts of the emerging and speculative technologies; field studies encountering research
centers of such technologies; and an artistic, autopoietic process that explores the heuristics
of life expansion. This investigation forms an integrative view of the human use of
technology and its melioristic aim. The outcome of the research is a theoretical framework
for further research in artistic approaches to life expansion