206 research outputs found

    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

    On the institutional work of widening participation practice

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    This study is motivated by the following question: when practitioners engage in the project of ‘widening participation’ (WP), what are they hoping to do? Due to both its grounding in neoliberal logics and its aspirations for social justice, the very idea of WP is contested and subject to contradiction. WP, therefore, can mean substantially different things to different people, particularly to practitioners. While practitioner perspectives are chronically understudied in WP research, a nascent body of work on WP practitioners demonstrates that practitioner perspectives are crucial to understanding how policies are translated into material realities on the ground. Contributing to this work, I explore the ways in which WP practitioners understand and assess the institutional change work they are tasked to perform. To do so, I conducted a qualitative case study of the diverse community of WP practitioners who work on the UNIQ residential outreach programme at the University of Oxford, which comprises career WP workers and two previously unexplored subpopulations of practitioners: student interns, and in-house evaluators. Through a conceptual review of WP literature, I show that dominant conceptual models in what I call ‘critical WP research’ are insufficient for capturing how actors agentically navigate change-work in institutional and organisational contexts. This thesis’ primary theoretical contribution is its proposal that the neoinstitutional sociology of institutions and organisations—often referred to as ‘organisational institutionalism’ (OI)—lends us powerful tools for understanding how actors actively intervene within and/or against institutions as they work toward making higher education institutions (HEIs) more accessible and inclusive. Namely, the growing institutional work perspective (IWP) offers a cogent model for examining how organisational actors engage in purposive action in service of creating, maintaining and/or disrupting institutions. In the WP context, I argue that WP represents a recognisable ‘organisational field’ in UK social life, and thus operates via a unique set of institutional logics, and that higher educational institutions are better understood as organisations that are governed by wider institutional forces. WP practice, I contend, amounts to a form of institutional work, which is enacted in/on HEIs. To explore the empirical realities of institutional work in the WP context, I selected Oxford WP as my object of inquiry because Oxford represents an exceptional case of how the institutional forces buttressing WP—massification, neoliberalism, an increasing societal priority on inclusivity and social mobility—clash with the formerly hegemonic elite paradigm of education that Oxbridge embodies. Palpable contradictions find their way in every aspect of an Oxford WP practitioner's work: from selecting and targeting students, to determining which ‘myths’ about Oxford to debunk, to evaluating the ‘success’ of their interventions. Practitioners draw on an array of strategies of institutional work, like identity work and category work, to navigate these contradictions. I found that any attempt to make sense of the contradictions inherent to WP practice at Oxford amounts to acts of (de)legitimising Oxford WP. Depending on how they ‘come up against’ (Ahmed 2012:26) these contradictions through practice, WP practitioners either reify the institutional order, or gain access to transformative knowledge that inspires them to push against it

    Large Language Models

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    Artificial intelligence is making spectacular progress, and one of the best examples is the development of large language models (LLMs) such as OpenAI's GPT series. In these lectures, written for readers with a background in mathematics or physics, we give a brief history and survey of the state of the art, and describe the underlying transformer architecture in detail. We then explore some current ideas on how LLMs work and how models trained to predict the next word in a text are able to perform other tasks displaying intelligence.Comment: 46 page

    Codebook Features: Sparse and Discrete Interpretability for Neural Networks

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    Understanding neural networks is challenging in part because of the dense, continuous nature of their hidden states. We explore whether we can train neural networks to have hidden states that are sparse, discrete, and more interpretable by quantizing their continuous features into what we call codebook features. Codebook features are produced by finetuning neural networks with vector quantization bottlenecks at each layer, producing a network whose hidden features are the sum of a small number of discrete vector codes chosen from a larger codebook. Surprisingly, we find that neural networks can operate under this extreme bottleneck with only modest degradation in performance. This sparse, discrete bottleneck also provides an intuitive way of controlling neural network behavior: first, find codes that activate when the desired behavior is present, then activate those same codes during generation to elicit that behavior. We validate our approach by training codebook Transformers on several different datasets. First, we explore a finite state machine dataset with far more hidden states than neurons. In this setting, our approach overcomes the superposition problem by assigning states to distinct codes, and we find that we can make the neural network behave as if it is in a different state by activating the code for that state. Second, we train Transformer language models with up to 410M parameters on two natural language datasets. We identify codes in these models representing diverse, disentangled concepts (ranging from negative emotions to months of the year) and find that we can guide the model to generate different topics by activating the appropriate codes during inference. Overall, codebook features appear to be a promising unit of analysis and control for neural networks and interpretability. Our codebase and models are open-sourced at https://github.com/taufeeque9/codebook-features

    A practice-led investigation into the role of play as a feedback mechanism between the human and technological systems - as revealed through art & technology projects

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    This research project will develop existing philosophical concepts of technic, and technicity. This research project will explore the techno-social coalescences (assemblages) that are formed around my Art & Technology projects and their audiences (recipients). A practice-led approach to framing these engagements enables this research to diagram these assemblages. These novel distributions of content and expression will lead to the conceptualisation of new notions of art, play and technology that emerge through these activities. In such ways this research will enhance our understandings of the relationships between humans and technology

    A pattern language of Celtic traditional music and dance for social, economic, and ecological regeneration

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    This thesis investigates the potential role of Celtic traditional music and dance (CTMD) cultures in creating more resilient, embedded, and sustainable societies and economies. It does so by synthesising the ideas of the vernacular architect Christopher Alexander and an ecological form of political economy derived from the work of Karl Polanyi. With an empirical emphasis on a historically connected diaspora of the North Atlantic, the study explores the development and place-making potential of CTMD for marginalized communities exposed to the vagaries of global markets. Grounded in distributist economic theory, drawing heavily on Polanyian (‘substantivist’) economics, inspired in-part by anarchist visions of decentralization and sufficiency, the analysis starts from a historical sociological approach to capitalist modernity (Weber, Marx, Elias, Bauman). Challenging the conventional opposition of individualism versus collectivism, both state and market are seen as both interdependent and dependent on an anthropology of autonomous, transacting, ‘billiard-ball individuals’. For the purposes of this dissertation, and with a view to resilient local development, the counterpoint for all permutations of the State-Market is better understood in terms of the Polanyian category of ‘livelihood’. From this perspective, any transition to a sustainable modernity requires the re-emergence of more bottom-up, communitarian, and localized networks of families and place-based communities. Such a partial re-embedding of social and economic life would be predicated upon increased levels of trust and reciprocity, mutual obligation, community engagement, and informal markets and market places. Although the effects of capitalist modernization are sweeping, influencing all areas of life from the structure of whole societies to our very conception of self, there do still exist vestiges of pre-modern, place-based societies. In A Pattern Language, ecological architect, Christopher Alexander, documented the 253 replicable architectural patterns that create gestalt beauty and harmony in buildings. In this investigation, CTMD is explored as a vernacular culture that emerges in the same way, from repeated and nested patterns. A musical style based on the fiddle (but including many instruments such as pipes, accordion, piano, etc.) CTMD grew out of the folk cultures of France, the British Isles, and Northern Europe. In Canada especially, it has had considerable exchange and influence with First Nations and MĂ©tis cultures. Starting from this premise, the thesis applies pattern language theory to CTMD cultures and social networks and associations on both sides of the Atlantic. Through 72 interviews with 81 musicians, music teachers and students, parents, festival organizers, persons in economic development and place-marketing, i.e., the wide array of stakeholders in Celtic traditional music and dance cultures, it elucidates the social, political, and economic emergent patterns that are present in thriving CTMD cultures which constitute a ‘pattern language of Celtic traditional music and dance’. On the basis of this analysis it is argued that the application of pattern language theory to CTMD provides a useful framework through which to analyse human networks and to establish a framework for societies with higher numbers of grassroots networks and associations, and in doing so offers a hopeful means for increasing social, economic, and ecological resilience in marginalized areas particularly in the North Atlantic. Furthermore, it argues that this ‘pattern language of Celtic traditional music and dance’ provides a glimpse of what a new, more sustainable, ecologically benign and partially re-embedded modernity might look like as well as a framework by which to nudge society in that direction

    The Future of Coral Reefs

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    This volume contains a series of papers prepared for presentation at the 14th International Coral Reef Symposium, originally planned for July 2020 in Bremen, Germany, but postponed until 2021 (online) and 2022 (in person) because of the COVID-19 pandemic. It contains a series of papers illustrating the breadth of modern studies on coral reefs and the response of the reef science community to the threats that coral reefs now face, above all from climate change. The first group of papers focus on the biology of a selection of reef organisms, ranging from sea fans to coral dwelling crabs. The next group describe studies of coral communities and ecological interactions in regions as diverse as Florida, Kenya, Colombia, and Norway. Further papers describe investigations into the effects of global warming (in the Maldives and in Timor-Leste) and of other impacts (UV blockers, ocean acidification). The final two papers describe the latest applications of satellite and camera technology to the challenge of mapping and monitoring reefs

    The Transcendent Character of the Good

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    This volume addresses issues of moral pluralism and polarization by drawing attention to the transcendent character of the good. It probes the history of Christian theology and moral philosophy to investigate the value of this idea and then relates it to contemporary moral issues. The good is transcendent in that it goes beyond concrete goods, things, acts, or individual preferences. It functions as the pole of a compass that helps orient our moral life. This volume explores the critical tension between the transcendent good and its concrete embodiments in the world through concepts like conscience, natural and divine law, virtue, and grace. The chapters are divided into three parts. Part I discusses metaphysical issues like the realist nature and the unity of the good in relation to philosophical, naturalist, and theological approaches from Augustine to Iris Murdoch. The chapters in Part II explore issues about knowing the transcendent good and doing good, exemplified in the delicate balance between divine command and human virtuousness. Early Protestant theological views prove to be excellent interlocutors for this reflection. Finally, Part III focuses on how transcendence is at stake in two heavily debated moral issues of today: euthanasia and the family. The Transcendent Character of the Good will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working in theological ethics, moral philosophy, and the history of ethics. The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license

    Biometric Systems

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    Because of the accelerating progress in biometrics research and the latest nation-state threats to security, this book's publication is not only timely but also much needed. This volume contains seventeen peer-reviewed chapters reporting the state of the art in biometrics research: security issues, signature verification, fingerprint identification, wrist vascular biometrics, ear detection, face detection and identification (including a new survey of face recognition), person re-identification, electrocardiogram (ECT) recognition, and several multi-modal systems. This book will be a valuable resource for graduate students, engineers, and researchers interested in understanding and investigating this important field of study

    Growing Intercommunalist "pockets of resistance" with Aloha 'Aina in Hawai'i

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    In der hawaiianischen Vorstellung steht das Land in einer Kinship- oder Verwandtschaftsbeziehung als lebendes und atmendes Familienmitglied, von dem man abstammt. Aloha 'Aina („Liebe zum Land“) ist eine Onto-Epistemologie der Indigenen auf Hawai'i, analog zu anderen gemeinschaftlichen Organisationsformen, die Mensch, Nicht-Mensch und Natur als miteinander verbunden betrachten, wie etwa im Glauben der Haudenosaunee. Anstatt Aloha 'Aina als eine Methode der „dekolonialen Klimagerechtigkeit“ zu prĂ€sentieren, die im globalen Norden nachgeahmt werden soll, und damit Aloha 'Aina von jenem „Land“ zu entfernen, theoretisiere ich ein ortsbezogenes Konstrukt, das ich „Spirit of Relationality“ nenne. Ich verknĂŒpfe das hawaiianische Aloha 'Aina mit der politischen Theorie des Interkommunalismus des Black Panther Huey P. Newton, um dekoloniale Formen globaler Klimagerechtigkeit fĂŒr nicht-Indigene PositionalitĂ€ten zu entwickeln. Der Zweck dieser Verbindung war es, den „Geist“ innerhalb der postmarxistischen Theorien neu zu verorten, wie sie von Vanessa Watts (Haudenosaunee & Anishinaabe) kritisiert werden, da dieser Geist fĂŒr eurozentrische Perspektiven entfernt wurde. Indem ich hawaiianische Geschichten und zeitgenössische Poesie analysiere, vergleiche ich auch Vorstellungen von lokalem Glauben anderswo, wie auf den Philippinen und im Ästuargebiet, durch die Verbundenheit des Pazifiks und von fluidem Wasser und Luft. Metaphern von Spirit/Geist und Kinship, sowie eine materialistische Analyse des Antikolonialismus und der Arbeiterbewegung auf Hawaii fĂŒhrten dazu, dass ich meine eigenen Konzepte als „Pneumaterialismus“ bezeichnete. Dies ergibt sich aus der Metaphorik von „pneuma“ als liminaler Geist und hawaiianischem „ea“ („Atem,“ „Leben,“ „Wiederaufleben“), mit Wortspielen zur Metaphysik und Antagonismen zwischen Materialismus/Materie und Idealismus. Die Dynamik interkultureller und organischer Symbiosen und indigener SolidaritĂ€ten bildet ebenfalls die Grundlage dieser Metaphern.In Indigenous Hawaiian conceptualization land is relational, a living and breathing family member that one is descended from. Aloha 'Aina (“love of the land”) is an Indigenous way of knowing and being in Hawai'i, analogous to other communal forms of organization that consider human, non-human, and nature as interrelated, such as in Haudenosaunee beliefs. Instead of presenting Aloha 'Aina as a method of “decolonial climate justice” to emulate within the global North, and thus remove Aloha 'Aina from its land, I theorize a place-based construct I call “spirit of relationality.” I connect Hawaiian Aloha 'Aina with Black Panther Huey P. Newton’s political theory of Intercommunalism towards decolonial forms of global climate justice for non-Indigenous positionalities. The purpose of this connection was to relocate “spirit” within post-Marxist theories, as critiqued by Vanessa Watts (Haudenosaunee & Anishinaabe) of having been removed for Eurocentric perspectives. Analyzing Hawaiian stories and contemporary poetry, I also compare notions of localized beliefs elsewhere, such as in the Philippines and in the estuary space, through the connectedness of the Pacific Ocean, in-flux waters, and air. Metaphors of spirit/ghost and kinship, as well as materialist analysis of anticolonialism and labor organizing in Hawai'i, led to labelling my own concepts as “Pneumaterialism.” This is from metaphors of “pneuma” as in-between spirit and Hawaiian “ea” (“breath,” “life,” “resurgence”), with wordplay on metaphysics and antagonisms between materialism/matter and idealism. Dynamics of intercultural and organic symbiosis and Indigenous solidarities also ground these metaphors
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