From systems to patterns and back - Exploring the spatial role of dynamic time and direction patterns in the area of regional planning

This master thesis presents a data-driven framework to explore the role of dynamic time and direction patterns in the area of Finnish Lapland in order to improve decision-making in urban planning and design tasks. The Arctic Ocean Railway project is chosen as a case study. In an era marked by dramatic environmental, political and societal changes, the Arctic region becomes more global and complex. An increasing number of actors are involved in its spatial transformations. Due to melting ice, the Northern Sea Route gains attention from the shipping and trade industries that are manifested in new port and infrastructure projects. Eco-tourism is booming in the Arctic due to its imaginary remoteness, while local Indigenous People try to preserve traditional livelihoods. In order to cope with the increasing complexity of such dynamic urban and regional challenges, Systems Thinking, dynamic patterns, modelling and use of simulation are researched to open up novel ways for complex regional planning methods. This is achieved by designing an agent-based model and using different representation and abstraction features for different dynamic data packages. The project is integrated within the GAMA simulation platform (a modelling and simulation development environment for building spatially explicit agent-based simulations) and embedded in the MIT CityScope framework - a medium for both, analyzing agent’s behavioural patterns and displaying them to the relevant stakeholders. The project attempts to address the necessity to handle the increasing complexity by presenting a dynamic, evidence-based planning and decision support tool called CityScope Lapland. The main goal of CityScope Lapland is to use digital technologies to incorporate variables like time and direction in urban spatial analysis and methodology; secondly, to improve the accessibility of the decision-making process for non-experts through a tangible user interface, and third, to help users evaluate their decisions by creating a feedback through real-time visualization of urban simulation results when facing less and less predictable futures. The project provides an alternative design approach, introducing new forms of urban imagination and different ways of perceiving and measuring complex spatial transformations

AI in Learning: Designing the Future

AI (Artificial Intelligence) is predicted to radically change teaching and learning in both schools and industry causing radical disruption of work. AI can support well-being initiatives and lifelong learning but educational institutions and companies need to take the changing technology into account. Moving towards AI supported by digital tools requires a dramatic shift in the concept of learning, expertise and the businesses built off of it. Based on the latest research on AI and how it is changing learning and education, this book will focus on the enormous opportunities to expand educational settings with AI for learning in and beyond the traditional classroom. This open access book also introduces ethical challenges related to learning and education, while connecting human learning and machine learning. This book will be of use to a variety of readers, including researchers, AI users, companies and policy makers

AI in Learning: Designing the Future

AI (Artificial Intelligence) is predicted to radically change teaching and learning in both schools and industry causing radical disruption of work. AI can support well-being initiatives and lifelong learning but educational institutions and companies need to take the changing technology into account. Moving towards AI supported by digital tools requires a dramatic shift in the concept of learning, expertise and the businesses built off of it. Based on the latest research on AI and how it is changing learning and education, this book will focus on the enormous opportunities to expand educational settings with AI for learning in and beyond the traditional classroom. This open access book also introduces ethical challenges related to learning and education, while connecting human learning and machine learning. This book will be of use to a variety of readers, including researchers, AI users, companies and policy makers

You Can\u27t Get There from Here: Movement SF and the Picaresque

This dissertation examines the crisis of authenticity in postmodern culture and argues that contemporary science fiction, specifically the subgenre of Movement SF, has evolved a unique answer to this crisis by adopting, perhaps spontaneously, the picaresque narrative structure. Postmodern fiction has a tenuous relationship with the issue of authenticity, such that the average postmodern subject is utterly without true authenticity at all, alternately victim to the socioeconomic conditions of his or her culture and to the elision of the self as a result of the homogenizing effects of advertising, television, etc. Postmodern SF also carries this bleak perception of the possibility of agency; William Gibson\u27s Sprawl and Bridge trilogies are rife with negations of human agency at the metaphorical hands of various aspects and incarnations of what Fredric Jameson terms the technological sublime. This dissertation puts forth the argument that a group of post-Eighties SF texts all participate in a spontaneous revival of the picaresque mode, using the picaresque journey and related motifs to re-authenticate subjects whose identity and agency are being erased by powerful social and economic forces exterior to and normally imperceptible by the individual. This dissertation is organized around three loosely connected parts. Part 1 attempts to define Movement SF by separating the various, often confusing marketing labels (such as cyberpunk, postcyberpunk, etc.) and extracting a cluster of core characteristics that have shaped the genre since its inception in the early 80s. Part 1 further examines how these core characteristics (or premises) of Movement SF provide fertile ground for picaresque narrative strategies. Part 2 describes in detail the picaresque as it appears in Movement SF, examining worldbuilding strategies, the persistence and evolution of tropes and motifs common to the traditional picaresque, and the generation of new tropes and motifs unique to Movement picaresques. Part 3 examines the spatial tactics used in Movement picaresque narratives to enable picaresque marginality in totalized, globalized environments. Furthermore, Part 3 examines the use of psychological plurality as an internal tactic to escape closed environments

Examining university student satisfaction and barriers to taking online remote exams

Recent years have seen a surge in the popularity of online exams at universities, due to the greater convenience and flexibility they offer both students and institutions. Driven by the dearth of empirical data on distance learning students' satisfaction levels and the difficulties they face when taking online exams, a survey with 562 students at The Open University (UK) was conducted to gain insights into their experiences with this type of exam. Satisfaction was reported with the environment and exams, while work commitments and technical difficulties presented the greatest barriers. Gender, race and disability were also associated with different levels of satisfaction and barriers. This study adds to the increasing number of studies into online exams, demonstrating how this type of exam can still have a substantial effect on students experienced in online learning systems and technologies