1,378 research outputs found
Multidisciplinary perspectives on Artificial Intelligence and the law
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
Digital agriculture: research, development and innovation in production chains.
Digital transformation in the field towards sustainable and smart agriculture. Digital agriculture: definitions and technologies. Agroenvironmental modeling and the digital transformation of agriculture. Geotechnologies in digital agriculture. Scientific computing in agriculture. Computer vision applied to agriculture. Technologies developed in precision agriculture. Information engineering: contributions to digital agriculture. DIPN: a dictionary of the internal proteins nanoenvironments and their potential for transformation into agricultural assets. Applications of bioinformatics in agriculture. Genomics applied to climate change: biotechnology for digital agriculture. Innovation ecosystem in agriculture: Embrapa?s evolution and contributions. The law related to the digitization of agriculture. Innovating communication in the age of digital agriculture. Driving forces for Brazilian agriculture in the next decade: implications for digital agriculture. Challenges, trends and opportunities in digital agriculture in Brazil
Indigenous Territorial Autonomy and Self-Government in the Diverse Americas
Across the Americas, Indigenous and Afro-descendent peoples have demanded autonomy, self-determination, and self-governance. By exerting their collective rights, they have engaged with domestic and international standards on the rights of Indigenous Peoples, implemented full-fledged mechanisms for autonomous governance, and promoted political and constitutional reform aimed at expanding understandings of multicultural citizenship and the plurinational state. Yet these achievements come in conflict with national governments’ adoption of neoliberal economic and neo-extractive policies which advance their interests over those of Indigenous communities.
Available for the first time in English, Indigenous Territorial Autonomy and Self-Government in the Diverse Americas explores current and historical struggles for autonomy within ancestral territories, experiences of self-governance in operation, and presents an overview of achievements, challenges, and threats across three decades. Case studies across Bolivia, Chile, Nicaragua, Peru, Colombia, Mexico, Panama, Ecuador, and Canada provide a detailed discussion of autonomy and self-governance in development and in practice.
Paying special attention to the role of Indigenous peoples’ organizations and activism in pursuing sociopolitical transformation, securing rights, and confronting multiple dynamics of dispossession, this book engages with current debates on Indigenous politics, relationships with national governments and economies, and the multicultural and plurinational state. This book will spark critical reflection on political experience and further exploration of the possibilities of the self-determination of peoples through territorial autonomies
Agency and Organisation: The Dialectics of Nature and Life
In recent decades, there have been major theoretical changes within evolutionary biology. In this dissertation, I critically reconstruct these developments through philosophy to assess how it may inform these debates. The overall aim is to show the mutual relevance between current trends in biology and the dialectical approach to nature. I argue that the repetition of the neglected tradition of organicism is anticipated both by a dialectical tradition within science and by Hegel’s philosophy – and that these theories may together inform the ongoing shift within evolutionary biology called the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis (EES).
I stage the discussion by outlining the tenets and history of the modern synthesis (MS) and the alternative: the extended evolutionary synthesis (EES). It takes us into topics such as autonomy, organisation, reduction, and autopoiesis. Based on these discussions, I make the case that the most promising alternative to the MS is the so-called organisational approach formulated within theoretical biology and apply dialectics to strengthen this claim. In my view, they share a fundamental premise: Biology must surpass the physical worldview and adopt a more complex model to comprehend life as an ongoing regeneration of organisation and an expression of self-determination.
To bring out the philosophical stakes of this shift, I take on Hegel’s writings on nature, life, and purposiveness and relate them to contemporary thinkers. The main contribution of this work lies not in a particularly novel reading of any of the theories I examine but in bringing them together – both within philosophy and biology and between them – and systematically mapping how philosophy and the humanities should deal with the natural sciences. The new kind of naturalism suggested here, which places life at its core, also calls for another scientific ideal which strives for unification without subsumption or eradication of differences
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Sonic heritage: listening to the past
History is so often told through objects, images and photographs, but the potential of sounds to reveal place and space is often neglected. Our research project ‘Sonic Palimpsest’1 explores the potential of sound to evoke impressions and new understandings of the past, to embrace the sonic as a tool to understand what was, in a way that can complement and add to our predominant visual understandings. Our work includes the expansion of the Oral History archives held at Chatham Dockyard to include women’s voices and experiences, and the creation of sonic works to engage the public with their heritage. Our research highlights the social and cultural value of oral history and field recordings in the transmission of knowledge to both researchers and the public. Together these recordings document how buildings and spaces within the dockyard were used and experienced by those who worked there. We can begin to understand the social and cultural roles of these buildings within the community, both past and present
The mad manifesto
The “mad manifesto” project is a multidisciplinary mediated investigation into the circumstances by which mad (mentally ill, neurodivergent) or disabled (disclosed, undisclosed) students faced far more precarious circumstances with inadequate support models while attending North American universities during the pandemic teaching era (2020-2023).
Using a combination of “emergency remote teaching” archival materials such as national student datasets, universal design for learning (UDL) training models, digital classroom teaching experiments, university budgetary releases, educational technology coursewares, and lived experience expertise, this dissertation carefully retells the story of “accessibility” as it transpired in disabling classroom containers trapped within intentionally underprepared crisis superstructures. Using rhetorical models derived from critical disability studies, mad studies, social work practice, and health humanities, it then suggests radically collaborative UDL teaching practices that may better pre-empt the dynamic needs of dis/abled students whose needs remain direly underserviced.
The manifesto leaves the reader with discrete calls to action that foster more critical performances of intersectionally inclusive UDL classrooms for North American mad students, which it calls “mad-positive” facilitation techniques:
1. Seek to untie the bond that regards the digital divide and access as synonyms.
2. UDL practice requires an environment shift that prioritizes change potential.
3. Advocate against the usage of UDL as a for-all keystone of accessibility.
4. Refuse or reduce the use of technologies whose primary mandate is dataveillance.
5. Remind students and allies that university space is a non-neutral affective container.
6. Operationalize the tracking of student suicides on your home campus.
7. Seek out physical & affectual ways that your campus is harming social capital potential.
8. Revise policies and practices that are ability-adjacent imaginings of access.
9. Eliminate sanist and neuroscientific languaging from how you speak about students.
10. Vigilantly interrogate how “normal” and “belong” are socially constructed.
11. Treat lived experience expertise as a gift, not a resource to mine and to spend.
12. Create non-psychiatric routes of receiving accommodation requests in your classroom.
13. Seek out uncomfortable stories of mad exclusion and consider carceral logic’s role in it.
14. Center madness in inclusive methodologies designed to explicitly resist carceral logics.
15. Create counteraffectual classrooms that anticipate and interrupt kairotic spatial power.
16. Strive to refuse comfort and immediate intelligibility as mandatory classroom presences.
17. Create pathways that empower cozy space understandings of classroom practice.
18. Vector students wherever possible as dynamic ability constellations in assessment
Integration of BIM in Building Sustainability Assessment methods
Tese de doutoramento em Sustentabilidade do Ambiente ConstruídoThe Architecture, Engineering and Construction (AEC) industry is highly responsible for several environmental
impacts and worldwide authorities and societies are increasingly looking for more sustainable buildings.
Given the ambitious targets of climate neutrality and decarbonisation, there is an urgent need to develop
specific strategies to act in the building sector, as it has been recognised as a key industry to reverse
environmental impacts. Among the existing tools, Building Sustainability Assessment (BSA) methods stand
out as a pathway to evaluate and promote the integration of sustainability principles in buildings. However,
such methods often require multi-disciplinary information about the building and significant resources such
as time, money, and human labour. Consequently, and in the absence of mandatory legislation, BSA is
usually neglected or applied in project later stages just to provide a sustainable evaluation of the building.
With the deployment of Building Information Modelling (BIM), the opportunity for BSA to adopt and benefit
from BIM functionalities arises. Currently, BIM has not been used comprehensively in the evaluation process
of BSA but the potential for process automation and simplification are well known. To effectively integrate
BSA into BIM environment, this research aims to develop a BIM integration framework for the Portuguese
residential BSA method SBToolPT-H. Moreover, such framework will be materialized by the creation of an enduser
BIM-based application – SBToolBIM – which will act as a decision support tool regarding building
sustainability for the project's early stages. SBToolBIM will automate and accelerate the assessment of SBToolPTH
by reflecting its criteria through computable rules. Results show the attractiveness of SBToolBIM, as well as
the possibility to have real-time feedback about the building sustainability level in early project stages, allowing
for the introduction and comparison of different sustainability measures with few resources. SBToolBIM has
established a novel and common approach which can be used as a systematic framework to apply BIM in
other BSA schemes, representing a pathway to reduce the building sector impacts and provide valuable
contributes to reach worldwide climate neutrality and decarbonisation targets.A indústria da Arquitetura, Engenharia e Construção (AEC) é responsável por diversos impactes ambientais,
levando as autoridades e sociedades mundiais à procura por edifícios mais sustentáveis. Perante os
ambiciosos objetivos da neutralidade climática e descarbonização, surge a necessidade de desenvolver
estratégias específicas para o setor dos edifícios, dado ser uma indústria chave para a reversão dos referidos
impactes. Entre as ferramentas existentes, destacam-se os métodos da avaliação da sustentabilidade de
edifícios (BSA, do inglês Building Sustainability Assessment) como forma de avaliar e promover a integração
de medidas sustentáveis. No entanto, a sua utilização requer informações multidisciplinares do edifício, bem
como recursos significativos, tais como tempo, custos e mão de obra. Consequentemente e na ausência de
legislação obrigatória, os BSA são geralmente negligenciados ou aplicados em fases finais de projeto, apenas
para identificar o nível de sustentabilidade do edifício. Com a implementação do Building Information
Modeling (BIM), surge a oportunidade dos BSA adotarem e beneficiarem das suas funcionalidades.
Atualmente, o BIM ainda não é integralmente utilizado no processo de avaliação dos BSA, mas as suas
potencialidades para automação e simplificação do processo já foram reconhecidas. De modo a integrar os
BSA em ambiente BIM, este trabalho visa desenvolver uma estrutura de integração BIM para o método BSA
residencial português SBToolPT-H. A estrutura será materializada através da criação de uma aplicação BIM –
SBToolBIM – que irá atuar como uma ferramenta de apoio à decisão em fases iniciais de projeto. O SBToolBIM
irá automatizar e acelerar os processos de avaliação da sustentabilidade através do SBToolPT-H, refletindo os
seus critérios através de regras computacionais. Os resultados demonstram a utilidade do SBToolBIM, bem
como a possibilidade de fornecer feedback em tempo real sobre o nível de sustentabilidade do edifício nas
fases iniciais de projeto, permitindo a introdução e a comparação de diferentes medidas de sustentabilidade,
utilizando poucos recursos. O SBToolBIM estabelece uma nova abordagem sistemática para aplicação do BIM
noutros métodos BSA, representando um caminho para a redução dos impactes do setor e dando valiosas
contribuições para alcançar as metas de neutralidade climática e descarbonização.SBToolBIM research was funded by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT), grant
number SFRH/BD/145735/2019
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