Machinic Eyes: New and Post-Digital Aesthetics, Surveillance, and Resistance

This work concerns the rise of the New Aesthetic, an art project developed by James Bridle in 2012. The New Aesthetic, as envisioned by Bridle, was chiefly concerned with the overlapping of physical and digital realities through both the artifacts produced by this overlapping and the systems involved therein. I introduce the advent of the New Aesthetic and present the major criticisms: the lack of a robust theoretical and scholarly framework, the lack of a historical framework, the privileging of artifacts over systems as new Aesthetic, and the fragmented scholarly outlook on the New Aesthetic. Upon further examination, I discovered that the New Aesthetic is less of an art project but a metaphor for a global surveillance apparatus that is the result of clandestine partnerships between multinational technology corporations and intelligence agencies associated the Five Eyes consortium. In this dissertation, I critique the New Aesthetic from a scholarly viewpoint, offer a historical precedent of how the New Aesthetic came to be from cultural and technological perspectives, examine the rise of the global surveillance apparatus within the New Aesthetic, and offer ideas of how to resist surveillance as a result of our reliance upon computational technologies

Computer Science Principles with Java

This textbook is intended to be used for a first course in computer science, such as the College Board’s Advanced Placement course known as AP Computer Science Principles (CSP). This book includes all the topics on the CSP exam, plus some additional topics. It takes a breadth-first approach, with an emphasis on the principles which form the foundation for hardware and software. No prior experience with programming should be required to use this book. This version of the book uses the Java programming language.https://rdw.rowan.edu/oer/1018/thumbnail.jp

Computer Science Principles with C++

This textbook is intended to be used for a first course in computer science, such as the College Board’s Advanced Placement course known as AP Computer Science Principles (CSP). This book includes all the topics on the CSP exam, plus some additional topics. It takes a breadth-first approach, with an emphasis on the principles which form the foundation for hardware and software. No prior experience with programming should be required to use this book. This version of the book uses the C++ programming language.https://rdw.rowan.edu/oer/1025/thumbnail.jp

Computer Science Principles with Python

This textbook is intended to be used for a first course in computer science, such as the College Board’s Advanced Placement course known as AP Computer Science Principles (CSP). This book includes all the topics on the CSP exam, plus some additional topics. It takes a breadth-first approach, with an emphasis on the principles which form the foundation for hardware and software. No prior experience with programming should be required to use this book. This version of the book uses the Python programming language.https://rdw.rowan.edu/oer/1024/thumbnail.jp

Electronic instructional materials and course requirements "Computer science" for specialty: 1-53 01 01 «Automation of technological processes and production»

The purpose of the electronic instructional materials and course requirements by the discipline «Computer science» (EIMCR) is to develop theoretical systemic and practical knowledge in different fields of Computer science. Features of structuring and submission of educational material: EIMCR includes the following sections: theoretical, practical, knowledge control, auxiliary. The theoretical section presents lecture material in accordance with the main sections and topics of the syllabus. The practical section of the EIMCR contains materials for conducting practical classes aimed to develop modern computational thinking, basic skills in computing and making decisions in the field of the fundamentals of computer theory and many computer science fields. The knowledge control section of the EIMCR contains: guidelines for the implementation of the control work aimed at developing the skills of independent work on the course under study, developing the skills of selecting, analyzing and writing out the necessary material, as well as the correct execution of the tasks; list of questions for the credit by the discipline. The auxiliary section of the EIMCR contains the following elements of the syllabus: explanatory note; thematic lectures plan; tables of distribution of classroom hours by topics and informational and methodological part. EIMCR contains active links to quickly find the necessary material

AndroSAT: Security Analysis Tool for Android Applications

ABSTRACT AndroSAT: Security Analysis Tool for Android Applications With about 1.5 million Android device activations per day and billions of applications installation from Google Play, Android is becoming one of the most widely used operating systems for smartphones and tablets. Besides typical personal usages, Android mobile devices are also being integrated into enterprises, government organizations, and military networks. Consequently, these devices hold valuable sensitive information which makes them face the same level of malicious attacks that have targeted the desktop environments over the past three decades. In this thesis, we present AndroSAT, a Security Analysis Tool for Android applications. The developed framework allows us to efficiently experiment with different security aspects of Android apps through the integration of (i) a static analysis module that scans Android apps for malicious patterns. The static analysis process involves several steps such as n-gram analysis of dex files, de-compilation of the app, pattern search, and analysis of the AndroidManifest file; (ii) a dynamic analysis sandbox that executes Android apps in a controlled virtual environment which logs low-level interactions with the operating system. The effectiveness of the developed framework is confirmed by testing it on popular apps collected from F-Droid, and malware samples obtained from a third party and the Android Malware Genome Project dataset. As a case study, we show how the analysis reports obtained from AndroSAT can be used for studying the frequency of use of different Android permissions and dynamic operations and detection of Android malware

Prediction, evolution and privacy in social and affiliation networks

In the last few years, there has been a growing interest in studying online social and affiliation networks, leading to a new category of inference problems that consider the actor characteristics and their social environments. These problems have a variety of applications, from creating more effective marketing campaigns to designing better personalized services. Predictive statistical models allow learning hidden information automatically in these networks but also bring many privacy concerns. Three of the main challenges that I address in my thesis are understanding 1) how the complex observed and unobserved relationships among actors can help in building better behavior models, and in designing more accurate predictive algorithms, 2) what are the processes that drive the network growth and link formation, and 3) what are the implications of predictive algorithms to the privacy of users who share content online. The majority of previous work in prediction, evolution and privacy in online social networks has concentrated on the single-mode networks which form around user-user links, such as friendship and email communication. However, single-mode networks often co-exist with two-mode affiliation networks in which users are linked to other entities, such as social groups, online content and events. We study the interplay between these two types of networks and show that analyzing these higher-order interactions can reveal dependencies that are difficult to extract from the pair-wise interactions alone. In particular, we present our contributions to the challenging problems of collective classification, link prediction, network evolution, anonymization and preserving privacy in social and affiliation networks. We evaluate our models on real-world data sets from well-known online social networks, such as Flickr, Facebook, Dogster and LiveJournal

FinBook: literary content as digital commodity

This short essay explains the significance of the FinBook intervention, and invites the reader to participate. We have associated each chapter within this book with a financial robot (FinBot), and created a market whereby book content will be traded with financial securities. As human labour increasingly consists of unstable and uncertain work practices and as algorithms replace people on the virtual trading floors of the worlds markets, we see members of society taking advantage of FinBots to invest and make extra funds. Bots of all kinds are making financial decisions for us, searching online on our behalf to help us invest, to consume products and services. Our contribution to this compilation is to turn the collection of chapters in this book into a dynamic investment portfolio, and thereby play out what might happen to the process of buying and consuming literature in the not-so-distant future. By attaching identities (through QR codes) to each chapter, we create a market in which the chapter can ‘perform’. Our FinBots will trade based on features extracted from the authors’ words in this book: the political, ethical and cultural values embedded in the work, and the extent to which the FinBots share authors’ concerns; and the performance of chapters amongst those human and non-human actors that make up the market, and readership. In short, the FinBook model turns our work and the work of our co-authors into an investment portfolio, mediated by the market and the attention of readers. By creating a digital economy specifically around the content of online texts, our chapter and the FinBook platform aims to challenge the reader to consider how their personal values align them with individual articles, and how these become contested as they perform different value judgements about the financial performance of each chapter and the book as a whole. At the same time, by introducing ‘autonomous’ trading bots, we also explore the different ‘network’ affordances that differ between paper based books that’s scarcity is developed through analogue form, and digital forms of books whose uniqueness is reached through encryption. We thereby speak to wider questions about the conditions of an aggressive market in which algorithms subject cultural and intellectual items – books – to economic parameters, and the increasing ubiquity of data bots as actors in our social, political, economic and cultural lives. We understand that our marketization of literature may be an uncomfortable juxtaposition against the conventionally-imagined way a book is created, enjoyed and shared: it is intended to be