408 research outputs found
LIPIcs, Volume 251, ITCS 2023, Complete Volume
LIPIcs, Volume 251, ITCS 2023, Complete Volum
Second-Person Surveillance: Politics of User Implication in Digital Documentaries
This dissertation analyzes digital documentaries that utilize second-person address and roleplay to make users feel implicated in contemporary refugee crises, mass incarceration in the U.S., and state and corporate surveillances. Digital documentaries are seemingly more interactive and participatory than linear film and video documentary as they are comprised of a variety of auditory, visual, and written media, utilize networked technologies, and turn the documentary audience into a documentary user. I draw on scholarship from documentary, game, new media, and surveillance studies to analyze how second-person address in digital documentaries is configured through user positioning and direct address within the works themselves, in how organizations and creators frame their productions, and in how users and players respond in reviews, discussion forums, and Letâs Plays. I build on Michael Rothbergâs theorization of the implicated subject to explore how these digital documentaries bring the user into complicated relationality with national and international crises. Visually and experientially implying that users bear responsibility to the subjects and subject matter, these works can, on the one hand, replicate modes of liberal empathy for suffering, distant âothersâ and, on the other, simulate oneâs own surveillant modes of observation or behavior to mirror it back to users and open up oneâs offline thoughts and actions as a site of critique.
This dissertation charts how second-person address shapes and limits the political potentialities of documentary projects and connects them to a lineage of direct address from educational and propaganda films, museum exhibits, and serious games. By centralizing the userâs individual experience, the interventions that second-person digital documentaries can make into social discourse change from public, institution-based education to more privatized forms of sentimental education geared toward personal edification and self-realization. Unless tied to larger initiatives or movements, I argue that digital documentaries reaffirm a neoliberal politics of individual self-regulation and governance instead of public education or collective, social intervention.
Chapter one focuses on 360-degree virtual reality (VR) documentaries that utilize the feeling of presence to position users as if among refugees and as witnesses to refugee experiences in camps outside of Europe and various dwellings in European cities. My analysis of Clouds Over Sidra (Gabo Arora and Chris Milk 2015) and The Displaced (Imraan Ismail and Ben C. Solomon 2015) shows how these VR documentaries utilize observational realism to make believable and immersive their representations of already empathetic refugees. The empathetic refugee is often young, vulnerable, depoliticized and dehistoricized and is a well-known trope in other forms of humanitarian media that continues into VR documentaries. Forced to Flee (Zahra Rasool 2017), I am Rohingya (Zahra Rasool 2017), So Leben FlĂŒchtlinge in Berlin (Berliner Morgenpost 2017), and Limbo: A Virtual Experience of Waiting for Asylum (Shehani Fernando 2017) disrupt easy immersions into realistic-looking VR experiences of stereotyped representations and user identifications and, instead, can reflect back the userâs political inaction and surveillant modes of looking.
Chapter two analyzes web- and social media messenger-based documentaries that position users as outsiders to U.S. mass incarceration. Users are noir-style co-investigators into the crime of the prison-industrial complex in Fremont County, Colorado in Prison Valley: The Prison Industry (David Dufresne and Philippe Brault 2009) and co-riders on a bus transporting prison inmatesâ loved ones for visitations to correctional facilities in Upstate New York in A Temporary Contact (Nirit Peled and Sara Kolster 2017). Both projects construct an experience of carceral constraint for users to reinscribe seeming âoutsideâ places, people, and experiences as within the continuation of the racialized and classed politics of state control through mass incarceration. These projects utilize interfaces that create a tension between replicating an exploitative hierarchy between non-incarcerated users and those subject to mass incarceration while also de-immersing users in these experiences to mirror back the userâs supposed distance from this mode of state regulation.
Chapter three investigates a type of digital game I term dataveillance simulation games, which position users as surveillance agents in ambiguously dystopian nation-states and force users to use their own critical thinking and judgment to construct the criminality of state-sanctioned surveillance targets. Project Perfect Citizen (Bad Cop Studios 2016), Orwell: Keeping an Eye on You (Osmotic Studios 2016), and Papers, Please (Lucas Pope 2013) all create a dual empathy: players empathize with bureaucratic surveillance agents while empathizing with surveillance targets whose emails, text messages, documents, and social media profiles reveal them to be ânormalâ people. I argue that while these games show criminality to be a construct, they also utilize a racialized fear of the loss of oneâs individual privacy to make players feel like they too could be surveillance targets.
Chapter four examines personalized digital documentaries that turn users and their data into the subject matter. Do Not Track (Brett Gaylor 2015), A Week with Wanda (Joe Derry Hall 2019), Stealing Ur Feelings (Noah Levenson 2019), Alfred Premium (JoĂ«l Ronez, Pierre Corbinais, and Ămilie F. Grenier 2019), How They Watch You (Nick Briz 2021), and Fairly Intelligentâą (A.M. Darke 2021) track, monitor, and confront users with their own online behavior to reflect back a corporate surveillance that collects, analyzes, and exploits user data for profit. These digital documentaries utilize emotional fear- and humor-based appeals to persuade users that these technologies are controlling them, shaping their desires and needs, and dehumanizing them through algorithmic surveillance
Sensing Collectives: Aesthetic and Political Practices Intertwined
Are aesthetics and politics really two different things? The book takes a new look at how they intertwine, by turning from theory to practice. Case studies trace how sensory experiences are created and how collective interests are shaped. They investigate how aesthetics and politics are entangled, both in building and disrupting collective orders, in governance and innovation. This ranges from populist rallies and artistic activism over alternative lifestyles and consumer culture to corporate PR and governmental policies. Authors are academics and artists. The result is a new mapping of the intermingling and co-constitution of aesthetics and politics in engagements with collective orders
The Politics of Platformization: Amsterdam Dialogues on Platform Theory
What is platformization and why is it a relevant category in the contemporary political landscape? How is it related to cybernetics and the history of computation? This book tries to answer such questions by engaging in multidisciplinary dialogues about the first ten years of the emerging fields of platform studies and platform theory. It deploys a narrative and playful approach that makes use of anecdotes, personal histories, etymologies, and futurable speculations to investigate both the fragmented genealogy that led to platformization and the organizational and economic trends that guide nowadays platform sociotechnical imaginaries
Learning-Based Ubiquitous Sensing For Solving Real-World Problems
Recently, as the Internet of Things (IoT) technology has become smaller and cheaper, ubiquitous sensing ability within these devices has become increasingly accessible. Learning methods have also become more complex in the field of computer science ac- cordingly. However, there remains a gap between these learning approaches and many problems in other disciplinary fields. In this dissertation, I investigate four different learning-based studies via ubiquitous sensing for solving real-world problems, such as in IoT security, athletics, and healthcare. First, I designed an online intrusion detection system for IoT devices via power auditing. To realize the real-time system, I created a lightweight power auditing device. With this device, I developed a distributed Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) for online inference. I demonstrated that the distributed system design is secure, lightweight, accurate, real-time, and scalable. Furthermore, I characterized potential Information-stealer attacks via power auditing. To defend against this potential exfiltration attack, a prototype system was built on top of the botnet detection system. In a testbed environment, I defined and deployed an IoT Information-stealer attack. Then, I designed a detection classifier. Altogether, the proposed system is able to identify malicious behavior on endpoint IoT devices via power auditing. Next, I enhanced athletic performance via ubiquitous sensing and machine learning techniques. I first designed a metric called LAX-Score to quantify a collegiate lacrosse teamâs athletic performance. To derive this metric, I utilized feature selection and weighted regression. Then, the proposed metric was statistically validated on over 700 games from the last three seasons of NCAA Division I womenâs lacrosse. I also exam- ined the biometric sensing dataset obtained from a collegiate teamâs athletes over the course of a season. I then identified the practice features that are most correlated with high-performance games. Experimental results indicate that LAX-Score provides insight into athletic performance quality beyond wins and losses. Finally, I studied the data of patients with Parkinsonâs Disease. I secured the Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) sensing data of 30 patients while they conducted pre-defined activities. Using this dataset, I measured tremor events during drawing activities for more convenient tremor screening. Our preliminary analysis demonstrates that IMU sensing data can identify potential tremor events in daily drawing or writing activities. For future work, deep learning-based techniques will be used to extract features of the tremor in real-time. Overall, I designed and applied learning-based methods across different fields to solve real-world problems. The results show that combining learning methods with domain knowledge enables the formation of solutions
Lessons from Formally Verified Deployed Software Systems (Extended version)
The technology of formal software verification has made spectacular advances,
but how much does it actually benefit the development of practical software?
Considerable disagreement remains about the practicality of building systems
with mechanically-checked proofs of correctness. Is this prospect confined to a
few expensive, life-critical projects, or can the idea be applied to a wide
segment of the software industry?
To help answer this question, the present survey examines a range of
projects, in various application areas, that have produced formally verified
systems and deployed them for actual use. It considers the technologies used,
the form of verification applied, the results obtained, and the lessons that
can be drawn for the software industry at large and its ability to benefit from
formal verification techniques and tools.
Note: a short version of this paper is also available, covering in detail
only a subset of the considered systems. The present version is intended for
full reference.Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1211.6186 by other author
Challenges and perspectives of hate speech research
This book is the result of a conference that could not take place. It is a collection of 26 texts that address and discuss the latest developments in international hate speech research from a wide range of disciplinary perspectives. This includes case studies from Brazil, Lebanon, Poland, Nigeria, and India, theoretical introductions to the concepts of hate speech, dangerous speech, incivility, toxicity, extreme speech, and dark participation, as well as reflections on methodological challenges such as scraping, annotation, datafication, implicity, explainability, and machine learning. As such, it provides a much-needed forum for cross-national and cross-disciplinary conversations in what is currently a very vibrant field of research
Heterogeneous photocatalysis in flow : technologies for accelerating sustainable synthesis
The global climate crisis has driven society to strive for sustainability across all
industries in order to combat anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions and pollution. For
over a century, utilisation of solar irradiation has been an attractive but challenging
solution to providing sustainable energy, leading to significant academic and industrial
research and development of a wide range of light harvesting technologies, such as
photovoltaics and, more recently, photocatalysis.
Simultaneously, society is progressing rapidly towards a fourth industrial
revolution, with automation, robotics, artificial intelligence, and machine learning being
broadly adopted throughout industry and academic research. Within chemistry, these
technologies are driving the development of automated synthesis platforms that can
rapidly perform and analyse chemical reactions, quickly exploring a vast chemical space
to find optimised conditions. Enabling technologies for synthesis, such as flow chemistry
and in-line process analytical tools, are critical to these efforts as they provide the physical
means to automate altering reaction conditions and data collection which enable machine
learning algorithms to search chemical space and self-optimise.
The combination of heterogeneous photocatalysis and enabling technologies is a
promising strategy to provide sustainable and continuous photosynthetic processes for the
chemical industry. However, the efficiency of heterogeneous photocatalysts remains a
significant challenge that must be overcome through material design and reactor
engineering. Within this thesis, we discuss our recent contributions to this field, including
the development of new polymer-supported photocatalyst materials which share
advantages of both homogeneous and heterogeneous photocatalysts. Additionally, we
demonstrate enabling technologies such as flow chemistry, additive manufacturing, and
in-line analysis as powerful tools for enhancing heterogeneous photocatalysis.
Furthermore, we present the development of an entirely new technology for automated
flow (photo)synthesis and purification: in-line flash chromatography
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