9,423 research outputs found

    The Globalization of Artificial Intelligence: African Imaginaries of Technoscientific Futures

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    Imaginaries of artificial intelligence (AI) have transcended geographies of the Global North and become increasingly entangled with narratives of economic growth, progress, and modernity in Africa. This raises several issues such as the entanglement of AI with global technoscientific capitalism and its impact on the dissemination of AI in Africa. The lack of African perspectives on the development of AI exacerbates concerns of raciality and inclusion in the scientific research, circulation, and adoption of AI. My argument in this dissertation is that innovation in AI, in both its sociotechnical imaginaries and political economies, excludes marginalized countries, nations and communities in ways that not only bar their participation in the reception of AI, but also as being part and parcel of its creation. Underpinned by decolonial thinking, and perspectives from science and technology studies and African studies, this dissertation looks at how AI is reconfiguring the debate about development and modernization in Africa and the implications for local sociotechnical practices of AI innovation and governance. I examined AI in international development and industry across Kenya, Ghana, and Nigeria, by tracing Canada’s AI4D Africa program and following AI start-ups at AfriLabs. I used multi-sited case studies and discourse analysis to examine the data collected from interviews, participant observations, and documents. In the empirical chapters, I first examine how local actors understand the notion of decolonizing AI and show that it has become a sociotechnical imaginary. I then investigate the political economy of AI in Africa and argue that despite Western efforts to integrate the African AI ecosystem globally, the AI epistemic communities in the continent continue to be excluded from dominant AI innovation spaces. Finally, I examine the emergence of a Pan-African AI imaginary and argue that AI governance can be understood as a state-building experiment in post-colonial Africa. The main issue at stake is that the lack of African perspectives in AI leads to negative impacts on innovation and limits the fair distribution of the benefits of AI across nations, countries, and communities, while at the same time excludes globally marginalized epistemic communities from the imagination and creation of AI

    Endogenous measures for contextualising large-scale social phenomena: a corpus-based method for mediated public discourse

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    This work presents an interdisciplinary methodology for developing endogenous measures of group membership through analysis of pervasive linguistic patterns in public discourse. Focusing on political discourse, this work critiques the conventional approach to the study of political participation, which is premised on decontextualised, exogenous measures to characterise groups. Considering the theoretical and empirical weaknesses of decontextualised approaches to large-scale social phenomena, this work suggests that contextualisation using endogenous measures might provide a complementary perspective to mitigate such weaknesses. This work develops a sociomaterial perspective on political participation in mediated discourse as affiliatory action performed through language. While the affiliatory function of language is often performed consciously (such as statements of identity), this work is concerned with unconscious features (such as patterns in lexis and grammar). This work argues that pervasive patterns in such features that emerge through socialisation are resistant to change and manipulation, and thus might serve as endogenous measures of sociopolitical contexts, and thus of groups. In terms of method, the work takes a corpus-based approach to the analysis of data from the Twitter messaging service whereby patterns in users’ speech are examined statistically in order to trace potential community membership. The method is applied in the US state of Michigan during the second half of 2018—6 November having been the date of midterm (i.e. non-Presidential) elections in the United States. The corpus is assembled from the original posts of 5,889 users, who are nominally geolocalised to 417 municipalities. These users are clustered according to pervasive language features. Comparing the linguistic clusters according to the municipalities they represent finds that there are regular sociodemographic differentials across clusters. This is understood as an indication of social structure, suggesting that endogenous measures derived from pervasive patterns in language may indeed offer a complementary, contextualised perspective on large-scale social phenomena

    Emerging Power Electronics Technologies for Sustainable Energy Conversion

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    This Special Issue summarizes, in a single reference, timely emerging topics related to power electronics for sustainable energy conversion. Furthermore, at the same time, it provides the reader with valuable information related to open research opportunity niches

    Filter-Feeding in Marine Invertebrates

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    Filter-feeding in marine invertebrates is a big and important research subject, which cannot be even approximately covered by the present six articles. But although these articles deal with a limited and rather random selection of both topics and filter-feeding species, they give an update of certain aspects of important ongoing research. The articles deal with many topics, such as: filtration rates, energy budgets, growth rates, bioenergetic modeling, filter-pump design, particle-capture mechanisms, functional morphology, and hydrodynamics studied in sponges, jellyfish, mussels, and other filter-feeding marine invertebrates. This makes the Special Issue relevant for all marine biologists

    Operatic Pasticcios in 18th-Century Europe

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    In Early Modern times, techniques of assembling, compiling and arranging pre-existing material were part of the established working methods in many arts. In the world of 18th-century opera, such practices ensured that operas could become a commercial success because the substitution or compilation of arias fitting the singer's abilities proved the best recipe for fulfilling the expectations of audiences. Known as »pasticcios« since the 18th-century, these operas have long been considered inferior patchwork. The volume collects essays that reconsider the pasticcio, contextualize it, define its preconditions, look at its material aspects and uncover its aesthetical principles

    Genomic Analysis of Antibiotics Resistance in Pathogens

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    The emergence of antibiotic-resistant pathogens currently represents a serious threat to public health and the economy. Due to antibiotic treatments in humans and veterinary medicine, prophylactic use and environmental contamination, bacteria are today more frequently exposed to unnatural doses of antibiotics and their selective effect.Antibiotic resistance can be encoded on chromosomes, plasmids, or other mobile genetic elements in bacteria. It may also result from mutations that lead to changes in the affinity of antibiotics for their targets or in the ability of antibiotics to act on bacterial growth or death. Exposure of bacteria, bacterial populations, and microbial communities to antibiotics at different concentrations shapes their genomic dynamics, as does the mobilisation and spread of resistance determinants. It is, therefore, essential to understand the dynamics and mobilisation of genes encoding antibiotic resistance, in human, animal, plant, and environmental microbiomes, through genomic and metagenomic approaches and bioinformatics analyses.This Special Issue gathers research publications on the horizontal transfer of antibiotic-resistance genes, their dissemination and epidemiology, their association with bacterial virulence, between bacterial genotypes and their phenotypes, and other related research topics

    Outdoor Insulation and Gas Insulated Switchgears

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    This book focuses on theoretical and practical developments in the performance of high-voltage transmission line against atmospheric pollution and icing. Modifications using suitable fillers are also pinpointed to improve silicone rubber insulation materials. Very fast transient overvoltage (VFTO) mitigation techniques, along with some suggestions for reliable partial discharge measurements under DC voltage stresses inside gas-insulated switchgears, are addressed. The application of an inductor-based filter for the protective performance of surge arresters against indirect lightning strikes is also discussed

    Land Use and Land Cover Mapping in a Changing World

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    It is increasingly being recognized that land use and land cover changes driven by anthropogenic pressures are impacting terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems and their services, human society, and human livelihoods and well-being. This Special Issue contains 12 original papers covering various issues related to land use and land use changes in various parts of the world (see references), with the purpose of providing a forum to exchange ideas and progress in related areas. Research topics include land use targets, dynamic modelling and mapping using satellite images, pressures from energy production, deforestation, impacts on ecosystem services, aboveground biomass evaluation, and investigations on libraries of legends and classiïŹcation systems

    Effective and proportionate implementation of the DMA

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