Funding Media, Strengthening Democracy: Grantmaking for the 21st Century

Despite the pervasiveness of media, the amount of philanthropic dollars in support of public interest media remains minuscule and, therefore largely ineffective. The report, based on a survey of the the funding sector, calls on philanthropists to embrace a practice of transparency and information sharing via technology, to determine how existing funds are being used and how they can best be leveraged to increase philanthropic impact within the media field

Generating multimedia presentations: from plain text to screenplay

In many Natural Language Generation (NLG) applications, the output is limited to plain text – i.e., a string of words with punctuation and paragraph breaks, but no indications for layout, or pictures, or dialogue. In several projects, we have begun to explore NLG applications in which these extra media are brought into play. This paper gives an informal account of what we have learned. For coherence, we focus on the domain of patient information leaflets, and follow an example in which the same content is expressed first in plain text, then in formatted text, then in text with pictures, and finally in a dialogue script that can be performed by two animated agents. We show how the same meaning can be mapped to realisation patterns in different media, and how the expanded options for expressing meaning are related to the perceived style and tone of the presentation. Throughout, we stress that the extra media are not simple added to plain text, but integrated with it: thus the use of formatting, or pictures, or dialogue, may require radical rewording of the text itself

Engineers for the future; accounting for diversity

tailoring engineering and STEM education to meet the needs of all stakeholders. (External Industry requirement) a. Educational institutions must consider an increasingly diverse group of stakeholders, including students, staff, industry, and the wider community. How can educational activities expand our horizons beyond classroom and industry experience

Dance of the bulrushes: building conversations between social creatures

The interactive installation is in vogue. Interaction design and physical installations are accepted fixtures of modern life, and with these technology-driven installations beginning to exert influence on modes of mass communication and general expectations for user experiences, it seems appropriate to explore the variety of interactions that exist. This paper surveys a number of successful projects with a critical eye toward assessing the type of communication and/or conversation generated between interactive installations and human participants. Moreover, this exploration seeks to identify whether specific tactics and/or technologies are particularly suited to engendering layers of dialogue or ‘conversations’ within interactive physical computing installations. It is asserted that thoughtful designs incorporating self-organizational abilities can foster rich dialogues in which participants and the installation collaboratively generate value in the interaction. To test this hypothesis an interactive installation was designed and deployed in locations in and around London. Details of the physical objects and employed technologies are discussed, and results of the installation sessions are shown to corroborate the key tenets of this argument in addition to highlighting other concerns that are specifically relevant to the broad topic of interactive design

Intelligent Tutoring Systems for Generation Z's Addiction

As generation Z's big data is flooding the Internet through social nets, neural network based data processing is turning an important cornerstone, showing significant potential for fast extraction of data patterns. Online course delivery and associated tutoring are transforming into customizable, on-demand services driven by the learner. Besides automated grading, strong potential exists for the development and deployment of next generation intelligent tutoring software agents. Self-adaptive, online tutoring agents exhibiting "intelligent-like" behavior, being capable "to learn" from the learner, will become the next educational superstars. Over the past decade, computer-based tutoring agents were deployed in a variety of extended reality environments, from patient rehabilitation to psychological trauma healing. Most of these agents are driven by a set of conditional control statements and a large answers/questions pairs dataset. This article provides a brief introduction on Generation Z's addiction to digital information, highlights important efforts for the development of intelligent dialogue systems, and explains the main components and important design decisions for Intelligent Tutoring System.Comment: 4 page

Assessment of the level of awareness of intelligent buildings in Lagos State, Nigeria

The feasibility of achieving sustainable building development, an eco-friendly environment, and building investment conservation by integrating technological intelligence in buildings is highly viable. Intelligence features are, therefore, increasingly being incorporated in new designs and existing buildings to enhance the useful life, productivity and satisfaction of occupants, and a greener environment. This article evaluates the use of intelligent building systems in Nigeria. Primary data were obtained with the use of structured questionnaires that were self-administered to construction professionals in the private and public sectors in Lagos State. Data collected were analysed using descriptive and inferential statistics. Findings established that 90.24% of the respondents were aware of intelligent building systems, while practitioners who have worked or were working on buildings with intelligent features were limited to 51.2%. Approximately 64.60% of the respondents have used intelligent buildings previously, but only thirteen (13) notable buildings were identified to have employed intelligent building systems to a reasonable extent in the study area. The features of intelligent buildings with top level of awareness were CCTV system; access control and locks (mean = 3.96); alarms and alerts (mean = 3.92); HVAC system (mean = 3.90), and fire alarm system (mean = 3.89). Features with high level of utilisation include lighting system, which was the most utilised feature (mean = 3.57); fire alarm system (mean = 3.48); access control and lock; CCTV system (mean = 3.45), and HVAC system (mean = 3.43). The results showed that most of the features with a high level of awareness were also those with a high level of utilisation. The study established that the level of awareness and utilisation of intelligent building systems in the study area is high, but full adoption of the system is still low. &nbsp

The State of Science-and-Religion Scholarship At The Turn of the Century

In this keynote address to the 2000 Science and Religion Colloquium, the author not only describes and assesses the state of religion-and-science scholarship at the turn of the century hut also proposes a new approach for guiding it into the new century. After surveying the multifaceted terrain of recent research and identifying significant areas of current activity, Dr. Wildman forwards three theses regarding the future of religion-and-science scholarship. Such scholarship should make itself intelligible to the general public by avoiding methodological debates, employ multi-disciplinary resources in approaching research questions, and adopt a problem-oriented framework in handling complex, contemporary problems