Operationalizing design fiction with anticipatory ethnography

Transmuting the entanglement of situations, contexts, artifacts and people, designers mediate the relationship between ‘what could be’ and ‘what is’. All design, then, has an implicit relationship with the future. Latency will always exist as part of this relationship, between the inception of a design concept, development and delivery ofthat concept, and the manifestation ofthat concept’s potential impact on the world. As we move further into the heart of the Digital Revolution these periods of latency decrease, whilst the breadth and depth of potential impacts increase. Always an arm’s length away, but with a velocity and mass greater than at any point in history, the momentum of the future today is greater than ever before. This paper describes the practicalities of operationalizing design fiction, using anticipatory ethnography, in order to illuminate and explore the implications of plausible near futures and in doing so allowing designers and their designs to match the velocity of the future before critical impacts occur. By harnessing designers' speculation can we make the future’s ‘what is’ better than simply ‘what could be’

Media Infrastructures and the Politics of Digital Time

Digital media everyday inscribe new patterns of time, promising instant communication, synchronous collaboration, intricate time management, and profound new advantages in speed. The essays in this volume reconsider these outward interfaces of convenience by calling attention to their supporting infrastructures, the networks of digital time that exert pressures of conformity and standardization on the temporalities of lived experience and have important ramifications for social relations, stratifications of power, practices of cooperation, and ways of life. Interdisciplinary in method and international in scope, the volume draws together insights from media and communication studies, cultural studies, and science and technology studies while staging an important encounter between two distinct approaches to the temporal patterning of media infrastructures, a North American strain emphasizing the social and cultural experiences of lived time and a European tradition, prominent especially in Germany, focusing on technological time and time-critical processes

Towards European Anticipatory Governance for Artificial Intelligence

This report presents the findings of the Interdisciplinary Research Group “Responsibility: Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence” of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities and the Technology and Global Affairs research area of DGAP. In September 2019, they brought leading experts from research and academia together with policy makers and representatives of standardization authorities and technology organizations to set framework conditions for a European anticipatory governance regime for artificial intelligence (AI)

Prediction-based techniques for the optimization of mobile networks

Mención Internacional en el título de doctorMobile cellular networks are complex system whose behavior is characterized by the superposition of several random phenomena, most of which, related to human activities, such as mobility, communications and network usage. However, when observed in their totality, the many individual components merge into more deterministic patterns and trends start to be identifiable and predictable. In this thesis we analyze a recent branch of network optimization that is commonly referred to as anticipatory networking and that entails the combination of prediction solutions and network optimization schemes. The main intuition behind anticipatory networking is that knowing in advance what is going on in the network can help understanding potentially severe problems and mitigate their impact by applying solution when they are still in their initial states. Conversely, network forecast might also indicate a future improvement in the overall network condition (i.e. load reduction or better signal quality reported from users). In such a case, resources can be assigned more sparingly requiring users to rely on buffered information while waiting for the better condition when it will be more convenient to grant more resources. In the beginning of this thesis we will survey the current anticipatory networking panorama and the many prediction and optimization solutions proposed so far. In the main body of the work, we will propose our novel solutions to the problem, the tools and methodologies we designed to evaluate them and to perform a real world evaluation of our schemes. By the end of this work it will be clear that not only is anticipatory networking a very promising theoretical framework, but also that it is feasible and it can deliver substantial benefit to current and next generation mobile networks. In fact, with both our theoretical and practical results we show evidences that more than one third of the resources can be saved and even larger gain can be achieved for data rate enhancements.Programa Oficial de Doctorado en Ingeniería TelemáticaPresidente: Albert Banchs Roca.- Presidente: Pablo Serrano Yañez-Mingot.- Secretario: Jorge Ortín Gracia.- Vocal: Guevara Noubi

Exploring 'smart citizenship' as a socio-technical ecology: the case of Oxfordshire, UK

Critical social science scholarship on ‘smart citizenship’ has thus far emphasised ‘bottom-up’ participation as a democratising antidote to ‘top-down’ corporate or state-led smart cities. It is implied that contesting these powerful smart actors involves increasing the degree of citizen participation in smart programmes or projects and by enabling greater political agency in grassroots or citizen-centric alternatives. In this thesis, I emphasise the multiple and heterogenous ways ‘smart citizenship’ is enacted through a diverse set of discourses, practices, and materialities. Approaching these collectives as ‘socio-technical ecologies’, I seek to move beyond existing dichotomies that frame smart citizenship as either a condition of technologically-mediated authoritarian control (top-down) or of increased democratic participatory processes (bottom-up). My approach, I argue, helps to account for a wider set of interrelated ways in which citizenship is negotiated in actually-existing contexts of the smart city. The thesis draws on empirical materials generated through a study of how the UK county of Oxfordshire is being made ‘smart’. In doing so, I identify four overlapping, interconnected ways in which smart citizenship is constituted through ecologies of discourses, practices and materialities. The first is a type of ‘informational’ smart citizenship, which is centred on establishing and mobilising a fairly familiar mix of participatory deliberative engagement practices, procedures, and technologies. The second is the primarily discursive framing of citizens as living lab ‘beneficiaries’ who accrue relative advantages from experiments with technological products or services. Beneficiary citizens are enrolled in political-economic discourses of innovation to legitimise imaginaries of anticipated smart futures. The third raises the importance of 'expert' citizenship, which is deployed by partners to constitute local tech workers as experts engaged in making Oxford smart. I finally consider the ‘sim’ citizenships produced from machine learning methods of data analysis generative of road actor behaviour models for digital twin modelling. Sim citizens, calibrated by smart city data, populate the digital twin for iterative validation and verification testing of automated driving systems. The thesis altogether contributes to scholarly understandings of smart city citizenship by identifying emerging sets of relations between humans and technologies in digitally-mediated cities

High Consequence Scenarios for North Korean Atmospheric Nuclear Tests with Policy Recommendations for the U.S. Government

The government of North Korea has declared high-altitude EMP-capability to be a “strategic goal” and has also threatened an atmospheric test of a hydrogen bomb. Atmospheric nuclear tests have the potential to cripple satellites and the undersea cable networks critical to communication, and navigation necessary for trans-Pacific trade among the U.S., China, and other nations. When a nuclear warhead is detonated at high altitude, a series of electromagnetic pulses radiate downward within the line of sight of the blast. These pulses can disable equipment with miniature electronics and long conductors. Electric grid controls and transmission systems are especially vulnerable. Intense X-rays and free electrons caused by high-altitude nuclear tests can also disable satellites over large regions of space. After the 1962 Starfish Prime test of EMP effects by the U.S, numerous satellites failed. Based on past missile tests, calculated delivery ranges, EMP coverage areas, and geography, Resilient Societies developed five scenarios for North Korean atmospheric tests. Possible sites for EMP tests include the South Pacific Ocean northeast of French Polynesia, Johnson Atoll southwest of Hawaii, and vicinity of the U.S. territory of Guam. Missile trajectories for all three of these EMP test scenarios overfly populated areas. Missile navigation or nuclear device fuzing errors could place the populations of Japan, Guam, and Hawaii are at risk. All potential EMP test locations could cause disruption to international satellite and undersea cable communications networks. North Korea should not be permitted to conduct an atmospheric nuclear tests since EMP effects on large networks necessary for electric power and international data sharing could have serious worldwide consequences due to the importance of Asia and the Pacific region to the global economy. In the regrettable event that North Korea chooses to conduct atmospheric nuclear tests, U.S. and allied monitoring of EMP effects will be helpful

Big data analytics:Computational intelligence techniques and application areas

Big Data has significant impact in developing functional smart cities and supporting modern societies. In this paper, we investigate the importance of Big Data in modern life and economy, and discuss challenges arising from Big Data utilization. Different computational intelligence techniques have been considered as tools for Big Data analytics. We also explore the powerful combination of Big Data and Computational Intelligence (CI) and identify a number of areas, where novel applications in real world smart city problems can be developed by utilizing these powerful tools and techniques. We present a case study for intelligent transportation in the context of a smart city, and a novel data modelling methodology based on a biologically inspired universal generative modelling approach called Hierarchical Spatial-Temporal State Machine (HSTSM). We further discuss various implications of policy, protection, valuation and commercialization related to Big Data, its applications and deployment