3,109 research outputs found

    Multidisciplinary perspectives on Artificial Intelligence and the law

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    This open access book presents an interdisciplinary, multi-authored, edited collection of chapters on Artificial Intelligence (‘AI’) and the Law. AI technology has come to play a central role in the modern data economy. Through a combination of increased computing power, the growing availability of data and the advancement of algorithms, AI has now become an umbrella term for some of the most transformational technological breakthroughs of this age. The importance of AI stems from both the opportunities that it offers and the challenges that it entails. While AI applications hold the promise of economic growth and efficiency gains, they also create significant risks and uncertainty. The potential and perils of AI have thus come to dominate modern discussions of technology and ethics – and although AI was initially allowed to largely develop without guidelines or rules, few would deny that the law is set to play a fundamental role in shaping the future of AI. As the debate over AI is far from over, the need for rigorous analysis has never been greater. This book thus brings together contributors from different fields and backgrounds to explore how the law might provide answers to some of the most pressing questions raised by AI. An outcome of the Católica Research Centre for the Future of Law and its interdisciplinary working group on Law and Artificial Intelligence, it includes contributions by leading scholars in the fields of technology, ethics and the law.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

    A Critical Review Of Post-Secondary Education Writing During A 21st Century Education Revolution

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    Educational materials are effective instruments which provide information and report new discoveries uncovered by researchers in specific areas of academia. Higher education, like other education institutions, rely on instructional materials to inform its practice of educating adult learners. In post-secondary education, developmental English programs are tasked with meeting the needs of dynamic populations, thus there is a continuous need for research in this area to support its changing landscape. However, the majority of scholarly thought in this area centers on K-12 reading and writing. This paucity presents a phenomenon to the post-secondary community. This research study uses a qualitative content analysis to examine peer-reviewed journals from 2003-2017, developmental online websites, and a government issued document directed toward reforming post-secondary developmental education programs. These highly relevant sources aid educators in discovering informational support to apply best practices for student success. Developmental education serves the purpose of addressing literacy gaps for students transitioning to college-level work. The findings here illuminate the dearth of material offered to developmental educators. This study suggests the field of literacy research is fragmented and highlights an apparent blind spot in scholarly literature with regard to English writing instruction. This poses a quandary for post-secondary literacy researchers in the 21st century and establishes the necessity for the literacy research community to commit future scholarship toward equipping college educators teaching writing instruction to underprepared adult learners

    Fictocritical Cyberfeminism: A Paralogical Model for Post-Internet Communication

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    This dissertation positions the understudied and experimental writing practice of fictocriticism as an analog for the convergent and indeterminate nature of “post-Internet” communication as well a cyberfeminist technology for interfering and in-tervening in metanarratives of technoscience and technocapitalism that structure contemporary media. Significant theoretical valences are established between twen-tieth century literary works of fictocriticism and the hybrid and ephemeral modes of writing endemic to emergent, twenty-first century forms of networked communica-tion such as social media. Through a critical theoretical understanding of paralogy, or that countercultural logic of deploying language outside legitimate discourses, in-volving various tactics of multivocity, mimesis and metagraphy, fictocriticism is ex-plored as a self-referencing linguistic machine which exists intentionally to occupy those liminal territories “somewhere in among/between criticism, autobiography and fiction” (Hunter qtd. in Kerr 1996). Additionally, as a writing practice that orig-inated in Canada and yet remains marginal to national and international literary scholarship, this dissertation elevates the origins and ongoing relevance of fictocriti-cism by mapping its shared aims and concerns onto proximal discourses of post-structuralism, cyberfeminism, network ecology, media art, the avant-garde, glitch feminism, and radical self-authorship in online environments. Theorized in such a matrix, I argue that fictocriticism represents a capacious framework for writing and reading media that embodies the self-reflexive politics of second-order cybernetic theory while disrupting the rhetoric of technoscientific and neoliberal economic forc-es with speech acts of calculated incoherence. Additionally, through the inclusion of my own fictocritical writing as works of research-creation that interpolate the more traditional chapters and subchapters, I theorize and demonstrate praxis of this dis-tinctively indeterminate form of criticism to empirically and meaningfully juxtapose different modes of knowing and speaking about entangled matters of language, bod-ies, and technologies. In its conclusion, this dissertation contends that the “creative paranoia” engendered by fictocritical cyberfeminism in both print and digital media environments offers a pathway towards a more paralogical media literacy that can transform the terms and expectations of our future media ecology

    Under construction: infrastructure and modern fiction

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    In this dissertation, I argue that infrastructural development, with its technological promises but widening geographic disparities and social and environmental consequences, informs both the narrative content and aesthetic forms of modernist and contemporary Anglophone fiction. Despite its prevalent material forms—roads, rails, pipes, and wires—infrastructure poses particular formal and narrative problems, often receding into the background as mere setting. To address how literary fiction theorizes the experience of infrastructure requires reading “infrastructurally”: that is, paying attention to the seemingly mundane interactions between characters and their built environments. The writers central to this project—James Joyce, William Faulkner, Karen Tei Yamashita, and Mohsin Hamid—take up the representational challenges posed by infrastructure by bringing transit networks, sanitation systems, and electrical grids and the histories of their development and use into the foreground. These writers call attention to the political dimensions of built environments, revealing the ways infrastructures produce, reinforce, and perpetuate racial and socioeconomic fault lines. They also attempt to formalize the material relations of power inscribed by and within infrastructure; the novel itself becomes an imaginary counterpart to the technologies of infrastructure, a form that shapes and constrains what types of social action and affiliation are possible

    Redes de sensores para la predicción solar a corto plazo en el marco de las microgrids y smartcities

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    En los últimos años, la potencia fotovoltaica instalada global ha crecido notablemente, llegando a superar el 20\% de la demanda energética en varios países. Esto se debe en parte a la reducción de costes de esta tecnología y la política de promover el uso de energías renovables. La producción de la energía fotovoltaica depende directamente de los niveles de radiación solar incidente sobre los paneles, que se trata de un recurso externo y variable. La irradiancia solar fluctúa principalmente por dos factores, pero la mayor variabilidad está asociada a la presencia de nubes, y estas variaciones tienen una duración que va desde unos pocos segundos hasta varios minutos. Debido al funcionamiento del mercado eléctrico y a la nula inercia en la producción energética de estos sistemas, los productores fotovoltaicos necesitan de predicciones precisas en diferentes horizontes temporales con el fin de maximizar la energía ofertada en el mercado, incrementando de este modo la integración de la misma. Por otra parte, también necesitan datos en tiempo real para una gestión más óptima del sistema fotovoltaico. Las predicciones a corto plazo se emplean para el sistema de control y balance de la producción energética, y a medio plazo para la programación y venta de energía en el mercado eléctrico, sin embargo, los sistemas actuales de predicción son escasos y caros para ser contemplados en sistemas de media y pequeña escala. Numerosos estudios han intentado cubrir la necesidad de predicción a corto plazo estimando espacio-temporalmente el campo de irradiancia con cámaras de cielo completo e imágenes de satélite, sin embargo, estos métodos están limitados por la problemática de la conversión de imagen a irradiancia. Investigadores influyentes en este área creen que las redes de sensores de irradiancia pueden jugar un papel fundamental en este contexto, ofreciendo en tiempo real varias medidas espaciales y con la alta resolución temporal necesaria. La información espacio-temporal capturada por la red permitiría estimar el campo de irradiancia y analizar su evolución, capturando incluso los eventos más rápidos. Las tecnologías inalámbricas han evolucionado en el marco de las ciudades inteligentes y el internet de las cosas, apareciendo tecnologías que se adecuan a diferentes escenarios. El interés mostrado en estos sistemas ha producido un abaratamiento de los módulos de comunicaciones inalámbricas, gracias a la economía de escala. Las redes de sensores podrían beneficiarse de estas tecnologías inalámbricas, ofreciendo a su vez un ahorro en costes del despliegue respecto a su equivalente cableado y una mayor flexibilidad para integrar nuevos nodos en la red. Por ello, esta tesis se pretende estudiar el potencial de estas redes inalámbricas como fuente de información crítica para la gestión a corto plazo de sistemas fotovoltaicos, y la explotación de los datos de la misma, implementando y desarrollando algoritmos con estos datos con fines de predicción de la producción y para la operación óptima de estos sistemas.In recent years, global installed photovoltaic power has grown significantly, exceeding 20% of energy demand in several countries. This is partly due to the cost reduction of this technology and the policy of promoting the use of renewable energies. Photovoltaic energy production depends directly on the levels of solar radiation incident on the panels, which is an external and variable resource. Solar irradiance fluctuates mainly due to two factors, but the greatest variability is associated with the presence of clouds, and these variations range in duration from a few seconds to several minutes. Due to the functioning of the electricity market and the lack of inertia in the energy production of these systems, PV producers need accurate forecasts at different time horizons in order to maximize the energy offered in the market, thus increasing the integration of the same. On the other hand, they also need real-time data for more optimal PV system management. Short-term forecasts are used for the energy production control and balancing system, and medium-term forecasts are used for scheduling and selling energy in the electricity market, however, current forecasting systems are scarce and expensive to be contemplated in medium and small-scale systems. Numerous studies have attempted to address the need for short-term forecasting by estimating the spatio-temporal irradiance field with full-sky cameras and satellite imagery, however, these methods are limited by the problems of image-to-irradiance conversion. Influential researchers in this area believe that irradiance sensor networks can play a key role in this context, providing various spatial measurements in real time and with the necessary high temporal resolution. The spatio-temporal information captured by the network would allow estimating the irradiance field and analyzing its evolution, capturing even the fastest events. Wireless technologies have evolved within the framework of smart cities and the internet of things, with the emergence of technologies that are suitable for different scenarios. The interest shown in these systems has led to a reduction in the cost of wireless communications modules, thanks to economies of scale. Sensor networks could benefit from these wireless technologies, offering savings in deployment costs compared to their wired equivalent and greater flexibility to integrate new nodes in the network. Thus, this thesis aims to study the potential of these wireless networks as a source of critical information for the short-term management of photovoltaic systems, and the exploitation of the data from it, implementing and developing algorithms with this data for production prediction purposes and for the optimal operation of these systems

    The density of leopards in a mixed-use landscape in the Western Cape, South Africa

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    Large carnivores face numerous threats, including habitat loss and fragmentation, direct killing, and prey depletion, leading to significant global range and population declines. Despite these threats, leopards (Panthera pardus) persist outside protected areas throughout most of their range, occupying a diverse range of habitat types and land uses, including peri-urban and rural areas. Our understanding of leopard population dynamics in mixed-use landscapes is limited, especially in South Africa, where most research has focused on protected areas. Here I use spatially explicit capture-recapture (SECR) models on camera trap data to estimate how leopard density varies across a mixed-use landscape of protected areas, farmland, and urban areas in the Overberg region of the Western Cape, South Africa. Data were derived from 86 paired camera stations, which collected data for 161 camera trap nights, providing 221 independent leopard captures at 50 camera trap stations. A total of 25 individual leopards were identified, and the best-performing SECR model included the covariate sex on the σ (spatial decay), and a combination of sex, vegetation type and the interaction on λ0 (capture probability), with a density estimate of 0.64 leopards per 100 km2 . Elevation, terrain ruggedness, protected area status and NDVI were all important drivers of leopard density in the region, with leopard density highest on elevated remnants of natural land outside of protected areas. These results are similar to previous research findings in the Western Cape, where high-lying natural vegetation was shown to serve as both a refuge and a corridor for leopard movement in otherwise transformed landscapes. Given the low level of risks to lives and livelihoods posed by leopards in this region, the continued persistence of leopards in this shared landscape is considered high. Education of landowners should still be prioritised to improve tolerance towards leopards in the event of occasional negative impacts (e.g., livestock depredation)

    Mooring the global archive: a Japanese ship and its migrant histories

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    Martin Dusinberre follows the Yamashiro-maru steamship across Asian and Pacific waters in an innovative history of Japan's engagement with the outside world in the late-nineteenth century. His compelling in-depth analysis reconstructs the lives of some of the thousands of male and female migrants who left Japan for work in Hawai'i, Southeast Asia and Australia. These stories bring together transpacific historiographies of settler colonialism, labour history and resource extraction in new ways. Drawing on an unconventional and deeply material archive, from gravestones to government files, paintings to song, and from digitized records to the very earth itself, Dusinberre addresses key questions of method and authorial positionality in the writing of global history. This engaging investigation into archival practice asks, what is the global archive, where is it cited, and who are 'we' as we cite it? This title is also available as Open Access

    Tradition and Innovation in Construction Project Management

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    This book is a reprint of the Special Issue 'Tradition and Innovation in Construction Project Management' that was published in the journal Buildings

    Taylor University Catalog 2023-2024

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    The 2023-2024 academic catalog of Taylor University in Upland, Indiana.https://pillars.taylor.edu/catalogs/1128/thumbnail.jp
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