HOMEBOTS: Intelligent Decentralized Services for Energy Management

The deregulation of the European energy market, combined with emerging advanced capabilities of information technology, provides strategic opportunities for new knowledge-oriented services on the power grid. HOMEBOTS is the namewe have coined for one of these innovative services: decentralized power load management at the customer side, automatically carried out by a `society' of interactive household, industrial and utility equipment. They act as independent intelligent agents that communicate and negotiate in a computational market economy. The knowledge and competence aspects of this application are discussed, using an improved \ud version of task analysis according to the COMMONKADS knowledge methodology. Illustrated by simulation results, we indicate how customer knowledge can be mobilized to achieve joint goals of cost and energy savings. General implications for knowledge creation and its management are discussed

Intermedia Remediated & the Question of Designing Discourse

New “engines of discourse” (neural networks, algorithms and other forms of artificial intelligence, combined with the devices that record and interpret viewer actions) bring to the fore rhetorical concerns that challenge discipline-based notions of process and form. We shall focus here on the tradition of intermedial art practices to better understand the ever more complex question of how to inter-relate three aspects of digital communication: authorial “intent”, the digital sign and its interactive exploration by a “spect-actor”. We shall argue that the digital sign is an extension of intermedial thinking rooted in a pre-digital, photographic practice and esthetic. The writings of several French theorists on the subject of interactive digital design will provide a context for understanding examples of “virtual art-realities”, whose specificity is staging relationships between objects and people. Keywords: Rhetoric; Discourse; Intermedia; Interactivity; Digital Sign; Esthetics; Artificial Intelligence; Behavior-based Art.</p

Troping the Enemy: Metaphor, Culture, and the Big Data Black Boxes of National Security

This article considers how cultural understanding is being brought into the work of the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA), through an analysis of its Metaphor program. It examines the type of social science underwriting this program, unpacks implications of the agency’s conception of metaphor for understanding so-called cultures of interest, and compares IARPA’s to competing accounts of how metaphor works to create cultural meaning. The article highlights some risks posed by key deficits in the Intelligence Community\u27s (IC) approach to culture, which relies on the cognitive linguistic theories of George Lakoff and colleagues. It also explores the problem of the opacity of these risks for analysts, even as such predictive cultural analytics are becoming a part of intelligence forecasting. This article examines the problem of information secrecy in two ways, by unpacking the opacity of “black box,” algorithm-based social science of culture for end users with little appreciation of their potential biases, and by evaluating the IC\u27s nontransparent approach to foreign cultures, as it underwrites national security assessments

Imaginative Value Sensitive Design: How Moral Imagination Exceeds Moral Law Theories in Informing Responsible Innovation

Safe-by-Design (SBD) frameworks for the development of emerging technologies have become an ever more popular means by which scholars argue that transformative emerging technologies can safely incorporate human values. One such popular SBD methodology is called Value Sensitive Design (VSD). A central tenet of this design methodology is to investigate stakeholder values and design those values into technologies during early stage research and development (R&D). To accomplish this, the VSD framework mandates that designers consult the philosophical and ethical literature to best determine how to weigh moral trade-offs. However, the VSD framework also concedes the universalism of moral values, particularly the values of freedom, autonomy, equality trust and privacy justice. This paper argues that the VSD methodology, particularly applied to nano-bio-info-cogno (NBIC) technologies, has an insufficient grounding for the determination of moral values. As such, an exploration of the value-investigations of VSD are deconstructed to illustrate both its strengths and weaknesses. This paper also provides possible modalities for the strengthening of the VSD methodology, particularly through the application of moral imagination and how moral imagination exceed the boundaries of moral intuitions in the development of novel technologies

The Effects Of Metaphors And Pair Programming On Recall And Retention Amongst Students With Different Learning Styles And Self-Regulated Learning Levels

Kajian ini bertujuan meneliti kesan tiga kaedah pengajaran iaitu kombinasi Metafora dan Pengaturcaraan secara Berpasangan (MPP), Pengaturcaraan secara Berpasangan (PP) dan kaedah Pengajaran Langsung (PL) terhadap prestasi ingatkembali dan ketekalan para pelajar sains komputer di institusi pengajian tinggi di Malaysia. The study aimed to investigate the effects of (i) Metaphors with Pair Programming (MPP), (ii) Pair Programming (PP) and (iii) Direct Instruction Method (DI) on the students' recall and retention of programming performance amongst computing students in an institution of higher learning in Malaysia