APPLICATIONS AND PERCEIVED IMPACT OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE IN ACADEMIC LIBRARIES IN NIGERIA

This paper expounds the application and perceived impact of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in academic libraries in Nigeria. Libraries especially in developing countries may become moribund in the 21 century unless they begin to harness new, smart and intelligent technologies for improved operations and service delivery. This research adopted a literature-based approach to x-ray the applications and perceived impact of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in academic libraries in Nigeria. Through a systematic analysis and review of literature, the study brought to limelight the current state of AI integration in academic libraries in Nigeria and its possible impact on library services, collections, users, professionals and general library operations and services. The application of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in academic libraries has the potential to revolutionize library operations and services. Some of the identifies AI tools include: Natural Language Recognition, Robotics, Big Data, Data Mining, Chatbot, Machine Learning, Pattern Recognition and Expert system. Findings from the study revealed that the application of AI in academic libraries have the potentials to increases productivity, improved customer satisfaction through personalization, easy availability and accessibility of information, easy collaboration and knowledge sharing, virtual assistance and chatbots, and ultimately increase overall operational effectiveness. This paper also explored some of the challenges associated with the application of AI technologies in academic libraries in Nigeria such as poor ICT skills and technical expertise, high initial costs of implementation, phobia for job displacement, epileptic power supply, poor maintenance culture, resistance to change, poor network connectivity, privacy and ethical implications, etc. To maximize the potential benefits of AI applications in academic libraries in Nigeria, it is crucial for these libraries to implement appropriate planning, guidelines and regulations on AI use as well as training and retraining of academic librarians to acquire the required ICT skills, knowledge and competence in order to adapt in the present digital and changing library environment

The Contribution of Society to the Construction of Individual Intelligence

It is argued that society is a crucial factor in the construction of individual intelligence. In other words that it is important that intelligence is socially situated in an analogous way to the physical situation of robots. Evidence that this may be the case is taken from developmental linguistics, the social intelligence hypothesis, the complexity of society, the need for self-reflection and autism. The consequences for the development of artificial social agents is briefly considered. Finally some challenges for research into socially situated intelligence are highlighted

Robotic Wireless Sensor Networks

In this chapter, we present a literature survey of an emerging, cutting-edge, and multi-disciplinary field of research at the intersection of Robotics and Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) which we refer to as Robotic Wireless Sensor Networks (RWSN). We define a RWSN as an autonomous networked multi-robot system that aims to achieve certain sensing goals while meeting and maintaining certain communication performance requirements, through cooperative control, learning and adaptation. While both of the component areas, i.e., Robotics and WSN, are very well-known and well-explored, there exist a whole set of new opportunities and research directions at the intersection of these two fields which are relatively or even completely unexplored. One such example would be the use of a set of robotic routers to set up a temporary communication path between a sender and a receiver that uses the controlled mobility to the advantage of packet routing. We find that there exist only a limited number of articles to be directly categorized as RWSN related works whereas there exist a range of articles in the robotics and the WSN literature that are also relevant to this new field of research. To connect the dots, we first identify the core problems and research trends related to RWSN such as connectivity, localization, routing, and robust flow of information. Next, we classify the existing research on RWSN as well as the relevant state-of-the-arts from robotics and WSN community according to the problems and trends identified in the first step. Lastly, we analyze what is missing in the existing literature, and identify topics that require more research attention in the future

Role of Librarian in Internet and World Wide Web Environment

The transition of traditional library collections to digital or virtual collections presented the librarian with new opportunities. The Internet, Web environment and associated sophisticated tools have given the librarian a new dynamic role to play and serve the new information based society in better ways than hitherto. Because of the powerful features of Web i.e. distributed, heterogeneous, collaborative, multimedia, multi-protocol, hypermedia- oriented architecture, World Wide Web has revolutionized the way people access information, and has opened up new possibilities in areas such as digital libraries, virtual libraries, scientific information retrieval and dissemination. Not only the world is becoming interconnected, but also the use of Internet and Web has changed the fundamental roles, paradigms, and organizational culture of libraries and librarians as well. The article describes the limitless scope of Internet and Web, the existence of the librarian in the changing environment, parallelism between information science and information technology, librarians and intelligent agents, working of intelligent agents, strengths, weaknesses, threats and opportunities involved in the relationship between librarians and the Web. The role of librarian in Internet and Web environment especially as intermediary, facilitator, end-user trainer, Web site builder, researcher, interface designer, knowledge manager and sifter of information resources is also described

Combining brain-computer interfaces and assistive technologies: state-of-the-art and challenges

In recent years, new research has brought the field of EEG-based Brain-Computer Interfacing (BCI) out of its infancy and into a phase of relative maturity through many demonstrated prototypes such as brain-controlled wheelchairs, keyboards, and computer games. With this proof-of-concept phase in the past, the time is now ripe to focus on the development of practical BCI technologies that can be brought out of the lab and into real-world applications. In particular, we focus on the prospect of improving the lives of countless disabled individuals through a combination of BCI technology with existing assistive technologies (AT). In pursuit of more practical BCIs for use outside of the lab, in this paper, we identify four application areas where disabled individuals could greatly benefit from advancements in BCI technology, namely,“Communication and Control”, “Motor Substitution”, “Entertainment”, and “Motor Recovery”. We review the current state of the art and possible future developments, while discussing the main research issues in these four areas. In particular, we expect the most progress in the development of technologies such as hybrid BCI architectures, user-machine adaptation algorithms, the exploitation of users’ mental states for BCI reliability and confidence measures, the incorporation of principles in human-computer interaction (HCI) to improve BCI usability, and the development of novel BCI technology including better EEG devices

Using Web Archives to Enrich the Live Web Experience Through Storytelling

Much of our cultural discourse occurs primarily on the Web. Thus, Web preservation is a fundamental precondition for multiple disciplines. Archiving Web pages into themed collections is a method for ensuring these resources are available for posterity. Services such as Archive-It exists to allow institutions to develop, curate, and preserve collections of Web resources. Understanding the contents and boundaries of these archived collections is a challenge for most people, resulting in the paradox of the larger the collection, the harder it is to understand. Meanwhile, as the sheer volume of data grows on the Web, storytelling is becoming a popular technique in social media for selecting Web resources to support a particular narrative or story . In this dissertation, we address the problem of understanding the archived collections through proposing the Dark and Stormy Archive (DSA) framework, in which we integrate storytelling social media and Web archives. In the DSA framework, we identify, evaluate, and select candidate Web pages from archived collections that summarize the holdings of these collections, arrange them in chronological order, and then visualize these pages using tools that users already are familiar with, such as Storify. To inform our work of generating stories from archived collections, we start by building a baseline for the structural characteristics of popular (i.e., receiving the most views) human-generated stories through investigating stories from Storify. Furthermore, we checked the entire population of Archive-It collections for better understanding the characteristics of the collections we intend to summarize. We then filter off-topic pages from the collections the using different methods to detect when an archived page in a collection has gone off-topic. We created a gold standard dataset from three Archive-It collections to evaluate the proposed methods at different thresholds. From the gold standard dataset, we identified five behaviors for the TimeMaps (a list of archived copies of a page) based on the page’s aboutness. Based on a dynamic slicing algorithm, we divide the collection and cluster the pages in each slice. We then select the best representative page from each cluster based on different quality metrics (e.g., the replay quality, and the quality of the generated snippet from the page). At the end, we put the selected pages in chronological order and visualize them using Storify. For evaluating the DSA framework, we obtained a ground truth dataset of hand-crafted stories from Archive-It collections generated by expert archivists. We used Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to evaluate the automatically generated stories against the stories that were created by domain experts. The results show that the automatically generated stories by the DSA are indistinguishable from those created by human subject domain experts, while at the same time both kinds of stories (automatic and human) are easily distinguished from randomly generated storie