AI Education: Open-Access Educational Resources on AI

Open-access AI educational resources are vital to the quality of the AI education we offer. Avoiding the reinvention of wheels is especially important to us because of the special challenges of AI Education. AI could be said to be “the really interesting miscellaneous pile of Computer Science”. While “artificial” is well-understood to encompass engineered artifacts, “intelligence” could be said to encompass any sufficiently difficult problem as would require an intelligent approach and yet does not fall neatly into established Computer Science subdisciplines. Thus AI consists of so many diverse topics that we would be hard-pressed to individually create quality learning experiences for each topic from scratch. In this column, we focus on a few online resources that we would recommend to AI Educators looking to find good starting points for course development. [excerpt

Digital Preservation and Access of Natural Resources Documents

Digitization and preservation of natural resource documents were reviewed and the current status of digitization presented for a North American university. It is important to present the status of the digitation process for natural resources and to advocate for increased collections of digital material for ease of reference and exchange of information. Digital collections need to include both published documents and ancillary material for research projects and data for future use and interpretation. The methods in this paper can be applied to other natural resource collections increasing their use and distribution. The process of decision making for documents and their preservation and inclusion in ScholarWorks is presented as a part of the Forest Sciences Commons as a subset of the Life Sciences Commons of the Digital Commons Open Network launched and maintained by bepress. Digitization has increased the roles and skillsets needed for librarians and from libraries. This creates new challenges and opportunities for the library as publisher and as an advocate for open access. Digital curation melds together digitization and knowledge management and enhances community engagement. Digitization of collections are reviewed and natural resource documentation presented for faculty publications, Research Projects and Centers, eBooks, Journals, Galleries and electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETDs). Recommendations are made to increase the digital curation of the collection by encouraging community participation and use. Digital archives are important to natural resource professionals as society-ready natural resource graduates need to deal effectively with complex ecological, economic and social issues of current natural resources management. Natural resource research for the future needs to ensure that professionals have a greater breath of knowledge as they interpret and apply new knowledge, understanding, and technology to complex, transdisciplinary social and biological issues and challenges

User oriented access to secure biomedical resources through the grid

The life science domain is typified by heterogeneous data sets that are evolving at an exponential rate. Numerous post-genomic databases and areas of post-genomic life science research have been established and are being actively explored. Whilst many of these databases are public and freely accessible, it is often the case that researchers have data that is not so freely available and access to this data needs to be strictly controlled when distributed collaborative research is undertaken. Grid technologies provide one mechanism by which access to and integration of federated data sets is possible. Combining such data access and integration technologies with fine grained security infrastructures facilitates the establishment of virtual organisations (VO). However experience has shown that the general research (non-Grid) community are not comfortable with the Grid and its associated security models based upon public key infrastructures (PKIs). The Internet2 Shibboleth technology helps to overcome this through users only having to log in to their home site to gain access to resources across a VO – or in Shibboleth terminology a federation. In this paper we outline how we have applied the combination of Grid technologies, advanced security infrastructures and the Internet2 Shibboleth technology in several biomedical projects to provide a user-oriented model for secure access to and usage of Grid resources. We believe that this model may well become the de facto mechanism for undertaking e-Research on the Grid across numerous domains including the life sciences

Managing Access to Service Providers in Federated Identity Environments: A Case Study in a Cloud Storage Service

© 2015 IEEE. Currently the diversity of services, which are adhering to Identity Federation, has raised new challenges in the area. Increasingly, service providers need to control the access to their resources by users from the federation as, even though the user is authenticated by the federation, its access to resources cannot be taken for granted. Each Service Provider (SP) of a federation implements their own access control mechanism. Moreover, SPs might need to allow different access control granularity. For instance, all users from a particular Identity Provider (IdP) may access the resources due to some financial agreement. On the other hand, it might be the case that only specific users, or groups of users, have access to the resources. This paper proposes a solution to this problem through a hierarchical authorization system. Our approach, which can be customized to different SPs, allows the SP administrator to manage which IdPs, or users, have access to the provided resources. In order to demonstrate the feasibility of our approach, we present a case study in the context of a cloud storage solution

Equity in a pastoral commons : Bayan Mountain, Mongolia : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Philosophy in Development Studies

Common property regimes (CPRs) have been embraced as a means to achieve sustainable use of resources. However, it is also claimed that these and other forms of communal resource management can allow for equitable access to resources, which is of some importance given the heavier reliance of poorer households on common resources. This view however appears to be contradicted by the existence of wealth differentiation among resource users, suggesting that the reality is more complex. This case study of a local pastoral commons used by Kazak herders in western Mongolia explores factors influencing both access to resources and wealth differentiation, which has been considerable since the end of socialism and attempts to evaluate the extent to which resource access in the CPR can be considered equitable. There is differential resource access in the study community, both in terms of rights of access, with some inequities linked to non-wealth-related household characteristics, and in terms of the ability to realise nominal access rights, which is chiefly affected by relative wealth. Although allocation of access rights is not discriminatory, the interrelationship between wealth and resource access thus serves to reinforce wealth differentiation. Wealth differentiation itself however depends on multiple factors including but not limited to resource access, and does not reliably indicate inequitable access to resources. The case study indicates that CPRs cannot be considered inherently equitable, but that instead equity in resource access is affected by social differentiation in the user group. In addition, where factors considered necessary to successful collective action are wanting, equitable outcomes seem less likely. Thus most inequities in access rights date back to privatisation in Mongolia and the resulting institutional breakdown and lack of user participation both in allocation of resources and in devising appropriate resource access rules. Despite this, evidence from both the case study and other pastoral commons suggests that CPRs may still offer more equitable access to resources than do other types of property regime

State Regulation of Open-Access, Common-Pool Resources.

Open-access, common-pool resources, such as many fisheries, aquifers, oil pools, and the atmosphere, often require some type of regulation of private access and use to avoid wasteful exploitation. This paper summarizes the arguments and literature associated with this problem. The historical and contemporary record of open-access resources is not a happy one, and many of the problems persist, despite large aggregate gains from resolving them. The discussion here suggests why that is the case. The paper focuses on government responses to the common pool, the private and political negotiations underlying them, and the information and transaction costs that influence the design of property rights and regulatory policies. Understanding the type of institution that emerges and its effects on the commons depends upon identifying the key parties involved, their objectives, and their political influence. Further, it requires detailed analysis of the bargaining that occurs within and across groups. The paper summarizes the open-access problem and provides case analyses of regulation of common-pool fisheries, oil reservoirs, and the atmosphere. The final section summarizes the general themes and the advantages of the New Institutional Economics (NIE) approach to analyzing the common pool.

Open Access, Law, Knowledge, Copyrights, Dominance and Subordination

The concept of open access to legal knowledge is at the surface a very appealing one. A citizenry that is well informed about the law may be more likely to comply with legal dictates and proscriptions, or at a minimum, will be aware of the consequences for not doing so. What is less apparent, however, is whether an open access approach to legal knowledge is realistically attainable without fundamental changes to the copyright laws that would recalibrate the power balance between content owners and citizens desiring access to interpretive legal resources. A truly useful application of open access principles would require adoption of compulsory licensing regimes with respect to proprietary legal resources, and significant government subsidies as well. Because affluent individuals today are both more likely to gain access to information and more likely to have the resources to use it, this Article concludes that the open access construct currently does little to actually empower access to legal information in any significant way

Financial bootstrapping and social capital: how technology-based start-ups fund innovation

Innovation requires more than technological expertise. It is a time consuming activity requiring access to a range of resources including finance. Yet, innovators involved in start-ups rarely have direct access to significant financial resources. Instead, they turn to a variety of forms of financial bootstrapping. Defined as access to resources not owned or controlled by the individual innovator, bootstrapping involves imaginative and parsimonious strategies for marshalling and gaining control of resources. This paper reports on research into bootstrapping using case studies, drawn from biographies of well-known innovators. The study found that bootstrapping was widespread and innovators showed great ingenuity in obtaining finance without recourse to conventional financial institutions. Not only were ranges of bootstrapping techniques employed, the study also provided valuable insights into the importance of social capital, in the form of networks of friends, colleagues and other contacts, in providing innovators with access to bootstrapping finance

Firewalls: A Balance Between Security and Accesibility

Access control lists and firewall rules are intended to prevent access to certain resources on a computer network while allowing access to other resources. Access control lists determine who has access to resources while firewall rules prevent general access to resources. The goal of this research is to find the best way to optimize a campus internet connection as well as a balance between the application of rules and lists and the accessibility of the outside world. This research is done utilizing a simulated internet and local network environment. The environment utilized simulates the set-up currently in use by an educational institution and will serve as a test environment upon completion of my research

Freeing up access to learning: the role for Open Educational Resources

The internet revolution of the last few years has had an impact on how we all live our lives. So it is not surprising that this is also a time of change in attitudes towards how we learn. Free access to information through computer networks has expanded, and part of that information flow are materials designed to help people learn. In addition there are many further online resources that help the learning process, even if that was not the original aim. However, there are risks in this evolution in access to information both for the end user, who can be confused by the options available to them, and to those involved in providing education, who may see their traditional role changing and becoming harder to perform. This situation provides the background for a growing movement to directly consider how education can be provided in a freer and more open way. This has been termed “Open Educational Resources” (OER). The exact definition of the term depends on interpretation, however a useful statement was provided as an outcome from an event organized by UNESCO in 2002 as: “OER are teaching, learning, and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license that permits their free use or re-purposing by others. Open educational resources include full courses, course materials, modules, textbooks, streaming videos, tests, software, and any other tools, materials, or techniques used to support access to knowledge (Atkins, Brown and Hammond, 2007, p4).” Arguably the only difference between an online learning object and an open educational resource is the declaration that it is open. This may be true but that turns out to be a powerful difference. By being open the content can be accessed by any learner who can do so, it can be taken and run in new contexts, it can be reworked by others and adapted for local needs (with the result shared back if desired), it can be made part of shared pool of resources, it can be the shared point of reference for collaboration, and it can be the key to building policies that work in different domain