Inclusion of 3D Artifacts into a Digital Library: Exploring Technologies and Best Practice Techniques
The IUPUI University Library Center for Digital Scholarship has been digitizing and providing access to community and cultural heritage collections since 2006. Varying formats include: audio, video, photographs, slides, negatives, and text (bound, loose). The library provides access to these collections using CONTENTdm. As 3D technologies become increasingly popular in libraries and museums, IUPUI University Library is exploring the workflows and processes as they relate to 3D artifacts. This presentation will focus on incorporating 3D technologies into an already established digital library of community and cultural heritage collections.
U.S. retail giant Walmart has applied to the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office (USPTO) to patent a blockchain system for deliveries, according to an official patent document released August 30.
Walmart has applied for a number of blockchain-related patents in the U.S. in the past year. According to Investopedia, blockchain technology enhancement is mainly being used by the retailed in order to “help Walmart keep pace with its rivals,” such as Amazon.
Recently, Walmart applied for a patent on systems and methods for managing smart appliances via blockchain. The tech would allow users to customize levels of access and control for appliances such as portable computing devices.
In mid-July, the retail giant patented the technology for a blockchain-powered delivery management system that can keep delivered items safe until their purchasers are able to sign for and collect them.
Earlier this week, Apple ($NASDAQ:AAPL) acquired augmented reality (AR) lens and glasses company Akonia Holographics ($AKONIAHOLOGRAPHICS), which spawned plenty of speculation on Apple getting serious about AR.
Augmented reality overlays digital information over the real world and differs from virtual reality (VR), where the whole environment is simulated. Akonia describes its AR product as “thin, transparent smart glass lenses that display vibrant, full-color, wide field-of-view images.”
“Digital maps have become essential tools of our everyday lives, yet despite their ubiquity, they are still in their infancy. From urban mobility to indoor positioning, from LIDAR to Augmented Reality, advances in technology and new kinds of data are powering innovations in all areas of digital mapping. If you love maps and are passionate about what is possible, you will be in great company.”
Between the “dumb” fixed algorithms and true AI lies the problematic halfway house we’ve already entered with scarcely a thought and almost no debate, much less agreement as to aims, ethics, safety, best practice. If the algorithms around us are not yet intelligent, meaning able to independently say “that calculation/course of action doesn’t look right: I’ll do it again”, they are nonetheless starting to learn from their environments. And once an algorithm is learning, we no longer know to any degree of certainty what its rules and parameters are. At which point we can’t be certain of how it will interact with other algorithms, the physical world, or us. Where the “dumb” fixed algorithms – complex, opaque and inured to real time monitoring as they can be – are in principle predictable and interrogable, these ones are not. After a time in the wild, we no longer know what they are: they have the potential to become erratic. We might be tempted to call these “frankenalgos” – though Mary Shelley couldn’t have made this up.
Twenty years ago, George Dyson anticipated much of what is happening today in his classic book Darwin Among the Machines. The problem, he tells me, is that we’re building systems that are beyond our intellectual means to control. We believe that if a system is deterministic (acting according to fixed rules, this being the definition of an algorithm) it is predictable – and that what is predictable can be controlled. Both assumptions turn out to be wrong.“It’s proceeding on its own, in little bits and pieces,” he says. “What I was obsessed with 20 years ago that has completely taken over the world today are multicellular, metazoan digital organisms, the same way we see in biology, where you have all these pieces of code running on people’s iPhones, and collectively it acts like one multicellular organism.“There’s this old law called Ashby’s law that says a control system has to be as complex as the system it’s controlling, and we’re running into that at full speed now, with this huge push to build self-driving cars where the software has to have a complete model of everything, and almost by definition we’re not going to understand it. Because any model that we understand is gonna do the thing like run into a fire truck ’cause we forgot to put in the fire truck.”
Walsh believes this makes it more, not less, important that the public learn about programming, because the more alienated we become from it, the more it seems like magic beyond our ability to affect. When shown the definition of “algorithm” given earlier in this piece, he found it incomplete, commenting: “I would suggest the problem is that algorithm now means any large, complex decision making software system and the larger environment in which it is embedded, which makes them even more unpredictable.” A chilling thought indeed. Accordingly, he believes ethics to be the new frontier in tech, foreseeing “a golden age for philosophy” – a view with which Eugene Spafford of Purdue University, a cybersecurity expert, concurs. Where there are choices to be made, that’s where ethics comes in.
our existing system of tort law, which requires proof of intention or negligence, will need to be rethought. A dog is not held legally responsible for biting you; its owner might be, but only if the dog’s action is thought foreseeable.
model-based programming, in which machines do most of the coding work and are able to test as they go.
As we wait for a technological answer to the problem of soaring algorithmic entanglement, there are precautions we can take. Paul Wilmott, a British expert in quantitative analysis and vocal critic of high frequency trading on the stock market, wryly suggests “learning to shoot, make jam and knit”
The venerable Association for Computing Machinery has updated its code of ethics along the lines of medicine’s Hippocratic oath, to instruct computing professionals to do no harm and consider the wider impacts of their work.
40 virtual reality headsets with haptic handsets for them to manipulate in the VR/AR space, and I connected them to content from New York Times VR and WITHIN. The content placed students in settings such as on the ground in a refugee crisis or in the midst of the Millions March in New York City.
At the beginning of every class, they would go into this virtual space and engage with the content instead of just reading it. They’d respond to me about what it was like to be immersed in the experience.
The content from the WITHIN app provided one of the more visceral experiences for students.
At the end of the course, for example, students met with a shark tank-type group—investors from the community, business, and industry folks—and pitched them business ideas that would utilize VR to provide a solution to problems that were local, regional, national or even global in scope.
Were you able to measure this success?
The way that I measured it was completion. How many of my students actually got through my class successfully? It was over 85%. My research from the two classes where I used VR and this approach shows students were engaged, and ultimately more successful in my classes.
Künstliche Intelligenzen und Roboter werden in unserem Leben immer selbstverständlicher. Was erwarten wir von den intelligenten Maschinen, wie verändert ihre Präsenz in unserem Alltag und die Interaktion mit ihnen unser Selbstverständnis und unseren Umgang mit anderen Menschen? Müssen wir Roboter als eine Art menschliches Gegenüber anerkennen? Und welche Freiheiten wollen wir den Maschinen einräumen? Es ist dringend an der Zeit, die ethischen und rechtlichen Fragen zu klären.
1954 wurdeUnimate, der erste Industrieroboter , von George Devol entwickelt [1]. Insbesondere in den 1970er Jahren haben viele produzierende Gewerbe eine Roboterisierung ihrer Arbeit erfahren (beispielsweise die Automobil- und Druckindustrie).
Definition eines Industrieroboters in der ISO 8373 (2012) vergegenwärtigt: »Ein Roboter ist ein frei und wieder programmierbarer, multifunktionaler Manipulator mit mindestens drei unabhängigen Achsen, um Materialien, Teile, Werkzeuge oder spezielle Geräte auf programmierten, variablen Bahnen zu bewegen zur Erfüllung der verschiedensten Aufgaben«.
Ethische Überlegungen zu Robotik und Künstlicher Intelligenz
Versucht man sich einen Überblick über die verschiedenen ethischen Probleme zu verschaffen, die mit dem Aufkommen von ›intelligenten‹ und in jeder Hinsicht (Präzision, Geschwindigkeit, Kraft, Kombinatorik und Vernetzung) immer mächtigeren Robotern verbunden sind, so ist es hilfreich, diese Probleme danach zu unterscheiden, ob sie
1. das Vorfeld der Ethik,
2. das bisherige Selbstverständnis menschlicher Subjekte (Anthropologie) oder
3. normative Fragen im Sinne von: »Was sollen wir tun?« betreffen.
Die folgenden Überlegungen geben einen kurzen Aufriss, mit welchen Fragen wir uns jeweils beschäftigen sollten, wie die verschiedenen Fragenkreise zusammenhängen, und woran wir uns in unseren Antworten orientieren können.
Aufgabe der Ethik ist es, solche moralischen Meinungen auf ihre Begründung und Geltung hin zu befragen und so zu einem geschärften ethischen Urteil zu kommen, das idealiter vor der Allgemeinheit moralischer Subjekte verantwortet werden kann und in seiner Umsetzung ein »gelungenes Leben mit und für die Anderen, in gerechten Institutionen« [8] ermöglicht. Das ist eine erste vage Richtungsangabe.
Normative Fragen lassen sich am Ende nur ganz konkret anhand einer bestimmten Situation bearbeiten. Entsprechend liefert die Ethik hier keine pauschalen Urteile wie: »Roboter sind gut/schlecht«, »Künstliche Intelligenz dient dem guten Leben/ist dem guten Leben abträglich«.
Thirty students registered for Arizona State University Online’s general biology course are using ASU-supplied virtual reality (VR) headsets for a variety of required lab exercises
The VR equipment, which costs ASU $399 per student, allows learners to complete lab assignments in virtual space using goggles and a controller to maneuver around a simulated lab. Content for the online course was developed and assessed by ASU biology professors and was evaluated this summer. Students also can use their own VR headsets and access the content on their laptops, as 370 other students are doing.
A university official told Campus Technology the initiative will help online students have the experiences provided in brick-and-mortar labs as well as new ones that were impossible previously. The effort also will ease a problem on campus with limited lab space.
Similar labs are planned for the University of Texas at San Antonio and McMaster University in Canada, according to a blog post from Google, which partnered with the ed-tech company Labster to create the virtual labs. In addition, virtual labs also are available at eight community colleges in California, offering IT and cybersecurity skills instruction.
About half of colleges have space dedicated to VR, with adoption expected to increase as technology costs go down, according to a recent survey by nonprofit consortium Internet2. The survey found that 18% of institutions have “fully deployed” VR and are increasingly making it available to online students, while half are testing or have not yet deployed the technology.
Colleges are using VR for a variety of purposes, from classroom instruction to admissions recruiting to career training.
In addition, because the use of VR is growing in K–12 education, students will expect to use it in college.
Some schools invest in technology but never find the right way to teach with it. Here, a school library specialist shares how she turned teachers and students from skeptics into evangelists.