IFI7101: Session 13

[14.9] Session 13 – Design issues and processes

Lecture and seminar by David Lamas

Driving question:

How is New Media designed and deployed?
Is it art or engineering?

The walls between art and engineering exist only in our minds

Maybe the question that needs to be asked is how far apart art and engineering actually are. In general it seems that people put them at opposite sides of the spectrum with art being all about creativity and engineering all logical and scientific.

For me the art of engineering is so much more than just creativity – it is something that goes to the core of function, aesthetics, and problem solving. I believe that we as engineers need to create solutions that actually enhance people's lives. The point where all of this comes together is the point were we as engineers can start to be artists.

It is more than function and more than beauty – true engineering art should take your breath away and change the way you see the world. That is the kind of art that I want to create.

Definition by Duncan Drennan

Concept map:

Where the Hell is Matt?

In Tallinn, today, September 17th, 2011

Read more on: www.wherethehellismatt.com

IFI7124: Digital Knowledge Ecosystems

Digital ecosystem

A digital ecosystem is any distributed adaptive open socio-technical system, with properties of self-organisation, scalability and sustainability, inspired by natural ecosystems.



Knowledge ecosystem

The idea of a knowledge ecosystem is an approach to knowledge management which claims to foster the dynamic evolution of knowledge interactions between entities to improve decision-making and innovation through improved evolutionary networks of collaboration.

Like natural ecosystems, these knowledge ecosystems have inputs, throughputs and outputs operating in open exchange relationship with their environments. Multiple layers and levels of systems may be integrated to form a complete ecosystem. These systems consist of interlinked knowledge resources, databases, human experts, and artificial knowledge agents that collectively provide an online knowledge for anywhere anytime performance of organizational tasks. The availability of knowledge on an anywhere-anytime basis blurs the line between learning and work performance. Both can occur simultaneously and sometimes interchangeably.

Picture of the Day

And when it rains on your parade, look up rather than down.
Without the rain, there would be no rainbow. (G. K. Chesterton)

The camera that turns light into living pictures

No more fighting with dials and settings and modes. No more flat, boring, static photographs. With a Lytro, you unleash the light.

How does it work?

The light field is a core concept in imaging science, representing fundamentally more powerful data than in regular photographs. The light field fully defines how a scene appears. It is the amount of light traveling in every direction through every point in space – it's all the light rays in a scene. Conventional cameras cannot record the light field.

Recording light fields requires an innovative, entirely new kind of sensor called a light field sensor. The light field sensor captures the color, intensity and vector direction of the rays of light. This directional information is completely lost with traditional camera sensors, which simply add up all the light rays and record them as a single amount of light.

By substituting powerful software for many of the internal parts of regular cameras, light field processing introduces new capabilities that were never before possible. Sophisticated algorithms use the full light field to unleash new ways to make and view pictures. Relying on software rather than components can improve performance, from increased speed of picture taking to the potential for capturing better pictures in low light. It also creates new opportunities to innovate on camera lenses, controls and design.

The way we communicate visually is evolving rapidly, and people's expectations are changing in lockstep. Light field cameras offer astonishing capabilities. They allow both the picture taker and the viewer to focus pictures after they're snapped, shift their perspective of the scene, and even switch seamlessly between 2D and 3D views. With these amazing capabilities, pictures become immersive, interactive visual stories that were never before possible – they become living pictures.

See more photos on their website.

(Thanks, Mattias, for the hint and link in your blog. Interesting discovery!)

Cloud computing

Cloud computing is the delivery of computing as a service rather than a product, whereby shared resources, software and information are provided to computers and other devices as a utility (like the electricity grid) over a network (typically the Internet).

The concept of cloud computing fills a perpetual need of IT: a way to increase capacity or add capabilities on the fly without investing in new infrastructure, training new personnel, or licensing new software. Cloud computing encompasses any subscription-based or pay-per-use service that, in real time over the Internet, extends IT's existing capabilities.

IFI7101: Session 8

[8.9] Session 8 (guided self-study) – Privacy and Security

Lecture and seminar by David Lamas

Driving questions:

1) What is privacy and how is if affected by this era of Google and Facebook? Don't we care about privacy any longer?

2) And what about security? What are the current issues and how does this concept relate to the softer privacy concepts?

There's more on privacy and security matters under my previous posts:

• Security and Privacy Matters (IFI7115)
• Week 3: Ethics and Law in New Media
• Week 6: Ethics and Law in New Media

The Internet has brought new concerns about privacy in an age where computers can permanently store records of everything: where every online photo, status update, Twitter post and blog entry by and about us can be stored forever.

Internet privacy involves the desire or mandate of personal privacy concerning transactions or transmission of data via the Internet. It also involves the exercise of control over the type and amount of information revealed about a person on the Internet and who may access said information.

People with only a casual concern for Internet privacy need not achieve total anonymity. Internet users may achieve an adequate level of privacy through controlled disclosure of personal information. The revelation of IP addresses, non-personally-identifiable profiling, and similar information might become acceptable trade-offs for the convenience that users could otherwise lose using the workarounds needed to suppress such details rigorously. On the other hand, some people desire much stronger privacy. In that case, they may try to achieve Internet anonymity to ensure privacy – use of the Internet without giving any third parties the ability to link the Internet activities to personally-identifiable information (P.I.I.) of the Internet user. In order to keep your information private, people need to be careful on what they submit and look at online. When filling out forms and buying merchandise, that becomes tracked and because your information was not private, companies are now sending you spam and advertising on similar products.

In today's technological world, millions of individuals are subject to privacy threats. Companies are hired not only to watch what you visit online, but to infiltrate the information and send advertising based on your browsing history. People set up accounts for Facebook; enter bank and credit card information to various websites.

With the creation of Facebook and the continued popularity of MySpace many people are giving their personal information out on the internet. These social networks keep track of all interactions used on their sites and save them for later use. Most users are not aware that they can modify the privacy settings and unless they modify them, their information is open to the public.

Another privacy issue with social networks is the privacy agreement. The privacy agreement states that the social network owns all of the content that users upload. This includes pictures, videos, and messages are all stored in the social networks database even if the user decides to terminate his or her account. Additionally, the advent of the Web 2.0, which is the system that facilitates participatory information sharing and collaboration on the World Wide Web, allows for Facebook and other social networking media websites filter through the advertisements, assigning specific ones to specific age groups, gender groups, and even ethnicities. Web 2.0 has caused social profiling and is a growing concern for Internet privacy.

Social networking has redefined the role of Internet privacy. Since users are willingly disclosing personal information online, the role of privacy and security is somewhat blurry. Sites such as Facebook, Myspace, and Twitter have grown popular by broadcasting status updates featuring personal information such as location. Facebook Places, in particular, is a Facebook service which publicizes user location information to the networking community. Users are allowed to "check-in" at various locations including retail stores, convenience stores, and restaurants. Also, users are able to create their own place, disclosing personal information onto the Internet.

In one way or another, it is the user's prerogative to apply privacy settings when providing personal information on the internet and it should be done smartly.

Concept map:

Scan the World

Discover instant information around you for all of the interesting places, attractions, restaurants, movie theaters, shops, doctors or museums. Last train home? junaio 3.0 takes Augmented Reality another step forward, making the Augmented World around us come to life.

Compatible with iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad2. Requires iOS 4.0 or later.

Read more on their website.