In Technology as Experience, John McCarthy and Peter Wright argue that any account of what is often called the user experience must take into consideration the emotional, intellectual, and sensual aspects of our interactions with technology. We don't just use technology, they point out; we live with it. They offer a new approach to understanding human-computer interaction through examining the felt experience of technology. Drawing on the pragmatism of such philosophers as John Dewey and Mikhail Bakhtin, they provide a framework for a clearer analysis of technology as experience.
So, when it comes to terrorism, it only works because of technology, because a small number of people, almost always men, can use technology for leverage. Nineteen terrorists armed with sticks and stones could do very little to affect the United States of America. But 19 terrorists armed with jet fuel-laden aircraft ... The technology pushed their destructive capability way beyond where it would have been. Nineteen men against 300 million people. We would have never known they existed if they hadn't leveraged technology.
Communities and technologies are key to community informatics. These technologies cover a wide range, with sophisticated computer and networking technologies only being one end of the spectrum. Face-to-face and other non-computerized technologies can be just as important, if often not more so. ICTs should therefore always be read as covering this whole spectrum.
This paper introduces the concept of phatic technology and analyses its role in modern society. A phatic
technology is a technology that serves to establish, develop, and maintain human relationships. The primary
function of this type of technology is to create a social context: its users form a social community with a
collection of interactional goals, which may be relevant to all human interchanges in that social context.
The National Center for Biomedical Ontology is a consortium of leading biologists, clinicians, informaticians, and ontologists who develop innovative technology and methods allowing scientists to create, disseminate, and manage biomedical information and knowledge in machine-processable form. Our visionis that all biomedical knowledge and data are disseminated on the Internet using principled ontologies, such that they are semantically interoperable and useful for improving biomedical science and clinical care. Our resources include the Open Biomedical Ontologies (OBO) library, the Open Biomedical Data (OBD) repositories, and tools for accessing and using this information in research. The Center collaborates with biomedical researchers conducting Driving Biological Projects to enable outside research and stimulate technology development in the Center. The Center undertakes outreach and educational activities (Biomedical Informatics Program) to train future researchers to use biomedical ontologies and related tools with the goal of enhancing scientific discovery.
RPI's Tetherless World Constellation will address this emerging area of "Web Science," focusing on the World Wide Web and it's future use. Faculty in the constellation will explore the research and engineering principles that underlie the Web, will enhance the Web's reach beyond the desktop and laptop computer, and will develop new technologies and languages that expand the capabilities of the Web. We will use powerful scientific and mathematical techniques from many disciplines to explore the modeling of the Web from network- and information- centric views. Our goals will include making the next generation web natural to use while being responsive to the growing variety of policy and social needs, whether in the area of privacy, intellectual property, general compliance, or provenance. The Tetherless World Constellation will design new techniques to explore social, scientific, and legal impacts of the evolving technologies deployed on the Web.
Vannevar Bush's 1945 article, "As We May Think," has been much celebrated as a central inspiration for the development of hypertext and the World Wide Web. Less attention, however, has been paid to Bush's motivation for imagining a new generation of information technologies; it was his hope that more powerful tools, by automating the routine aspects of information processing, would leave researchers and other professionals more time for creative thought. But now, more than sixty years later, it seems clear that the opposite has happened, that the use of the new technologies has contributed to an accelerated mode of working and living that leaves us less to think, not more. In this talk I will explore how this state of affairs has come about and what we can do about it.
There is a growing community interest in applying Semantic Web and Web 2.0 technologies in health care and life sciences areas including the Health Care and Life Sciences Interest Group (HCLSIG ; http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/hcls/) and Medicine 2.0 (http://www.medicine20congress.com/). This has motivated us to explore how to intersect these two sets of technologies in the context of the HCLS Knowledge Base (KB).
Rapid advances in information technologies continue to drive a flood of data and analysis techniques in ecological and environmental sciences.
Using these resources more effectively and taking advantage of associated cross-disciplinary research opportunities poses a major challenge to both
scientists and information technologists. These challenges are now being addressed in projects that apply knowledge representation and Semantic
Web technologies to problems in discovering and integrating ecological data and data analysis techniques. In this paper, we present an overview
of the major ontological components of our project, SEEK ("Science Environment for Ecological Knowledge"). We describe the concepts and
models that are represented in each, and present a discussion of potential applications of these ontologies on the Semantic Web
Grockit is about questioning together. To this end, we are developing an online learning game where people can teach each other.
Our organization is about the space where learning and technology meet. By combining our years of experience as teachers and developers, we are creating a place where learners can meet other learners. You can read more about our thoughts on learning and technology in our blog. You can also learn more about how we live and work at Grockit.
The prototype we describe is a biomedical knowledge base, constructed for a demonstration at Banff WWW2007 , that integrates 15 distinct data sources using currently available Semantic Web technologies such as the W3C standard Web Ontology Language [OWL] and Resource Description Framework [RDF]. This report outlines which resources were integrated, how the knowledge base was constructed using free and open source triple store technology, how it can be queried using the W3C Recommended RDF query language SPARQL [SPARQL], and what resources and inferences are involved in answering complex queries. While the utility of the knowledge base is illustrated by identifying a set of genes involved in Alzheimer's Disease, the approach described here can be applied to any use case that integrates data from multiple domains.
The SciLands is a mini-continent and user community in the virtual world platform Second Life devoted exclusively to science and technology. There are over 20 science and technology related organizations in the SciLands, including government agencies, universities and museums.
Central to Web 2.0 is the requirement for interactive systems to enable the participation of users in production and social interaction. Consequently, in order to critically explore the Web 2.0 phenomenon it is important to explore the relationship of interactivity to social power. This study firstly characterises interactivity in these media using Barry's (2001) framework differentiating interactivity from disciplining technologies as defined by Foucault. Contrary to Barry's model though, the analysis goes on to explore how interactivity may indeed function as a disciplining technology within the framework of a neoliberal political economy.
Bringing Wisdom to Emerging Technology
We are at an amazing and critical juncture in human history. If we continue on our current path, we face many potential disasters: overpopulation, shortages of water, oil, and raw materials, financial instability, disease, terrorism, war, and the destruction of species and ecosystems (eg. see Jeffrey Sachs "Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet"). But the next few decades will also bring advances in science and technology which may dramatically improve our lives. It is remarkable that we are simultaneously on the verge of major revolutions in biology, neuroscience, psychology, artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, and fundamental physics.
Felix is a community effort to implement the OSGi R4 Service Platform, which includes the OSGi framework and standard services, as well as providing and supporting other interesting OSGi-related technologies. The ultimate goal is to provide a completely compliant implementation of the OSGi framework and standard services and to support a community around this technology. Felix currently implements a large portion of the OSGi release 4 specification, but additional work is necessary for full compliance. Despite this fact, the OSGi framework functionality provided by Felix is very stable.
Croquet is a powerful open source software technology that, in the form of the Croquet Software Developer's Kit (Croquet SDK), can be used by experienced software developers to create and deploy deeply collaborative multi-user online vitual world applications on and across multiple operating systems and devices. Derived from Squeak, the Croquet system features a peer-based messaging protocol that dramatically reduces the need for server infrastructures to support virtual world deployment and makes it easy for software developers to create deeply collaborative applications. Cobalt is a National Science Foundation-sponsored effort to develop an open source virtual world browser and authoring toolkit application based on the Croquet technology.
CENDI's vision is to provide its member federal STI agencies a cooperative enterprise where capabilities are shared and challenges are faced together so that the sum of accomplishments is greater than each individual agency can achieve on its own.
CENDI's mission is to help improve the productivity of federal science- and technology-based programs through effective scientific, technical, and related information-support systems. In fulfilling its mission, CENDI agencies play an important role in addressing science- and technology-based national priorities and strengthening U.S. competitiveness.
CENDI is an interagency working group of senior scientific and technical information (STI) managers from 13 U.S. federal agencies
The Collaboration Project is an independent forum of leaders committed to leveraging the interactive web and the benefits of collaborative technology to solve government's complex problems. Powered by the National Academy of Public Administration, this "wikified" space is designed to share ideas, examples and insights on the adoption of Web 2.0 technologies in the field of public governance.
As computers and computer networks become more sophisticated, a huge amount of information, such as that found in Web documents, has been accumulated and circulated. Such information gives people a framework for organizing their daily lives. A well-functioning society needs technology that can be used to manage this wealth of information and, in particular, investigate its credibility. This technology would be able to handle a wide range of tasks: extracting credible information related to a given topic, organizing this information, detecting its provenance, clarifying background, facts, and various related opinions and the distribution of them, and so on. Especially, as the Web is becoming a major source of information nowadays, it is necessary to provide efficient and reliable methods for evaluation of Web content's trustworthiness. The aim of this workshop is to provide a forum for discussion on issues related to information credibility criteria and the process of its evaluation.
LT4eL (Language Technology for e-Learning) develops a framework of multilingual language technology tools and semantic web techniques for improving the retrieval and the metadata annotation of learning material.
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