Emerging Literacies (Asynchronous Session)
Cheating Death: Artificial Intelligence, Game Design, and the Logic of Pandemic Culture View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Eric Freedman
Crises reveal precarity and uncertainty, speak to evolving psychosocial and material relations, and lead to commercially and politically bound narratives that reconstitute society. Data, tethered to artificial intelligence and to algorithmic projection plays a significant role in crisis management. This research is focused on artificial intelligence and the algorithmic imperative in video game development and playable pandemic narratives. Gameplay rules and structures, the evidenced-based decisions that impact game outcomes, are made possible through a game’s underlying AI frameworks. Gameplay can be understood, in part, as a cycle of interaction that leads from information gathering and analysis to decision-making. While AI is formally associated with data management, it also creates clear signposts of agency. By reading AI systems, players gain control over playable space; by studying loops, cycles, boundaries and vectors players are able to “cheat” game systems. As a case study of AI and player agency, this essay examines the AI systems of Naughty Dog, a California-based developer that has advanced this work across two significant video game franchises: Uncharted and The Last of Us. While both game worlds are structured through common AI archetypes, the latter weds these object-oriented parameters to a character-driven pandemic narrative. To survive, to progress in The Last of Us, is to read embedded algorithms as overdetermined pattern agents. Writ large, pandemic culture fosters dependencies toward pattern recognition, to seeing (and mastering) contagion across a number of navigable geographic vectors. This essay argues toward a common framework for understanding how agency operates through algorithmic projection.
DNA and the Boundaries of Identity: The Utilization and Transformation of Data and Metadata in Direct-to-Consumer Ancestry Testing View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Eve J. Carlisle Polley
The advent and exponential popularity of direct-to-consumer DNA ancestry testing has motivated a burst of activity in social sciences research with study subjects ranging from the behaviors of genomic researchers to the moral conundrums faced by end consumers. At the same time, humanists have for decades been discussing with increasing urgency theories about the nature and consequences of social identities. In this online lightning talk, I present a portion of my research at the intersection of these sociological and humanistic discourses, and argue that—at a minimum—there is manifest in the technology and utilization of DNA ancestry testing racialist and nationalist epistemologies and social realities that are inadequately, and harmfully, apparently hidden from the perceptions of many researchers and end consumers. How are the boundaries between different ancestral groups being drawn? Whose knowledges contribute to the determination of these boundaries? What dynamics of social power are present? This relatively nascent science, technology, and consumer service arguably signals a new biotechnological epoch with regards to our access, as humans, to this sort of data about ourselves as beings that may be understood in a myriad of ways from the genetic to the political. These questions about the boundaries of social identities impact not only how we understand the nature or composition of society, but also what kinds of claims these identities warrant their claimants to make.
Building Data Analytic Literacy: Key Curriculum Design Considerations View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Andrew Banasiewicz
Rapidly expanding automation is not only reshaping how work is done – it is changing the very essence of economic value creation, and by extension, the makeup of core business competencies. Torrents of data spawned by the ever-expanding electronic transactional and communication infrastructure hide enormous informational potential, but tapping into it requires specialized skillset. Not surprisingly, data analytic literacy joins communication, teamwork, and critical thinking as an essential business competency, which means that to be positioned to contribute to, and benefit from the emerging Age of Data opportunities, business (and other) graduates need to be analytically literate. Development of data analytic literacy, however, calls for more than adding a handful of ‘data courses’ – what is needed is a comprehensive approach focused on learning how to translate a variety of messy and dissimilar data streams into decision-guiding knowledge. In other words, there is an urgent need to infuse university curricula with data utilization competencies, framed here as data analytic literacy. An important aspect of data analytic literacy is that it is a multidisciplinary competency that combines elements of computer science, statistics, cognitive sciences, and management, in a way that facilitates infusion of objective data derived insights into traditionally subjective reasoning driven decision-making. In an operational sense, it entails a lot more than just ‘data crunching’ – fully developed data analytic literacy can be characterized as the ability to learn with data in a manner that cognitively resembles learning from experience.
Analysis of Difficulty Levels of Information Technology Tools During the Pandemic View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Lorimer Imperio
The main objective of this paper is to determine the difficulty level of the 881certificates acquired online by the selected 94 students at the School of Information and Computing Sciences during the time of implementation of enhanced community quarantine as an alternative way to complete the 486-hour requirement of their training. This research paper considers the following problems: the level of difficulty of the 881 certificates; the provision of basis for the equivalent points/hours per certificates; and the gender of those who got more interest in acquiring certificates. This paper utilized quantitative research. Gathering of data was done through the utilization of linkedin.com, data gathered was tallied in the spreadsheet, and average function was used in the analysis. Result shows that 100% of the female participants has an excess number of certificates while it is only 97.83% from the male participants. In the final result, CSS and PHP fall under Easy which is 86 or 91.49% divided into male = 51% and female = 49%, which shows that male participants have this level with an equivalent 10 points/hours. A total of 9 certificates fall under the average level in favor of male with an equivalent 20 points/hours and those are the following: HTML, C++, SQL, JAVASCRIPT, C#, C, JAVA, JQUERY, and PYTHON. The result of the difficult level with an equivalent 30 points/hours is consist of 5 certificates namely: SWIFT, RUBY, ORACLE, MACHINELEARNING, and DATASCIENCEWITHPYTHON in favor of females.
Thinking Ecological Intelligence: What Pragmatism Can Teach Us about AI
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Andrew Goodman
William James’ pragmatist philosophy proposes that all that we experience must be accounted for to find truth. Amongst the many failings of ‘AI’ discourse is the failure to consider the full range of intelligence or consciousness which we find ample evidence of in the world, from the octopus, to fungi, to insect colonies, and to neurodiverse human communities. The reliance in AI algorithmic development on limited and brain-centric cognitive models has, I argue, been a leading cause of the failure of AI, as it ignores the multiplicity of forms of consciousness, and because it perpetuates the Enlightenment model of the bounded individual as the only intelligent form possible. In this paper I utilise James’ philosophical methodology to explore the possibility of ecological intelligence as evidenced in the world, which might offer a different and differential path to AI development.
