I’m at DH 2023 in Graz, Austria and keeping my live notes here on Philosophi.ca.
The weather is hot and humid, at least in comparison to Edmonton, but the town is lovely. There is a lot of green space and a good tram system.
The conference is not at the university, but in a conference centre that is, thankfully, air conditioned.
U of A computing scientists work with Japanese researchers to refine a virtual and mixed reality video game that can improve motor skills for older adults and sedentary people.
The Folio of the University of Alberta published a story about a trip to Japan that I and others embarked on, U of A computing scientists work with Japanese researchers on virtual reality game to get people out of their seats. Ritsumeikan invited us to develop research collaborations around gaming, language and artificial intelligence. Our visit was a chance to further the collaborations, like the one my colleagues Eleni Stroulia and Victor Fernandez Cervantes are developing with Thawmas Ruck around games for older adults. This inter-university set of collaborations build on projects I was involved in going back to 2011, including a conference (Replaying Japan) and a journal, the Journal of Replaying Japan.
The highlight was the signing of a Memorandum Of Understanding by the two presidents (of U of A and Ritsumeikan). I was also involved as was Professor Nakamura. May the collaboration thrive.
Yesterday I was part of a signing ceremony for a Memorandum of Agreement between Ritsumeikan University and the University of Alberta. I and the President of the University of Alberta (Bill Flanagan) signed on behalf of U of A. The MOU described our desire to build on our collaborations around Replaying Japan. We hope to build collaborations around artificial intelligence, games, learning, and digital humanities. KIAS and the AI4Society signature area have been supporting this research collaboration.
Today (March 2nd, 2023) we are having a short conference at Ritsumeikan that included a panel about our collaboration, at which I talked, and a showcase of research in game studies at Ritsumeikan.
In order to track the pandemic, the Public Health Agency of Canada has been using location data without explicit and informed consent. Transparency is key to building and maintaining trust.
The Conversation has just published an article on Ottawa’s use of our location data raises big surveillance and privacy concerns. This was written with a number of colleagues who were part of a research retreat (Dagstuhl) on Mobility Data Analysis: from Technical to Ethical.
We are at a moment when ethical principles are really not enough and we need to start talking about best practices in order to develop a culture of ethical use of data.
Yesterday (Friday the 13th of August) we finished the 5th day of the Replaying Japan 2021 conference. The conference was organized by the AI for Society Signature Area, the Kule Institute for Advanced Study, and the Prince Takamado Japan Centre all at the University of Alberta.
At the conference I organized a roundtable about the Replaying Japan conference itself titled “Ten Years of Dialogue: Reflecting on Replaying Japan.” I moderated the discussion and started with a brief history that I quote from here:
The Replaying Japan conference will have been going now for ten years if you include its predecessor symposium that was held in 2012 in Edmonton, Canada.
The encounter around Japanese Game Culture came out of the willingness of Ritsumeikan University to host Geoffrey Rockwell as a Japan Foundation Japan Studies Fellow in Kyoto in 2011. While Rockwell worked closely with researchers like Prof. INABA at the Ritsumeikan Digital Humanities Centre for Japanese Arts and Culture, he also got to meet Professors Nakamura and Koichi at the Ritsumeikan Centre for Game Studies. Out of these conversations it became clear that game studies in the West and game studies in Japan were not in conversation. The research communities were siloes working in their own languages that didn’t intermingle much. We agreed that we needed to try to bridge the communities and organized a first small symposium in 2012 in Edmonton with support from the Prince Takamado Japan Centre at the University of Alberta. At a meeting right after the symposium we developed the idea for a conference that could go back and forth between Japan and the West called Replaying Japan. Initially the conference just went back and forth between Kyoto and Edmonton, but we soon started going to Europe and the USA which expanded the network.
(From the abstract for the roundtable)
At the conference I was also part two papers that were presented others:
You can see the conference Schedule here.
Leonardo Impett has a nice demonstration here of ImageGraph: a visual programming language for the Visual Digital Humanities. ImageGraph is a visual programming environment that works with Google Colab. When you have your visual program you can compile it into Python in a Colab notebook and then run that notebook. The visual program is stored in your Github account and the Python code can, of course, be used in larger projects.
The visual programming language has a number of functions for handling images and using artificial intelligence techniques on them. It also has text functions, but they are apparently not fully worked out.
I love the way Impett combines off the shelf systems while adding a nice visual development environment. Very clean.
How the traditional conference format has been reimagined in the wake of COVID-19 lockdowns.
University Affairs recently published a short article we wrote on Embracing econferences: a step toward limiting the negative effects of conference culture. The article came out of our work on a collection titled Right Research: Modelling Sustainable Research Practices in the Anthropocene.
The article talks about the carbon cost of flying and the advantages of econferencing, that we have all learned about in this pandemic. It asks about after the pandemic.
As we move into the post-pandemic future, we find ourselves at a crossroads. Once travel restrictions are lifted, will we return to face-to-face conferences and double-down on travel requirements? Or will we continue to explore more sustainable, virtual alternatives, like econferences?
Gather is a video-calling space that lets multiple people hold separate conversations in parallel, walking in and out of those conversations just as easily as they would in real life.
Kisha introduced me to Gather, a cross between Second Life and Zoom. If you have a Gather account you can create a space – your own little classroom with different gathering spots. People then move around these 8-bit animated spaces and when they are in hearing distance they can video conference. Users can also read posters put up, or documents left around, or watch videos created for a space. It actually looks like a nice type of space for a class to use as an alternative to Zoom.
This paper focuses on the fact that AI is predominantly portrayed as white—in colour, ethnicity, or both. We first illustrate the prevalent Whiteness
“The Whiteness of AI” was mentioned in an online panel following The State of AI Ethics report (October 2020) from the Montreal AI Ethics Institute. This article starts from the observation that if you search Google images for “robot” or “AI” you get predominately images of white (or blue) entities. (Go ahead and try it.) From there it moves to the tendency of “White people; and the persistent tendency of members of that group, who dominate the academy in the US and Europe, to refuse to see themselves as racialised or race as a matter of concern at all.” (p. 686)
The paper then proposes three theories about the whiteness of AI to make it strange and to challenge the myth of colour-blindness that many of us in technology related fields live in. Important reading!
Last week KIAS, AI 4 Society and SKIPP jointly sponsored Jason Lewis presenting on “Reflections on the Indigenous Protocol & Artificial Intelligence Position Paper”.
Prof. Jason Edward Lewis led the Indigenous Protocol and Artificial Intelligence Working Group in providing a starting place for those who want to design and create AI from an ethical position that centres Indigenous perspectives. Dr. Maggie Spivey- Faulkner provided a response.
Lewis talked about the importance of creative explorations from indigenous people experimenting with AI.
The Folio has published a short story on the talk, Creating ethical AI from Indigenous perspectives. The video should be up soon.
