Smart University

Smart University
Author: Lindsay Weinberg
Publisher: JHU Press
Total Pages: 148
Release: 2024-10-08
Genre: Education
ISBN: 142145002X

How surveillance perpetuates long-standing injustices woven into the fabric of higher education. Higher education increasingly relies on digital surveillance in the United States. Administrators, consulting firms, and education technology vendors are celebrating digital tools as a means of ushering in the age of "smart universities." By digitally monitoring and managing campus life, institutions can supposedly run their services more efficiently, strengthen the quality of higher education, and better prepare students for future roles in the digital economy. Yet in practice, these initiatives often perpetuate austerity, structural racism, and privatization at public universities under the guise of solving higher education's most intractable problems. In Smart University, Lindsay Weinberg evaluates how this latest era of tech solutions and systems in our schools impacts students' abilities to access opportunities and exercise autonomy on their campuses. Using historical and textual analysis of administrative discourses, university policies, conference proceedings, grant solicitations, news reports, tech industry marketing materials, and product demonstrations, Weinberg argues that these more recent transformations are best understood as part of a longer history of universities supporting the development of technologies that reproduce racial and economic injustice on their campuses and in their communities. Aimed at anyone concerned with the future of surveillance on higher education, Smart University empowers readers with the knowledge, tools, and frameworks for contesting and reimagining the role of digital technology on university campuses.

The Last Lecture

The Last Lecture
Author: Randy Pausch
Publisher:
Total Pages: 206
Release: 2008
Genre: Cancer
ISBN: 9780340977002

A lot of professors give talks titled 'The Last Lecture'. Professors are asked to consider their demise and to ruminate on what matters most to them: What wisdom would we impart to the world if we knew it was our last chance? If we had to vanish tomorrow, what would we want as our legacy? When Randy Pausch, a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon, was asked to give such a lecture, he didn't have to imagine it as his last, since he had recently been diagnosed with terminal cancer. But the lecture he gave, 'Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams', wasnt about dying. It was about the importance of overcoming obstacles, of enabling the dreams of others, of seizing every moment (because time is all you have and you may find one day that you have less than you think). It was a summation of everything Randy had come to believe. It was about living. In this book, Randy Pausch has combined the humour, inspiration, and intelligence that made his lecture such a phenomenon and given it an indelible form. It is a book that will be shared for generations to come.

Learning Automata and Their Applications to Intelligent Systems

Learning Automata and Their Applications to Intelligent Systems
Author: JunQi Zhang
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 276
Release: 2023-11-10
Genre: Technology & Engineering
ISBN: 1394188528

Comprehensive guide on learning automata, introducing two variants to accelerate convergence and computational update speed Learning Automata and Their Applications to Intelligent Systems provides a comprehensive guide on learning automata from the perspective of principles, algorithms, improvement directions, and applications. The text introduces two variants to accelerate the convergence speed and computational update speed, respectively; these two examples demonstrate how to design new learning automata for a specific field from the aspect of algorithm design to give full play to the advantage of learning automata. As noisy optimization problems exist widely in various intelligent systems, this book elaborates on how to employ learning automata to solve noisy optimization problems from the perspective of algorithm design and application. The existing and most representative applications of learning automata include classification, clustering, game, knapsack, network, optimization, ranking, and scheduling. They are well-discussed. Future research directions to promote an intelligent system are suggested. Written by two highly qualified academics with significant experience in the field, Learning Automata and Their Applications to Intelligent Systems covers such topics as: Mathematical analysis of the behavior of learning automata, along with suitable learning algorithms Two application-oriented learning automata: one to discover and track spatiotemporal event patterns, and the other to solve stochastic searching on a line Demonstrations of two pioneering variants of Optimal Computing Budge Allocation (OCBA) methods and how to combine learning automata with ordinal optimization How to achieve significantly faster convergence and higher accuracy than classical pursuit schemes via lower computational complexity of updating the state probability A timely text in a rapidly developing field, Learning Automata and Their Applications to Intelligent Systems is an essential resource for researchers in machine learning, engineering, operation, and management. The book is also highly suitable for graduate level courses on machine learning, soft computing, reinforcement learning and stochastic optimization.