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Summary

Introduction

A key component of the University of Glasgow Library's mobile strategy is to increase the skills of our staff as we operate in an increasingly mobile environment. This is being achieved through an ongoing training programme introducing all library staff to the tools and trends of mobile technologies and how they are changing library services and working practices.

In this chapter, we present a case study of the impact of the training programme for staff. We will demonstrate how the interventions in relation to staff training for the mobile environment are contributing to the creation of a workforce that is increasingly confident and engaged with mobile technology, and how this was a significant driver in the decision to make a substantial financial investment in mobile devices for library staff in 2013. The combination of a confident workforce with widespread access to modern mobile devices presents a game-changing moment for the library service which could revolutionize the way we work, communicate and deliver services.

We have a plan!

The University of Glasgow Library is one of the largest academic libraries in Scotland, supporting over 23,000 students and 6000 staff. The Library has 200 members of staff (full-time and part-time).

We have a well established mobile strategy, which has a number of high-level aims across a range of activities: information gathering; device testing; mobile-friendly services; library infrastructure; communications; and digital skills. Development across all of these areas of activity is co-ordinated by the Library's Mobile Technologies Group (MTG) through a series of annual work-plans. Planning for mobile must be flexible enough to allow for constant review and change in response to the rapidly changing technological landscape along with our user needs and expectations. A cyclical approach to strategy implementation has been adopted, with each cycle spanning one academic year. Since 2010 there have been four phases of strategic activity. Initiatives have included the development of a mobile website; improved Wi-Fi infrastructure throughout the library building; and the development of our Live Lab concept.

The strategy includes very specific commitments to support the development of digital skills among our users and our staff, and the Live Lab concept was established to support this aim. The Live Lab provides Library staff with an environment in which future mobile services can be explored, developed and tested in a highly collaborative and innovative way.

Though they can be traced back to different roots, both smart design and smart systems have to do with the recent developments of artificial intelligence. There are two major questions related to them: (i) What way are smart design and smart systems enabled by artificial narrow, general, or super intelligence? and (ii) How can smart design be used in the realization of smart systems? and How can smart systems contribute to smart designing? A difficulty is that there are no exact definitions for these novel concepts in the literature. The endeavor to analyze the current situation and to answer the above questions stimulated an exploratory research whose first findings are summarized in this paper. Its first part elaborates on a plausible interpretation of the concept of smartness and provides an overview of the characteristics of smart design as a creative problem solving methodology supported by artificial intelligence. The second part exposes the paradigmatic features and system engineering issues of smart systems, which are equipped with application-specific synthetic system knowledge and reasoning mechanisms. The third part presents and elaborates on a conceptual model of AI-based couplings of smart design and smart systems. The couplings may manifest in various concrete forms in real life that are referred to as “connectors” in this paper. The principal types of connectors are exemplified and discussed. It has been found that smart design tends to manifest as a methodology of blue-printing smart systems and that smart systems will be intellectualized the enablers of implementation of smart design. Understanding the affordances of and creating proper connectors between smart design and smart systems need further explorative research.

One of the qualities that distinguishes living systems from inanimate matter is the ability to adapt to changes in the environment. Smart materials have the ability to perform both sensing and actuating functions and are, therefore, capable of imitating this rudimentary aspect of life. Poled piezoelectric ceramics, for instance, are capable of acting as both sensor and actuator. External forces are detected through the direct piezoelectric effect, and a response is elicited through the converse piezoelectric effect, in which a voltage of suitable phase, frequency, and amplitude is applied to the same ceramic.

In this special issue, emphasis is placed on actuators, with articles on piezoelectric, electrostrictive, magnetostrictive, and shape memory materials. This is not to say that sensor materials are any less important; it is simply a matter of space. Optical fiber sensors, chemical sensors, thermistors, micromachined semiconductors, and other smart materials deserve special issues of their own.

Smart materials can be conveniently subdivided into passively smart materials that respond to external change without assistance, and actively smart materials that utilize a feedback loop enabling them to both recognize the change and initiate an appropriate response through an actuator circuit.

Zinc oxide varistors are passively smart materials capable of self-protection against high voltage breakdown. When struck by lightning, the ceramic varistor loses most of its electrical resistance, and the current is bypassed to ground. The resistance change is reversible, and acts as a standby protection phenomenon.

Summary

Over the past few years Amsterdam has been doing everything in its power to become ‘smart’. Like all other significant big cities, it is working hard to find innovative ways to make life more pleasant, safe and sustainable. It is positioning all sorts of sensors and collecting large amounts of data to help it make better decisions, and in so doing, automating society. Oftentimes this involves casting an envious eye on a number of smart ‘model cities’, such as Songdo in South Korea and Masdar in the desert of the United Arab Emirates. Here, large-scale pilot projects have been launched, full of impressive tech, sensors and screens that make life easier. Another attractive example can be found in Rio de Janeiro, where IBM has built a huge, futuristic command centre to regulate traffic as efficiently as possible, serve tickets for traffic violations and predict and respond to emergency incidents.

Smart cities 1.0

There are some flaws to this approach. The first generation of smart cities tries to provide their residents with all the comforts, but see them exclusively as consumers. Technology and data provide previously unheard-of possibilities for surveillance – criminals can even be identified before having committed a possible crime. In this context, every citizen becomes a potential offender who has to be kept in check. In the ultimate smart city, residents are anything but conscious agents who play a part in shaping their living and working environment. This smart city is a machine that needs to be optimised, with no consideration or understanding of the organic reality. It wants to maximise efficiency and avoid friction, so it simply and non-negotiably imposes top-down, non-transparent technological solutions.

The paradox is that, by doing this, the smart city ends up stifling innovation. Citizens find themselves faced with increasingly complex systems that affect their lives profoundly, but that they have less and less understanding of. The same is true, incidentally, for politicians and policymakers; they tend to be just as removed from the innovations that they are promoting. The net result of this is that cities render their residents passive and, by doing so, leave their tremendous potential untapped. That is a great shame, because it is their experience, engagement and energy that are essential in identifying and addressing social issues.

Summary

Introduction

At present, most electricity networks simply supply to the home or office whatever energy is demanded. A meter, often at the periphery of the building, monitors consumption and the building owner is subsequently charged accordingly.

While simple, this approach has a number of disadvantages.

It requires significant additional electricity generation to be available in order to supply peaks in demand. This is both costly and can have an environmental impact.
It provides little information to the home owner as to their instantaneous usage, making it hard to understand how energy consumption can be reduced.
It does not readily allow electricity generated locally, for example via solar panels on the building, to be supplied back to the grid.
Reading the meter can require the visit of an employee to the home.

With increasing environmental concerns and the possibility of a substantial increase of demand for electricity if battery-powered cars are charged at home, there are strong drivers to enhance the electricity supply in order to overcome these disadvantages. Such an approach is often termed the ‘smart grid’ – ‘smart’ because it would have some intelligence in terms of the way in which electricity is consumed. There are many differing views as to what the smart grid might look like and how it might be provided, which are explored in this section.

Summary

Since the 2008 GFC, financial regulation has increased dramatically in scope and scale. Post-crisis regulation, plus rapid technological change, has spurred the development of FinTech and RegTech firms and data-driven financial service providers. Financial regulators increasingly seek to balance the traditional objectives of financial stability and consumer protection with promoting growth, innovation, and sustainability. This chapter analyses possible new regulatory approaches, ranging from doing nothing (which spans being permissive to highly restrictive, depending on context), cautious permissiveness (on a case-by-case basis, or through special charters), structured experimentalism (e.g., sandboxes or piloting), and development of specific new regulatory frameworks. We argue for a new balanced, risk-based, proportionate approach that incorporates these rebalanced objectives, and which we term ‘smart regulation’.

Summary

Chapter 7 examines smart contracts’ ability to self-perform, self-enforce, and self-remedy and the remaining applicability of contract law and contract remedies. Smart contracts (coupled with blockchain technology) have created visions of self-executing, self-enforcing, and self-remedying contracts that eliminate the need for courts or arbitral tribunals to apply contract law to disputes. The theory goes that, since the possibility of breach is eliminated in such contracts, contract remedies become unnecessary.

Objective

A novel, smartphone-based technique for endoscopic grommet insertion is presented.

Results and conclusion

This method is both cost-effective and time-saving, offering a valuable alternative to the traditional microscope-based method in a resource-constrained setting.

Summary

Buildings are one of the most prominent energy consumers in modern-day power grids. In particular, commercial buildings consume large amounts of energy for operating lighting systems, heating–ventilation and air-conditioning (HVAC), and IT equipment including servers. High energy consumption at the buildings increases energy consumption cost and environment pollution. To deal with these issues, buildings can be converted to ‘smart buildings’. Through the concept of smart buildings, electric loads can be controlled in an adaptive manner. Unused equipment can be switched off so that the total energy consumption in the building can be reduced. The appliances that are installed inside a building will generate huge data in order to have real-time information inside the building. To fulfill these objectives, different methodologies exist. In this chapter, we focus on commercial buildings as smart buildings for efficient energy management.

Concept of Smart Building

Most commercial buildings are equipped with HVAC systems, IT equipment, servers, and plug-in equipment. These equipments can be integrated with different sensing and actuation technologies, so that they can be controlled dynamically depending on their requirements. Different useful techniques that are deployed in different buildings to make them smart buildings, are discussed here.

Summary

In between the headline-making, milestone ai achievements and the smaller bits of computational intelligence that we find everywhere are impressive AI programs that are used by physicians, scientists, engineers, and business people to help them in (and sometimes automate) their workaday tasks. I call these the “smart tools” of AI. Sometimes these are stand-alone systems, but more often they are integrated into a larger computational framework or into hardware devices. Some work only when called upon to help solve some particular problem, such as disease diagnosis. Some are constantly active, such as online stock-trading systems. I'll not be able to mention all of them since there are far too many, and some are known only to their corporate and government users. But a few examples will serve to illustrate their utility and variety.

In Medicine

Let's start with how AI is being used in medical clinical practice. Beginning as early as the 1980s, AI technology has been an important part of medical systems and devices. In March 2000, a monthly magazine titled Medical Device & Diagnostic Industry published an article claiming that “the medical device industry is seeing an emergence of computer-based intelligent decision support systems (DSSs) and expert systems, the current success of which reflects a maturation of artificial intelligence (AI) technology.” It mentioned several AI-infused devices, including the “Agilent Acute Cardiac Ischemia Time-Insensitive Predictive Instrument…, an intelligent electrocardiagram (ECG) device that predicts the probability of acute cardiac ischemia (ACI), a common form of heart attack,” and the General Electric “MAC 5000 Resting Test System, [incorporating] the Marquette 12SL ECG analysis program, an integrated DSS that uses newly developed digital processing methods and diagnostic program algorithms to interpret and classify ECG waveforms.”

Information has become one of the most crucial commodities in today's world. From multinational corporations to single individuals, we all make critical decisions based on the information available to us. However, modern ease of access to information does not often guarantee access to good information. In this digital age, where facts can be easily manipulated to align with political, social or monetary aims, media literacy has become an essential skill.

Media Smart: Lessons, Tips and Strategies for Librarians, Classroom Instructors and Other Information Professionals is an invaluable toolkit for navigating the fraught information landscape. From the history of media manipulation to practical applications of media literacy, this book will offer a thorough grounding in teaching students to defend themselves from mis-and dis-information. It discusses how technology affects the information we receive, offers a brief look at the psychology behind how we process information, describes the various means by which media can be manipulated and provides tips about how to recognize and avoid false or misleading information.

Featuring numerous classroom exercises and case studies specific to each aspect of media manipulation, this book is essential reading for students and educators in communications, media and information literacy as well as librarians and anyone interested in developing their media literacy skills.

Summary

There be monsters there

When an economist – of almost any persuasion or field of study – goes down the list of Nobel Prize winners since 1968, they see a mountain of progress in the subject. A lot of it is ‘inside baseball’ whose importance might not be readily accessible to non-economists, and it might not add up to technological progress as observable as mobile phones and laptop computers, or advances in medicine. Because of the nature of economics as already described – storytelling that is not particularly testable – different economists in different fields and of different political alignments will like some of the work, and not like some of the work. For me, the research on information asymmetries showing how unregulated markets don't work well – even in terms of productivity – is particularly important. It also highlights the role for implicit and explicit contracts, in other words ‘good behaviour’, ideally enforced without the expenses of the legal system. As we will argue, the adherence to norms is valuable not least for a central bank.

But what one won't find is any discovery that is so earth-shattering in its policy impact that it can be the explanation for a new world order of permanently low inflation and interest rates. There has been no polio or smallpox vaccine in economics research. ‘Forward guidance’ in monetary policy may or may not be new (it may just be a variant on old-fashioned ‘jawboning’ as a policy tool) but it's hard to imagine that anyone would say that it changed the shape of monetary policy to the extent necessary to explain a fundamental shift in outcomes.

The rise of China, and the opening of the world to free trade with China, has been of large magnitude. Deregulation, the weakening of trade unions and employee rights, increased university enrolment rates, lowering of taxes on corporations and the well-off, increased female participation in the labour market – all of these were of sufficient magnitude that they had significant impacts, some good and some bad; even leaving aside that they have left us with a world on the brink of environmental disaster.

Rather than thinking that the policies of the central banks were novel and based upon unobservable but dramatic improvements in economic analysis, maybe what's gone on is something much simpler. Policy makers ignored the map markings that ‘there be monsters there’.

Summary

The chapter focuses, in the area of property and security rights, on the interface between the virtual and transnational dimension of transactions on the blockchain on one hand and the “real” world of compulsory and public policy rules applying on a given territory and on given property on the other. The author takes the perspective of a continental lawyer analyzing the validity of transactions, the validity and integrity of the property title electronically created and transferred. In doing so, he relies not only on the traditional legal tools but also on the most recent legislative initiatives, especially in France, introducing a legal framework encompassing new ways of transferring property (based on blockchain technologies) and new titles (e.g., tokens in the context of initial coin offerings). Through this analysis, the core issue is to determine whether these new transactions and these new property titles can be effective, in a national and international context. The author raises questions and concerns about the actual legal uncertainty and the best (local and global) regulatory responses to the technological challenges.

Summary

As the previous chapters have shown, medieval readers were pragmatic and they did not shy away from adding things to their books if it enhanced their reading experience. While so far the focus has been on additions to the page, this chapter introduces a physical tool that was sometimes added to enhance the reading experience even further: the bookmark, which, like the manicula, had a variety of appearances. Here we look at the various ways in which monks and other medieval readers kept track of the page at which they had stopped reading, and from which they planned to continue reading in the near future. What tools were available for this purpose? And how did these differ from one another?

Static Bookmarks

If certain bookmarks can be called “smart,” and some really are, it follows that others were, well, dumb. In bookmark terms that qualifier must go to types that are fixed to one specific page rather than being able to freely move throughout the book. Some of these static bookmarks were extremely easy to produce. All the reader had to do, for example, was attach a string to the corner of the page. A slightly more labour-intensive version of this static bookmark is seen in Figure 73. It was produced by making a small cut in the corner of the page, after which the emerging strip was guided through a small incision, and then folded outwards, so as to stick out of the book. The result was as unmovable as it was destructive to the page. A slightly less invasive version, no doubt preferred by medieval librarians, didn't involve cutting but rather gluing a tiny strip of parchment on the long side of the page. These “fore-edge” bookmarks could even be filled with extra information, such as which section started at the marked location.

Dynamic Bookmarks

Far more “technical” and interesting from a book-historical point of view are bookmarks that could be used at any page of the manuscript because they were movable—let's call these dynamic. An unusual thirteenth-century example survives in what is now Amsterdam, UB, I G 56– 57: heart-shaped bookmarks that could be clipped onto a page. Notably, they were cut out of a thirteenth-century manuscript with scissors.

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