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The Mediated Planet presents the NordAI Seminar Series 2022

The NordAI spring seminars is a seminar series, curated by Adam Wickberg and Tirza Meyer from the Mediated Planet Research Group at the Division. The series features contributions from leading scholars working with AI at the interface between the human and non-human world, exploring the question of what constitutes the environment through the lens of artificial intelligence.
Earth Science Planet Globe Environment Lights

The first seminar was held in February and featured Christer Andersson, analyst at the Swedish Defence Research Agency, Sweden on AI and analysis of environmental data: a perspective from the Swedish defence researchers?

Next up is Bill Adam. Claudio Segré Professor of Conservation, Graduate Institute, Geneva; Downing College Cambridge, who among many other things has spent a semester at the Division (2017).

The Digital Animal and Conservation by Algorithm

Digital innovation has brought about a revolution in devices to observe, track and locate animals.  These range from fixed devices such as webcams and camera traps (trail cams), through airborne and satellite remote sensing to tracking and imaging devices fitted to living animals (collars and tags).  Digital data from these devices is streamed, shared, archived and analysed, yielding new knowledge and new systems of knowledge accumulation, and enabling new modes of intervention in non-human lives and human society, ‘conservation by algorithm’.  This seminar will discuss some of these innovations, and their implications.  It will explore the new digital lives that animals take on within databases and information networks, and their implications for human understandings of nature, and for conservation management.

Time: Tue 2022-03-29 13.00
Location: Zoom – link can be found here

Discussant: Finn-Arne Jørgensen, Professor in Environmental History, University of Stavanger
Recommended reading:
Adams, William, “Digital Animals,” The Philosopher, vol. 108, no. 1 (2022).
Adams, William, “Geographies of conservation II: Technology, surveillance and conservation by algorithm,” Progress in Human Geography, vol. 43, no. 2 (2019): 337–350.

Follow this link for more information on NordAI

Technical Development and Education

As digitisation and computers in general are advancing rapidly, many engineers and scientists work on the possibilities and challenges developing artificial intelligence might pose. AI as a topic is also being researched by a handful of members of our division.

As such, researcher Lina Rahm has published a new article with the title “Education, automation and AI: a genealogy of alternative future” in the journal Learning, Media and Technology. She discusses the co-development of education technologies with both new trends in digital advancements and views on these issues from the past. The way we do education as humanities scholars has already changed profoundly during the ongoing pandemic. Furthermore, change is an ongoing thing and thus Lina’s research is necessary more than ever.

If you are interested in the article you can find it here.

Abstract:

The relationship between technical development and education is a reciprocal one, where education always stands in relation to those skills, competencies, and techniques that are anticipated as necessary in a technological future. At the same time, skills and competencies are also necessary to drive innovation and technical development for the progressive creation of desirable futures. Jumping back to the 1950s, this article illustrates how automation and AI have been anticipated as both problems and solutions in society, and how education has been used to solve these problems or realize these solutions. That is, computerization debates have concentrated on both the growing opportunities and the increasing risks, but almost always also on the need for corresponding education. The article uses a genealogical approach to show how, from the 1950s and up until today, education has been mobilized as an important tool for governance in computer policies.

 

 

Digitising Education – A Reflection

Our division is engaged in multiple forms of teaching. This did not change during the pandemic. The new reality, dominated by working from home and thus increasingly online, forced us to find new ways of teaching.

It was paramount to keep the same level of quality while moving whole courses online and dealing with the restrictions, such digitised interactions entail. By transferring courses online, which usually would include a mixture of lectures, small-group seminars and excursions, many challenges came up.

First of all, we needed to ensure that basic functions of our courses could be established online and that the continuation of our students’ education was ensured. During the first months of the pandemic, this was based a lot on improvisation and on an extensive usage of already existing infrastructure, such as Canvas, the course web and, especially, tons of emails. Luckily, IT-support made Zoom very quickly available. The initial transition happened surprisingly smooth.

Schüler, Eingabe, Tastatur, Text, Frau, Start, Geschäft

But, as the saying goes, at every level there is another devil: problems occurred, while time progressed and experiences in online teaching added up. How can you ensure that your students can learn in the best way possible if you lose to a big extent the direct contact with them? How can you keep concentration and interest levels high if zoom-fatigued individuals challenged with all kinds of non-education related issues were under more and more pressure? How could you, as a teacher or course administrator, deal with the unplanned extra work resulting from unforeseen additional tasks?

These were only some questions which came up during the last year. Our division was able to develop some strategies to cope and thus fared fairly well during this time. To communicate and discuss our experiences, four scholars of our division have taken part in this year’s KTH SoTL: Learning Spaces Conference. The following is a short report on their panel.

Decorative: KTH SOTL Logo, KTH SoTL 2021: Learning Spaces

Per Högselius (head of undergraduate teaching), Kati Lindström (course responsible in Energy Systems in Society and in History of Science and Technology, teacher in Perspectives on Science, Technology and Landscape in Time and Space), Katarina Larsen (Course responsible in Swedish Society and teacher in Gender and Technology) and Siegfried Evens (course coordinator in Swedish Society, Culture and Industry in Historical Perspective and teacher in Energy Systems in Society) presented together our experiences at the division.

Per began with an overview over our various courses we offered during the last year. It was a broad range, reaching from Swedish perspectives on progress, industrialisation and system-approaches, over energy and geopolitics, to political ecology, science fiction and gender in technology.

Kati followed with small meta-studies on our e-learning performance. One critical point was here the usage of Canvas, which as a course administrating tool, had maybe outlived itself in the current circumstances. It became important to use as much diversity as possible, by including audio, video, standard presentations and possibilities for interaction as well as discussions among the students. It became also clear that students were highly versed in digital tools but not necessarily in the humanities’ ways of reading and writing texts. This discrepancy needed to be bridged by teachers and used technology. There were already a lot of tools being used, some of which were Mentimeter, Kahoot and Padlet.

Katarina continued with introducing two innovative ways in teaching. One was the distance teaching walk done with small groups of students as replacement for a regularly scheduled excursion and the other a specific mapping exercise linked to this walk done in Nearpod. By working in our Swedish Society Course, Katarina introduced this new form of excursion by building upon smartphones’ ability to using geographic locating devices. In this way, students could walk across the area of Liljeholmen and get specific tasks and information at respective locations. Later on during the seminar, students could then draw their ideas for improved urban planning in this area on a map presented in Nearpod. Thus it was possible for students to experience this excursion and an important part of the course, even though big-group excursions had to be cancelled. It was on the outside and student groups did not exceed about 5 people at a time.

Siegfried rounded up the panel with the presentation of the interactive teaching tool Nearpod. This tool, which he introduced in our Swedish Society Course first, enables teachers and students to interact with each other during a presentation. In this way, the limitations of power point are easily overcome. We only got positive feedback from our students on this, so Siegfried went along and showed our experiences to colleagues from other schools. From my personal experience, Nearpod was very important in diversifying our ability as teachers in engaging with the students digitally. Its use should therefore be promoted.

In total, this panel was successful in showing innovative ways on how to improve our digitised forms of teaching. At this stage, it is important to have an ongoing dialogue with other departments to exchange ideas and reflections. This panel has been a great start for that. As the pandemic continues, digital teaching will stay with us. When eventually real-life teaching will become practice again, the experiences we are collecting right now will turn out very useful in the future. I am sure they will transform contemporary forms of teaching even in a long, and hopefully pandemic-free, perspective.

By Achim Klüppelberg

Experiences in Digital Teaching

Covid-19 has profoundly changed the way we work as scholars of the humanities. Teaching is no exception to this. The digitisation of university education was abruptly maximised and teachers were to a big extent forced to adapt to the new reality of online teaching on their own.

Kati Lindström has written about her experiences during the autumn term. She is a researcher with a lot of know-how both in teaching in general and in digital education in particular. In her opinion, the systems we use can be majorly improved. Canvas as a teaching platform is limited under these new conditions and needs a drastic makeover or at least generous supplementation to make education more efficient. As a result of inefficient software, teachers need to spend a lot of time on tedious clicking-work, which easily could be made obsolete. During the last term, this got out of hand.

The stress, which is put upon teachers, manifests in different forms. For Kati, it took the form of severe arm pain, which under the given circumstances is hard to mitigate. Therefore, the question needs to be asked:

A computer mouse, being used by a hand. A keyboard, pen, headphones and a mug are standing left of it. The picture is kept in black and white.

What can we improve in the field of digital education during the upcoming terms?

In the face of the surging Covid-19 pandemic, we will most likely not be able to go back to normal any time soon. So if we have to do online teaching to this extent for the foreseeable future, it should be in the interest of everyone to enable the conduction of education within the boundaries of (professional) sustainability.

Please check out the original blog post by Kati Lindström here. The link directs you to Kati’s home page.

 

Our New Post-Doc in Energy History: Marta Musso Investigating Resource Exploitation and Possibilities for Digital Archives

Covid-19 profoundly changes the way we work. What luckily has not changed, is that new people join us at the division. Marta has recently taken up the position of a post-doc, while we are mostly working from home. Thus we asked her the following questions to introduce Marta’s work, show potential for collaboration and to get to know her a little bit better.

A picture of Marta Musso, smiling warmly and friendly, open curly brown hair, glasses

Could you please tell us about yourself and the fields you are working on?

My name is Marta Musso and I am the new post-doc in energy history at the department, working together with Per Högselius. My research follows two main strands: the first one is linked to energy policy history, and it focusses on the international economic policy of resource exploitation, and the relations between state and enterprises in negotiations for resource exploitation in the post-colonial years. The second strand of research refers to the development of digital archives, and the usage of digital-born documents on behalf of historians. I am involved in preservation projects to allow historians to make the best out of digitisation and digital technologies, such as Archives Portal Europe (www.archivesportaleurope.net). At the same time, I am an advocate of digital preservation, particularly for what concerns energy archives. Currently I am the president of Eogan, the network of energy archives.

What do you work on right now? Do you feel an impact by the current pandemic on your work?

My current research project at KTH is an extension of my PhD, which focussed on the development of the Algerian oil industry and on the nationalisation of oil resources in the post-colonial years. I am now looking at the claims of the G-77 and OPEC countries in particular with regards to the international commodity market in the years leading to and following the 1973 oil crisis. Luckily so far I have found a lot of material online (thumbs up to the UN archives which have a very good digitisation strategy!), and I have much material from my PhD years that I did not get to properly study (particular from the OPEC archives). However, I would like to also visit the OECD archives in Paris and not only are they closed, but on their website they state clearly that they do not do digitisation on demand. Hopefully the situation will change between now and Autumn 2021. Other than that, it is bad that I cannot get to meet my new colleagues and get a better feeling of the spirit of the department; on the other hand, there are a lot of interesting things happening online and I don’t feel like I am missing out. As a matter of fact, having a toddler in the house, some things are easier to do online than in person, so I also appreciate the good side of this difficult situation.

What do you aim for in the near future in terms of research, projects, or public outreach?

I hope to have a book manuscript by end of 2021, and 2/3 papers out in the meantime. I also really like to engage in public history projects, and I would like to be more involved in making documentaries or to communicate my research in other ways than academic papers – but it is difficult to find the time and the opportunities! I also hope that my research could be of interest to current energy policies, particularly with regards to international coordination in the fight against climate change. One of the aims of my current research is to show how many lost opportunities there were in the 1970s to develop a more balance global economy

In the very near future, I am presenting a volume I have recently co-edited, which is being published by the Journal of Energy History as open access, on the 11th December, at 2pm. (Registration here)

Video presentation of Marta’s project

Thank you Marta. It is great to have you and your expertise with us!