Category: Emerging Technologies

3D/VR in the Academic Library: Emerging Practices and Trends

CLIR has released 3D/VR in the Academic Library: Emerging Practices and Trends.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

The volume seeks to prompt greater awareness for library professionals as they develop programs that use 3D and VR technologies and work to integrate changing scholarly demands and conventions with existing library services and policies. Eight chapters contributed by experts in a variety of fields cover 3D content creation, VR visualization and analysis, 3D/VR-based educational deployment, and 3D/VR data curation, providing a snapshot of professional objectives and workflows that have developed around 3D/VR. Together, the chapters highlight three critical approaches for librarians and digital curators to consider as they use 3D/VR to support their communities: (1) treat the academic outputs that use 3D/VR as scholarly products; (2) build a 3D/VR scholarly community to support knowledge exchange across a range of stakeholder groups; and (3) develop technical tools, training, and infrastructure to support a 3D/VR research ecosystem.

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Search Results Ranking Using Machine-Learning Algorithms: "Best Match: New Relevance Search for PubMed"

Nicolas Fiorini et al. have published "Best Match: New Relevance Search for PubMed" in PLOS Biology.

Here's an excerpt:

PubMed is a free search engine for biomedical literature accessed by millions of users from around the world each day. With the rapid growth of biomedical literature—about two articles are added every minute on average—finding and retrieving the most relevant papers for a given query is increasingly challenging. We present Best Match, a new relevance search algorithm for PubMed that leverages the intelligence of our users and cutting-edge machine-learning technology as an alternative to the traditional date sort order. The Best Match algorithm is trained with past user searches with dozens of relevance-ranking signals (factors), the most important being the past usage of an article, publication date, relevance score, and type of article. This new algorithm demonstrates state-of-the-art retrieval performance in benchmarking experiments as well as an improved user experience in real-world testing (over 20% increase in user click-through rate). Since its deployment in June 2017, we have observed a significant increase (60%) in PubMed searches with relevance sort order: it now assists millions of PubMed searches each week. In this work, we hope to increase the awareness and transparency of this new relevance sort option for PubMed users, enabling them to retrieve information more effectively.

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Horizon Report 2018 Higher Education Edition

EDUCAUSE has released the Horizon Report 2018 Higher Education Edition.

Here's an excerpt:

The Horizon Report highlights six trends, six challenges, and six developments relating to educational technology and practices that are likely to enter mainstream use within their focus sectors over the next five years (2018–22).

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"Current Trends and Goals in the Development of Makerspaces at New England College and Research Libraries"

Ann Marie Lynn Davis has published "Current Trends and Goals in the Development of Makerspaces at New England College and Research Libraries" in Information Technology and Libraries.

Here's an excerpt:

This study investigates why and which types of college and research libraries (CRLs) are currently developing Makerspaces (or an equivalent space) for their communities. Based on an online survey and phone interviews with a sample population of CRLs in New England, the investigator found that more than two dozen (26) CRLs had or were in the process of developing a Makerspace in this region. In addition, a number of other CRLs were actively engaged in promoting and diffusing the Maker ethos. Of these libraries, most were motivated to promote open access to new technologies, literacies, and STEM-related knowledge.

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"A Survey of Scholarly Data Visualization"

Jiaying Liu et al. have published "A Survey of Scholarly Data Visualization" in IEEE Access.

Here's an excerpt:

In this paper, we first introduce the basic concepts and the collection of scholarly data. Then, we provide a comprehensive overview of related data visualization tools, existing techniques, as well as systems for the analyzing volumes of diverse scholarly data. Finally, open issues are discussed to pursue new solutions for abundant and complicated scholarly data visualization, as well as techniques, that support a multitude of facets.

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The Internet of Things Connectivity Binge: What Are the Implications?

The Pew Research Centerhas released The Internet of Things Connectivity Binge: What Are the Implications? .

Here's an excerpt:

Researchers have been showing how easy it is to hack cars, voting machines and power plants. They have demonstrated ransomware exploits against home thermostats and exposed vulnerabilities in implanted heart pacemakers. In one paper, "IoT Goes Nuclear," analysts showed how a flaw in the design of smart lightbulbs could be used for a "bricking attack" that kills all of a city's traffic lights. . . .

Thus, the question: Could security vulnerabilities that become evident as the IoT rolls out prompt people, businesses and government to avoid or withdraw from certain online connectivity options? In summer 2016, Pew Research Center and Elon University’s Imagining the Internet Center conducted a large canvassing of technologists, scholars, practitioners, strategic thinkers and other leaders, asking them to react to this framing of the issue.

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NMC Horizon Report: 2017 Higher Education Edition

NMC and the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative have released the NMC Horizon Report: 2017 Higher Education Edition.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

This 14th edition describes annual findings from the NMC Horizon Project, an ongoing research project designed to identify and describe emerging technologies likely to have an impact on learning, teaching, and creative inquiry in education. Six key trends, six significant challenges, and six important developments in educational technology are placed directly in the context of their likely impact on the core missions of universities and colleges. The three key sections of this report constitute a reference and straightforward technology-planning guide for educators, higher education leaders, administrators, policymakers, and technologists.

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"Blockchain Technology as a Regulatory Technology: From Code Is Law to Law Is Code"

Primavera De Filippi and Samer Hassan have published "Blockchain Technology as a Regulatory Technology: From Code Is Law to Law Is Code" in First Monday.

Here's an excerpt:

To illustrate the extent to which blockchain code can assume the function of law, let us take the example of a hypothetical blockchain-based DRM system. Copyright law introduces "artificial scarcity" in the realm of information, by prohibiting (or constraining) the reproduction of creative works without the consent of the corresponding right holders. Yet, given the ease with which one can produce an identical copy of a digital work, copyright infringement has become widespread in the digital world. Since many years already, content providers have been relying on technological means (such as DRM systems, or other technological measures of protection) to restrain the way in which content can be accessed, used or reused by introducing a new set of technical rules, as a complement to the legal provisions of copyright law. Yet, most of these systems are limited by the fact that it is impossible to distinguish one digital file from another. By leveraging on the transparency and immutability of blockchain technologies, it is possible to restore the unicity and transferability of digital works, by linking every digital copy to a particular token on the blockchain. Authors can then associate these tokens with a particular set of rights to their digital works and trade them in the same way as they would trade digital tokens. Blockchain technology can thus be used to implement "artificial scarcity" at the level of each individual file—thus potentially allowing for the reintroduction of the first sale doctrine [11] in the digital realm, without the need to rely on any contractual or legal means.

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