July 2024

Mohammad Anas Wahaj | 24 jul 2024

Online privacy, online advertising, user data analytics and online regulatory policies are issues that continue to be debated regarding internet and online users. Big technology companies, consumer organizations, government regulators and various industry lobbies continue to push their conflicting agendas to influence the internet and its future. Convergence of interests that keep the internet free from manipulation by any particular group or groups is a challenging task. The paramount concern of all parties should ba a focus on keeping the internet safe, free, open and friendly, while at the same time bringing economic benefits to all. The socio-economic balance on the internet with consideration of the needs of all concerned groups should remain paramount while deciding the future. Recent backing out by Google from deprecating cookies from Chrome again brought the influence of big tech, user data privacy and online advertising issues on the forefront. Patrick Roman Gut, senior vice president and head of new business at Adstra, explains these issues and suggests options for the post-cookie internet. He says, '...there will eventually come a day when the Chrome browser no longer supports third-party cookies. Other major browsers like Safari and Firefox already default to cookies off, so no matter when Google finally makes the change, it's clear that the world has entered a post-cookie era. Another way to think about this is as a multi-identifier era, where brands must use multiple tools and tactics to find and understand their customers across online environments.' As advertising landscape continues to be more omnichannel and entrenched in multi-ID world, brands must be prepared to effectively handle the paradigm shift. Mr. Gut says - Advertising still largely relies on cookies, but the open market is a multi-ID space; Effective targeting requires a combination of methodologies (deterministic, probabilistic or contextual); Crosswalk solutions provide effective data management in a multi-ID landscape (Crosswalk solution involves mapping anonymous digital identifiers to personally identifiable information to unify online and offline data for a comprehensive view of customer behaviors); AI enables additional insights and predictions for extended reach and future success. Read on...

DIGIDAY: How advertisers are moving from cookies to a multi-ID landscape
Author: Patrick Roman Gut

Mohammad Anas Wahaj | 22 jul 2024

Generative AI (artifical intelligence) has potential to transform education practices and will bring new challenges to the traditional pedagogy in many fields of learning. Architecture and design education is no exception. The already fast changing world of architecture with climate change, environmental issues, natural disasters, shifting human needs and requirements etc and speedy technological innovations and advancements like AI, makes adapting to the present and predicting the future a humongous task for all those in the field - academics, researchers, educators, professionals, students, policy makes etc. Teaching an architect is a responsible task. Eric J. Cesal, Design Educator and Author, explains how the AI will impact architecture and design education and profession, and what practices in the design teaching and learning process would no longer be needed in the future. He says, 'The conversation about what and how to teach is already contentious, and it must necessarily evolve with technology...However, there's another, easier conversation to have: what not to teach...in my own teaching and conversations with colleagues, there seems to be a consensus among design faculty that certain things should no longer be taught in architecture school. These anachronisms remain fixtures in most schools due to institutional and cultural inertia...AI will change that calculus. It gives us new arguments for purging some of the more ossified practices of design culture.' He further specifies following three things that are inherent to the educational process that AI will assist in getting rid of - (1) Masochism: All-nighters, self-neglect, exhaustion etc are problems that are part of architecture and design schools. Educators want to curb them and it seems difficult to bring a culture change. Ideas need to be executed, they are tested, proven and demonstrated through drawings and models. This requires efforst and hard work with strict deadlines. Mr. Cesal says, 'This may seem reasonable—at least to anyone who's been to architecture school - as long as you ignore the downstream effects. As you stay up for several nights in a row to test and prove that one brilliant idea, your creative faculties steadily decline, compromising what might have been that second or third brilliant idea...Research consistently shows that a well-rested brain is better able to generate novel ideas, solve complex problems, and think critically...As AI rapidly takes over the rote, mechanical aspects of design, humans must focus their efforts on only those things that a human can do...So tell your students to leave the studio at a reasonable hour and go home. Insist on it. Insist that they do their designs, do their best, and then go home, or go out.' (2) Fetishization of the Image: Mass media brought an image-based culture in the architecture profession. Mr. Cesal says, 'This shift can be attributed to the way mass media fragmented different types of professional success: commercial success (making money), professional success (being esteemed by one’s peers), and cultural success (being esteemed by the wider culture)...these three types of success typically follow a sequential path. However, architecture has an alternative route, which I’ll call Path B. This route subverts the conventional sequence...Through Path B, an architect can achieve cultural success by earning the esteem of their peers, even if they have limited commercial success or built projects. With sufficient professional and cultural success, one can then achieve commercial succes...some architects can win the Pritzker Prize...with a very shallow portfolio of built works, principally on the strength of their publications and theoretical work...The existence of Path B in architecture enables and encourages a fetishization of image-making...The rise of AI in architecture fundamentally challenges the viability of pursuing Path B. With AI-powered tools capable of generating stunning, novel renderings based on text prompts, the mere production of impressive architectural images no longer signifies the same level of creativity and innovation that it once did. As a result, achieving early acclaim primarily through image-making will become increasingly difficult...As image-production becomes easier, the true test of an architect’s creativity and skill will likely shift toward her or his ability to navigate the complex realities of bringing designs to life, and to navigate the changing realities of practice...AI has made making images of our ideas simpler. Let's adapt to this change by ending our collective fetishization of image-making and focusing instead on the higher-order problems of the future.' (3) Design School as Rite of Passage: The old English model of education in American universities focused on broad range of subjects and students were not particularly trained in particular field. Medicine and law became first specializations in mid-18th century. Archiecture became an educational specialization about a century later. Mr. Cesal says, 'It wasn't really until the late 19th century that American institutions, influenced by German models, began to adopt the graduate and research models we know today, along with the concept of electives and majors. In contrast to the old English model, it was designed to train individuals for a lifetime of continuous work in a specific field, beginning at the age of 18...Going through a major program does more than just teach you the technical skills necessary to execute a specific type of work: it inducts you into a tribe. You undergo shared experiences that then bond you with others in your eventual profession. However, with the rapid advancements in AI, this model may no longer be suitable for the future. As AI accelerates the pace of technological change, it becomes increasingly challenging to predict the skills and capacities that will be necessary for professional work in the coming decades. The idea of fully training someone for a profession by their early 20s, with the expectation that this education will suffice for a lifetime, seems anachronistic in a world where entire professions may become obsolete within a matter of years. To adapt to this new reality, we must restructure learning to be a continuous, lifelong process rather than a one-time experience...This new paradigm could take many forms, such as having professionals return to school for a semester every few years...The key is to recognize that the current specialization model, which was developed in an era when America still ran on steam power, may no longer be adequate for a future characterized by rapid technological change. In the field of architecture, this means re-evaluating the notion of design school as a singular rite of passage. In the future, design school won't be something you went through. It will be a process that lasts a lifetime.' Read on...

ArchDaily: How AI Can Help Us End Design Education Anachronisms
Author: Eric J. Cesal

Mohammad Anas Wahaj | 13 jul 2024

cOAlition S, launched on 04 September 2018 by a group of national research funding organisations, with the support of the European Commission and the European Research Council (ERC), is an initiative to make full and immediate Open Access to research publications a reality. On its website (coalition-s.org), cOAlition S signals the commitment to implement the necessary measures to fulfil its main principle - 'With effect from 2021, all scholarly publications on the results from research funded by public or private grants provided by national, regional and international research councils and funding bodies, must be published in Open Access Journals, on Open Access Platforms, or made immediately available through Open Access Repositories without embargo.' cOAlition S is build around Plan S that is a set of principles that ensure open and immediate access to funded research publications. It was born from the cooperation between the Heads of the participating Research Funding Organisations, Marc Schiltz, the President of Science Europe, and Robert-Jan Smits, previously the Open Access Envoy of the European Commission. It also drew on significant input from the Scientific Council of the ERC. cOAlition S presented a proposal 'Towards Responsible Publishing (TRP)', that includes a vision for a community-based scholarly communication system fit for open science in the 21st century, where scholars can rapidly and transparently share the full range of their research outputs and participate in new quality control mechanisms and evaluation standard. According to the proposal, the main challenges that a future scholarly communication system should address include that - The dominant publishing models are highly inequitable; The sharing of research outputs is needlessly delayed; The full potential of peer review is not realised; The coupling of editorial gatekeeping with academic career incentives is damaging science. To address these challenges, cOAlition S proposed a set of five guiding principles - (1) Authors are responsible for the dissemination of their findings, (2) All scholarly outputs are shared immediately and openly. (3) Quality control processes are community-based and open, to ensure trustworthiness of research findings. (4) All scholarly outputs are eligible for consideration in research assessment. (5) Stakeholders commit to support the sustainability and diversity of the scholarled publishing ecosystem. The report, 'Towards Responsible Publishing': Findings from a global stakeholder consultation, presents the findings of a global multi-stakeholder consultation conducted between November 2023 and May 2024 by Research Consulting Limited (UK) and Leiden University's Centre for Science and Technology Studies (CWTS) (Netherlands) on behalf of cOAlition S. Johan Rooryck, Executive Director of cOAlition S and Bodo Stern, Chief of Strategic Initiatives, Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Chair of the TRP Steering Group at cOAlition S, in the foreword of the report write, 'Research funders have the responsibility to make sure that their funding is used in ways that improve the scholarly publishing landscape for the benefit of the research community and society. The 'Towards Responsible Publishing' proposal is therefore a logical next step for cOAlition S funders to help make the publishing system fit for the 21st century. It builds on Plan S and goes further in proposing a way to disseminate research that is not only more open, but also more trusted, equitable, efficient, and sustainable...This report presents the findings of that consultation: it shows an insightful picture of researchers' attitudes towards innovative research practices, such as open access publishing, preprint posting, open peer review and the incentives needed to embrace these behaviours.' For the report, authors collected 11145 responses from researchers via a global survey, reached 440 respondents through an initial feedback survey, engaged 72 participants via focus groups, and attracted a total of 10 organisational feedback letters from low- and middle-income countries that were underrepresented in the data. HIGHLIGHTS OF THE REPORT - When deciding how to reach their target audiences, researchers continue to rely on the current journals ecosystem; When deciding what to read, researchers once again prioritise the reputation of a journal; The consultation revealed support among researchers for some of the practices encouraged in the TRP proposal, such as preprint posting and the open sharing of peer review reports; Across the most represented disciplines in our data (medical and health sciences, life sciences, social sciences, engineering and arts and humanities), views regarding preprint posting are broadly aligned; Views are slightly more positive for respondents who have posted a preprint in the last three years; The highest resistance to the publication of open peer review reports was in the field of Law (39%), followed by Arts and Humanities (36%). In this context, consultation participants highlighted that existing recognition and reward mechanisms are inadequate for incentivising adoption of these practices, which will highly affect their uptake by researchers; The consultation found that, on balance, researchers would support the integration of practices like preprint posting (48% would support the practice vs 27% who would be opposed) and open peer review (47% would support the practice vs 29% who would be opposed) into journal publication workflows; Lack of clear implementation guidance emerged as a significant concern during the consultation; The need for a gradual, collaborative implementation approach involving pilots and engagement with existing initiatives was emphasised; Without broader engagement, cOAlition S' efforts risk being viewed by low- and middle-income countries as an imposition by wealthier nations; Shifting more publication responsibilities to individual authors could disproportionately overburden under-resourced researchers with limited institutional support services; Consultation participants highlighted the perceived importance of peer review and dedicated editorial roles in scholarly communication; Consultation participants saw a significant increase in preprint posting as potentially risking the proliferation of poor-quality, unvetted research outputs that may flood the public domain unchecked; The problem of subpar research making it through the peer review and publication process, while undesirable, already exists to some extent in the current system; The complexity of the proposed system may make it challenging for nonexperts like journalists, policymakers and the public to navigate the research landscape effectively. CONCLUSIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS - Based on the findings from this global multi-stakeholder consultation, we conclude that there is support for some of the principles and practices encouraged in the TRP proposal. This highlights opportunities for cOAlition S to make progress in their desired direction of travel, building on select parts of the proposal; cOAlition S is well-placed to pursue the preprint posting and open licensing activities in the near term; In the medium-term, cOAlition S could focus on encouraging and promoting open peer review across the publishing landscape, including both preprints and journal articles; Realising the full vision of the TRP proposal will require longer-term efforts and cooperation with other stakeholders to update recognition and reward mechanisms at a global scale and ransition funding and infrastructures to support a globally inclusive, scholar-led publishing ecosystem. Read on...

Zenodo: 'Towards Responsible Publishing': Findings from a global stakeholder consultation
Authors: Andrea Chiarelli, Ellie Cox, Rob Johnson, Ludo Waltman, Wolfgang Kaltenbrunner, André Brasil, Andrea Reyes Elizondo, Stephen Pinfield