It is hard to believe that I have been connected to this place in some way for nearly four decades. I came as an undergrad and joined the UT Libraries team as a student shelver, working in the stacks, in reference, and in the newfangled Electronic Information Center while studying for my graduate degree. I joined the full time staff when I graduated and have had the privilege to work on amazing projects with amazing people ever since. We explored what it meant to build collections on the Internet, we built out digitization services, and we helped define digital preservation. I leave having had the joy of working with a small team to understand the impact of emerging AI and piloting considered applications of the technology in real workflows. The technology kept changing but the mission never did: Make knowledge discoverable. Keep knowledge safe. Share knowledge as widely as possible.
To my colleagues here at UT, across the state, and throughout the broader libraries and archives community: thank you. It has been an honor working with you all. Thank you for the collaboration, patience, and shared purpose.
I continue to be fascinated by the intersection of new technology and collecting practices: how each wave of change, from the web, to digitization, to AI, reshapes what we collect, how we describe it, what we do to make sure it is available, and how we keep it safe for the long haul. I intend to stay engaged with those questions, and if the right challenge in this space finds me, I will be listening.
If our paths have crossed anywhere in this community, I would love to stay connected. All the best.
/Aaron
web performance metrics and lighthouse
Lighthouse – https://developers.google.com/web/tools/lighthouse
Lighthouse performance scoring – https://web.dev/performance-scoring/
PageSpeed Insights – https://pagespeed.web.dev/
Deep Fakes for Text
I attended a talk recently where they discussed how the capacity to produce deep faked video would affect our capacity to trust what we’re seeing as evidence in the media and in the court systems. At that discussion, some mentioned that perhaps the textual media would then retain some form of advantage in the credibility game…
Nope…
Researchers, scared by their own work, hold back “deepfakes for text” AI
Automated meeting notes
So – would you let somebody listen in to all your meetings to stop having to take your own notes?
voicea – Turn talk into action
What forms of informal or formal permissions will we need to establish as we start having automated systems that could be listening in to our every conversation and producing notes?
Responsibility Assignment Matrix
Not new by any stretch of the imagination. However, RACI and its alternatives are a great way to talk about the levels involved in ensuring that you keep everybody “in the loop” as you work on projects that affect an organization.
Stands for:
Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Responsibility_assignment_matrix
Open Source Telepresence
We have tested the Double Robotics telepresence robot in the past, but I’m trying to avoid going down a bit of an open source telepresence rabbit hole today. Documenting some sites and code to explore later…
Double Robotics: Double gives you a physical presence at work or school when you can’t be there in person. (not open-source)
https://www.doublerobotics.com/
warp-os: open-source telepresence robot operating system
https://github.com/adawarp/warp-os
Building a Telepresence Robot Based on an open-source Robot Operating System and Android
https://ascc.okstate.edu/sites/default/files/papers/HaDo_Craig_TACS_2012_Updated.pdf
OhmniLabs Launches First Open Telepresence Robotics Platform
Telepresence Robot
https://hackaday.io/project/2338-telepresence-robot
Willow Garage Creates Awesome Open Source Telepresence Robots
world’s cheapest telepresence robot project
https://github.com/start-jsk/telemba
Autonomous Delivery
George Mason is sharing the details of an automated food delivery service on campus.
These are the same bots that had at one point been slated to be navigating Austin’s streets. Good to see Starship Technologies still plugging away at the problem.
Still curious how we could use the work in this area to change the way libraries transport our volumes around our campuses.
update 2019-02-04:
Adding a link to Amazon Scout:
Meet Scout: Field testing a new delivery system with Amazon Scout.
https://blog.aboutamazon.com/transportation/meet-scout
And also to LG CLOI:
A robot that actively engages with people, providing information
and services such as escort, ordering, delivery, shopping and cleaning.
EVTradinPost has been placed on hold
Dear friends –
It has come to my attention that the primary use of the EVTradinPost’s systems have come to be for people to post scam listings or to try and defraud sellers. The platform I was using offers no tools to assist in managing that situation and even if it did – I have been clear – this is a side, passion project for me. While this is a painful decision, I must acknowledge that I have no time to spend worrying about what people are posting and I absolutely don’t want to be spending my personal funds to sponsor fraud and scams. As such – I have shut the site down while I decide what to do next with it.
If the site was useful to you in the time it was up – I am glad.
Best – /Aaron Choate
Collective Efficacy
Just adding a note to myself for a topic to dig into at some point. – Collective Efficacy but mentioned in a way as to be less controlling as the definition found on the wikipedia page.
A Google Talk that is worth listening to:
Will self-driving tests have a benefit for pedestrians and bicyclists?
I was on my weekly bike ride through downtown as I noticed the new signs warning that the autonomous vehicle testing will be taking place in downtown Austin, TX. Was it a coincidence that I was able to ride through the 3rd street corridor in the bike lane in one smooth reasonably timed swoop? Or… will the city be taking this as an opportunity to use the bond funding we passed to place some well timed additional effort into making the light timing and traffic flows predictable and free flowing? Getting things as predictable as possible would help reduce the problem set a bit for this initial testing as well as making life easier for the humans in this system.
Here’s hoping it was intentional.