Spark

This week a look at some of the innovative approaches Canadian museums and galleries are taking to incorporate digital technology into their physical spaces. We explore the approaches of the Art Gallery of Ontario and the Ontario Science Centre in Toronto the Canadian Museum for Human Rights in Winnipeg.

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In a world of technological convergence can ethical innovation survive? That's not a trailer for a new sci-fi flick but rather one of the bigger questions Andrew Maynard explores in his new book Films from the Future: The Technology and Morality of SciFi Movies. The book explores technology through the lens of a dozen familiar and not so familiar science fiction films.

On social media, finding out who exactly who is responsible for targeted ads for political causes, parties, or social movements isn't easy. Jeremy Merrill is one of the people behind Propublica's Political Ad Collector. Jeremy and his colleagues at Propublica have continued to monitor how political ads thrive on Facebook - who's behind them, and why regular users should care.

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What do you think the greatest films of all time are? And how would you go about defending your choices? Traditionally, movies are ranked by by how well they did at the box office, and by how they were critically reviewed -- which leaves many influential films out. Now, Livio Bioglio, an Italian computer scientist has developed a new algorithm that yields some surprising results.

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Cuneiform is the oldest known form of writing, and was used to tell the story of the rise and fall of Assyria and Babylonia some 5,000 years ago. And although half a million of the etched stone tablets have been unearthed, 90 percent of them remain untranslated. Émilie Pagé-Perron hopes to change that, by enlisting the aid of AI to look for patterns and reveal the stories the cuneiform texts tell.

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Google's Street View has yielded a trove of information, from illicit activities to acts of great kindness. And it turns out the service is really good for an activity usually done offline: birding. Nick Lund, a writer for the National Audubon Society and creator of the website, The Birdist, explains his latest avian adventure: Google Street View Birding.

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We've all gone through breakups. That's why Ridwan Madon, a student at the TISCH school for the arts, created Breakup Aid. It's a chatbot created to be a substitute for those who need a listening ear but think they may actually feel more comfortable talking to a chatbot about the trials of breaking up.

Google has come under fire for exploring the idea of bringing a version of it search engine back to China. This has led some Google employees to condemn the company for considering the idea. We asked Scott Romaniuk of the University of Alberta's China Institute to examine some of the issues.

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There's been a lot of attention on Sidewalk Toronto's Quayside project, but many are having trouble imagining what a smart city might actually look like. Quayside is a smart city test-bed project by Sidewalk Labs, Google's sister company. Nabeel Ahmed is a tech consultant and smart cities researcher. He discusses what the project could mean for Canadian tech innovation.

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Are tech giants doing enough for workers' rights? That's one of the issues tech entrepreneur Saadia Muzaffar spoke about in a recent talk in Ottawa last week. Muzaffar is a tech-entrepreneur and founder of Tech Girls Can, and co-founder of Tech Reset Canada. She talks about why we need to consider the human labour behind tech conveniences.

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Faxes seemed so magical back in the old days. But don't drop off your fax machine at the museum just yet. They're far from obsolete yet many industries still rely on the daily use of fax machines including medicine and the legal profession. Some young faxers take inside the curious persistence of the fax.

A startup called Predictim wants to use AI to help parents and guardians find the best babysitter. With the potential caregivers' consent, the company analyzes social media files to deliver a risk assessment. But does this actually work? And what are the ethics of digging through people's social media files? We put these questions to Avi Goldfarb. He's one of the author's of Prediction Machines: The Simple Economics of Artificial Intelligence.

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Intersect To is what the intersection of tech and local activism looks like in Toronto. They are a group of artists, academics, and tech professionals who aim to build a tech community by and for people who identify as Black, Indigenous, and People Of Colour. They describe it as space to learn, make, and have critical discussions on technology.

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Being self-employed can be great, but it can also be easy to procrastinate, especially if you work at home. The solution? Pay a fee for a boss to make sure you stick to deadlines! Manasvini Krishna is a software developer. She designed Boss as a Service to help people get more done in a day.

==========In Sweden, electronic devices implanted under the skin are becoming more common and useful for everyday things. The microchip devices have been implanted into 4,000 Swedes. Per Söderström is a consultant and biohacker in Sweden, who uses his device for everything from to entering his Stockholm office office to buying snacks at vending machines.

Conserve The Sound preserves the sound:

Daniel Chun and Jan Derksen run a film design and communication firm, based in Germany. But they're also interested in preserving vanishing and endangered sounds. They created Conserve the Sound, an online museum of vintage sounds.

From a rotary dial phones to a Polaroid cameras, the site documents sounds from the past before they completely disappear from our daily life.

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It's okay to cry on Instagram:

On Instagram, it can often seem like people are displaying an art directed, perfectly lit, ideal version of their lives. But now some see it as a place to reveal their full selves -- tears, warts and all. Aimee Morrison, an associate professor of English and Literature at the University of Waterloo, talks about what she thinks is behind this trend.

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Using 'shoe lasers' to help people with Parkinson's take the next step: Freezing of gait is a common symptom for people with Parkinson's disease and causes a temporary inability to move. This freezing made walking difficult for Lise Pape's father. So she designed Path Finder to help. It's a shoe attachment that projects a laser in front of the user. The visual cue helps people with Parkinson's get moving again.

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Productivity is Counterproductive: The focus on workplace efficiency and systemized time management goes back to the turn of the last century, but in today's tech-driven world, it has become a badge of honour, an obsession that prioritizes individual mastery of activity over the actual meaning of work. In her new book, Counterproductive, Melissa Gregg argues it isolates us and takes the politics out of work

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Last year, Toronto introduced plans for a smart neighbourhood at the waterfront. The plan is to make city living "smarter", but it's also raised questions about data privacy, public space, and the relationship between governments and private companies. Nasma Ahmed weighs in on these issues. She's the founding director of the Digital Justice Lab and is among a new group of community activists in Toronto pushing for youth to practice and learn about their digital rights.

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The city of Belleville, Ontario is bringing an on-demand approach to their transit system. It will allow transit users to hail a bus and meet it at their nearest bus stop using an app on their phones. A similar program has been proposed in Calgary. These programs are part of a broader trend described as Mobility as a Service. Sampo Hietanen is the founder and CEO of MaaS Global. His company lets people connect with different modes of transportation on a single platform.

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From fake news to trolling, there are many examples of harmful speech online. But legislation in Canada hasn't kept pace with technological change-and existing laws don't fully cover the myriad ways of promoting hate on the internet. UBC assistant professor Heidi Tworek is the co-author of a new report on how we should be dealing with harmful speech online.

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Oceanographic researchers collected hundreds-of-thousands of hours of underwater recordings to study humpback whales in the South Pacific. But sifting through it to isolate whale calls would take about 19 years. That's why Google comes teamed up with the N.O.A.A. to help out. Research Oceanographer Ann Allen, describes how machine learning is now helping researchers sift through this sea of audio data to help them track whale populations.

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The U.S. Library of Congress has an enormous collection of online material available for anyone to explore, download and use. But how to get people interested? Canadian artist and Innovator-in-Residence, Jer Thorp, created Serendipity Run, a tag-like game that ran on Twitter, to encourage serendipitous discovery. It's an example of how he uses art to empower people to take control of data.

Human-rights organization Freedom House releases their annual Freedom on the Net report. Research Director Adrian Shahbaz explains how fake news, repeals of net neutrality, and reduced privacy protection have weakened the openness of the web -- especially in the United States.

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Chris Donahue studies machine learning and music at the University of California in San Diego. He started playing piano when he was a three years old and these days he wanted to find a way to marry his interests in music and computer science. He created Piano Genie, an AI musical tool he describes as the opposite of Guitar Hero.

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Even with everything from car subscriptions to scooter sharing, it seems like we're still stuck in traffic. Gabe Klein once headed up the transportation commissions of Chicago & Washington D.C. and was the VP of Zipcar. He believes our relationship with the car has to change - and that technology may be the driving force to change it.

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ShiftRide wants to enable people in need of a car for a short trip to essentially rent one from someone in their neighbourhood. Car owners can put an under-utilized vehicles and users without a car can get access to one. Founder and CEO Nima Tahami discusses what he calls on demand mobility.

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Innisfil, Ontario's transit and ride sharing partnership with Uber made headlines when it first began. A year and half later we check in with mayor-elect and former deputy mayor Lynn Dollin to find out how the collaboration is working for Innisfil and why she thinks it's good for her town.

Digital redlining is when seemingly neutral algorithms inadvertently make decisions that lead to discrimination. Chris Gilliard teaches at Macomb Community College in Dearborn Michigan. He's studied digital redlining and uses it as a powerful metaphor to talk about the way class divisions and racial discrimination can be fostered by algorithmic decision making.

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It was a Hallowe'en-worthy experiment. On Halloween night Researchers at MIT let the internet and its users "control" an actor as he played an online game. How well can a hive mind work? Researcher Niccolo Pescatelli explains.

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How vulnerable are electronic voting machines? Well J. Alex Halderman once hacked into one in front of U.S. Congress to demonstrate their vulnerabilities. He's a cyber security expert and professor of computer science and engineering at the University of Michigan. He discusses how these voting security issues may be putting democracy at risk.

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Agbogbloshie, an area in Accra, Ghana. Every year, 250,000 tons of old phones, computers, and appliances are illegally brought here. About 6,000 people, including many children, live and work here. It's a polluted, blighted place. But it's also a place of community and culture. Florian Weigensamer is one of the filmmakers behind the documentary, Welcome to Sodom, which tells the stories of Agbogbloshie.

This fall saw the quiet departure of the co-creators of Instagram from the Facebook owned company. That's caused some to speculate that it may have something to do with the move towards more advertising. Over the last year more sponsored ads are showing up on Instagram which may not be what the founders were going for when they created the platform. Tech journalist and entrepreneur, Takara Small explains what this shift on Instagram means for the average consumer.

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Instagram has gone from pictures of people's food, to influencers encouraging you to drink special tea. Until now, the position of those influencers was held by people like the Kardashians with tens of millions of followers. Now, regular students with just a few thousand followers, like Jade White and Azita Peters, are advertising for brands on their own accounts. Donna Wertalik, Director of Marketing for the Pamplin College of Business at Virginia Tech, weighs in on the trend.

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Following Facebook's most recent data breach, many have suggested that tech giants like social media platforms should be regulated as 'information fiduciaries' and act in the best interests of their users. Jonathan Zittrain, Director of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, discusses what that would look like for platforms like Facebook.

-----------In 1993, a new magazine launched with Canadian Marshall McLuhan as its "patron saint." Now Wired magazine is celebrating its 25th birthday as one of the world's leading technology and design journals. Clive Thompson, a Canadian who has been writing for Wired for many of those 25 years, joins Nora to talk about how the tech times have changed.

Music streaming giants are removing the curator and replacing it with data - and not just any data - your DNA. Spotify and Ancestry are teaming up to provide consumers with playlists curated by a users DNA and ethnic lineage. Deezer researchers used AI to curate playlists based on mood. But critics, like Toronto-based music journalists Eric Zaworski and Sajae Elder, think it might be kind of creepy and an invasion of privacy.

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When you ask Alexa a question, there's a good chance she gets the answer from Wikipedia, the volunteer-driven knowledge bank, which raises another question. Alexa, should Amazon be paying Wikipedia for that? Rachel Withers thinks so.

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Increasingly the digital divide is characterized by the inability to maintain access to smartphones, laptops and other technologies. Amy Gonzales is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at UC Santa Barbara. She discusses the difficulties of keeping devices connected and the inequalities that can create.

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Smartphones can offer life-changing accessibility for people who are blind but many people with sight loss still don't own one. Phone It Forward takes donated smartphones, refurbishes them and loads them with accessible apps to give to people with vision loss who need them.

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We used to talk about the digital divide as a sort of 'yes or no' issue. Is there broadband in your area or not? But the reality of internet access in Canada is more nuanced than that, and digital inequality has real consequences for individuals, for whole communities, and the overall Canadian economy. Researcher Nisa Malli talks to Nora about where we're at and how to improve.