Spark

Ross Goodwin took an AI on a trip from New York to New Orleans. Along the way the AI used inputs from a camera, a clock, a GPS, and a microphone to make "observations" and write about the trip. The book and project is called 1 the Road and it's inspired by beat generation author Jack Kerouac's famous book On the Road.

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Montreal artist Adam Basanta's All We'd Ever Need is One Another works by getting a computer to randomly generate abstract images. A second computer compares the work to a database of human art. If it finds a close match, it names the computer-generated work after the human art. Cue the lawsuit for copyright and trademark infringement. Jeremy de Beer, who specializes in law and innovation, weighs in on what a case like this could mean for the idea intellectual property.

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Fortnite, is the most popular streaming game in history. More people watch gamers play Fortnite on the Twitch streaming service than watch NFL football. That gave oceanographer Henri Drake an idea. He created "ClimateFortnite," in which he and other climate scientists play the game and also answer questions about climate change using the in-game chat.

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Could this trojan-horse style of education in a gaming environment be an effective way to teach and reach people? MIT qualitative sociologist T.L. Taylor, who has focused on internet and game studies for over two decades, explains the interrelations between culture and technology in online leisure environments.

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Laurent Bastien is a Canadian journalist who's doing researchers a favour. His Twitter account shares nothing but cryptic links to Freedom of Information requests. The point is to avoid doubling-up on information requests by creating access to requests that have already been processed but have not been publicly released by the government.

Saqib Shaikh is a software engineer at Microsoft. He has also been blind since this age of seven, and has long dreamed of technology that could describe the world around him in real time. And now, he's made it. He explains how the Seeing AI voice assistant app describes the world around him.

----------What does a city have to do with obesity? New AI uses satellite imagery and Google Street View to show how urban design and obesity in US cities are related-without looking at a single person. Elaine Nsoesie, one of the researchers who designed the algorithm, explains how.----------Water is something that most of us take for granted. But the city of El Paso, Texas, is one of the most arid places on the planet-and water is a precious commodity. So Ed Archuleta designed a system to recycle most of the city's water-even sewage. And he says it's a protocol that many more cities are going to have to adopt as climate changes.

----------What started off as a school project became one of the world's most popular nature app - with a new observation recorded every 45 seconds. iNaturalist helps anyone identify plants and animals. Scott Loarie, the Co-Director of iNaturalist, discusses how iNaturalist combines the power of citizen science and big data.

----------Photographs can be more than just memories. The University of Victoria's Mountain Legacy Project holds the world's largest collection of current and historical mountain photos. And they return to those sites in the Canadian Rockies to retake those photos to track how the mountains are changing. Journalist Meg Wilcox joined the team as they photographed vistas that were first captured over a century ago.

Our virtual assistants aren't ready to give advice

Do you talk to your smart speaker? Heather Suzanne Woods is an assistant professor of rhetoric and technology at Kansas State University. She's studied how humans use language to make sense of technological change and why people seem to have a relationship with their devices.

Move over Dr. Google, Dr. Siri will see you now.

People are getting used to using conversational agents like Amazon Alexa around the house. But what happens when people get medical advice from Siri or Alexa? Timothy Bickmore is a professor of Computer and Information Science at Northeastern University. He's been studying how conversational agents respond to medical questions.

A new opinion in the social media echo chamber could close it even tighter

Disrupting our social media echo chambers with an opposing view may seem like the best way to reduce political polarization. But sociologist Christopher Bail from Duke University found it can actually entrench people's views and opinions even more.

What if you could see a filter bubble on social media?

Imagine if you could visualize what political polarization looks like on Twitter?based on when influential accounts tweet about politics, how often, and who they follow. Camille Francois and John Kelly have done just that. They work for Graphika, a social media intelligence firm.

This week on Spark we're devoting the entire episode to some of the technologies used by law enforcement. Some of the benefits of these tools and how they can improve police work, and also some of their limitations and the issues they raise.

Josh Mitchell is a consultant with the security firm, Nuix. He tested five body cameras from five different companies and found that all of those cameras were vulnerable to hacking. Some of those vulnerabilities could allow a hacker to do location tracking, spread malware, download footage, and modify and re-upload that footage remotely.

For many, Body Cams on police are one answer to police accountability. But while you'd think recording a police-civilian incident would make what happened clear, there are other issues at play. In July, a U.S. federal judge ruled that NYC officers wearing body cameras are required to turn their cams on for what's called "low level encounters". Darius Charney is a lawyer at the Centre for Constitutional Rights in New York.

RideAlong is a mobile app that provides police and first responders with information on the individuals who frequently use emergency services to help them de-escalate the situation and keep everyone safe.

Technology has revolutionized police work. But what are the ethical guidelines of using tools like AI and big data for law enforcement? Can it lead to over policing? Ryan Prox is the Senior Constable in Charge of the Crime Analytics Advisory & Development Unit at the Vancouver Police Department.

The Toronto Police Service is planning to implement an American technology called ShotSpotter that can pinpoint when and where a gun was fired. More than 90 cities in the U.S. use the technology. Rob Maher is a "forensic audiologist". He has extensively studied methods to detect and analyze acoustic gun signals.

Saadia Muzaffar is a Toronto tech-entrepreneur and the co-founder of Tech Reset Canada. She has some concerns about ShotSpotter including privacy and the neighbourhoods that will be monitored.

Ear Hustle is a podcast about daily life in San Quentin prison. The term ear hustle is prison slang for eavesdropping. Earlonne Woods is incarcerated in San Quentin and is the co-producer and co-host along with Nigel Poor, an artist who volunteers. They discuss how the podcast, made entirely inside the walls of the prison, builds bridges between the inside and the outside.

Everyday seems to bring a new data breach. In his new book, Click Here To Kill Everybody famed cybersecurity expert, Bruce Schneier, says we ain't seen nothing yet. Security challenges are exploding in our hyper-connected era. Schneier explains why, and what we should do about it.

Do you remember a time when there were no notifications? Today, most of us are buried in an avalanche of beeps, whistles and pings -which we probably try to ignore. Hence the rise of "anti-notifications", which tell us what we're missing out on. UX designer and writer Adrian Zumbrunnen explains why.

Besides making it super-easy to get a ride somewhere, one of the great promises of ride-sharing services like Uber and Lyft was that they would reduce congestion on city streets. Unfortunately, the opposite has happened-and dramatically so.

Also, the value of video-game emulators, the call for ethical computer engineering standards, and a new app that aims to use AI to help improve parenting.

On this special episode of Spark, we're looking at how Google for Education is being used in by students and teachers across Canada.

Reimagining the university for the 21st century. The future of trades in a changing world. Mapping the sounds of protest. How machines, platforms and the crowd are rearranging the world.

Time to get rid of the job interview. What romance writers can teach us about the digital economy.

We need a survival guide for thinking because we're bad at it. What Confucius, The Buddha, and Aristotle can teach us about technology. Online is the loneliest number.