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#identity
Hashtagging Race, Gender, Sexuality, and Nation
Abigail De Kosnik and Keith P. Feldman, editors
University of Michigan Press, 2019
Since its launch in 2006, Twitter has served as a major platform for political performance, social justice activism, and large-scale public debates over race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and nationality. It has empowered minoritarian groups to organize protests, articulate often-underrepresented perspectives, and form community. It has also spread hashtags that have been used to bully and silence women, people of color, and LGBTQ people.

#identity is among the first scholarly books to address the positive and negative effects of Twitter on our contemporary world. Hailing from diverse scholarly fields, all contributors are affiliated with The Color of New Media, a scholarly collective based at the University of California, Berkeley. The Color of New Media explores the intersections of new media studies, critical race theory, gender and women’s studies, and postcolonial studies. The essays in #identity consider topics such as the social justice movements organized through #BlackLivesMatter, #Ferguson, and #SayHerName; the controversies around #WhyIStayed and #CancelColbert; Twitter use in India and Africa; the integration of hashtags such as #nohomo and #onfleek that have become part of everyday online vernacular; and other ways in which Twitter has been used by, for, and against women, people of color, LGBTQ, and Global South communities. Collectively, the essays in this volume offer a critically interdisciplinary view of how and why social media has been at the heart of US and global political discourse for over a decade.
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Imaging and Sensing for Unmanned Aircraft Systems
Control and Performance, Volume 1
Vania V. Estrela
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2020
This two-volume book set explores how sensors and computer vision technologies are used for the navigation, control, stability, reliability, guidance, fault detection, self-maintenance, strategic re-planning and reconfiguration of unmanned aircraft systems (UAS).
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Imaging and Sensing for Unmanned Aircraft Systems
Deployment and Applications, Volume 2
Vania V. Estrela
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2020
This two-volume book set explores how sensors and computer vision technologies are used for the navigation, control, stability, reliability, guidance, fault detection, self-maintenance, strategic re-planning and reconfiguration of unmanned aircraft systems (UAS).
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In the Land of the Unreal
Virtual and Other Realities in Los Angeles
Lisa Messeri
Duke University Press, 2024
In the mid-2010s, a passionate community of Los Angeles-based storytellers, media artists, and tech innovators formed around virtual reality (VR), believing that it could remedy society’s ills. Lisa Messeri offers an ethnographic exploration of this community, which conceptualized VR as an “empathy machine” that could provide glimpses into diverse social realities. She outlines how, in the aftermath of #MeToo, the backlash against Silicon Valley, and the turmoil of the Trump administration, it was imagined that VR—if led by women and other marginalized voices—could bring about a better world. Messeri delves into the fantasies that allowed this vision to flourish, exposing the paradox of attempting to use a singular VR experience to mend a fractured reality full of multiple, conflicting social truths. She theorizes this dynamic as unreal, noting how dreams of empathy collide with reality’s irreducibility to a “common” good. With In the Land of the Unreal, Messeri navigates the intersection of place, technology, and social change to show that technology alone cannot upend systemic forces attached to gender and race.
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Indie Cinema Online
Sarah E.S. Sinwell
Rutgers University Press, 2020
Indie Cinema Online investigates the changing nature of contemporary American independent cinema in an era of media convergence. Focusing on the ways in which modes of production, distribution, and exhibition are shifting with the advent of online streaming, simultaneous release strategies, and web series, this book analyzes sites such as SundanceTV, YouTube, Netflix, Hulu, and other online spaces as a means of redefining independent cinema in a digital era. Analyzing the intersections among cinema studies, cultural studies, and new media studies within contemporary convergence culture, author Sarah E.S. Sinwell looks at sites of media convergence that are often ignored within most studies of digital media. Emphasizing the ways in which the forms and technologies of media culture have changed during the age of convergence, this book analyzes contemporary production, distribution, and exhibition practices as a means of examining the changing meanings of independent cinema within digital culture.
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Indigeneity in Real Time
The Digital Making of Oaxacalifornia
Ingrid Kummels
Rutgers University Press, 2023
Long before the COVID-19 crisis, Mexican Indigenous peoples were faced with organizing their lives from afar, between villages in the Oaxacan Sierra Norte and the urban districts of Los Angeles, as a result of unauthorized migration and the restrictive border between Mexico and the United States. By launching cutting-edge Internet radio stations and multimedia platforms and engaging as community influencers, Zapotec and Ayuujk peoples paved their own paths to a transnational lifeway during the Trump era. This meant adapting digital technology to their needs, setting up their own infrastructure, and designing new digital formats for re-organizing community life in all its facets—including illness, death and mourning, collective celebrations, sport tournaments, and political meetings—across vast distances. Author Ingrid Kummels shows how mediamakers and users in the Sierra Norte villages and in Los Angeles created a transborder media space and aligned time regimes. By networking from multiple places, they put into practice a communal way of life called Comunalidad and an indigenized American Dream—in real time.
 
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Industrial Software Technology
R.J. Mitchell
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 1987
A number of interrelated developments are changing the nature of software technology. Developments in hardware are putting greatly increased power at the disposal of the software technologist. Advances in formal methods are providing the means to bring greater precision into the early stages of system development. Techniques such as expert systems are being brought into the domain of software technology as a result of advances in the application of artificial intelligence research. Developments in paradigms of system development are giving the software technologist better models of system structure and better tools and techniques for creating large systems, and greater political recognition of the importance of information technology is resulting in increased funding for research and development in software technology.
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Industry of Anonymity
Inside the Business of Cybercrime
Jonathan Lusthaus
Harvard University Press, 2018

The most extensive account yet of the lives of cybercriminals and the vast international industry they have created, deeply sourced and based on field research in the world’s technology-crime hotspots.

Cybercrime seems invisible. Attacks arrive out of nowhere, their origins hidden by layers of sophisticated technology. Only the victims are clear. But every crime has its perpetrator—specific individuals or groups sitting somewhere behind keyboards and screens. Jonathan Lusthaus lifts the veil on the world of these cybercriminals in the most extensive account yet of the lives they lead, and the vast international industry they have created.

We are long past the age of the lone adolescent hacker tapping away in his parents’ basement. Cybercrime now operates like a business. Its goods and services may be illicit, but it is highly organized, complex, driven by profit, and globally interconnected. Having traveled to cybercrime hotspots around the world to meet with hundreds of law enforcement agents, security gurus, hackers, and criminals, Lusthaus takes us inside this murky underworld and reveals how this business works. He explains the strategies criminals use to build a thriving industry in a low-trust environment characterized by a precarious combination of anonymity and teamwork. Crime takes hold where there is more technical talent than legitimate opportunity, and where authorities turn a blind eye—perhaps for a price. In the fight against cybercrime, understanding what drives people into this industry is as important as advanced security.

Based on seven years of fieldwork from Eastern Europe to West Africa, Industry of Anonymity is a compelling and revealing study of a rational business model which, however much we might wish otherwise, has become a defining feature of the modern world.

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Information Activism
A Queer History of Lesbian Media Technologies
Cait McKinney
Duke University Press, 2020
For decades, lesbian feminists across the United States and Canada have created information to build movements and survive in a world that doesn't want them. In Information Activism Cait McKinney traces how these women developed communication networks, databases, and digital archives that formed the foundation for their work. Often learning on the fly and using everything from index cards to computers, these activists brought people and their visions of justice together to organize, store, and provide access to information. Focusing on the transition from paper to digital-based archival techniques from the 1970s to the present, McKinney shows how media technologies animate the collective and unspectacular labor that sustains social movements, including their antiracist and trans-inclusive endeavors. By bringing sexuality studies to bear on media history, McKinney demonstrates how groups with precarious access to control over information create their own innovative and resourceful techniques for generating and sharing knowledge.
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Information Please
Culture and Politics in the Age of Digital Machines
Mark Poster
Duke University Press, 2006
Information Please advances the ongoing critical project of the media scholar Mark Poster: theorizing the social and cultural effects of electronically mediated information. In this book Poster conceptualizes a new relation of humans to information machines, a relation that avoids privileging either the human or the machine but instead focuses on the structures of their interactions. Synthesizing a broad range of critical theory, he explores how texts, images, and sounds are made different when they are mediated by information machines, how this difference affects individuals as well as social and political formations, and how it creates opportunities for progressive change.

Poster’s critique develops through a series of lively studies. Analyzing the appearance of Sesame Street’s Bert next to Osama Bin Laden in a New York Times news photo, he examines the political repercussions of this Internet “hoax” as well as the unlimited opportunities that Internet technology presents for the appropriation and alteration of information. He considers the implications of open-source licensing agreements, online personas, the sudden rise of and interest in identity theft, peer-to-peer file sharing, and more. Focusing explicitly on theory, he reflects on the limitations of critical concepts developed before the emergence of new media, particularly globally networked digital communications, and he argues that, contrary to the assertions of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, new media do not necessarily reproduce neoimperialisms. Urging a rethinking of assumptions ingrained during the dominance of broadcast media, Poster charts new directions for work on politics and digital culture.

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Information Security
Foundations, technologies and applications
Ali Ismail Awad
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2018
The rapid advancements in telecommunications, computing hardware and software, and data encryption, and the widespread use of electronic data processing and electronic business conducted through the Internet have led to a strong increase in information security threats. The latest advances in information security have increased practical deployments and scalability across a wide range of applications to better secure and protect our information systems and the information stored, processed and transmitted. This book outlines key emerging trends in information security from the foundations and technologies in biometrics, cybersecurity, and big data security to applications in hardware and embedded systems security, computer forensics, the Internet of Things security, and network security.
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The Inspiration Machine
Computational Creativity in Poetry and Jazz
Eitan Y. Wilf
University of Chicago Press, 2023
Explores how creative digital technologies and artificial intelligence are embedded in culture and society.
 
In The Inspiration Machine, Eitan Y. Wilf explores the transformative potentials that digital technology opens up for creative practice through three ethnographic cases, two with jazz musicians and one with a group of poets. At times dissatisfied with the limitations of human creativity, these artists do not turn to computerized algorithms merely to execute their preconceived ideas. Rather, they approach them as creative partners, delegating to them different degrees of agentive control and artistic decision-making in the hopes of finding inspiration in their output and thereby expanding their own creative horizons.
 
The algorithms these artists develop and use, however, remain rooted in and haunted by the specific social predicaments and human shortfalls that they were intended to overcome. Experiments in the digital thus hold an important lesson: although Wilf’s interlocutors returned from their adventures with computational creativity with modified, novel, and enriched capacities and predilections, they also gained a renewed appreciation for, and at times a desire to re-inhabit, non-digital creativity. In examining the potentials and pitfalls of seemingly autonomous digital technologies in the realm of art, Wilf shows that computational solutions to the real or imagined insufficiencies of human practice are best developed in relation to, rather than away from, the social and cultural contexts that gave rise to those insufficiencies, in the first place.
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Institutional Literacies
Engaging Academic IT Contexts for Writing and Communication
Stuart A. Selber
University of Chicago Press, 2020
Information technologies have become an integral part of writing and communication courses, shaping the ways students and teachers think about and do their work. But, too often, teachers and other educational stakeholders take a passive or simply reactive role in institutional approaches to technologies, and this means they are missing out on the chance to make positive changes in their departments and on campus.

Institutional Literacies argues that writing and communication teachers and program directors should collaborate more closely and engage more deeply with IT staff as technology projects are planned, implemented, and expanded. Teachers need to both analyze how their institutions approach information technologies and intervene in productive ways as active university citizens with relevant expertise. To help them do so, the book offers a three-part heuristic, reflecting the reality that academic IT units are complex and multilayered, with historical, spatial, and textual dimensions. It discusses six ways teachers can intervene in the academic IT work of their own institutions: maintaining awareness, using systems and services, mediating for audiences, participating as user advocates, working as designers, and partnering as researchers. With these strategies in hand, educators can be proactive in helping institutional IT approaches align with the professional values and practices of writing and communication programs.
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Integrating Social Media into Information Systems
Requirements, Gaps, and Potential Solutions
Douglas Yeung, Douglas
RAND Corporation, 2018
This report examines the technical challenges associated with incorporating bulk, automated analysis of social media information into procedures for vetting people seeking entry into the United States. The authors identify functional requirements and a framework for operational metrics for the proposed social media screening capabilities and provide recommendations on how to implement those capabilities.
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An Intelligence in Our Image
The Risks of Bias and Errors in Artificial Intelligence
Osonde A. Osoba
RAND Corporation, 2017
Machine learning algorithms and artificial intelligence influence many aspects of life today and have gained an aura of objectivity and infallibility. The use of these tools introduces a new level of risk and complexity in policy. This report illustrates some of the shortcomings of algorithmic decisionmaking, identifies key themes around the problem of algorithmic errors and bias, and examines some approaches for combating these problems.
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Intelligent Distributed Video Surveillance Systems
Sergio A. Velastin
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2006
There is a growing interest in the development and deployment of surveillance systems in public and private locations. Conventional approaches rely on the installation of wide area CCTV (Closed Circuit Television), but the explosion in the numbers of cameras that have to be monitored, the increasing costs of providing monitoring personnel and the limitations that humans have to maintain sustained levels of concentration severely limit the effectiveness of these systems. Advances in information and communication technologies, such as computer vision for face recognition and human behaviour analysis, digital annotation and storage of video, transmission of video/audio streams over wired and wireless networks, can potentially provide significant improvements in this field.
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Intelligent Multimedia Processing and Computer Vision
Techniques and applications
Shyam Singh Rajput
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2023
Intelligent multimedia involves the computer processing and understanding of perceptual input from speech, text, videos and images. Reacting to these inputs is complex and involves research from engineering, computer science and cognitive science. Intelligent multimedia processing deals with the analysis of images and videos to extract useful information for numerous applications including medical imaging, robotics, remote sensing, autonomous driving, AR/VR, law enforcement, biometrics, multimedia enhancement and reconstruction, agriculture, and security. Intelligent multimedia processing and computer vision have seen an upsurge over the last few years. With the increasing use of intelligent multimedia processing techniques in various sectors, the requirement for fast and reliable techniques to analyse and process multimedia content is increasing day by day.
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Intelligent Multimedia Technologies for Financial Risk Management
Trends, tools and applications
Simon Grima
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2023
Multimedia technologies have opened up a wide range of applications by combining a variety of information sources such as voice, graphics, animation, images, audio, and full-motion video which can be successfully implemented in banking, financial services and insurance (BFSI) industries to support their activities and strategic goals.
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Intelligent Network Design Driven by Big Data Analytics, IoT, AI and Cloud Computing
Sunil Kumar
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2022
As enterprise access networks evolve with a larger number of mobile users, a wide range of devices and new cloud-based applications, managing user performance on an end-to-end basis has become rather challenging. Recent advances in big data network analytics combined with AI and cloud computing are being leveraged to tackle this growing problem. AI is becoming further integrated with software that manage networks, storage, and can compute.
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Internet and Wireless Security
Robert Temple
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2002
Many organisations are transforming their businesses through the development of information and communications technologies. The security of this e-commerce is now a key enabler for businesses, and this book presents an overview of current and future infrastructures for e-business security.
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The Internet Challenge to Television
Bruce M. Owen
Harvard University Press, 1999

After a half-century of glacial creep, television technology has begun to change at the same dizzying pace as computer software. What this will mean--for television, for computers, and for the popular culture where these video media reign supreme--is the subject of this timely book. A noted communications economist, Bruce Owen supplies the essential background: a grasp of the economic history of the television industry and of the effects of technology and government regulation on its organization. He also explores recent developments associated with the growth of the Internet. With this history as a basis, his book allows readers to peer into the future--at the likely effects of television and the Internet on each other, for instance, and at the possibility of a convergence of the TV set, computer, and telephone.

The digital world that Owen shows us is one in which communication titans jockey to survive what Joseph Schumpeter called the "gales of creative destruction." While the rest of us simply struggle to follow the new moves, believing that technology will settle the outcome, Owen warns us that this is a game in which Washington regulators and media hyperbole figure as broadly as innovation and investment. His book explains the game as one involving interactions among all the players, including consumers and advertisers, each with a particular goal. And he discusses the economic principles that govern this game and that can serve as powerful predictive tools.

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Internet Daemons
Digital Communications Possessed
Fenwick McKelvey
University of Minnesota Press, 2018

A complete history and theory of internet daemons brings these little-known—but very consequential—programs into the spotlight


We’re used to talking about how tech giants like Google, Facebook, and Amazon rule the internet, but what about daemons? Ubiquitous programs that have colonized the Net’s infrastructure—as well as the devices we use to access it—daemons are little known. Fenwick McKelvey weaves together history, theory, and policy to give a full account of where daemons come from and how they influence our lives—including their role in hot-button issues like network neutrality.

Going back to Victorian times and the popular thought experiment Maxwell’s Demon, McKelvey charts how daemons evolved from concept to reality, eventually blossoming into the pandaemonium of code-based creatures that today orchestrates our internet. Digging into real-life examples like sluggish connection speeds, Comcast’s efforts to control peer-to-peer networking, and Pirate Bay’s attempts to elude daemonic control (and skirt copyright), McKelvey shows how daemons have been central to the internet, greatly influencing everyday users.

Internet Daemons asks important questions about how much control is being handed over to these automated, autonomous programs, and the consequences for transparency and oversight.

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Internet Freedom Software and Illicit Activity
Supporting Human Rights Without Enabling Criminals
Sasha Romanosky
RAND Corporation, 2015
This report examines the portfolio of tools funded by the State Department’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor that help support Internet freedom and assesses the impact of these tools in promoting U.S. interests (such as freedom of expression, freedom of the press, and the free flow of information) without enabling criminal activity.
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The Internet Is for Cats
How Animal Images Shape Our Digital Lives
Jessica Maddox
Rutgers University Press, 2023
LOL cats. Grumpy Cat. Dog-rating Twitter. Pet Instagram accounts. It’s generally understood the internet is for pictures of cute cats (and dogs, and otters, and pandas). But what motivates people to make and share these images, and how do they relate to other online social practices? 
 
The Internet is for Cats examines how animal images are employed to create a lighter, more playful mood, uniting users within online spaces that can otherwise easily become fractious and toxic. Placing today’s pet videos, photos, and memes within a longer history of mediated animal images, communication scholar Jessica Maddox also considers the factors that make them unique. She explores the roles that animals play within online economies of cuteness and attention, as well as the ways that animal memes and videos respond to common experiences of life under neoliberalism. 
 
Conducting a rich digital ethnography, Maddox combines observations and textual analysis with extensive interviews of the people who create, post and share animal media, including TikTok influencers seeking to make their pets famous, activists tweeting about wildlife conservation, and Redditors upvoting every cute cat photo. The Internet is for Cats will leave you with a new appreciation for the human social practices behind the animal images you encounter online. 
 
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The Internet of Elsewhere
The Emergent Effects of a Wired World
Farivar, Cyrus
Rutgers University Press, 2011

Through the lens of culture, The Internet of Elsewhere looks at the role of the Internet as a catalyst in transforming communications, politics, and economics. Cyrus Farivar explores the Internet's history and effects in four distinct and, to some, surprising societies—Iran, Estonia, South Korea, and Senegal. He profiles Web pioneers in these countries and, at the same time, surveys the environments in which they each work. After all, contends Farivar, despite California's great success in creating the Internet and spawning companies like Apple and Google, in some areas the United States is still years behind other nations.

Surprised? You won't be for long as Farivar proves there are reasons that:

  • Skype was invented in Estonia—the same country that developed a digital ID system and e-voting;
  • Iran was the first country in the world to arrest a blogger, in 2003;
  • South Korea is the most wired country on the planet, with faster and less expensive broadband than anywhere in the United States;
  • Senegal may be one of sub-Saharan Africa's best chances for greater Internet access.

The Internet of Elsewhere brings forth a new complex and modern understanding of how the Internet spreads globally, with both good and bad effects.

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The Internet of Medical Things
Enabling technologies and emerging applications
Subhendu Kumar Pani
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2022
The Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) allows clinicians to monitor patients remotely via a network of wearable or implantable devices. The devices are embedded with software or sensors to enable them to send and receive data via the internet so that healthcare professionals can monitor health data such as vital statistics, metabolic rates or drug delivery regimens, and can provide advice or treatment plans based on this real-world, real-time data. This edited book discusses key IoT technologies that facilitate and enhance this process, such as computer algorithms, network architecture, wireless communications, and network security.
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Internet Spaceships Are Serious Business
An EVE Online Reader
Marcus Carter
University of Minnesota Press, 2016

EVE Online is a socially complex, science-fiction-themed universe simulation and massively multiplayer online game (MMOG) first released in 2003. Notorious for its colossal battles and ruthless player culture, it has hundreds of thousands of players today. In this fascinating book, scholars, players, and EVE’s developer (CCP Games) examine the intricate world of EVEOnline--providing authentic accounts of lived experience within a game with more than a decade of history and millions of “real” dollars behind it.

Internet Spaceships Are Serious Business features contributions from outstanding EVE Online players, such as The Mittani, an infamous member of the game’s community, as well as academics from around the globe. They cover a wide range of subjects: the game’s technicalities and its difficulty; its projection of humanity’s future in space; the configuration of its unique, single-server game world; the global nature of warfare in its “nullsec” territory (and how EVE players have formed a global concept of time); stereotypes of Russian players; espionage play; in-game memorials to Vile Rat (aka U.S. State Department official Sean Smith, murdered in the 2012 Benghazi attack); its gendered playing experience; and CCP Games’ relationship with players; and its history and legacy.

Internet Spaceships Are Serious Business is a must for EVE Online players interested in a broad perspective on their all-consuming game. It is also accessible to scholars, game designers seeking to understand and replicate the successful aspects unique to EVE Online, and even those who have never played this notoriously complex game.

Contributors: William Sims Bainbridge, National Science Foundation; Chribba; Jedrzej Czarnota; Kjartan Pierre Emilsson; Dan Erdman; Rebecca Fraimow; Martin R. Gibbs, U of Melbourne; Catherine Goodfellow; Kathryn Gronsbell; Keith Harrison; Kristin MacDonough; Mantou (Zhang Yuzhou); Oskar Milik; The Mittani (Alexander Gianturco); Joji Mori; Richard Page; Christopher Paul, Seattle U; Erica Titkemeyer, U of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; Nick Webber, Birmingham City U.


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Introduction to Probability for Data Science
Stanley Chan
Michigan Publishing Services, 2021
[from the Preface] This introductory textbook in undergraduate probability emphasizes the inseparability between data (computing) and probability (theory) in our time. It examines the motivationintuition, and implication of the probabilistic tools used in science and engineering:
  1. Motivation: In the ocean of mathematical definitions, theorems, and equations, why should we spend our time on this particular topic but not another?
  2. Intuition: When going through the deviations, is there a geometric interpretation or physics beyond those equations?
  3. Implication: After we have learned a topic, what new problems can we solve?
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