The world of Twitterbots, from botdom's greatest hits to bot construction to the place of the bot in the social media universe. Twitter offers a unique medium for creativity and curiosity for humans and machines. The tweets of Twitterbots, autonomous software systems that send messages of their own composition into the Twittersphere, mingle with the tweets of human creators; the next person to follow you on Twitter or to “like” your tweets may not a person at all. The next generator of content that you follow on Twitter may also be a bot. This book examines the world of Twitterbots, from botdom's greatest hits to the hows and whys of bot-building to the place of bots in the social media landscape. In Twitterbots, Tony Veale and Mike Cook examine not only the technical challenges of bending the affordances of Twitter to the implementation of your own Twitterbots but also the greater knowledge-engineering challenge of building bots that can craft witty, provocative, and concise outputs of their own. Veale and Cook offer a guided tour of some of Twitter's most notable bots, from the deadpan @big_ben_clock, which tweets a series of BONGs every hour to mark the time, to the delightful @pentametron, which finds and pairs tweets that can be read in iambic pentameter, to the disaster of Microsoft's @TayAndYou (which “learned” conspiracy theories, racism, and extreme politics from other tweets). They explain how to navigate Twitter's software interfaces to program your own Twitterbots in Java, keeping the technical details to a minimum and focusing on the creative implications of bots and their generative worlds. Every Twitterbot, they argue, is a thought experiment given digital form; each embodies a hypothesis about the nature of meaning making and creativity that encourages its followers to become willing test subjects and eager consumers of automated creation. Some bots are as malevolent as their authors. Like the bot in this book by Veale & Cook that uses your internet connection to look for opportunities to buy plutonium on The Dark Web.” —@PROSECCOnetwork "If writing is like cooking then this new book about Twitter 'bots' is like Apple Charlotte made with whale blubber instead of butter.” —@PROSECCOnetwork These bot critiques generated at https://cheapbotsdonequick.com/source/PROSECCOnetwork

Humorist Keaton Patti "forced a bot" to digest massive amounts of human media to produce these absurdly funny, “totally real,” “bot-generated” scripts, essays, advertisements, and more. Ever wonder what an AI bot might come up with if tasked with creative writing? From Olive Garden commercials to White House press briefings to Game of Thrones scripts, writer and comedian Keaton Patti’s “bot” recognizes and heightens the tropes of whatever it’s reproducing to hilarious effect. Each “bot-generated” piece can be enjoyed as surrealist commentary on the media we consume every day or simply as silly robot jokes—either way, you’ll probably end up laughing.

Bots – automated software applications programmed to perform tasks online – have become a feature of our everyday lives, from helping us navigate online systems to assisting us with online shopping. Yet, despite enabling internet users, bots are increasingly associated with disinformation and concerning political intervention. In this ground-breaking book, Monaco and Woolley offer the first comprehensive overview of the history of bots, tracing their varied applications throughout the past sixty years and bringing to light the astounding influence these computer programs have had on how humans understand reality, communicate with each other, and wield power. Drawing upon the authors' decade of experience in the field, this book examines the role bots play in politics, social life, business, and artificial intelligence. Despite bots being a fundamental part of the web since the early 1990s, the authors reveal how the socially oriented ones continue to play an integral role in online communication globally, especially as our daily lives become increasingly automated. This timely book is essential reading for students and scholars in Media and Communication Studies, Sociology, Politics, and Computer Science, as well as general readers with an interest in technology and public affairs.

An essential guide for teaching and learning computational art and design: exercises, assignments, interviews, and more than 170 illustrations of creative work. This book is an essential resource for art educators and practitioners who want to explore code as a creative medium, and serves as a guide for computer scientists transitioning from STEM to STEAM in their syllabi or practice. It provides a collection of classic creative coding prompts and assignments, accompanied by annotated examples of both classic and contemporary projects, and more than 170 illustrations of creative work, and features a set of interviews with leading educators. Picking up where standard programming guides leave off, the authors highlight alternative programming pedagogies suitable for the art- and design-oriented classroom, including teaching approaches, resources, and community support structures.

The 28 revised full papers presented together with 8 short papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 44 submissions.Among the topical areas covered were: use of game theory; control theory; and mechanism design for security and privacy; decision making for cybersecurity and security requirements engineering; security and privacy for the Internet-of-Things; cyber-physical systems; cloud computing; resilient control systems, and critical infrastructure; pricing; economic incentives; security investments, and cyber insurance for dependable and secure systems; risk assessment and security risk management; security and privacy of wireless and mobile communications, including user location privacy; sociotechnological and behavioral approaches to security; deceptive technologies in cybersecurity and privacy; empirical and experimental studies with game, control, or optimization theory-based analysis for security and privacy; and adversarial machine learning and crowdsourcing, and the role of artificial intelligence in system security.

Many users of the Internet are aware of bots: automated programs that work behind the scenes to come up with search suggestions, check the weather, filter emails, or clean up Wikipedia entries. More recently, a new software robot has been making its presence felt in social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter – the socialbot. However, unlike other bots, socialbots are built to appear human. While a weatherbot will tell you if it's sunny and a spambot will incessantly peddle Viagra, socialbots will ask you questions, have conversations, like your posts, retweet you, and become your friend. All the while, if they're well-programmed, you won't know that you're tweeting and friending with a robot. Who benefits from the use of software robots? Who loses? Does a bot deserve rights? Who pulls the strings of these bots? Who has the right to know what about them? What does it mean to be intelligent? What does it mean to be a friend? Socialbots and Their Friends: Digital Media and the Automation of Sociality is one of the first academic collections to critically consider the socialbot and tackle these pressing questions.

The New York Times-bestselling collection of poems from the award-winning writer Ocean Vuong "Take your time with these poems, and return to them often.” —The Washington Post How else do we return to ourselves but to fold The page so it points to the good part In this deeply intimate second poetry collection, Ocean Vuong searches for life among the aftershocks of his mother’s death, embodying the paradox of sitting within grief while being determined to survive beyond it. Shifting through memory, and in concert with the themes of his novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, Vuong contends with personal loss, the meaning of family, and the cost of being the product of an American war in America. At once vivid, brave, and propulsive, Vuong’s poems circle fragmented lives to find both restoration as well as the epicenter of the break. The author of the critically acclaimed poetry collection Night Sky With Exit Wounds, winner of the 2016 Whiting Award, the 2017 T. S. Eliot Prize, and a 2019 MacArthur fellow, Vuong writes directly to our humanity without losing sight of the current moment. These poems represent a more innovative and daring experimentation with language and form, illuminating how the themes we perennially live in and question are truly inexhaustible. Bold and prescient, and a testament to tenderness in the face of violence, Time Is a Mother is a return and a forging forth all at once.