ITECH1500 Digital Literacy - Summary Notes

Digital Revolution

  • Fast and continuous change in technology.

  • Driven by cheaper prices, smaller sizes, and faster speeds.

  • Examples: online games, smartphones, eCommerce.

  • History: Cray-2 Supercomputer vs. modern consoles (PS4, PS5).

  • GFLOPs (Giga floating point operations per second) and TFLOPs (Tera floating point operations per second).

  • Supercomputers: powerful computers with many cores and high power consumption.

  • Moore’s Law: Complexity of integrated circuits doubles every 2 years (relevant until ~2005).

  • Shift from packing more circuits to adding more CPUs.

Regulations

  • Technological advancements lead to regulations (e.g., printing press -> copyright laws).

  • Lessig’s “Pathetic Dot” Theory: Four types of regulations - law, norms, market, architecture.

Ethics

  • Principles of right and wrong guiding behavior.

  • Code of Conduct: Examples include the Australian Computer Society (ACS) Code of Ethics.

  • Values: public interest, quality of life, honesty, competence, professionalism.

  • Ethical Frameworks:

    • Deontology: Morality based on rules.

    • Utilitarianism: Morality based on maximizing happiness for the most people.

    • Virtue Ethics: Ethical behavior through virtuous character.

  • Whistleblowing: Revealing illegal, immoral, or unsafe information.

Processes and Models

  • Process: Steps leading to an outcome valuable to an organization.

  • Model: Representation of something in the real world for understanding.

    • Mapping, fit for purpose, abstraction.

  • Process modelling improves efficiency, cost, flexibility, and quality.

Process Modelling Techniques

  • Flowcharts: Good for basic processes but lack detail on actors/objects.

  • Swimlane Diagrams: Flowcharts with extensions for actors and objects.

  • BPMN (Business Process Model and Notation): Standard for modelling business processes.

BPMN Elements

  • Events: Start and end points of a process.

  • Activities/Tasks: Actions performed in the process.

  • Gateways: Control flow, including exclusive (XOR) and parallel (AND) splits/joins.

XOR vs. AND

  • Exclusive (XOR): Follow exactly one path.

  • Parallel (AND): Follow all paths simultaneously.

Modelling Real-World Processes

  • Requires domain expertise.

  • Information collection methods: Evidence-based, interview-based, workshop-based.

  • Steps:

    • Identify process boundaries (triggers and outcomes).

    • Identify activities and events.

    • Identify resources and handovers (swimlanes).

    • Identify control flow (sequence, decisions, dependencies, parallel activities).

Guidelines for Process Modelling (7PMG)

  • G1: Fewest elements possible.

  • G2: Minimize routing paths.

  • G3: One start and one end event.

  • G4: Model as structured as possible.

  • G5: Avoid OR-gateways.

  • G6: Use verb-object activity labels.

  • G7: Decompose models with >30 elements.

Process Redesign

  • Reasons: Improve quality, reduce inefficiencies, lower costs, increase flexibility.

  • Approaches: Gradual improvement vs. complete redesign.

  • Automation: Quicker performance/reliability but can be expensive/inflexible.

  • Integration: Designing software to manage processes.

Common Business Processes

  • Customer Management (CRM)

  • Payroll and HR

  • Manufacturing and Supply Chain

  • Monitoring and Governance

  • Document and Content Management Systems (DMS, CMS)

  • Groupware Systems

  • Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)

  • Spreadsheets

Ethics of Automation

  • Considerations: Human oversight, job displacement.

Intelligence and AI

  • Definitions vary (IQ, business intelligence, military intelligence).

  • AI Categories (Russell & Norvig, 2009):

    • Systems that think like humans (cognitive modelling).

    • Systems that think rationally.

    • Systems that act like humans (Turing Test/Imitation Game).

    • Systems that act rationally (best decisions/actions).

Turing Test

  • Assess if a computer can mimic a human.

  • CAPTCHA: Automated Turing test to distinguish humans from computers.

Non-Human Intelligence

  • Focus: Achieving right conclusions, decisions, actions.

  • Examples: Solving problems, playing games, interacting, learning.

  • Deep Blue: IBM computer that beat Garry Kasparov (chess).

    • State-space search algorithm.

  • Personal Digital Assistants: Natural language analysis, generation, speech synthesis.

Machine Learning

  • Addressing problems where goal state is unknown or solutions are hard to match.

  • Types:

    • Supervised Learning: Given correct examples; uses artificial neural networks.

    • Reinforcement Learning: Given reward; learns to maximize it (Exploitation vs. Exploration).

    • Unsupervised Learning: No feedback; finds similar objects (clustering, e.g., k-means).

Neural Networks

  • Traditional vs. Convolutional (feature extraction from images).

  • Recurrent Neural Networks (time-series data).

  • Generative Adversarial Networks (image/text generation).

  • Transformers (Large Language Models).

Large Language Models (LLM)

  • Predicting next word; used by ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, etc.

  • Open-source models (Falcon TII, LLaMA, DeepSeek).

Social and Ethical Issues in AI

  • Bias from data (supervised learning).

  • Job displacement.

  • Ethical dilemmas (e.g., trolley problem in self-driving cars).

Research Process

  • Empirical: Experiments, data collection, analysis, publishing.

  • Publication process: Conferences, journals, peer review.

Citations and References

  • Citing: Recognizing date, publisher.

  • Types: APA (soft sciences), IEEE (hard sciences).

  • Referencing: Full information for source retrieval.

  • Paraphrasing: Ideal approach to using information.

Electricity and Transistors

  • Electrical current flows from high to low potential (volts).

  • Transistor: Electronic component with three pins (MOSFET).

    • Acts as an electrically-controlled switch.

Logic Gates

  • AND gate: Output is true if both inputs are true.

  • OR gate: Output is true if any input is true.

  • XOR gate: Output is true if only one input is true.

Binary System

  • Base-2 numeral system.

  • Bit: Binary digit (0 or 1).

  • Byte: 8 bits.

  • Converting decimals to binary example:

    • Start with 19:

      • 19 − 16 = 3 → ✅ use 2⁴ → binary digit = 1

      • 3 − 8 = negative → ❌ don't use 2³ → binary digit = 0

      • 3 − 4 = negative → ❌ don't use 2² → binary digit = 0

      • 3 − 2 = 1 → ✅ use 2¹ → binary digit = 1

      • 1 − 1 = 0 → ✅ use 2⁰ → binary digit = 1

      • Answer: 19 (decimal) = 10011 (binary)

  • Word: Size depends on the computer (32-bit or 64-bit).

Representing Text

  • Unicode: Maps integers to characters.

  • Examples:

    • 65 = A

    • 97 = a

    • 128,514 = 😲

CPU and RAM

  • CPU (Central Processing Unit): The brain of the computer.

  • RAM (Random Access Memory): Temporary storage connected to CPU.

  • Bytes have addresses for storage and retrieval.

Prefixes

  • SI Prefixes: Powers of 10 (kilo, mega, giga, tera).

  • IEC Prefixes: Powers of 2 (kibi, mebi, gibi, tebi).

Algorithms

  • Linear Search: Sequential searching.

  • Opcodes: Instruction codes for CPU.

  • Operands: Inputs to an instruction.

Project Management

  • Planning, organizing, monitoring, and completing IT goals.

  • Steps: Initiation, Planning, Execution, Monitoring, Closing.

  • PMBOK (Project Management Body of Knowledge).

SDLC (System Development Lifecycle)

  • Models:

    • Waterfall

    • Incremental

    • Spiral

    • Unified process

  • Phases: Planning, Analysis, Design, Implementation, Maintenance.

Agile

  • Lightweight approaches with customer involvement.

  • Delivering value as soon as possible.

IT Service Management (ITSM)

  • Processes/techniques for managing IT services.

  • ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library).

Computer Storage

  • Solid State: SSD, USB, SD Card.

  • Magnetic: Hard Disk Drive.

  • Optical: CDs, DVDs.

Latency

  • Access time to retrieve data.

  • Solid-state: ~0.1ms

  • Hard disk: ~10-20ms

  • Blu-ray: ~100ms

Compression

  • Lossless: Original data recoverable.

  • Lossy: Some data lost.

Software and Programming

  • JavaScript: High-level language.

  • Assembly Language: Low-level language.

  • Compilers: High-level -> machine code.

  • Interpreters: Executes high-level code.

Operating Systems

  • Allows device interaction and hardware management.

Software Licensing

  • Proprietary software: Rights retained by the developer.