Measuring the Use of the Active and Assisted Living Prototype CARIMO for Home Care Service Users: Evaluation Framework and Results

To address the challenges of aging societies, various information and communication technology (ICT)-based systems for older people have been developed in recent years. Currently, the evaluation of these so-called active and assisted living (AAL) systems usually focuses on the analyses of usability and acceptance, while some also assess their impact. Little is known about the actual take-up of these assistive technologies. This paper presents a framework for measuring the take-up by analyzing the actual usage of AAL systems. This evaluation framework covers detailed information regarding the entire process including usage data logging, data preparation, and usage data analysis. We applied the framework on the AAL prototype CARIMO for measuring its take-up during an eight-month field trial in Austria and Italy. The framework was designed to guide systematic, comparable, and reproducible usage data evaluation in the AAL field; however, the general applicability of the framework has yet to be validated

Music Recommender Systems Challenges and Opportunities for Non-Superstar Artists

Music Recommender Systems (MRS) are important drivers in music industry and are widely adopted by music platforms. Other than most MRS research exploring MRS from a technical or from a consumers’ perspective, this work focuses on the impact, value generation, challenges and opportunities for those, who contribute the core value, i.e. the artists. We outline the non-superstar artist’s perspective on MRS, and explore the question if and how non-superstar artists may benefit from MRS to foster their professional advancement. Thereby, we explain several techniques how MRS generate recommendations and discuss their impact on non- superstar artists

GLADNET: Promise and Legacy

[Excerpt] The Global Applied Disability Research and Information Network on Employment and Training (GLADNET) was launched by the International Labour Organization (ILO) in 1995, in cooperation with over 50 social policy research centres, governmental and non- governmental organizations involved in disability-related employment programmes from over thirty countries around the world. Major organizations of persons with disabilities were also represented – the World Blind Union, the World Federation of the Deaf, Inclusion International (formerly the International League of Societies for Persons with Mental Handicap (ILSMH)) and Disabled Peoples International (DPI). GLADNET’s lifespan was little more than a generation (1995 – 2018). What’s of interest is that it survived beyond its first few years of existence. It could easily have died early on, given a significant change in nature of support from its initiating body. That it didn’t speaks to the aspirational nature and relevance of the vision prompting its formation. It’s in pursuit of that vision where GLADNET left its mark. This document focuses on its legacy, beginning with a brief review of context within which it was initiated

Validation and application of close-range photogrammetry to quantify ephemeral gully erosion

Agricultural soil erosion is a serious problem on farms because it contributes to crop yield declines and beyond farms because it is a source of sediment and chemical pollutants. Ephemeral gullies effectively convey runoff and connect agricultural uplands to off-site waters, so control of this phenomenon would benefit multiple societal sectors. Soil conservationists often employ predictive soil erosion models to develop conservation plans, but commonly used models cannot account for ephemeral gully erosion. Future models with the capability to simulate such concentrated flow erosion must be verified with field measurements. This work sought to quantify the measurement uncertainty of a recently developed tool based on geo-referenced close-range digital photogrammetry and to apply it to naturally evolving channels in agricultural fields. Repeated photogrammetric surveys were conducted to create a set of point clouds, which were compared to define the two standard deviation (2σ) uncertainty in average elevation change between two point clouds as ± 1.29 to ± 2.55 mm (depending on surface relief), the 2σ relative vertical uncertainty of individual point clouds as 0.916 mm, and the 2σ geo-referenced vertical accuracy of entire point clouds as 8.26 cm. Utilization of the method at field monitoring sites resulted in average watershed-scale (0.47 to 3.19 ha) estimates of ephemeral gully erosion rates of 3.93, 0.847, and 0.415 Mg ha-1 for three time intervals during 2013 and 2014. For the average soil bulk density of approximately 1.2 Mg m-3, the vertical change uncertainty applied to estimate soil mass moved by ephemeral gully erosion resulted in an average sediment flux uncertainty of ± 0.175 Mg. The small uncertainties determined in the validation study and the plausible rates of soil loss by topographically concentrated overland flow quantified in the field study reflect the reliability of the data, which contributes to their utility for future refinement of soil erosion models that explicitly predict ephemeral gully erosion

An Analysis of Tracking Service Settings in Blackberry 10 and Windows Phone 8 Smartphones

The use of tracking settings in smartphones facilitates the provision of tailored services to users by allowing service providers access to unique identifiers stored on the smartphones. In this paper, we investigate the `tracking of' settings on the Blackberry 10 and Windows Phone 8 platforms. To determine if they work as claimed, we set up a test bed suitable for both operating systems to capture traffic between the smartphone and external servers. We dynamically execute a set of similar Blackberry 10 and Windows Phone 8 applications, downloaded from their respective official markets. Our results indicate that even if users turn of tracking settings in their smartphones, some applications leak unique identifiers without their knowledge

Energy-Aware Streaming Multimedia Adaptation: An Educational Perspective

As mobile devices are getting more powerful and more affordable the use of online educational multimedia is also getting very prevalent. Limited battery power is nevertheless, a major restricting factor as streaming multimedia drains battery power quickly. Many battery efficient multimedia adaptation techniques have been proposed that achieve battery efficiency by lowering presentation quality of entire multimedia. Adaptation is usually done without considering any impact on the information contents of multimedia. In this paper, based on the results of an experimental study, we argue that without considering any negative impact on information contents of multimedia the adaptation may negatively impact the learning process. Some portions of the multimedia that require a higher visual quality for conveying learning information may lose their learning effectiveness in the adapted lowered quality. We report results of our experimental study that indicate that different parts of the same learning multimedia do not have same minimum acceptable quality. This strengthens the position that power-saving adaptation techniques for educational multimedia must be developed that lower the quality of multimedia based on the needs of its individual fragments for successfully conveying learning informatio

Property-Based Methods for Collaborative Model Development

Industrial applications of mo del-driven engineering to de- velop large and complex systems resulted in an increasing demand for collab oration features. However, use cases such as mo del di�erencing and merging have turned out to b e a di�cult challenge, due to (i) the graph- like nature of mo dels, and (ii) the complexity of certain op erations (e.g. hierarchy refactoring) that are common to day. In the pap er, we present a novel search-based automated mo del merge approach where rule-based design space exploration is used to search the space of solution candi- dates that represent con�ict-free merged mo dels. Our metho d also allows engineers to easily incorp orate domain-sp eci�c knowledge into the merge pro cess to provide b etter solutions. The merge pro cess automatically cal- culates multiple merge candidates to b e presented to domain exp erts for �nal selection. Furthermore, we prop ose to adopt a generic synthetic b enchmark to carry out an initial scalability assessment for mo del merge with large mo dels and large change sets

Disability quotas: past or future policy?

This article considers the issues associated with the use of quota systems for the employment of workers with a disability. It examines the use and experiences of such quotas in Italy, Russia and the United Kingdom. Italy has a long established quota for the employment of such workers, whilst the modern Russian system it is a more recent innovation. In contrast the UK abandoned its quotas in the 1990s. We draw on the experiences of the three countries to consider generally whether the use of quotas is either an acceptable means of encouraging employers to take on disabled workers, or is necessary to achieve this objective