6,609 research outputs found

    Proceedings of the 10th International congress on architectural technology (ICAT 2024): architectural technology transformation.

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    The profession of architectural technology is influential in the transformation of the built environment regionally, nationally, and internationally. The congress provides a platform for industry, educators, researchers, and the next generation of built environment students and professionals to showcase where their influence is transforming the built environment through novel ideas, businesses, leadership, innovation, digital transformation, research and development, and sustainable forward-thinking technological and construction assembly design

    Breaking Virtual Barriers : Investigating Virtual Reality for Enhanced Educational Engagement

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    Virtual reality (VR) is an innovative technology that has regained popularity in recent years. In the field of education, VR has been introduced as a tool to enhance learning experiences. This thesis presents an exploration of how VR is used from the context of educators and learners. The research employed a mixed-methods approach, including surveying and interviewing educators, and conducting empirical studies to examine engagement, usability, and user behaviour within VR. The results revealed educators are interested in using VR for a wide range of scenarios, including thought exercises, virtual field trips, and simulations. However, they face several barriers to incorporating VR into their practice, such as cost, lack of training, and technical challenges. A subsequent study found that virtual reality can no longer be assumed to be more engaging than desktop equivalents. This empirical study showed that engagement levels were similar in both VR and non-VR environments, suggesting that the novelty effect of VR may be less pronounced than previously assumed. A study against a VR mind mapping artifact, VERITAS, demonstrated that complex interactions are possible on low-cost VR devices, making VR accessible to educators and students. The analysis of user behaviour within this VR artifact showed that quantifiable strategies emerge, contributing to the understanding of how to design for collaborative VR experiences. This thesis provides insights into how the end-users in the education space perceive and use VR. The findings suggest that while educators are interested in using VR, they face barriers to adoption. The research highlights the need to design VR experiences, with understanding of existing pedagogy, that are engaging with careful thought applied to complex interactions, particularly for collaborative experiences. This research contributes to the understanding of the potential of VR in education and provides recommendations for educators and designers to enhance learning experiences using VR

    "It's not a career": Platform work among young people aged 16-19

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    In the online gig economy, or platform work as it is sometimes known, work can be organised through websites and smartphone apps. People can drive for Uber or Deliveroo, sell items on eBay or Etsy, or rent their properties on Airbnb. This research examines the views of young people between the ages of 16 and 19 in the United Kingdom to see whether they knew about the online gig economy, whether they were using it already to earn money, and whether they expected to use it for their careers. It discovers careers professionals’ levels of knowledge, and their ability (and desire) to include the gig economy in their professional practice. This research contributes to discussions about what constitutes decent work, and whether it can be found within the online gig economy. The results point to ways in which careers practice could include platform work as a means of extending young people’s knowledge about alternative forms of work. This study also makes a theoretical contribution to literature, bringing together elements of careership, cognitive schema theory, and motivational theory and psychology of working theory, in a novel combination, to explain how young people were thinking about platform work in the context of their careers

    Digitalization and Development

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    This book examines the diffusion of digitalization and Industry 4.0 technologies in Malaysia by focusing on the ecosystem critical for its expansion. The chapters examine the digital proliferation in major sectors of agriculture, manufacturing, e-commerce and services, as well as the intermediary organizations essential for the orderly performance of socioeconomic agents. The book incisively reviews policy instruments critical for the effective and orderly development of the embedding organizations, and the regulatory framework needed to quicken the appropriation of socioeconomic synergies from digitalization and Industry 4.0 technologies. It highlights the importance of collaboration between government, academic and industry partners, as well as makes key recommendations on how to encourage adoption of IR4.0 technologies in the short- and long-term. This book bridges the concepts and applications of digitalization and Industry 4.0 and will be a must-read for policy makers seeking to quicken the adoption of its technologies

    Low- and high-resource opinion summarization

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    Customer reviews play a vital role in the online purchasing decisions we make. The reviews express user opinions that are useful for setting realistic expectations and uncovering important details about products. However, some products receive hundreds or even thousands of reviews, making them time-consuming to read. Moreover, many reviews contain uninformative content, such as irrelevant personal experiences. Automatic summarization offers an alternative – short text summaries capturing the essential information expressed in reviews. Automatically produced summaries can reflect overall or particular opinions and be tailored to user preferences. Besides being presented on major e-commerce platforms, home assistants can also vocalize them. This approach can improve user satisfaction by assisting in making faster and better decisions. Modern summarization approaches are based on neural networks, often requiring thousands of annotated samples for training. However, human-written summaries for products are expensive to produce because annotators need to read many reviews. This has led to annotated data scarcity where only a few datasets are available. Data scarcity is the central theme of our works, and we propose a number of approaches to alleviate the problem. The thesis consists of two parts where we discuss low- and high-resource data settings. In the first part, we propose self-supervised learning methods applied to customer reviews and few-shot methods for learning from small annotated datasets. Customer reviews without summaries are available in large quantities, contain a breadth of in-domain specifics, and provide a powerful training signal. We show that reviews can be used for learning summarizers via a self-supervised objective. Further, we address two main challenges associated with learning from small annotated datasets. First, large models rapidly overfit on small datasets leading to poor generalization. Second, it is not possible to learn a wide range of in-domain specifics (e.g., product aspects and usage) from a handful of gold samples. This leads to subtle semantic mistakes in generated summaries, such as ‘great dead on arrival battery.’ We address the first challenge by explicitly modeling summary properties (e.g., content coverage and sentiment alignment). Furthermore, we leverage small modules – adapters – that are more robust to overfitting. As we show, despite their size, these modules can be used to store in-domain knowledge to reduce semantic mistakes. Lastly, we propose a simple method for learning personalized summarizers based on aspects, such as ‘price,’ ‘battery life,’ and ‘resolution.’ This task is harder to learn, and we present a few-shot method for training a query-based summarizer on small annotated datasets. In the second part, we focus on the high-resource setting and present a large dataset with summaries collected from various online resources. The dataset has more than 33,000 humanwritten summaries, where each is linked up to thousands of reviews. This, however, makes it challenging to apply an ‘expensive’ deep encoder due to memory and computational costs. To address this problem, we propose selecting small subsets of informative reviews. Only these subsets are encoded by the deep encoder and subsequently summarized. We show that the selector and summarizer can be trained end-to-end via amortized inference and policy gradient methods

    Ethnographies of Collaborative Economies across Europe: Understanding Sharing and Caring

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    "Sharing economy" and "collaborative economy" refer to a proliferation of initiatives, business models, digital platforms and forms of work that characterise contemporary life: from community-led initiatives and activist campaigns, to the impact of global sharing platforms in contexts such as network hospitality, transportation, etc. Sharing the common lens of ethnographic methods, this book presents in-depth examinations of collaborative economy phenomena. The book combines qualitative research and ethnographic methodology with a range of different collaborative economy case studies and topics across Europe. It uniquely offers a truly interdisciplinary approach. It emerges from a unique, long-term, multinational, cross-European collaboration between researchers from various disciplines (e.g., sociology, anthropology, geography, business studies, law, computing, information systems), career stages, and epistemological backgrounds, brought together by a shared research interest in the collaborative economy. This book is a further contribution to the in-depth qualitative understanding of the complexities of the collaborative economy phenomenon. These rich accounts contribute to the painting of a complex landscape that spans several countries and regions, and diverse political, cultural, and organisational backdrops. This book also offers important reflections on the role of ethnographic researchers, and on their stance and outlook, that are of paramount interest across the disciplines involved in collaborative economy research

    Blending the Material and Digital World for Hybrid Interfaces

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    The development of digital technologies in the 21st century is progressing continuously and new device classes such as tablets, smartphones or smartwatches are finding their way into our everyday lives. However, this development also poses problems, as these prevailing touch and gestural interfaces often lack tangibility, take little account of haptic qualities and therefore require full attention from their users. Compared to traditional tools and analog interfaces, the human skills to experience and manipulate material in its natural environment and context remain unexploited. To combine the best of both, a key question is how it is possible to blend the material world and digital world to design and realize novel hybrid interfaces in a meaningful way. Research on Tangible User Interfaces (TUIs) investigates the coupling between physical objects and virtual data. In contrast, hybrid interfaces, which specifically aim to digitally enrich analog artifacts of everyday work, have not yet been sufficiently researched and systematically discussed. Therefore, this doctoral thesis rethinks how user interfaces can provide useful digital functionality while maintaining their physical properties and familiar patterns of use in the real world. However, the development of such hybrid interfaces raises overarching research questions about the design: Which kind of physical interfaces are worth exploring? What type of digital enhancement will improve existing interfaces? How can hybrid interfaces retain their physical properties while enabling new digital functions? What are suitable methods to explore different design? And how to support technology-enthusiast users in prototyping? For a systematic investigation, the thesis builds on a design-oriented, exploratory and iterative development process using digital fabrication methods and novel materials. As a main contribution, four specific research projects are presented that apply and discuss different visual and interactive augmentation principles along real-world applications. The applications range from digitally-enhanced paper, interactive cords over visual watch strap extensions to novel prototyping tools for smart garments. While almost all of them integrate visual feedback and haptic input, none of them are built on rigid, rectangular pixel screens or use standard input modalities, as they all aim to reveal new design approaches. The dissertation shows how valuable it can be to rethink familiar, analog applications while thoughtfully extending them digitally. Finally, this thesis’ extensive work of engineering versatile research platforms is accompanied by overarching conceptual work, user evaluations and technical experiments, as well as literature reviews.Die Durchdringung digitaler Technologien im 21. Jahrhundert schreitet stetig voran und neue Geräteklassen wie Tablets, Smartphones oder Smartwatches erobern unseren Alltag. Diese Entwicklung birgt aber auch Probleme, denn die vorherrschenden berührungsempfindlichen Oberflächen berücksichtigen kaum haptische Qualitäten und erfordern daher die volle Aufmerksamkeit ihrer Nutzer:innen. Im Vergleich zu traditionellen Werkzeugen und analogen Schnittstellen bleiben die menschlichen Fähigkeiten ungenutzt, die Umwelt mit allen Sinnen zu begreifen und wahrzunehmen. Um das Beste aus beiden Welten zu vereinen, stellt sich daher die Frage, wie neuartige hybride Schnittstellen sinnvoll gestaltet und realisiert werden können, um die materielle und die digitale Welt zu verschmelzen. In der Forschung zu Tangible User Interfaces (TUIs) wird die Verbindung zwischen physischen Objekten und virtuellen Daten untersucht. Noch nicht ausreichend erforscht wurden hingegen hybride Schnittstellen, die speziell darauf abzielen, physische Gegenstände des Alltags digital zu erweitern und anhand geeigneter Designparameter und Entwurfsräume systematisch zu untersuchen. In dieser Dissertation wird daher untersucht, wie Materialität und Digitalität nahtlos ineinander übergehen können. Es soll erforscht werden, wie künftige Benutzungsschnittstellen nützliche digitale Funktionen bereitstellen können, ohne ihre physischen Eigenschaften und vertrauten Nutzungsmuster in der realen Welt zu verlieren. Die Entwicklung solcher hybriden Ansätze wirft jedoch übergreifende Forschungsfragen zum Design auf: Welche Arten von physischen Schnittstellen sind es wert, betrachtet zu werden? Welche Art von digitaler Erweiterung verbessert das Bestehende? Wie können hybride Konzepte ihre physischen Eigenschaften beibehalten und gleichzeitig neue digitale Funktionen ermöglichen? Was sind geeignete Methoden, um verschiedene Designs zu erforschen? Wie kann man Technologiebegeisterte bei der Erstellung von Prototypen unterstützen? Für eine systematische Untersuchung stützt sich die Arbeit auf einen designorientierten, explorativen und iterativen Entwicklungsprozess unter Verwendung digitaler Fabrikationsmethoden und neuartiger Materialien. Im Hauptteil werden vier Forschungsprojekte vorgestellt, die verschiedene visuelle und interaktive Prinzipien entlang realer Anwendungen diskutieren. Die Szenarien reichen von digital angereichertem Papier, interaktiven Kordeln über visuelle Erweiterungen von Uhrarmbändern bis hin zu neuartigen Prototyping-Tools für intelligente Kleidungsstücke. Um neue Designansätze aufzuzeigen, integrieren nahezu alle visuelles Feedback und haptische Eingaben, um Alternativen zu Standard-Eingabemodalitäten auf starren Pixelbildschirmen zu schaffen. Die Dissertation hat gezeigt, wie wertvoll es sein kann, bekannte, analoge Anwendungen zu überdenken und sie dabei gleichzeitig mit Bedacht digital zu erweitern. Dabei umfasst die vorliegende Arbeit sowohl realisierte technische Forschungsplattformen als auch übergreifende konzeptionelle Arbeiten, Nutzerstudien und technische Experimente sowie die Analyse existierender Forschungsarbeiten

    Reframing museum epistemology for the information age: a discursive design approach to revealing complexity

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    This practice-based research inquiry examines the impact of an epistemic shift, brought about by the dawning of the information age and advances in networked communication technologies, on physical knowledge institutions - focusing on museums. The research charts adapting knowledge schemas used in museum knowledge organisation and discusses the potential for a new knowledge schema, the network, to establish a new epistemology for museums that reflects contemporary hyperlinked and networked knowledge. The research investigates the potential for networked and shared virtual reality spaces to reveal new ‘knowledge monuments’ reflecting the epistemic values of the network society and the space of flows. The central practice for this thesis focuses on two main elements. The first is applying networks and visual complexity to reveal multi-linearity and adapting perspectives in relational knowledge networks. This concept was explored through two discursive design projects, the Museum Collection Engine, which uses data visualisation, cloud data, and image recognition within an immersive projection dome to create a dynamic and searchable museum collection that returns new and interlinking constellations of museum objects and knowledge. The second discursive design project was Shared Pasts: Decoding Complexity, an AR app with a unique ‘anti-personalisation’ recommendation system designed to reveal complex narratives around historic objects and places. The second element is folksonomy and co-design in developing new community-focused archives using the community's language to build the dataset and socially tagged metadata. This was tested by developing two discursive prototypes, Women Reclaiming AI and Sanctuary Stories
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