761 research outputs found

    Technical Training to Nonprofit Managers Influences Using Big Data Technology in Business Operations

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    This nonexperimental, survey-based online quantitative study on nonprofit managers’ technical training measures the extent of the influence on big data technology use. The unified theory of acceptance and use of technology is a theoretical framework to determine whether business managers are trained to have know-how in using big data technology. This study followed a quantitative methodology to help narrow the gap in research between what is not known in relation to the nonprofit manager’s technical training on the use of big data technology. Today’s data is the most critical asset, but progress toward big data technology-oriented usage needs to be accessed by the nonprofit. Nonprofits need to use big data technology to gain insights into identifying the program activities and monitor them to make better decisions that maximize societal impact. Big data technology allows nonprofit managers to be effective by getting insights into the problem-solving of the social programs where they operate to reduce unemployment, poverty, social exclusion, and low education levels. This study seeks to answer how nonprofit managers differ in technical training (facilitating conditions) using big data technology compared to managers who have not used big data technology to manage business operations. The study may contribute to bridging existing research gaps in managers’ technical training and using big data technology

    Machine Learning Algorithm for the Scansion of Old Saxon Poetry

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    Several scholars designed tools to perform the automatic scansion of poetry in many languages, but none of these tools deal with Old Saxon or Old English. This project aims to be a first attempt to create a tool for these languages. We implemented a Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (BiLSTM) model to perform the automatic scansion of Old Saxon and Old English poems. Since this model uses supervised learning, we manually annotated the Heliand manuscript, and we used the resulting corpus as labeled dataset to train the model. The evaluation of the performance of the algorithm reached a 97% for the accuracy and a 99% of weighted average for precision, recall and F1 Score. In addition, we tested the model with some verses from the Old Saxon Genesis and some from The Battle of Brunanburh, and we observed that the model predicted almost all Old Saxon metrical patterns correctly misclassified the majority of the Old English input verses

    Perpetuum mobile: conocimiento, investigación e innovación en la sociedad actual

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    La Educación se ha erigido como uno de los ejes fundamentales para la vertebración de la Cultura, tanto en Oriente como en Occidente. Disciplinas clásicas como la antropología y, más concretamente, la filosofía, la música, las matemáticas, el ejercicio físico y mental, la nutrición, la geografía, la historia o la tecnología, entre otras materias impregnadas por el Humanismo, se nos presentan como campos de investigación, de formación pedagógica y, en definitiva, de difusión del conocimiento. A este respecto, las aportaciones, aproximaciones, propuestas, análisis e investigaciones que conforman la presente edición crítica comparten la voluntad humanística de experimentar, conocer y compartir las diferentes disciplinas. Les invitamos, así pues, a leer, disfrutar y descubrir en los 13 capítulos que conforman este volumen el provecho de estas reminiscencias humanísticas en la Educación

    Seven Years of Design Research at Politecnico di Milano

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    Which are the main research funds currently accessed by the Department of Design? What are the topics explored through them and which are the interconnections with the Department core research activities? Also, what are the research products delivered, the reached outcomes, and the expected impacts BY these research projects? The book synthesises the results of a qualitative analysis conducted over 32 research (out of 96) projects coordinated or participated in by the researchers of the Department in the timeframe 2014-mid 2021. The results of the analysis confirm the high-level attractiveness of the Department research profile on core topics such as design methodology, service design, and health. However, more interestingly, the analysis shows a significant variety of new topics and themes that emerge as new research questions for the Department, such as the role of design in public sector innovation, ethics, or policy design. The publication provides a snapshot of the topics addressed through the competitive research projects, the dimension of such strands of investigations, the typology and features of results achieved, as well as their relationship to the Department's basic research lines. The relationship and interplay among the outputs, outcomes, and impacts of the funded research is then elaborated in impact pathways, opening up reflections about the upcoming and future of Design research. The findings of the analysis aim to capture the present to understand future directions in terms of scientific, societal, technological and economic aspects. The volume addresses an academic audience from long terms researchers the field of design and other closely related scientific disciplinary fields at the national and international levels, to young researchers approaching the world of design research

    The UX of things: exploring UX principles to inform security and privacy design in the smart home

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    Smart homes are under attack. Threats can harm both the security of these homes and the privacy of their inhabitants. As a result, in addition to delivering pleasant and aesthetic experiences, smart devices need to protect households from vulnerabilities and attacks. Further, the need for user-centered security and privacy design is particularly important for such an environment, given that inhabitants are demographically-diverse (e.g., age, gender, educational level) and have different skills and (dis)abilities. Prior work has explored different usable security and privacy solutions for smart homes; however, the applicability of user eXperience (UX) principles to security and privacy design is under-explored. This research project aims to address the on-going challenge of security and privacy in the smart home through the lens of UX design. The objective of this thesis is two-fold. First, to investigate how UX factors and principles affect the security and privacy of smart home users. Secondly, to inform product design through the development of an empirically-tested framework for UX design of security and privacy in smart home products. In the first step, we explored the relationship between UX, security, and privacy in smart homes from user and designer perspectives: through (i) conducting a qualitative interview study with smart home users (n=13) and (ii) analyzing an ethnomethodologically informed study of six UK households living in smart homes (n=6); and, we then explored the role of UX in the design of security, privacy and data protection in smart homes through qualitative semi-structured interviews with smart home users, designers and business leaders through two rounds of interviews (n=20, n=20). In the second step, using conceptual framework analysis, we systematically analyzed our previously collected data and the literature to construct a framework of design heuristics for consent and permission in smart homes. We applied these heuristics in four participatory co-design workshops and reported on their use. We further analyzed the use of the heuristics through thematic analysis highlighting how the heuristics were used, their purpose, and their effectiveness. By bringing UX design to the smart home security and privacy table, we believe that this research project will have a significant impact on academia, industry, and government organizations. Our thesis will improve design practices for security and privacy in domestic smart devices while addressing wider challenges, opportunities, and future work

    Requirements engineering for explainable systems

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    Information systems are ubiquitous in modern life and are powered by evermore complex algorithms that are often difficult to understand. Moreover, since systems are part of almost every aspect of human life, the quality in interaction and communication between humans and machines has become increasingly important. Hence the importance of explainability as an essential element of human-machine communication; it has also become an important quality requirement for modern information systems. However, dealing with quality requirements has never been a trivial task. To develop quality systems, software professionals have to understand how to transform abstract quality goals into real-world information system solutions. Requirements engineering provides a structured approach that aids software professionals in better comprehending, evaluating, and operationalizing quality requirements. Explainability has recently regained prominence and been acknowledged and established as a quality requirement; however, there is currently no requirements engineering recommendations specifically focused on explainable systems. To fill this gap, this thesis investigated explainability as a quality requirement and how it relates to the information systems context, with an emphasis on requirements engineering. To this end, this thesis proposes two theories that delineate the role of explainability and establish guidelines for the requirements engineering process of explainable systems. These theories are modeled and shaped through five artifacts. These theories and artifacts should help software professionals 1) to communicate and achieve a shared understanding of the concept of explainability; 2) to comprehend how explainability affects system quality and what role it plays; 3) in translating abstract quality goals into design and evaluation strategies; and 4) to shape the software development process for the development of explainable systems. The theories and artifacts were built and evaluated through literature studies, workshops, interviews, and a case study. The findings show that the knowledge made available helps practitioners understand the idea of explainability better, facilitating the creation of explainable systems. These results suggest that the proposed theories and artifacts are plausible, practical, and serve as a strong starting point for further extensions and improvements in the search for high-quality explainable systems

    Negotiating Software: Redistributing Control at Work and on the Web

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    Since the 1970s, digital technologies increasingly determine who gets what, when, and how; and the workings of informational capitalism have concentrated control over those technologies into the hands of just a few private corporations. The normative stance of this dissertation is that control over software should be distributed and subject to processes of negotiation: consensus-based decision making oriented towards achieving collective benefits. It explores the boundaries of negotiating software by trying to effect a change in two different kinds of software using two different approaches. The first approach targets application software – the paradigmatic model of commodified, turn-key computational media – in the context of knowledge work – labour that involves the creation and distribution of information through non-routine, creative, and abstract thinking. It tries to effect change by developing negotiable software as an alternative to the autocratic application model, which is software that embeds the support for distributed control in and over its design. These systems successfully demonstrate the technological feasibility of this approach, but also the limitations of design as a solution to systemic power asymmetries. The second approach targets consent management platforms – pop-up interfaces on the web that capture visitor’s consent for data processing – in the context of the European Union’s data protection regulation. It tries to effect change by employing negotiation software, which is software that supports existing processes of negotiation in complex systems, i.e., regulatory oversight and the exercise of digital rights. This approach resulted in a considerable increase in data protection compliance on Danish websites, but showed that sustainable enforcement using digital tools also requires design changes to data processing technologies. Both approaches to effecting software change – making software negotiable and using software in negotiations – revealed the drawbacks of individualistic strategies. Ultimately, the capacity of the liberal subject to stand up against corporate power is limited, and more collective approaches to software negotiation need to be developed, whether when making changes to designs or leveraging regulation

    An information privacy compliance model based on configurable software objects

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    South Africa’s Protection of Personal Information Act (POPIA), Act 4 of 2013 requires that organisations enforce information privacy rules in technology systems handling personally identifiable information (PII). This is in line with other national and regional information privacy legislations across the world. However, the absence of a coherent way to implement this legislation, in the form of software objects in technology systems, has created a gap in organisations around the world. To bridge this gap, this thesis proposes a compliance model based on a conceptual framework, a design framework, and a software-based prototype. The objective of this model is to test how best to enforce information privacy regulations in technology systems handling personally identifiable information. The proposed conceptual framework views information privacy compliance as a context-driven reality enforced by configurable software objects. To refine the conceptual framework, a design framework and a software-based prototype was developed using the design science research methodology as the theoretical construct and the UML ontology language and object-oriented programming paradigms as the underpinning practical construct. This prototype will assist organisational stakeholders in understanding and visualising the theoretical and practical constructs of handling personally identifiable information as software objects in technology systems. The design and implementation of this prototype resulted in some practical and theoretical recommendations. These include the adoption of a decision model notation (DMN) as a formal standard to manage privacy rules and the creation of a context-aware privacy compliance zone (CAP). However, the main contribution of this thesis is a reusable conceptual and contextual design framework and a prototype through which POPIA rules, or those of any similar information privacy law, such as the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), can be encapsulated into software objects used in technology systems to ease compliance with information privacy regulations.Thesis (PhD) -- Faculty of Engineering, the Built Environment, and Technology, 202

    Transformando la educación a través del conocimiento

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    La educación es uno de los motores de transformación social más poderoso que existen y ejerce como instrumento de cohesión social, igualando las diferencias de género, etnia, situación económica, etc. La investigación educativa es, pues, una actividad estratégica: las mejoras en educación repercuten en el conjunto de la sociedad. Es en este contexto donde se sitúa el presente volumen, titulado Transformando la educación a través del conocimiento. Esta obra recoge un total de 127 capítulos con experiencias de investigación teórica y aplicación práctica sobre experiencias concretas de innovación docente. Las contribuciones, centradas en áreas educativas diversas (educación lingüística, artística, en ciencias sociales y ambientales, etc.) y de diferentes niveles educativos (tanto de los preuniversitarios, como de educación superior), tienen en común que ofrecen una mirada renovada sobre los retos que debe enfrentar la educación actual: la inclusión educativa, la integración de las TIC en la educación, la transición entre diferentes niveles educativos, la igualdad de género o la educación emocional son, entre muchos otros, algunos de los temas abordados. El presente volumen, pues, quiere contribuir a la difusión de las algunas de las aportaciones más recientes que contribuyen al progreso del conocimiento sobre los procesos de enseñanza-aprendizaje en la sociedad actual
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