721,638 research outputs found
The Digital Cultural Atlas Project: Design Research and Cultural Narratives. An Experiential Approach for Design Education.
This paper outlines an approach developed for teaching research methods in a graphic design program, working in an interdisciplinary context with cultural researchers. Initially, the Digital Cultural Atlas (DCA) is introduced, as a 'work-in-progress' web site, which locates a diversity of geographic and place-based cultural resources across Greater Western Sydney. The initial information architecture consists of âbirdâs eye viewâ cartographic maps and cultural project resources. Through a teaching project in design research, students consider ways in which experiential âon the groundâ visual stories can be included.
Initial student research identifies a diversity of observed cultural community contexts and situations. This is followed by a second smaller scale study of fewer sites, using an understanding of participatory design research. In this stage, each student researches an individual community context using two 'voices' of the self - as participant, and as observer. These engagements with the self as 'actor' are recorded in a journal format across a specific time period, with reference to reflections prior to, during, and after 'action'. These provide the basis for the new visual stories in the DCA.
This paper describes and critiques this approach to teaching design research in visual communication, based on the DCA. In so doing, it links design research with human experiences of community and culture to engage with wider debates about the design of digital mapping spaces as information systems. The paper concludes with some reflections about the project's possible future as an ongoing participatory community resource which engages with both geographic and experiential web content and form.
Keywords:
Design Education; Participatory Design; Visual Narrative; Digital Mapping Systems; Community Identity; Designer As Actor</p
Towards a new vision of Information System Engineering.
Information Technologies bear the potential of new uses. These uses provoke a new organization which induces a new vision of software engineering. Under the influence of globalization, and the impact of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) that modify radically our relationship with space and time, the hierarchical company locked up on its local borders becomes an Extended Company, without borders, opened and adaptable. In this context, this paper proposes a shift in the way the design of information systems is viewed, so that the digital information system and potential user are in harmony right from the design stage of the system. The goal is to help to design systems that are useful. It will therefore be a matter of distributed intelligence of the situation in terms of interactions and cooperative partners rather than in terms of a more passive user. This means putting at the disposal of the user, seen as a "partner", a system that will help him or her think more efficiently about a situation. The approach adopted is a global philosophy based on business process management within the framework of all the methodological principles. The research described here is therefore a contribution to the software engineering.User; Software Engineering; Information System; Business Process Management; Extended Company; Digital Information System;
Enhancing Sustainable Innovation by Design: an Approach to the Co-creation of Economic, Social and Environmental Value
The thesis introduces a new, flexible and easy-to-use methodological design approach to envisioning product-service systems able to create economic value for business, as well as social and environmental benefits for society. Such an approach has been developed to support business innovation projects, by finding a practical way of making âsustainabilityâ part of their design briefs.
The approach proposed does not replace conventional eco-design practices: it is an instrument of different nature. It moves beyond the modification of products and their technological changes towards answers able to stimulate social innovation, and therefore to facilitate a radical transformation of industrially-oriented patterns of production and consumption.
To elaborate on this theme, an iterative research approach has been used, one that moves from the theory currently available on how to produce and design sustainable product-service systems to new experimentation practices, and from these practices to a new, theoretical, contribution. The domain chosen for its application is digital networking and information communication technology, with a particular focus on the electronics and consumer electronics sectors in Western markets
Identifying smart design attributes for Industry 4.0 customization using a clustering Genetic Algorithm
Industry 4.0 aims at achieving mass customization at a
mass production cost. A key component to realizing this is accurate
prediction of customer needs and wants, which is however a
challenging issue due to the lack of smart analytics tools. This
paper investigates this issue in depth and then develops a predictive
analytic framework for integrating cloud computing, big data
analysis, business informatics, communication technologies, and
digital industrial production systems. Computational intelligence
in the form of a cluster k-means approach is used to manage
relevant big data for feeding potential customer needs and wants
to smart designs for targeted productivity and customized mass
production. The identification of patterns from big data is achieved
with cluster k-means and with the selection of optimal attributes
using genetic algorithms. A car customization case study shows
how it may be applied and where to assign new clusters with
growing knowledge of customer needs and wants. This approach
offer a number of features suitable to smart design in realizing
Industry 4.0
Joint Coding-Modulation for Digital Semantic Communications via Variational Autoencoder
Semantic communications have emerged as a new paradigm for improving
communication efficiency by transmitting the semantic information of a source
message that is most relevant to a desired task at the receiver. Most existing
approaches typically utilize neural networks (NNs) to design end-to-end
semantic communication systems, where NN-based semantic encoders output
continuously distributed signals to be sent directly to the channel in an
analog communication fashion. In this work, we propose a joint
coding-modulation framework for digital semantic communications by using
variational autoencoder (VAE). Our approach learns the transition probability
from source data to discrete constellation symbols, thereby avoiding the
non-differentiability problem of digital modulation. Meanwhile, by jointly
designing the coding and modulation process together, we can match the obtained
modulation strategy with the operating channel condition. We also derive a
matching loss function with information-theoretic meaning for end-to-end
training. Experiments conducted on image semantic communication validate that
our proposed joint coding-modulation framework outperforms separate design of
semantic coding and modulation under various channel conditions, transmission
rates, and modulation orders. Furthermore, its performance gap to analog
semantic communication reduces as the modulation order increases while enjoying
the hardware implementation convenience
A vision of cyber-physical internet
When the Internet was born, the purpose was to
interconnect computers to share digital data at large-scale. On
the other hand, when embedded systems were born, the objective
was to control system components under real-time constraints
through sensing devices, typically at small to medium scales.
With the great evolution of the Information and Communication
Technology (ICT), the tendency is to enable ubiquitous and
pervasive computing to control everything (physical processes
and physical objects) anytime and at a large-scale. This new
vision gave recently rise to the paradigm of Cyber-Physical
Systems (CPS). In this position paper, we provide a realistic
vision to the concept of the Cyber-Physical Internet (CPI),
discuss its design requirements and present the limitations of
the current networking abstractions to fulfill these requirements.
We also debate whether it is more productive to adopt a
system integration approach or a radical design approach for
building large-scale CPS. Finally, we present a sample of realtime
challenges that must be considered in the design of the
Cyber-Physical Internet
Joint Source-Channel Coding for Channel-Adaptive Digital Semantic Communications
In this paper, we propose a novel joint source-channel coding (JSCC) approach
for channel-adaptive digital semantic communications. In semantic communication
systems with digital modulation and demodulation, end-to-end training and
robust design of JSCC encoder and decoder becomes challenging due to the
nonlinearity of modulation and demodulation processes, as well as diverse
channel conditions and modulation orders. To address this challenge, we first
develop a new demodulation method which assesses the uncertainty of the
demodulation output to improve the robustness of the digital semantic
communication system. We then devise a robust training strategy that
facilitates end-to-end training of the JSCC encoder and decoder, while
enhancing their robustness and flexibility. To this end, we model the
relationship between the encoder's output and decoder's input using binary
symmetric erasure channels and then sample the parameters of these channels
from diverse distributions. We also develop a channel-adaptive modulation
technique for an inference phase, in order to reduce the communication latency
while maintaining task performance. In this technique, we adaptively determine
modulation orders for the latent variables based on channel conditions. Using
simulations, we demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed JSCC
approach for both image classification and reconstruction tasks compared to
existing JSCC approaches
The AXIOM software layers
AXIOM project aims at developing a heterogeneous computing board (SMP-FPGA).The Software Layers developed at the AXIOM project are explained.OmpSs provides an easy way to execute heterogeneous codes in multiple cores. People and objects will soon share the same digital network for information exchange in a world named as the age of the cyber-physical systems. The general expectation is that people and systems will interact in real-time. This poses pressure onto systems design to support increasing demands on computational power, while keeping a low power envelop. Additionally, modular scaling and easy programmability are also important to ensure these systems to become widespread. The whole set of expectations impose scientific and technological challenges that need to be properly addressed.The AXIOM project (Agile, eXtensible, fast I/O Module) will research new hardware/software architectures for cyber-physical systems to meet such expectations. The technical approach aims at solving fundamental problems to enable easy programmability of heterogeneous multi-core multi-board systems. AXIOM proposes the use of the task-based OmpSs programming model, leveraging low-level communication interfaces provided by the hardware. Modular scalability will be possible thanks to a fast interconnect embedded into each module. To this aim, an innovative ARM and FPGA-based board will be designed, with enhanced capabilities for interfacing with the physical world. Its effectiveness will be demonstrated with key scenarios such as Smart Video-Surveillance and Smart Living/Home (domotics).Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft
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