98 research outputs found
Multimodal Content Delivery for Geo-services
This thesis describes a body of work carried out over several research projects in the area of multimodal interaction for location-based services. Research in this area has progressed from using simulated mobile environments to demonstrate the visual modality, to the ubiquitous delivery of rich media using multimodal interfaces (geo- services). To effectively deliver these services, research focused on innovative solutions to real-world problems in a number of disciplines including geo-location, mobile spatial interaction, location-based services, rich media interfaces and auditory user interfaces. My original contributions to knowledge are made in the areas of multimodal interaction underpinned by advances in geo-location technology and supported by the proliferation of mobile device technology into modern life. Accurate positioning is a known problem for location-based services, contributions in the area of mobile positioning demonstrate a hybrid positioning technology for mobile devices that uses terrestrial beacons to trilaterate position. Information overload is an active concern for location-based applications that struggle to manage large amounts of data, contributions in the area of egocentric visibility that filter data based on field-of-view demonstrate novel forms of multimodal input. One of the more pertinent characteristics of these applications is the delivery or output modality employed (auditory, visual or tactile). Further contributions in the area of multimodal content delivery are made, where multiple modalities are used to deliver information using graphical user interfaces, tactile interfaces and more notably auditory user interfaces. It is demonstrated how a combination of these interfaces can be used to synergistically deliver context sensitive rich media to users - in a responsive way - based on usage scenarios that consider the affordance of the device, the geographical position and bearing of the device and also the location of the device
The place probe: exploring a sense of place in real and virtual environments.
This paper describes the design, application, and refinement of a qualitative tool designed to study sense of place. The Place Probe incorporates a range of stimuli and techniques aimed at articulating a person's sense of place. It has been developed, used, and undergone three revisions. The paper describes the background to the choice of measures that were included in the Place Probe and describes its application in both a physical place and a virtual representation of that place. This enables a comparison of the experiences. An analysis of the results reveals a similarity of reported experience, however the extremes experienced in the physical place were less pronounced in the virtual representation. The Place Probe has been refined in light of the results of the empirical work and now incorporates both qualitative and quantitative data on the experience of place
extraction of land cover units from land cover components based on geometric rules
Land cover units are aggregations of land cover components that are obtained by using criteria of homogeneity and proximity of basic components. For example, residential urban settlements can be defined as aggregations of single buildings, neighboring green spaces, paved surfaces and small roads, which are separated by more prominent land cover components, such as main roads or rivers. Land cover components belong to standard classes typically obtained by an automated classification process applied to aerial or satellite images, such as buildings, constructed areas, bare soil, water, vegetation, and the like. Land cover units belong to more general classes, obtained by a combination of land cover components, such as residential areas, industrial areas, road networks, river systems, and agricultural units. In this paper, we describe an approach based on the application of geometric rules and semantic constraints to extract land cover units from land cover components. We use spatial operators to extract composite land cover units from land cover databases, where spatial operators are taken from standards of the Open Geospatial Consortium. Expert knowledge needs to be translated into specific automatic procedures, called complex object definitions or CODs. Finally, we build a prototype system, where the user can choose among a set of available CODs to build a sequence of actions that lead to the discovery of knowledge. We discuss several study cases, such as the recognition of urban settlements, agricultural land units, and road networks
Recommended from our members
More-than-social innovation : the material and discursive enactment of an open ed-tech network
Education policymakers, researchers and reformers are experimenting with âopenâ urban innovation hubs and ecosystems, calling upon teachers and school leaders to be more âentrepreneurialâ in their approaches to change with technology. Open innovation networks are fundamentally multivoiced and participatory by design, but we do not know very much about how they work with technology or what we might expect from them in terms of educational change. Despite the democratic possibilities of open innovation networks, if the history of technology-driven educational reform in this country serves as any guide, we might well expect the status quo in terms of their impact on school-based learning and teaching.
The broad purpose of this revelatory case study is to characterize the composition and enactment of one nominally open, urban ed-tech innovation network, identifying how and why actors swarm and learn around goals and projects that exist in dialogic tension. I take a mixed methods approach to capturing and interpreting highly mediated network interactions, combining egocentric network analysis, computational topic modeling and multimodal narrative analyses. I show how and why individual entrepreneurs of the self position themselves around and become a part of the spectacle of the ed-tech network, and how a pervasive market form patterns identity and interest discourses in both digital and physical urban space. The ed-tech network is revealed to act, know and learn in different ways within a variety of distinct scenes, including an inter-institutional assemblage of loosely coordinated computer science education actors, a scene of commercial and social entrepreneurs and a precarious community of practice focused on the production of marketable ed-tech professional identities and futures. The study concludes that the ed-tech network as a social technology and a spectacle can indeed convene broad discourse and boundary-spanning activity around the changing goals of school and education for the common good, even as the network is deeply patterned by enterprise. A framework for carnivalesque innovation is presented as a way of thinking about how open innovation networks and contemporary open learning environments can better pursue social goals of equity and justice in a marketized context.Curriculum and Instructio
A life lived on the corner
This thesis explores the everyday life of Brother, a well-known street dweller and local identity, who lives everyday life on a busy street corner in Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand. Brotherâs way of doing âbeing ordinaryâ attracts strong public curiosity, media interest, and monitoring by informal and formal social control mechanisms, including medical intervention. This research provides a comprehensive account of what can happen to those at the margins who dare, or are impelled, to do things differently. My research is inspired by the longstanding tradition of street corner sociology, and grounded within the sociology of everyday life orientation. My street ethnography involved participant observation over a three-and-a-half year period. In that time, I observed Brother and other street people, capturing the depth and nuanced complexities of a life lived in the open. Central to this thesis is an examination of the ways in which wider social structures and institutions bear upon the local micro-setting, in particular how classification processes act to âmake, remake, and unmakeâ people. Three core concepts of space, body, and social interaction are explored to examine, through the situatedness of everyday talk and social action, how social meanings are locally produced and understood. I argue that by developing spatial, bodily, and interactional methods, Brother has established organisational and social capacities, and lines of conduct, that are firmly founded in autonomous actions. Through his rejection of ascribed âhomelessâ membership and his clear embracement of a street lifestyle, Brotherâs street life is shown to subvert and trouble normative understandings, while engendering and maintaining a lived sense of home in the city he calls his whare [house]. My research contributes an Aotearoa New Zealand perspective to the international sociological street corner landscape, and provides a Wellington perspective to the emerging domestic literature on street life. More broadly, my study aims to stimulate critical sociological reflection regarding different modes of being and belonging in the world and how we, as a society, respond to this
Hypertext Semiotics in the Commercialized Internet
Die Hypertext Theorie verwendet die selbe Terminologie, welche seit Jahrzehnten in der semiotischen Forschung untersucht wird, wie z.B. Zeichen, Text, Kommunikation, Code, Metapher, Paradigma, Syntax, usw. Aufbauend auf jenen Ergebnissen, welche in der Anwendung semiotischer Prinzipien und Methoden auf die Informatik erfolgreich waren, wie etwa Computer Semiotics, Computational Semiotics und Semiotic Interface Engineering, legt diese Dissertation einen systematischen Ansatz fĂŒr all jene Forscher dar, die bereit sind, Hypertext aus einer semiotischen Perspektive zu betrachten. Durch die VerknĂŒpfung existierender Hypertext-Modelle mit den Resultaten aus der Semiotik auf allen Sinnesebenen der textuellen, auditiven, visuellen, taktilen und geruchlichen Wahrnehmung skizziert der Autor Prolegomena einer Hypertext-Semiotik-Theorie, anstatt ein völlig neues Hypertext-Modell zu prĂ€sentieren. Eine EinfĂŒhrung in die Geschichte der Hypertexte, von ihrer Vorgeschichte bis zum heutigen Entwicklungsstand und den gegenwĂ€rtigen Entwicklungen im kommerzialisierten World Wide Web bilden den Rahmen fĂŒr diesen Ansatz, welcher als Fundierung des BrĂŒckenschlages zwischen Mediensemiotik und Computer-Semiotik angesehen werden darf. WĂ€hrend Computer-Semiotiker wissen, dass der Computer eine semiotische Maschine ist und Experten der kĂŒnstlichen Intelligenz-Forschung die Rolle der Semiotik in der Entwicklung der nĂ€chsten Hypertext-Generation betonen, bedient sich diese Arbeit einer breiteren methodologischen Basis. Dementsprechend reichen die Teilgebiete von Hypertextanwendungen, -paradigmen, und -strukturen, ĂŒber Navigation, Web Design und Web Augmentation zu einem interdisziplinĂ€ren Spektrum detaillierter Analysen, z.B. des Zeigeinstrumentes der Web Browser, des Klammeraffen-Zeichens und der sogenannten Emoticons. Die Bezeichnung ''Icon'' wird als unpassender Name fĂŒr jene Bildchen, welche von der graphischen BenutzeroberflĂ€che her bekannt sind und in Hypertexten eingesetzt werden, zurĂŒckgewiesen und diese Bildchen durch eine neue Generation mĂ€chtiger Graphic Link Markers ersetzt. Diese Ergebnisse werden im Kontext der Kommerzialisierung des Internet betrachtet. Neben der Identifizierung der Hauptprobleme des eCommerce aus der Perspektive der Hypertext Semiotik, widmet sich der Autor den InformationsgĂŒtern und den derzeitigen Hindernissen fĂŒr die New Economy, wie etwa der restriktiven Gesetzeslage in Sachen Copyright und Intellectual Property. Diese anachronistischen BeschrĂ€nkungen basieren auf der problematischen Annahme, dass auch der Informationswert durch die Knappheit bestimmt wird. Eine semiotische Analyse der iMarketing Techniken, wie z.B. Banner Werbung, Keywords und Link Injektion, sowie Exkurse ĂŒber den Browser Krieg und den Toywar runden die Dissertation ab
Memory and modernity : the symbolic cityscape of Hong Kong.
This thesis proposes five conceptual headings through which to perceive the
city. They are: City as History, Spectacle, A Work of Art, Corporate Image, and
Home. Each heading is a complete concept on one level and the part of a greater
concept on another. A number of celebrity cities (e.g. London, Paris, New York, Los
Angeles, Las Vegas, etc.) are considered at each of the headings in turn.
A city is the spatial embodiment of memory and modernity. Memory and
modernity are multi-facaded within a totality. Each of the five conceptions reflects
one facade and their juxtaposition provides meanings to each other. A good city can
embrace parts of the five conceptions; whereas an ideal city must achieve an
equilibrium of them all. The second part of the thesis, The Phenomenology of A
City, examines the urban experience and consciousness of citizens, through the gaze
of four representational figures of the modern city (the shopper, flaneur, stranger, and
transgressor). Finally, the theories were applied to an exceptional modern city, Hong
Kong, in which the identity and image of the city is evaluated and explored. It is
worth noting that this thesis, if not the first, will be one of the few to analyse the city
of Hong Kong from an aesthetic and historical dimension.
The modern city is too gigantic and erratic to grasp completely. This thesis,
however, approaches it from these several historical and aesthetic viewpoints. It
seeks to capture the urban experience of ordinary people with a poetic lens, and
through which one glimpses what is it to experience (a very problematic word in this
thesis) the modern city
Writing the Cityscape: Narratives of Moscow since 1991
This thesis considers how continuity and transformation, the past and the future, are inscribed into the cityscape. Drawing on Roland Barthesâ image of the city as âa discourseâ and Michel de Certeauâs concept of the WandersmĂ€nner, who write the city with their daily movements, this thesis takes urban space as both a repository of, and inspiration for, narratives. In few cities is the significance of writing narratives more visible than in Moscow. In the 1930s, it was conceived as the archetypal Soviet city, embodying the Soviet Unionâs radiant future. Since the deconstruction of this grand narrative and the fall of the Soviet Union, competing ideas have flooded in to fill the void. With glass shopping arcades, a towering new business district, and reconstructed old churches, Moscowâs facelift offers only part of the picture. A number of other visions have been imprinted onto the post-Soviet city: nostalgic impulses for the simplicity of old Moscow; the search for a new, stable, powerful centre; desires for luxury, privatized gated communities; and feelings of abandonment in the grey, decaying, sprawling suburbs. Following an overview of recent changes to Moscowâs topography, these four major themes are investigated through the prism of post-Soviet Russian literature. Retro-detective fiction offers insight into nostalgia for the past and the temporal layers that build up the palimpsestic cityscape. Descriptions of Moscow after the apocalypse shed light on the cityâs traditional concentric structure and the concomitant symbolism of hierarchy. Glamour literature challenges this paradigm by focusing on the gated community, a topographical form that splinters the city. Images of the supernatural and the Gothic lead to an alternative vision of the hybrid city, embracing multiplicity. In this way, fictional works defy the physical worldâs constraints of time and space, revealing a kaleidoscope of different perspectives on post-Soviet Muscovite experiences
- âŠ