PocketCare: Tracking the Flu with Mobile Phones using Partial Observations of Proximity and Symptoms

Mobile phones provide a powerful sensing platform that researchers may adopt to understand proximity interactions among people and the diffusion, through these interactions, of diseases, behaviors, and opinions. However, it remains a challenge to track the proximity-based interactions of a whole community and then model the social diffusion of diseases and behaviors starting from the observations of a small fraction of the volunteer population. In this paper, we propose a novel approach that tries to connect together these sparse observations using a model of how individuals interact with each other and how social interactions happen in terms of a sequence of proximity interactions. We apply our approach to track the spreading of flu in the spatial-proximity network of a 3000-people university campus by mobilizing 300 volunteers from this population to monitor nearby mobile phones through Bluetooth scanning and to daily report flu symptoms about and around them. Our aim is to predict the likelihood for an individual to get flu based on how often her/his daily routine intersects with those of the volunteers. Thus, we use the daily routines of the volunteers to build a model of the volunteers as well as of the non-volunteers. Our results show that we can predict flu infection two weeks ahead of time with an average precision from 0.24 to 0.35 depending on the amount of information. This precision is six to nine times higher than with a random guess model. At the population level, we can predict infectious population in a two-week window with an r-squared value of 0.95 (a random-guess model obtains an r-squared value of 0.2). These results point to an innovative approach for tracking individuals who have interacted with people showing symptoms, allowing us to warn those in danger of infection and to inform health researchers about the progression of contact-induced diseases

Links between the personalities, styles and performance in computer programming

There are repetitive patterns in strategies of manipulating source code. For example, modifying source code before acquiring knowledge of how a code works is a depth-first style and reading and understanding before modifying source code is a breadth-first style. To the extent we know there is no study on the influence of personality on them. The objective of this study is to understand the influence of personality on programming styles. We did a correlational study with 65 programmers at the University of Stuttgart. Academic achievement, programming experience, attitude towards programming and five personality factors were measured via self-assessed survey. The programming styles were asked in the survey or mined from the software repositories. Performance in programming was composed of bug-proneness of programmers which was mined from software repositories, the grades they got in a software project course and their estimate of their own programming ability. We did statistical analysis and found that Openness to Experience has a positive association with breadth-first style and Conscientiousness has a positive association with depth-first style. We also found that in addition to having more programming experience and better academic achievement, the styles of working depth-first and saving coarse-grained revisions improve performance in programming.Comment: 27 pages, 6 figure

Tele-media-art: web-based inclusive teaching of body expression

Conferência Internacional, realizada em Olhão, Algarve, de 26-28 de abril de 2018.The Tele-Media-Art project aims to promote the improvement of the online distance learning and artistic teaching process applied in the teaching of two test scenarios, doctorate in digital art-media and the lifelong learning course ”the experience of diversity” by exploiting multimodal telepresence facilities encompassing the diversified visual, auditory and sensory channels, as well as rich forms of gestural / body interaction. To this end, a telepresence system was developed to be installed at Palácio Ceia, in Lisbon, Portugal, headquarters of the Portuguese Open University, from which methodologies of artistic teaching in mixed regime - face-to-face and online distance - that are inclusive to blind and partially sighted students. This system has already been tested against a group of subjects, including blind people. Although positive results were achieved, more development and further tests will be carried in the futureThis project was financed by Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation under Grant number 142793.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Ariadne: An interface to support collaborative database browsing:Technical Report CSEG/3/1995

This paper outlines issues in the learning of information searching skills. We report on our observations of the learning of browsing skills and the subsequent iterative development and testing of the Ariadne system – intended to investigate and support the collaborative learning of search skills. A key part of this support is a mechanism for recording an interaction history and providing students with a visualisation of that history that they can reflect and comment upon

Virtual Reference for Video Collections: System Infrastructure, User Interface and Pilot User Study

A new video-based Virtual Reference (VR) tool called VideoHelp was designed and developed to support video navigation escorting, a function that enables librarians to co-navigate a digital video with patrons in the web-based environment. A client/server infrastructure was adopted for the VideoHelp system and timestamps were used to achieve the video synchronization between the librarians and patrons. A pilot usability study of using VideoHelp prototype in video seeking was conducted and the preliminary results demonstrated that the system is easy to learn and use, and real-time assistance from virtual librarians in video navigation is desirable on a conditional basis

What does not happen: quantifying embodied engagement using NIMI and self-adaptors

Previous research into the quantification of embodied intellectual and emotional engagement using non-verbal movement parameters has not yielded consistent results across different studies. Our research introduces NIMI (Non-Instrumental Movement Inhibition) as an alternative parameter. We propose that the absence of certain types of possible movements can be a more holistic proxy for cognitive engagement with media (in seated persons) than searching for the presence of other movements. Rather than analyzing total movement as an indicator of engagement, our research team distinguishes between instrumental movements (i.e. physical movement serving a direct purpose in the given situation) and non-instrumental movements, and investigates them in the context of the narrative rhythm of the stimulus. We demonstrate that NIMI occurs by showing viewers’ movement levels entrained (i.e. synchronised) to the repeating narrative rhythm of a timed computer-presented quiz. Finally, we discuss the role of objective metrics of engagement in future context-aware analysis of human behaviour in audience research, interactive media and responsive system and interface design