Contributos para o desenvolvimento de aplicações para crianças com problemas de comunicação e integração

Communication, to express our needs and ideas, is a fundamental piece of our daily lives, enabling our interaction with others and contributing to establish social bonds. When this ability is affected, whether by contextual issues (e.g., noisy environment) or intrinsic conditions (e.g., speech articulation difficulties) it creates a challenging scenario for both the individuals and those surrounding them. Children diagnosed with Austism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) are a notable example of an audience facing these challenges given their frequent difficulties to communicate and socially interact with others. In this context, their challenges not only affect their ability to integrate with family and friends, but can also influence how they perform at school, an important environment for their development. In recent years, efforts have been made to propose technological solutions that contribute to support these children in their communication, but most of the work in the literature mainly focuses on the child entailing a support that does not truly addresses integration. Considering this context, we argue that these challenges need to be addressed considering the needs and motivations of children with ASD, but also keeping in mind the motivations of those around them, helping parents, teachers and friends to take part in the integration. Profiting from previous work on the characterization of the needs and motivations of children with ASD, their families, and teachers, the work carried out explores different communication-related scenarios, at school and at home, and proposes a set of requirements that should be considered to serve them. Considering these requirements, and adopting an iterative user-centered design approach, a first proof-of-concept application is proposed. AMICA, Adaptive Multimodal Integrated Communication for All, is a multi-platform, multiuser and multimodal application that aims to illustrate how some issues that affect children with ASD and those surrounding them can be addressed in order to their lives easier. At its current stage, AMICA already encompasses support for several communication features adapted to serve the child, family, friends, and teachers providing them a space for interaction. The modular multi-platform nature of the work carried out enables AMICA as a testbed for further research on different multimodal ways of communication for children with ASD (e.g., gaze or pictograms), but, also, by allowing the participation of different users, it fosters first studies on the dynamic nature of such communication.A comunicação, para expressar as nossas necessidades e ideias, é uma peça fundamental do nosso dia a dia, permitindo a nossa interação com os outros e contribuindo para estabelecer laços sociais. Quando essa capacidade é afetada, seja por questões contextuais (por exemplo, ambiente ruidoso) ou condições intrínsecas (por exemplo, dificuldades de articulação de fala), ela cria um cenário desafiante tanto para os indivíduos como para os que os rodeiam. As crianças diagnosticadas com Perturbação do Espetro do Autismo (PEA) são um exemplo notável de uma audiência que enfrenta esses desafios, devido às suas frequentes dificuldades para comunicar e interagir socialmente com os outros. Neste contexto, os seus desafios não afetam apenas a sua capacidade de integração com a família e os amigos, podendo, também, influenciar o seu desempenho na escola, um ambiente importante para o seu desenvolvimento. Nos últimos anos, têm sido feitos esforços para propor soluções tecnológicas que contribuam para apoiar essas crianças na sua comunicação, mas a maior parte do trabalho na literatura concentra-se principalmente no uso, pela criança, de apoios que não abordam verdadeiramente a integração. Considerando esse contexto, argumentamos que esses desafios precisam de ser abordados considerando as necessidades e motivações das crianças com PEA, mas também tendo em mente as motivações das pessoas ao seu redor, ajudando pais, professores e amigos a participarem na integração. Aproveitando os trabalhos anteriores sobre a caracterização das necessidades e motivações das crianças com PEA, as suas famílias e professores, o trabalho realizado explora diferentes cenários relacionados à comunicação, na escola e em casa, e propõe um conjunto de requisitos que devem ser considerados para os servir. Considerando esses requisitos e adotando uma abordagem de projeto iterativa, centrada no utilizador, uma primeira aplicação de prova de conceito é proposta. AMICA, Adaptive Multimodal Integrated Communication for All, é uma aplicação multi-plataforma, multi-utilizador e multimodal que visa ilustrar como algumas questões que afetam as crianças com PEA e aqueles que as rodeiam podem ser abordadas para tentar facilitar as suas vidas. No estado atual, a AMICA já engloba o suporte a vários recursos de comunicação adaptados para atender a criança, a família, os amigos e os professores, proporcionando-lhes um espaço de interação. A natureza modular multi-plataforma do trabalho realizado permite que AMICA seja uma base para mais pesquisas sobre diferentes formas multimodais de comunicação para crianças com PEA (por exemplo, olhar ou pictogramas), mas, também, permitindo a participação de diferentes utilizadores, promove primeiros estudos sobre a natureza dinâmica de tal comunicação.Mestrado em Engenharia de Computadores e Telemátic

PBS transition from analog to digital TV broadcasting: the human perspective

The purpose of this project is to examine a subset of Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) stations in how they made their transition to digital broadcasting to: 1. Identify candidate best practices for successfully transitioning from analog to digital broadcasting, 2. Make recommendations on how to educate the viewing audience on adapting, understanding, and utilizing Digital TV (DTV), and 3. Identify possible areas where further research might assist in a better understanding of how to manage change effectively

The Race for Privacy: Technological Evolution Outpacing Judicial Interpretations of the Fourth Amendment: Playpen, the Dark Web, and Governmental Hacking

Despite complying with the new amendments to Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 41, the Federal Bureau of Investigation\u27s (FBI) broad authorization to remotely access computers at anytime and anywhere within the United States is at odds with the reasonableness and particularity requirements of the Fourth Amendment. The exponential growth of technology has made life in the twenty-first century something our ancestors would envy, but the idea of allowing the government to perform unknown and undetected searches across the United States, especially in the hidden world of cyberspace, would have our founding fathers turning in their graves. Recognition is owed to the creators of the Constitution-and the Fourth Amendment specifically-for drafting a document that is still living and breathing, because doing so required tremendous vision. Free of British control and in an attempt to eliminate the immediate evils facing our infant country, the drafters of the Bill of Rights sought to prevent history from repeating itself by ratifying ten amendments to the United States Constitution. Their ability to foresee the unforeseeable is unparalleled; however, here in the digital age, the evolution of technology is outpacing the courts\u27 ability to interpret the Fourth Amendment in a manner that can reconcile governmental expedience and efficiency with individual privacy. This Note will explore the government\u27s use of network investigative techniques to hack unknown computers across the nation, as well as discuss how district courts disagree whether the hacking, albeit based on a warrant, runs afoul of the Fourth Amendment and former Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 41. For the courts that have found no Fourth Amendment conflict-whether they found that no search and seizure occurred or that an exception applied their decisions do not comport with existing case law and risk expanding the scope of governmental searches to unimaginable proportions

Information Outlook, November/December 2013

Volume 17, Issue 6https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/sla_io_2013/1005/thumbnail.jp

Explaining computer use among preservice teachers: Towards the development of a richer conceptual model incorporating experience, demographic, motivation, personality, and learning style clusters of variables.

Despite the professional training that North American teachers receive, many believe they are not well prepared to implement computer technology in their classrooms (Industry Canada, 2003; The CEO Forum, 2001). Educational computing research has failed to provide conceptually integrated frameworks and theories that can best predict or explain the factors that facilitate computer use, whether in a computer course or for general purposes. The conceptual framework that emerged in this study incorporated specific determinants of computer use---demographics, experience, learning style, motivation, and personality---for new teachers that represent prominent themes in theories of human motivation and decision making. However, among the twenty-one variables that constituted these five clusters, experience, intrinsic motivation, program of study, gender, familiarity with computer terminology, and educational level were the only significant predictors of computer use. Paper copy at Leddy Library: Theses & Major Papers - Basement, West Bldg. / Call Number: Thesis2006 .Z642. Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 67-07, Section: A, page: 2455. Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Windsor (Canada), 2006

Improving web search results with explanation-aware snippets: an experimental study

In this paper, we focus on a typical task on a web search, in which users want to discover the coherency between two concepts on the Web. In our point of view, this task can be seen as a retrieval process: starting with some source information, the goal is to find target information by following hyperlinks. Given two concepts, e.g. chemistry and gunpowder, are search engines able to find the coherency and explain it? In this paper, we introduce a novel way of linking two concepts by following paths of hyperlinks and collecting short text snippets. We implemented a proof-of-concept prototype, which extracts paths and snippets from Wikipedia articles. Our goal is to provide the user with an overview about the coherency, enriching the connection with a short but meaningful description. In our experimental study, we compare the results of our approach with the capability of web search engines. The results show that 72% of the participants find ours better than these of web search engines. (author's abstract