Digital Humanities for Lifelong Learners

Digital Humanities for Lifelong Learners is a research project that will convene leading thinkers in the fields of lifelong learning, humanities education, public media and humanities archives, and multi-platform interactive technology in a series of in-person and virtual meetings and other activities, including online surveys. The key purpose is to research how best to create a significant library of high quality, digital humanities modules, drawn from WGBH's vast archive and other public media sources, for lifelong learners, especially those aged 65+. An initial day-long meeting, held at WGBH and including all project participants, will set the agenda for this six-month research initiative, resulting in a detailed white paper that addresses audience research findings, humanities content, rights, and distribution issues, and technical and design approaches, and charts next steps for this project, including future funding possibilities

Globalization, Health and the Nutrition Transition: How Global TNCs are Changing Local Food Consumption Patterns

Food consumption patterns around the world are changing. In general, individuals around the globe are consuming more edible oils and sugars than they were twenty years ago. What has lead to this nutrition transition? Scholars have identified a range of mechanisms associated with the transition, but nearly all are related to the growing influence of transnational corporations on the global food system. These TNCs are the lead actors in most global food production systems, dictating what is produced, how it is processed, where it is sold and the desirability of food products to global consumers. Looking at these TNCs through the lens of global value chain analysis can begin to shed light on the global and local interactions that are contributing to changing food consumption patterns. These TNCs have come to dominate the global food value chain by operating globally to promote efficiency as well as locally to take advantage of regional preferences. A global value chain perspective highlights the role of TNCs in increasing the availability, affordability and desirability of diets higher in fat and sugar in Malaysia. These diets are scientifically linked to a higher risk for noncommunicable diseases such as obesity, diabetes and cardiovascular disease and Malaysia has experienced rising rates of noncommunicable disease. Because developing nations do not have the financial or medical capacity to deal with these rising rates of noncommunicable disease, the nutrition transition could lead to a global public health crisis. To avoid this kind of crisis, future GVC research should identify intervention points in global food value chains that can reverse this trend and encourage global TNCs to positively influence local diets in the future

Human activity recognition for pervasive interaction

PhD ThesisThis thesis addresses the challenge of computing food preparation context in the kitchen. The automatic recognition of fine-grained human activities and food ingredients is realized through pervasive sensing which we achieve by instrumenting kitchen objects such as knives, spoons, and chopping boards with sensors. Context recognition in the kitchen lies at the heart of a broad range of real-world applications. In particular, activity and food ingredient recognition in the kitchen is an essential component for situated services such as automatic prompting services for cognitively impaired kitchen users and digital situated support for healthier eating interventions. Previous works, however, have addressed the activity recognition problem by exploring high-level-human activities using wearable sensing (i.e. worn sensors on human body) or using technologies that raise privacy concerns (i.e. computer vision). Although such approaches have yielded significant results for a number of activity recognition problems, they are not applicable to our domain of investigation, for which we argue that the technology itself must be genuinely “invisible”, thereby allowing users to perform their activities in a completely natural manner. In this thesis we describe the development of pervasive sensing technologies and algorithms for finegrained human activity and food ingredient recognition in the kitchen. After reviewing previous work on food and activity recognition we present three systems that constitute increasingly sophisticated approaches to the challenge of kitchen context recognition. Two of these systems, Slice&Dice and Classbased Threshold Dynamic Time Warping (CBT-DTW), recognize fine-grained food preparation activities. Slice&Dice is a proof-of-concept application, whereas CBT-DTW is a real-time application that also addresses the problem of recognising unknown activities. The final system, KitchenSense is a real-time context recognition framework that deals with the recognition of a more complex set of activities, and includes the recognition of food ingredients and events in the kitchen. For each system, we describe the prototyping of pervasive sensing technologies, algorithms, as well as real-world experiments and empirical evaluations that validate the proposed solutions.Vietnamese government’s 322 project, executed by the Vietnamese Ministry of Education and Training

A Linear General Type-2 Fuzzy Logic Based Computing With Words Approach for Realising an Ambient Intelligent Platform for Cooking Recipes Recommendation

This paper addresses the need to enhance transparency in ambient intelligent environments by developing more natural ways of interaction, which allow the users to communicate easily with the hidden networked devices rather than embedding obtrusive tablets and computing equipment throughout their surroundings. Ambient intelligence vision aims to realize digital environments that adapt to users in a responsive, transparent, and context-aware manner in order to enhance users' comfort. It is, therefore, appropriate to employ the paradigm of “computing with words” (CWWs), which aims to mimic the ability of humans to communicate transparently and manipulate perceptions via words. One of the daily activities that would increase the comfort levels of the users (especially people with disabilities) is cooking and performing tasks in the kitchen. Existing approaches on food preparation, cooking, and recipe recommendation stress on healthy eating and balanced meal choices while providing limited personalization features through the use of intrusive user interfaces. Herein, we present an application, which transparently interacts with users based on a novel CWWs approach in order to predict the recipe's difficulty level and to recommend an appropriate recipe depending on the user's mood, appetite, and spare time. The proposed CWWs framework is based on linear general type-2 (LGT2) fuzzy sets, which linearly quantify the linguistic modifiers in the third dimension in order to better represent the user perceptions while avoiding the drawbacks of type-1 and interval type-2 fuzzy sets. The LGT2-based CWWs framework can learn from user experiences and adapt to them in order to establish more natural human-machine interaction. We have carried numerous real-world experiments with various users in the University of Essex intelligent flat. The comparison analysis between interval type-2 fuzzy sets and LGT2 fuzzy sets demonstrates up to 55.43% improvement when general type-2 fuzzy sets are used than when interval type-2 fuzzy sets are used instead. The quantitative and qualitative analysis both show the success of the system in providing a natural interaction with the users for recommending food recipes where the quantitative analysis shows the high statistical correlation between the system output and the users' feedback; the qualitative analysis presents social scienc

THE HOME MEAL REPLACEMENT OPPORTUNITY: A MARKETING PERSPECTIVE

Many food retailers perceive home meal replacements (HMR) or meal solutions as major opportunities for sales growth. These fully- or partially-prepared foods appear to solve growing consumer needs: lack of time, lack of skill, and lack of desire to prepare food. However, a recent financial review of the foodservice operations at 10 large supermarket chains found that the average store's prepared food operation was losing money. The study identified three important areas that supermarkets need to improve: product shrink, employee training, and promotion. These three areas are closely linked with the design and marketing of the HMR concept. To increase the profitability of their HMR programs, supermarkets and restaurants need to address the seven key "Ps" of HMR marketing: positioning, product, package, place, price, promotion, and people. This paper reviews these seven marketing issues and summarizes the lessons learned by early HMR providers.Home Meal Replacement, Meal Solutions, Prepared Food, Food Marketing Strategy, Convenience, Takeout Food, Supermarket, Restaurant, Central Kitchen, Foodservice, Agribusiness, Food Consumption/Nutrition/Food Safety, Marketing,

DESIGNING AN ENGLISH RADIO PROGRAM AS A MEDIUM OF LEARNING ENGLISH FOR THE TENTH GRADE SENIOR HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS OF LANGUAGE PROGRAM IN SMA NEGERI 1 CILACAP

This research is aimed at finding out the English materials that the tenth grade students of Language Program in SMAN 1 Cilacap need to be included in the English Radio Program in order to improve their listening and speaking skills; and designing an English Radio Program for the tenth grade students of Language Program in SMAN 1 Cilacap to be a medium of learning English. The study was Research and Development done by conducting the needs analysis, writing the course grid, developing the design of the English Radio Program, developing the outline and the script of the broadcast, implementing the broadcast, evaluating and revising the broadcast. The instruments were questionnaires, interview guidelines, and observations. The data from the questionnaires were analyzed quantitatively, while the data from the interview and observation were analyzed qualitatively. The result of the study is an English Radio Program named “English Time!”, which concludes: 1) the materials of the broadcasts were developed from the competences that the students found difficult to learn and other information which were chosen based on the needs analysis; and 2) the English Radio Program was designed using the format of a magazine program which was suitable for specific audience with specific needs. The program had six main activities to cover those students’ needs. They were “Let’s Listen”, “Language Focus”, “Meet the Guest”, “What did You Hear?”, “Read the Song”, and “Unique Facts”

A Survey on Multi-Resident Activity Recognition in Smart Environments

Human activity recognition (HAR) is a rapidly growing field that utilizes smart devices, sensors, and algorithms to automatically classify and identify the actions of individuals within a given environment. These systems have a wide range of applications, including assisting with caring tasks, increasing security, and improving energy efficiency. However, there are several challenges that must be addressed in order to effectively utilize HAR systems in multi-resident environments. One of the key challenges is accurately associating sensor observations with the identities of the individuals involved, which can be particularly difficult when residents are engaging in complex and collaborative activities. This paper provides a brief overview of the design and implementation of HAR systems, including a summary of the various data collection devices and approaches used for human activity identification. It also reviews previous research on the use of these systems in multi-resident environments and offers conclusions on the current state of the art in the field.Comment: 16 pages, to appear in Evolution of Information, Communication and Computing Systems (EICCS) Book Serie