Design Ltd.: Renovated Myths for the Development of Socially Embedded Technologies

This paper argues that traditional and mainstream mythologies, which have been continually told within the Information Technology domain among designers and advocators of conceptual modelling since the 1960s in different fields of computing sciences, could now be renovated or substituted in the mould of more recent discourses about performativity, complexity and end-user creativity that have been constructed across different fields in the meanwhile. In the paper, it is submitted that these discourses could motivate IT professionals in undertaking alternative approaches toward the co-construction of socio-technical systems, i.e., social settings where humans cooperate to reach common goals by means of mediating computational tools. The authors advocate further discussion about and consolidation of some concepts in design research, design practice and more generally Information Technology (IT) development, like those of: task-artifact entanglement, universatility (sic) of End-User Development (EUD) environments, bricolant/bricoleur end-user, logic of bricolage, maieuta-designers (sic), and laissez-faire method to socio-technical construction. Points backing these and similar concepts are made to promote further discussion on the need to rethink the main assumptions underlying IT design and development some fifty years later the coming of age of software and modern IT in the organizational domain.Comment: This is the peer-unreviewed of a manuscript that is to appear in D. Randall, K. Schmidt, & V. Wulf (Eds.), Designing Socially Embedded Technologies: A European Challenge (2013, forthcoming) with the title "Building Socially Embedded Technologies: Implications on Design" within an EUSSET editorial initiative (www.eusset.eu/

Políticas de Copyright de Publicações Científicas em Repositórios Institucionais: O Caso do INESC TEC

A progressiva transformação das práticas científicas, impulsionada pelo desenvolvimento das novas Tecnologias de Informação e Comunicação (TIC), têm possibilitado aumentar o acesso à informação, caminhando gradualmente para uma abertura do ciclo de pesquisa. Isto permitirá resolver a longo prazo uma adversidade que se tem colocado aos investigadores, que passa pela existência de barreiras que limitam as condições de acesso, sejam estas geográficas ou financeiras. Apesar da produção científica ser dominada, maioritariamente, por grandes editoras comerciais, estando sujeita às regras por estas impostas, o Movimento do Acesso Aberto cuja primeira declaração pública, a Declaração de Budapeste (BOAI), é de 2002, vem propor alterações significativas que beneficiam os autores e os leitores. Este Movimento vem a ganhar importância em Portugal desde 2003, com a constituição do primeiro repositório institucional a nível nacional. Os repositórios institucionais surgiram como uma ferramenta de divulgação da produção científica de uma instituição, com o intuito de permitir abrir aos resultados da investigação, quer antes da publicação e do próprio processo de arbitragem (preprint), quer depois (postprint), e, consequentemente, aumentar a visibilidade do trabalho desenvolvido por um investigador e a respetiva instituição. O estudo apresentado, que passou por uma análise das políticas de copyright das publicações científicas mais relevantes do INESC TEC, permitiu não só perceber que as editoras adotam cada vez mais políticas que possibilitam o auto-arquivo das publicações em repositórios institucionais, como também que existe todo um trabalho de sensibilização a percorrer, não só para os investigadores, como para a instituição e toda a sociedade. A produção de um conjunto de recomendações, que passam pela implementação de uma política institucional que incentive o auto-arquivo das publicações desenvolvidas no âmbito institucional no repositório, serve como mote para uma maior valorização da produção científica do INESC TEC.The progressive transformation of scientific practices, driven by the development of new Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), which made it possible to increase access to information, gradually moving towards an opening of the research cycle. This opening makes it possible to resolve, in the long term, the adversity that has been placed on researchers, which involves the existence of barriers that limit access conditions, whether geographical or financial. Although large commercial publishers predominantly dominate scientific production and subject it to the rules imposed by them, the Open Access movement whose first public declaration, the Budapest Declaration (BOAI), was in 2002, proposes significant changes that benefit the authors and the readers. This Movement has gained importance in Portugal since 2003, with the constitution of the first institutional repository at the national level. Institutional repositories have emerged as a tool for disseminating the scientific production of an institution to open the results of the research, both before publication and the preprint process and postprint, increase the visibility of work done by an investigator and his or her institution. The present study, which underwent an analysis of the copyright policies of INESC TEC most relevant scientific publications, allowed not only to realize that publishers are increasingly adopting policies that make it possible to self-archive publications in institutional repositories, all the work of raising awareness, not only for researchers but also for the institution and the whole society. The production of a set of recommendations, which go through the implementation of an institutional policy that encourages the self-archiving of the publications developed in the institutional scope in the repository, serves as a motto for a greater appreciation of the scientific production of INESC TEC

Unveiling the impact of neuromotor disorders on speech: a structured approach combining biomechanical fundamentals and statistical machine learning

Speech has been shown to convey clinically useful information in the study of Neurodegenerative Disorders (NDs), such as Parkinson’s Disease (PD). Traditionally the use of speech as an exploratory tool in People with Parkinson’s (PwP) has focused on the estimation of acoustic characteristics and their study at face value, analysing the physio-acoustical markers and using them as features for the differentiation between Healthy Controls (HC) and PwP. The present work takes a step further, given the intricate interoperation between neuromotor activity, responsible for both planning and driving the system, and the production of the acoustic speech signal; by the study of speech, this relationship may be properly exploited and analysed, providing a non-invasive method for the diagnosis, analysis, and observation of NDs. This work aims to introduce a working model that is capable of linking both domains and serves as a projection tool to provide insights about a speaker’s neuromotor state. This is based on a review of the neurophysiological background of the structure and function of the nervous system, and a review of the main nervous system dysfunctions involved in PD and other related neuromotor disorders. The role of the respiratory, phonatory, and articulatory systems is reviewed in the production of voice and speech under normal and pathological circumstances. This setting might allow for speech to be considered a useful trait within the precision medicine framework, as it provides a personal biometric marker that is innate and easy to elicit, can be recorded remotely with inexpensive equipment, is non-invasive, cost-effective, and easy to process. The problem can be divided into two main categories: firstly, a binary detection task distinguishing between healthy controls and individuals with NDs based on the projection model and phonatory estimates; secondly, a progression and tracking task providing a set of quantitative indices that enable clinically interpretable scores. This study aims to define a set of features and models that help to characterise hypokinetic dysarthria (HD). These incorporate the neuroscientific knowhow semantically and quantitatively to be used in clinical decision support tools that provide mechanistic insight on the processes involved in speech production, incorporating into the algorithmic element neuromotor considerations that add to better interpretability, consequently leading to improved clinical decisions and diagnosis. An overview of the acoustic signal processing algorithms for use in speech articulation and phonation system inversion regarding neuromotor disorder assessment is provided. An algorithmic methodology for model inversion and exploration has been proposed for the functional characterization and system inversion of each subsystem involved under the neuro-biomechanical foundations exposed before. A description of the vocal fold biomechanics using the glottal source, and formant dynamics provides the base for specific mapping to articulation kinematics. The statistical methods used in performance evaluation are based on three-way comparisons and transversal and longitudinal assessment by classical hypothesis testing. Three related experimental studies are shown to empirically illustrate the potential of phonation and articulation analysis: the characterization of PD from glottal biomechanics based on the amplitude distributions of the glottal flow and on the vocal fold body stiffness in assessing the efficiency of transcranial magnetic stimulation, and the description of PD dysarthria through an articulation projection model. The results from the biomechanical analysis of phonation showed that the behaviour of glottal source amplitude distributions from PD and healthy controls using three-way comparisons and hierarchical clustering were essentially distinguishable from those from normative young participants with the best accuracy scores produced by SVM classifiers of 94.8% (males) and 92.2% (females). Nevertheless, PD participants were barely separable from age-matched controls, possibly pointing to confounding factors due to age. The outcomes from using vocal fold stiffness in assessing the efficiency of transcranial magnetic stimulation showed mixed results, as some PD participants reflected clear improvements in phonation stability after stimulation, whereas some others did not. Some cases of sham controls experienced also minor improvements of unknown origin, possibly expressing a placebo effect. The overall results on the efficiency of stimulation showed an accuracy global score of 67% over the 18 cases studied. The results from articulation projection modelling showed the possibility of formulating personalised models for PD and control participants to transform acoustic formant dynamics into articulation kinematics. This might open the possibility of characterising PD dysarthria based on speech audio records. The most remarkable findings of the study include the determination of the glottal source amplitude distribution behaviour of normative and PD participants; the impact of age effects in phonation as a confounding factor in neuromotor disorder characterization; the importance of ensuring that the classification of speech dysarthria is based on principles that can be explained and interpreted; the need of taking into account the effects of medication when framing new classification experiments; the potential of using EEG-band decomposition to analyse vocal fold stiffness correlates, as well as the possibility of using these descriptions in longitudinal monitoring of treatment efficiency; the feasibility of establishing a relationship between acoustic and kinematic variables by projection model inversion; and the potential of these descriptions for estimating neuromotor activities in midbrain related to phonation and articulation activity. The most important outcome to be brought forth from the thesis is that the methodology used throughout the project uses a bottom-up approach based on speech model inversion at the acoustical, biomechanical, and neuromotor levels allowing to estimate glottal signals, biomechanical correlates, and neuromotor activity from speech alone, establishing a common neuromechanical characterisation framework on its own

LIPIcs, Volume 251, ITCS 2023, Complete Volume

LIPIcs, Volume 251, ITCS 2023, Complete Volum