1,517 research outputs found
AI: Limits and Prospects of Artificial Intelligence
The emergence of artificial intelligence has triggered enthusiasm and promise of boundless opportunities as much as uncertainty about its limits. The contributions to this volume explore the limits of AI, describe the necessary conditions for its functionality, reveal its attendant technical and social problems, and present some existing and potential solutions. At the same time, the contributors highlight the societal and attending economic hopes and fears, utopias and dystopias that are associated with the current and future development of artificial intelligence
Designing User-Centric Private Conversation Methods in the Metaverse
The metaverse is an emerging medium for remote interactions, allowing users to engage in immersive experiences with others in virtual environments, such as attending concerts, business meetings, or social gatherings with friends. Private conversation is an important feature that improves the overall experience in the metaverse. This essential element of virtual interactions allows the exchange of sensitive information and promotes self-disclosure, a key factor in building interpersonal relationships. However, current methods for establishing private conversations have several limitations. In Private Talk, floating icons above the users' avatars do not feel natural and break the immersion. Meanwhile, creating private rooms and teleporting to them disrupts the flow of experience.
The goal of this thesis is to design private conversations in the metaverse. First, we surveyed existing methods for establishing private conversations by assessing popular applications and online sources. Second, we developed our own application where we implemented two baseline methods for private conversations, Private Talk and private room. Next, we conducted a user study where we invited 12 participants to evaluate the baseline methods and propose their own methods. We employed questionnaires and conducted interviews to gather suggestions and valuable insights. A thematic analysis of the interview transcripts identified six themes; minimizing background noise, isolation for enhanced feeling of privacy, indicators and distinctions of privacy mode, easy and natural methods in virtual environments, and privacy concerns. From our results, we developed design implications for improving private conversation methods in the metaverse. Our findings aim to guide the design of the future metaverse
Taylor University Catalog 2023-2024
The 2023-2024 academic catalog of Taylor University in Upland, Indiana.https://pillars.taylor.edu/catalogs/1128/thumbnail.jp
Active Curation: algorithmic awareness for cultural commentary on social media platforms
This thesis examines how everyday social media users engage in curation practices to influence what news and information they see on their social feeds. It finds that cultural commentary content can act as a proxy for news on these platforms, contributing to public debate and the fifth estate.
While much research has explored the implications of algorithmically driven recommender systems for content personalisation and news visibility, this thesis investigates a gap in our understanding of how social media users understand and respond to algorithmic processes, customising their feed in their day-to-day curation practices on these platforms. It explores how a group of Australians aged 18–30 respond to algorithmic recommender systems and how effective their practices are in shaping their social feeds. The study used a mixed methods approach that included a digital ethnography of social media use and a comparative content analysis of social media news exposure and topics in the legacy news cycle.
This study develops a taxonomy of consumptive curation practices that users can engage in to influence their personalised social feeds. The study also examines users’ motivations for this curation and how effective these are in filtering news and ‘cultural commentary’ content into or out of their feed.
The findings demonstrate that algorithmic literacy is a driver of active curation practices, where users consciously engage in practices designed to influence recommender processes that customise their social feed. They also demonstrate the prevalence of non-journalistic news-related content or ‘cultural commentary’ on social media platforms in the form of hot takes, memes, and satire, and how this cultural commentary can act as a proxy for the news, even for users who are news avoidant. These findings address gaps in our understanding of news discovery and consumption on social media platforms, with implications for how news businesses can reach emerging news audiences
Automatic Generation of Personalized Recommendations in eCoaching
Denne avhandlingen omhandler eCoaching for personlig livsstilsstøtte i sanntid ved bruk av informasjons- og kommunikasjonsteknologi. Utfordringen er å designe, utvikle og teknisk evaluere en prototyp av en intelligent eCoach som automatisk genererer personlige og evidensbaserte anbefalinger til en bedre livsstil. Den utviklede løsningen er fokusert på forbedring av fysisk aktivitet. Prototypen bruker bærbare medisinske aktivitetssensorer. De innsamlede data blir semantisk representert og kunstig intelligente algoritmer genererer automatisk meningsfulle, personlige og kontekstbaserte anbefalinger for mindre stillesittende tid. Oppgaven bruker den veletablerte designvitenskapelige forskningsmetodikken for å utvikle teoretiske grunnlag og praktiske implementeringer. Samlet sett fokuserer denne forskningen på teknologisk verifisering snarere enn klinisk evaluering.publishedVersio
Southern Adventist University Undergraduate Catalog 2022-2023
Southern Adventist University\u27s undergraduate catalog for the academic year 2022-2023.https://knowledge.e.southern.edu/undergrad_catalog/1121/thumbnail.jp
Moving usable security research out of the lab: evaluating the use of VR studies for real-world authentication research
Empirical evaluations of real-world research artefacts that derive results from observations and experiments are a core aspect of usable security research. Expert interviews as part of this thesis revealed that the costs associated with developing and maintaining physical research artefacts often amplify human-centred usability and security research challenges. On top of that, ethical and legal barriers often make usability and security research in the field infeasible. Researchers have begun simulating real-life conditions in the lab to contribute to ecological validity. However, studies of this type are still restricted to what can be replicated in physical laboratory settings. Furthermore, historically, user study subjects were mainly recruited from local areas only when evaluating hardware prototypes. The human-centred research communities have recognised and partially addressed these challenges using online studies such as surveys that allow for the recruitment of large and diverse samples as well as learning about user behaviour. However, human-centred security research involving hardware prototypes is often concerned with human factors and their impact on the prototypes’ usability and security, which cannot be studied using traditional online surveys.
To work towards addressing the current challenges and facilitating research in this space, this thesis explores if – and how – virtual reality (VR) studies can be used for real-world usability and security research. It first validates the feasibility and then demonstrates the use of VR studies for human-centred usability and security research through six empirical studies, including remote and lab VR studies as well as video prototypes as part of online surveys.
It was found that VR-based usability and security evaluations of authentication prototypes, where users provide touch, mid-air, and eye-gaze input, greatly match the findings from the original real-world evaluations. This thesis further investigated the effectiveness of VR studies by exploring three core topics in the authentication domain: First, the challenges around in-the-wild shoulder surfing studies were addressed. Two novel VR shoulder surfing methods were implemented to contribute towards realistic shoulder surfing research and explore the use of VR studies for security evaluations. This was found to allow researchers to provide a bridge over the methodological gap between lab and field studies. Second, the ethical and legal barriers when conducting in situ usability research on authentication systems were addressed. It was found that VR studies can represent plausible authentication environments and that a prototype’s in situ usability evaluation results deviate from traditional lab evaluations. Finally, this thesis contributes a novel evaluation method to remotely study interactive VR replicas of real-world prototypes, allowing researchers to move experiments that involve hardware prototypes out of physical laboratories and potentially increase a sample’s diversity and size.
The thesis concludes by discussing the implications of using VR studies for prototype usability and security evaluations. It lays the foundation for establishing VR studies as a powerful, well-evaluated research method and unfolds its methodological advantages and disadvantages
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Sonic heritage: listening to the past
History is so often told through objects, images and photographs, but the potential of sounds to reveal place and space is often neglected. Our research project ‘Sonic Palimpsest’1 explores the potential of sound to evoke impressions and new understandings of the past, to embrace the sonic as a tool to understand what was, in a way that can complement and add to our predominant visual understandings. Our work includes the expansion of the Oral History archives held at Chatham Dockyard to include women’s voices and experiences, and the creation of sonic works to engage the public with their heritage. Our research highlights the social and cultural value of oral history and field recordings in the transmission of knowledge to both researchers and the public. Together these recordings document how buildings and spaces within the dockyard were used and experienced by those who worked there. We can begin to understand the social and cultural roles of these buildings within the community, both past and present
Behavior quantification as the missing link between fields: Tools for digital psychiatry and their role in the future of neurobiology
The great behavioral heterogeneity observed between individuals with the same
psychiatric disorder and even within one individual over time complicates both
clinical practice and biomedical research. However, modern technologies are an
exciting opportunity to improve behavioral characterization. Existing
psychiatry methods that are qualitative or unscalable, such as patient surveys
or clinical interviews, can now be collected at a greater capacity and analyzed
to produce new quantitative measures. Furthermore, recent capabilities for
continuous collection of passive sensor streams, such as phone GPS or
smartwatch accelerometer, open avenues of novel questioning that were
previously entirely unrealistic. Their temporally dense nature enables a
cohesive study of real-time neural and behavioral signals.
To develop comprehensive neurobiological models of psychiatric disease, it
will be critical to first develop strong methods for behavioral quantification.
There is huge potential in what can theoretically be captured by current
technologies, but this in itself presents a large computational challenge --
one that will necessitate new data processing tools, new machine learning
techniques, and ultimately a shift in how interdisciplinary work is conducted.
In my thesis, I detail research projects that take different perspectives on
digital psychiatry, subsequently tying ideas together with a concluding
discussion on the future of the field. I also provide software infrastructure
where relevant, with extensive documentation.
Major contributions include scientific arguments and proof of concept results
for daily free-form audio journals as an underappreciated psychiatry research
datatype, as well as novel stability theorems and pilot empirical success for a
proposed multi-area recurrent neural network architecture.Comment: PhD thesis cop
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