Engaging with 'impact' agendas? Reflections on storytelling as knowledge exchange

The ‘impact agenda’, that is the whole gamut of initiatives related to knowledge exchange and public engagement that have been articulated in recent years, has had and continues to have a significant shaping influence on the way in which academics carry out their research. Within a UK context, the Research Excellence Framework (2008-2013) has made an explicit engagement with this agenda virtually compulsory for research-active academics by introducing ‘impact’ as a new criteria on which the research performance of universities, departments and individual researchers is assessed. The new emphasis on impact, defined as the ‘demonstrable contribution’ that research makes ‘to society and the economy’ beyond specialist academic audiences, has generated much discussion and controversy among academics. The ‘impact agenda’ has been critiqued on a number of grounds, ranging from diluting standards of academic excellence (Jump 2012), to limiting academic freedom by tying fundable academic enquiry to policy objectives, to concerns about the difficulties and costs involved in assessing ‘impact’ (Martin 2011). The widespread perception that academic autonomy is increasingly threatened by the twin forces of ‘audit culture’ and the commodification of higher education has been exacerbated by the broader climate of economic austerity and related cuts in university funding. Meanwhile, ‘impact’ itself remains a poorly understood and nebulous concept even as ‘impact case studies’ are embedded within REF criteria and scores. The difficulty in clearly defining the rules of the game stems from the fact that each discipline, research community and individual researcher has their own notion of ‘impact’ as it pertains to their work. Nonetheless, there is a real danger that lack of clarity, compounded with the obligatory compliance to impact assessment, may encourage a strategic ‘game-playing’ and a random incentivisation of short-term ‘impact’ activities by university management, rather than a vision of what meaningful engagement with non-academic publics may look like. In the light of this, the basic aim of this chapter is to reflect critically on the difficulties of implementing impact agendas with recourse to a Research Networking initiative (Translating Russian and East European Cultures), funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). The chapter focuses on knowledge exchange, since a key and recurring point of reflection throughout the initiative concerned the nature and practice of knowledge exchange (cf. Mitton et al. 2007) across academic and non-academic ‘communities of practice’ (Wenger 1998). This topic is explored here though a case study of one particular strand of the TREEC Network Initiative dedicated to storytelling. The heart of the chapter reflects on storytelling as a way to facilitate ‘knowledge exchange’, as well as on the ability of the storytelling events organised to bring together different publics. Whilst critical of ‘impact agendas’, I proceed from the position that, as publicly funded researchers, academics have a responsibility to contribute to the wider society through their knowledge, skills and resources, and that beyond strategic compliance to impact assessment ‘knowledge exchange’, broadly defined, has always been and should remain an integral part of university activities

Adapting Game Mechanics with Micro-Machinations

In early game development phases game designers adjust game rules in a rapid, iterative and flexible way. In later phases, when software prototypes are available, play testing provides more detailed feedback about player experience. More often than not, the realized and the intended gameplay emerging from game software differ. Unfortunately, adjusting it is hard because designers lack a means for efficiently defining, fine-tuning and balancing game mechanics. The language Machinations provides a graphical notation for expressing the rules of game economies that fits with a designer’s understanding and vocabulary, but is limited to design itself. Micro-Mach

Evaluation of Visitor Experience at the Tower Bridge Exhibition

We worked with the Tower Bridge Exhibition to determine visitor comprehension and satisfaction on recent redesigns of their exhibits. Using a combination of surveys and observation, we found that visitor demographics have not changed and that visitors described the exhibit content as too easy, and engaged with exhibit contents and hosts less than expected, yet still found the Tower Bridge Exhibition enjoyable. Our recommendations included increasing the visibility and augmenting the information of existing exhibits, and increasing host interaction with visitors

Work Hard, Play Hard: Collecting Acceptability Annotations through a 3D Game

Corpus-based studies on acceptability judgements have always stimulated the interest of researchers, both in theoretical and computational fields. Some approaches focused on spontaneous judgements collected through different types of tasks, others on data annotated through crowd-sourcing platforms, still others relied on expert annotated data available from the literature. The release of CoLA corpus, a large-scale corpus of sentences extracted from linguistic handbooks as examples of acceptable/non acceptable phenomena in English, has revived interest in the reliability of judgements of linguistic experts vs. non-experts. Several issues are still open. In this work, we contribute to this debate by presenting a 3D video game that was used to collect acceptability judgments on Italian sentences. We analyse the resulting annotations in terms of agreement among players and by comparing them with experts{'} acceptability judgments. We also discuss different game settings to assess their impact on participants{'} motivation and engagement. The final dataset containing 1,062 sentences, which were selected based on majority voting, is released for future research and comparisons

Applying Game UX Techniques to Network Security Tools

This project describes the design and development of a game-style interface for Core Security’s Core Impact Pro software. We identified ways to improve the current interface with commonly used techniques from games and developed a prototype in which we implemented these techniques to make Core Impact Pro easier to use and understand. A user study with the prototype showed that users rated our interface better than the current interface and within twenty minutes of use were on average able to answer more questions regarding the state of the network accurately

Smart hospital emergency system via mobile-based requesting services

In recent years, the UK’s emergency call and response has shown elements of great strain as of today. The strain on emergency call systems estimated by a 9 million calls (including both landline and mobile) made in 2014 alone. Coupled with an increasing population and cuts in government funding, this has resulted in lower percentages of emergency response vehicles at hand and longer response times. In this paper, we highlight the main challenges of emergency services and overview of previous solutions. In addition, we propose a new system call Smart Hospital Emergency System (SHES). The main aim of SHES is to save lives through improving communications between patient and emergency services. Utilising the latest of technologies and algorithms within SHES is aiming to increase emergency communication throughput, while reducing emergency call systems issues and making the process of emergency response more efficient. Utilising health data held within a personal smartphone, and internal tracked data (GPU, Accelerometer, Gyroscope etc.), SHES aims to process the mentioned data efficiently, and securely, through automatic communications with emergency services, ultimately reducing communication bottlenecks. Live video-streaming through real-time video communication protocols is also a focus of SHES to improve initial communications between emergency services and patients. A prototype of this system has been developed. The system has been evaluated by a preliminary usability, reliability, and communication performance study

Psicolinguística da AI, Psicolinguística versus código de máquina

Abstract: I will examine the background of the language phylogeny in emerging Homo Sapiens as a fast, bipedal, long-distance runner in Black Africa;, followed by language psychogenesis in children from their gestation twenty-fourth week onward. I will concentrate on the audio-visual machiness impact,  Lacan’s mirror stage,  AV machines, the discontinuity between real and virtual realities, the remote control and AI machines as smart speakers and smart homes.  In addition, I will discuss the following questions: Is the Machine beyond human intelligence? Is the human individual beyond Homo Sapiens? Is the human community beyond social contract? My working hypotheses on education within phylogenetic psycholinguistics are built on the following topics: Tomorrow’s AI class (unit and room); guided self-learning and who is the guide; can transference and countertransference take place in AI-guided self-learning? Can a human subject develop such transference/countertransference with a machine? Can a machine “play the game”? In conclusion, I will debate “The utopian vision of an improved human being versus the dystopic vision of human beings and human communities totally enslaved to AI machines. Keywords: AI; linguistic phylogeny; guided self-learning; (counter)-transference; enslaved-to-machinesResumo: Examinarei os antecedentes da filogenia da linguagem no Homo Sapiens emergente como um bípede, corredor rápido e de longa distância na África Negra; seguido pela psicogênese da linguagem em crianças a partir da vigésima quarta semana de gestação. Vou me concentrar no impacto das máquinas audiovisuais, o palco do espelho de Lacan, as máquinas AV, a descontinuidade entre realidades reais e virtuais, o controle remoto e as máquinas de IA como alto-falantes inteligentes e casas inteligentes. Além disso, discutirei as seguintes questões: A Máquina está além da inteligência humana? O indivíduo humano está além do Homo Sapiens? A comunidade humana está além do contrato social? Minhas hipóteses de trabalho sobre educação dentro da psicolinguística filogenética são construídas nos seguintes tópicos: Aula de IA de amanhã (unidade e sala); autoaprendizagem guiada e quem é o guia; a transferência e a contratransferência podem ocorrer na autoaprendizagem guiada por IA? Um sujeito humano pode desenvolver tal transferência/contratransferência com uma máquina? Uma máquina pode “jogar o jogo”? Para concluir, debaterei “A visão utópica de um ser humano melhorado versus a visão distópica de seres humanos e comunidades humanas totalmente escravizadas por máquinas de IA.   Palavras-chave: IA; filogenia linguística; autoaprendizagem orientada; (contra)-transferência; escravizados a máquinas