23,574 research outputs found
The Industry and Policy Context for Digital Games for Empowerment and Inclusion:Market Analysis, Future Prospects and Key Challenges in Videogames, Serious Games and Gamification
The effective use of digital games for empowerment and social inclusion (DGEI) of people and communities at risk of exclusion will be shaped by, and may influence the development of a range of sectors that supply products, services, technology and research. The principal industries that would appear to be implicated are the 'videogames' industry, and an emerging 'serious games' industry. The videogames industry is an ecosystem of developers, publishers and other service providers drawn from the interactive media, software and broader ICT industry that services the mainstream leisure market in games, The 'serious games' industry is a rather fragmented and growing network of firms, users, research and policy makers from a variety of sectors. This emerging industry is are trying to develop knowledge, products, services and a market for the use of digital games, and products inspired by digital games, for a range of non-leisure applications. This report provides a summary of the state of play of these industries, their trajectories and the challenges they face. It also analyses the contribution they could make to exploiting digital games for empowerment and social inclusion. Finally, it explores existing policy towards activities in these industries and markets, and draws conclusions as to the future policy relevance of engaging with them to support innovation and uptake of effective digital game-based approaches to empowerment and social inclusion.JRC.J.3-Information Societ
Optimisation and Decision Support during the Conceptual Stage of Building Design
Merged with duplicate record 10026.1/726 on 28.02.2017 by CS (TIS)Modern building design is complex and involves many different disciplines operating in a
fragmented manner. Appropriate computer-based decision support (DS) tools are sought
that can raise the level of integration of different activities at the conceptual stage, in order
to help create better designs solutions. This project investigates opportunities that exist for
using techniques based upon the Genetic Algorithm (GA) to support critical activities of
conceptual building design (CBD). Collective independent studies have shown that the
GA is a powerful optimisation and exploratory search technique with widespread
application. The GA is essentially very simple yet it offers robustness and domain
independence. The GA efficiently searches a domain to exploit highly suitable
information. It maintains multiple solutions to problems simultaneously and is well suited
to non-linear problems and those of a discontinuous nature found in engineering design.
The literature search first examines traditional approaches to supporting conceptual design.
Existing GA techniques and applications are discussed which include pioneering studies in
the field of detailed structural design. Broader GA studies are also reported which have
demonstrated possibilities for investigating geometrical, topological and member size
variation. The tasks and goals of conceptual design are studied. A rationale is introduced,
aimed at enabling the GA to be applied in a manner that provides the most effective
support to the designer. Numerical experiments with floor planning are presented. These
studies provide a basic foundation for a subsequent design support system (DSS) capable
of generating structural design concepts.
A hierarchical Structured GA (SGA) created by Dasgupta et al [1] is investigated to
support the generation of diverse structural design concepts. The SGA supports variation
in the size, shape and structural configuration of a building and in the choice of structural
frame type and floor system. The benefits and limitations of the SGA approach are
discussed. The creation of a prototype DSS system, abritrarily called Designer-Pro
(DPRO), is described. A detailed building design model is introduced which is required
for design development and appraisal. Simplifications, design rationale and generic
component modelling are mentioned. A cost-based single criteria optimisation problem
(SCOP) is created in which other constraints are represented as design parameters.
The thesis describes the importance of the object-oriented programming (OOP) paradigm
for creating a versatile design model and the need for complementary graphical user
interface (GUI) tools to provide human-computer interaction (HCI) capabilities for control
and intelligent design manipulation. Techniques that increase flexibility in the generation
and appraisal of concept are presented. Tools presented include a convergence plot of
design solutions that supports cursor-interrogation to reveal the details of individual
concepts. The graph permits study of design progression, or evolution of optimum design
solutions. A visualisation tool is also presented.
The DPRO system supports multiple operating modes, including single-design appraisal
and enumerative search (ES). Case study examples are provided which demonstrate the
applicability of the DPRO system to a range of different design scenarios. The DPRO
system performs well in all tests. A parametric study demonstrates the potential of the
system for DS. Limitations of the current approach and opportunities to broaden the study
form part of the scope for further work. Some suggestions for further study are made,
based upon newly-emerging techniques
Interactions in Visualizations to Support Knowledge Activation
Humans have several exceptional abilities, one of which is the perceptual tasks of their visual sense. Humans have the unique ability to perceive data and identify patterns, trends, and outliers. This research investigates the design of interactive visualizations to identify the benefits of interacting with information. The research question leading the investigation is how does interacting with visualizations support analytical reasoning of emergent information to activate knowledge? The study uses the theory of distributed cognition and human-information interaction to apply the design science research framework. The motivation behind the research is to identify guidelines for interactive visualizations to enhance a user’s ability to make decisions in dynamic situations and apply knowledge gleaned from the visualization. An experiment is used to analyze the use of an interactive dashboard in a dynamic decision-making situation. The results of this experiment specifically look at the combination of interactions as they support the distribution of cognition over three spaces of a human-visualization cognitive system. The results provide insight into the benefits that interactions have for enhancing analytical reasoning, expanding the use of visualizations beyond communicating or disseminating information. Providing a broad range of interactions that work with multiple views of information increases the opportunities that users have to complete tasks. This research contributes to the information visualization discipline by expanding the focus from representing data to representing and interacting with information. Secondly, my results provide an example of a qualitative assessment based on the value of visualization, in comparison to traditional usability assessment
Supporting adaptiveness of cyber-physical processes through action-based formalisms
Cyber Physical Processes (CPPs) refer to a new generation of business processes enacted in many application environments (e.g., emergency management, smart manufacturing, etc.), in which the presence of Internet-of-Things devices and embedded ICT systems (e.g., smartphones, sensors, actuators) strongly influences the coordination of the real-world entities (e.g., humans, robots, etc.) inhabitating such environments. A Process Management System (PMS) employed for executing CPPs is required to automatically adapt its running processes to anomalous situations and exogenous events by minimising any human intervention. In this paper, we tackle this issue by introducing an approach and an adaptive Cognitive PMS, called SmartPM, which combines process execution monitoring, unanticipated exception detection and automated resolution strategies leveraging on three well-established action-based formalisms developed for reasoning about actions in Artificial Intelligence (AI), including the situation calculus, IndiGolog and automated planning. Interestingly, the use of SmartPM does not require any expertise of the internal working of the AI tools involved in the system
Towards the realisation of an integratated decision support environment for organisational decision making
Traditional decision support systems are based on the paradigm of a single decision maker working at a stand‐alone computer or terminal who has a specific decision to make with a specific goal in mind. Organizational decision support systems aim to support decision makers at all levels of an organization (from executive, middle management managers to operators), who have a variety of decisions to make, with different priorities, often in a distributed and dynamic environment. Such systems need to be designed and developed with extra functionality to meet the challenges such as collaborative working. This paper proposes an Integrated Decision Support Environment (IDSE) for organizational decision making. The IDSE distinguishes itself from traditional decision support systems in that it can flexibly configure and re‐configure its functions to support various decision applications. IDSE is an open software platform which allows its users to define their own decision processes and choose their own exiting decision tools to be integrated into the platform. The IDSE is designed and developed based on distributed client/server networking, with a multi‐tier integration framework for consistent information exchange and sharing, seamless process co‐ordination and synchronisation, and quick access to packaged and legacy systems. The prototype of the IDSE demonstrates good performance in agile response to fast changing decision situations
Sonification of Network Traffic Flow for Monitoring and Situational Awareness
Maintaining situational awareness of what is happening within a network is
challenging, not least because the behaviour happens within computers and
communications networks, but also because data traffic speeds and volumes are
beyond human ability to process. Visualisation is widely used to present
information about the dynamics of network traffic dynamics. Although it
provides operators with an overall view and specific information about
particular traffic or attacks on the network, it often fails to represent the
events in an understandable way. Visualisations require visual attention and so
are not well suited to continuous monitoring scenarios in which network
administrators must carry out other tasks. Situational awareness is critical
and essential for decision-making in the domain of computer network monitoring
where it is vital to be able to identify and recognize network environment
behaviours.Here we present SoNSTAR (Sonification of Networks for SiTuational
AwaReness), a real-time sonification system to be used in the monitoring of
computer networks to support the situational awareness of network
administrators. SoNSTAR provides an auditory representation of all the TCP/IP
protocol traffic within a network based on the different traffic flows between
between network hosts. SoNSTAR raises situational awareness levels for computer
network defence by allowing operators to achieve better understanding and
performance while imposing less workload compared to visual techniques. SoNSTAR
identifies the features of network traffic flows by inspecting the status flags
of TCP/IP packet headers and mapping traffic events to recorded sounds to
generate a soundscape representing the real-time status of the network traffic
environment. Listening to the soundscape allows the administrator to recognise
anomalous behaviour quickly and without having to continuously watch a computer
screen.Comment: 17 pages, 7 figures plus supplemental material in Github repositor
Virtual Reality Games for Motor Rehabilitation
This paper presents a fuzzy logic based method to track user satisfaction without the need for devices to monitor users physiological conditions. User satisfaction is the key to any product’s acceptance; computer applications and video games provide a unique opportunity to provide a tailored environment for each user to better suit their needs. We have implemented a non-adaptive fuzzy logic model of emotion, based on the emotional component of the Fuzzy Logic Adaptive Model of Emotion (FLAME) proposed by El-Nasr, to estimate player emotion in UnrealTournament 2004. In this paper we describe the implementation of this system and present the results of one of several play tests. Our research contradicts the current literature that suggests physiological measurements are needed. We show that it is possible to use a software only method to estimate user emotion
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