Revealing the Vicious Circle of Disengaged User Acceptance: A SaaS Provider's Perspective

User acceptance tests (UAT) are an integral part of many different software engineering methodologies. In this paper, we examine the influence of UATs on the relationship between users and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications, which are continuously delivered rather than rolled out during a one-off signoff process. Based on an exploratory qualitative field study at a multinational SaaS provider in Denmark, we show that UATs often address the wrong problem in that positive user acceptance may actually indicate a negative user experience. Hence, SaaS providers should be careful not to rest on what we term disengaged user acceptance. Instead, we outline an approach that purposefully queries users for ambivalent emotions that evoke constructive criticism, in order to facilitate a discourse that favors the continuous innovation of a SaaS system. We discuss theoretical and practical implications of our approach for the study of user engagement in testing SaaS applications

Phyphox smartphone labs in physics education: Breaking the vicious circle of student disengagement

Since the late 1960s, there has been a consensus that rote science learning has long-range negative consequences for student learning. Across the Western world, a number of well-funded reforms attempted to address this problem. Yet, the vicious circle of student science disengagement has continued. We believe that one of the reasons for this phenomenon is that, by and large, science teaching hasn’t changed sufficiently to meet the changing needs of the 21st century students. While many novel science education technologies have emerged lately, few secondary teachers have taken full advantage of these innovative tools. Surprisingly, instead of using already available technology, such as phyphox smartphone app (Staacks et al., 2018), to alter how secondary students engage with physics learning, technology is too often used to support old ways of learning physics, such as passively watching videos of recorded experiments or doing cookbook labs with computer simulations. Even the COVID-19 school closures and remote teaching are yet to become catalysts for re-evaluating secondary student science engagement. Paradoxically, as students become more engaged with their new digital tools (e.g., smartphones) in their personal lives, they become more disengaged from their formal K-12 science learning. We discuss how smartphones, novel technologies that 21st century students already have in their pockets and use daily for social interactions, can help break the vicious circle of secondary science disengagement by inspiring students to do data-driven science at school and at home (Milner-Bolotin & Milner, 2022; Milner-Bolotin et al., 2021). First, we propose a pedagogical approach for using smartphones in a science classroom to conduct hands-on inquiry that focuses on experimental design, data collection, and analysis. Second, we describe our experience of using this approach in a secondary physics classroom, as well as during the province-wide annual Physics Olympics event that takes place at the University of British Columbia (Milner-Bolotin et al., 2019). Third, we discuss how science educators can support new and practicing teachers in implementing this novel smartphone technology – phyphox – in their classrooms through mentorship during the physics teacher education and professional communities of practice. REFERENCES Milner-Bolotin, M., Liao, T., & McKenna, J. (2019). UBC Physics Olympics: Forty-one years of province-wide physics outreach. International Newsletter on Physics Education: International Commission on Physics Education - International Union of Pure and Applied Physics, 70(November), 5-6. https://mailchi.mp/a448561565a8/icpe-newsletter-issue-70-november-2019?e=[UNIQID] Milner-Bolotin, M., & Milner, V. (2022). Smartphone applications as a catalyst for active learning in chemistry: Investigating the Ideal Gas Law. In Y. J. Dori, C. Ngai, & G. Szteinberg (Eds.), Digital tools for equitable in person and remote chemistry learning (pp. 20). Royal Society of Chemistry. Milner-Bolotin, M., Milner, V., Tasnadi, A. M., Weck, H. T., Gromas, I., & Ispanovity, P. D. (2021). Contemporary experiments and new devices in physics classrooms. GIREP - Physics Education Conference 2019 Proceedings. http://fiztan.phd.elte.hu/english/student/devices.pdf  Staacks, S., Hütz, S., Heinke, H., & Stampfer, C. (2018). Advanced tools for smartphone-based experiments: phyphox. Physics education, 53(4), 045009. https://doi.org/10.1088/1361-6552/aac05

The Geometry of Concurrent Interaction: Handling Multiple Ports by Way of Multiple Tokens (Long Version)

We introduce a geometry of interaction model for Mazza's multiport interaction combinators, a graph-theoretic formalism which is able to faithfully capture concurrent computation as embodied by process algebras like the $\pi$-calculus. The introduced model is based on token machines in which not one but multiple tokens are allowed to traverse the underlying net at the same time. We prove soundness and adequacy of the introduced model. The former is proved as a simulation result between the token machines one obtains along any reduction sequence. The latter is obtained by a fine analysis of convergence, both in nets and in token machines

Hidden Tree Structure is a Key to the Emergence of Scaling in the World Wide Web

Preferential attachment is the most popular explanation for the emergence of scaling behavior in the World Wide Web, but this explanation has been challenged by the global information hypothesis, the existence of linear preference and the emergence of new big internet companies in the real world. We notice that most websites have an obvious feature that their pages are organized as a tree (namely hidden tree) and hence propose a new model that introduces a hidden tree structure into the Erd\H{o}s-R\'e}yi model by adding a new rule: when one node connects to another, it should also connect to all nodes in the path between these two nodes in the hidden tree. The experimental results show that the degree distribution of the generated graphs would obey power law distributions and have variable high clustering coefficients and variable small average lengths of shortest paths. The proposed model provides an alternative explanation to the emergence of scaling in the World Wide Web without the above-mentioned difficulties, and also explains the "preferential attachment" phenomenon.Comment: 4 Pages, 7 Figure

Human Perceptions of Fairness in Algorithmic Decision Making: A Case Study of Criminal Risk Prediction

As algorithms are increasingly used to make important decisions that affect human lives, ranging from social benefit assignment to predicting risk of criminal recidivism, concerns have been raised about the fairness of algorithmic decision making. Most prior works on algorithmic fairness normatively prescribe how fair decisions ought to be made. In contrast, here, we descriptively survey users for how they perceive and reason about fairness in algorithmic decision making. A key contribution of this work is the framework we propose to understand why people perceive certain features as fair or unfair to be used in algorithms. Our framework identifies eight properties of features, such as relevance, volitionality and reliability, as latent considerations that inform people's moral judgments about the fairness of feature use in decision-making algorithms. We validate our framework through a series of scenario-based surveys with 576 people. We find that, based on a person's assessment of the eight latent properties of a feature in our exemplar scenario, we can accurately (> 85%) predict if the person will judge the use of the feature as fair. Our findings have important implications. At a high-level, we show that people's unfairness concerns are multi-dimensional and argue that future studies need to address unfairness concerns beyond discrimination. At a low-level, we find considerable disagreements in people's fairness judgments. We identify root causes of the disagreements, and note possible pathways to resolve them.Comment: To appear in the Proceedings of the Web Conference (WWW 2018). Code available at https://fate-computing.mpi-sws.org/procedural_fairness

Observational Equivalence and Full Abstraction in the Symmetric Interaction Combinators

The symmetric interaction combinators are an equally expressive variant of Lafont's interaction combinators. They are a graph-rewriting model of deterministic computation. We define two notions of observational equivalence for them, analogous to normal form and head normal form equivalence in the lambda-calculus. Then, we prove a full abstraction result for each of the two equivalences. This is obtained by interpreting nets as certain subsets of the Cantor space, called edifices, which play the same role as Boehm trees in the theory of the lambda-calculus