12,367 research outputs found
Using technology in service delivery to families, children and young people
This paper provides an overview of how the innovative use of technology can add value to service delivery in organisations working with families, children and young people.Key messages:Most Australians have access to the Internet and use mobile devices to connect from anywhere, at any time. Research suggests that even isolated and marginalised groups are using technology in their everyday lives.For some groups (e.g., young people), technology may be their preferred method of communication.There appears to be a difference between how people are using the Internet (regularly, from anywhere, connecting with social networks, investigating services) and how some organisations are engaging with it (infrequently, in one direction).Technology works best when used to augment or improve existing services for clients, or to offer innovative approaches to existing services.Technology can be used in diverse ways for organisational improvement (e.g., remote access, staff training, professional development) or client services (e.g., online counselling, SMS appointment reminders, access to resources).Using technology does not necessarily involve large monetary investments or reinventing the wheel in terms of policy and procedures. Often it is a matter of adapting and refining existing services and policies to better suit the online world.Incorporating technology into services takes time, and will need continued assessment and refinement to be successful
Visions and Challenges in Managing and Preserving Data to Measure Quality of Life
Health-related data analysis plays an important role in self-knowledge,
disease prevention, diagnosis, and quality of life assessment. With the advent
of data-driven solutions, a myriad of apps and Internet of Things (IoT) devices
(wearables, home-medical sensors, etc) facilitates data collection and provide
cloud storage with a central administration. More recently, blockchain and
other distributed ledgers became available as alternative storage options based
on decentralised organisation systems. We bring attention to the human data
bleeding problem and argue that neither centralised nor decentralised system
organisations are a magic bullet for data-driven innovation if individual,
community and societal values are ignored. The motivation for this position
paper is to elaborate on strategies to protect privacy as well as to encourage
data sharing and support open data without requiring a complex access protocol
for researchers. Our main contribution is to outline the design of a
self-regulated Open Health Archive (OHA) system with focus on quality of life
(QoL) data.Comment: DSS 2018: Data-Driven Self-Regulating System
Invisible Influence: Artificial Intelligence and the Ethics of Adaptive Choice Architectures
For several years, scholars have (for good reason) been largely preoccupied with worries about the use of artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) tools to make decisions about us. Only recently has significant attention turned to a potentially more alarming problem: the use of AI/ML to influence our decision-making. The contexts in which we make decisionsâwhat behavioral economists call our choice architecturesâare increasingly technologically-laden. Which is to say: algorithms increasingly determine, in a wide variety of contexts, both the sets of options we choose from and the way those options are framed. Moreover, artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) makes it possible for those options and their framingsâthe choice architecturesâto be tailored to the individual chooser. They are constructed based on information collected about our individual preferences, interests, aspirations, and vulnerabilities, with the goal of influencing our decisions. At the same time, because we are habituated to these technologies we pay them little notice. They are, as philosophers of technology put it, transparent to usâeffectively invisible. I argue that this invisible layer of technological mediation, which structures and influences our decision-making, renders us deeply susceptible to manipulation. Absent a guarantee that these technologies are not being used to manipulate and exploit, individuals will have little reason to trust them
How a Diverse Research Ecosystem Has Generated New Rehabilitation Technologies: Review of NIDILRRâs Rehabilitation Engineering Research Centers
Over 50 million United States citizens (1 in 6 people in the US) have a developmental, acquired, or degenerative disability. The average US citizen can expect to live 20% of his or her life with a disability. Rehabilitation technologies play a major role in improving the quality of life for people with a disability, yet widespread and highly challenging needs remain. Within the US, a major effort aimed at the creation and evaluation of rehabilitation technology has been the Rehabilitation Engineering Research Centers (RERCs) sponsored by the National Institute on Disability, Independent Living, and Rehabilitation Research. As envisioned at their conception by a panel of the National Academy of Science in 1970, these centers were intended to take a âtotal approach to rehabilitationâ, combining medicine, engineering, and related science, to improve the quality of life of individuals with a disability. Here, we review the scope, achievements, and ongoing projects of an unbiased sample of 19 currently active or recently terminated RERCs. Specifically, for each center, we briefly explain the needs it targets, summarize key historical advances, identify emerging innovations, and consider future directions. Our assessment from this review is that the RERC program indeed involves a multidisciplinary approach, with 36 professional fields involved, although 70% of research and development staff are in engineering fields, 23% in clinical fields, and only 7% in basic science fields; significantly, 11% of the professional staff have a disability related to their research. We observe that the RERC program has substantially diversified the scope of its work since the 1970âs, addressing more types of disabilities using more technologies, and, in particular, often now focusing on information technologies. RERC work also now often views users as integrated into an interdependent society through technologies that both people with and without disabilities co-use (such as the internet, wireless communication, and architecture). In addition, RERC research has evolved to view users as able at improving outcomes through learning, exercise, and plasticity (rather than being static), which can be optimally timed. We provide examples of rehabilitation technology innovation produced by the RERCs that illustrate this increasingly diversifying scope and evolving perspective. We conclude by discussing growth opportunities and possible future directions of the RERC program
A tool to measure engineering students' design strategies and abilities
Malaysia is moving from service-based industries to knowledge-based industries to achieve Vision 2020. This is also in line with innovation-led economy and globalization. Hence, there is a pressing need to transform the current engineering education system to meet the ever-growing roles and responsibilities of contemporary engineers. Design is central to engineering activity because students can apply the theoretical knowledge into practice. Students' engineering design knowledge and abilities are unknown when they enroll into the engineering programs. These engineering programs are either too low or too advanced for the students' design abilities. Hence, dropout rates in the engineering programs escalate each year. The invention is an online questionnaire which will assist in determining students' engineering design knowledge and abilities. It will guide engineering faculties in identifying suitable candidates for their engineering program through the scores obtained by the students. The scores will determine the students' level of engineering design knowledge. This will function as a mechanism for the faculties to filter the candidates' knowledge of engineering design and reduce the number of dropouts from the engineering program
Reputation Agent: Prompting Fair Reviews in Gig Markets
Our study presents a new tool, Reputation Agent, to promote fairer reviews
from requesters (employers or customers) on gig markets. Unfair reviews,
created when requesters consider factors outside of a worker's control, are
known to plague gig workers and can result in lost job opportunities and even
termination from the marketplace. Our tool leverages machine learning to
implement an intelligent interface that: (1) uses deep learning to
automatically detect when an individual has included unfair factors into her
review (factors outside the worker's control per the policies of the market);
and (2) prompts the individual to reconsider her review if she has incorporated
unfair factors. To study the effectiveness of Reputation Agent, we conducted a
controlled experiment over different gig markets. Our experiment illustrates
that across markets, Reputation Agent, in contrast with traditional approaches,
motivates requesters to review gig workers' performance more fairly. We discuss
how tools that bring more transparency to employers about the policies of a gig
market can help build empathy thus resulting in reasoned discussions around
potential injustices towards workers generated by these interfaces. Our vision
is that with tools that promote truth and transparency we can bring fairer
treatment to gig workers.Comment: 12 pages, 5 figures, The Web Conference 2020, ACM WWW 202
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