39 research outputs found

    Designing a New Tactile Display Technology and its Disability Interactions

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    People with visual impairments have a strong desire for a refreshable tactile interface that can provide immediate access to full page of Braille and tactile graphics. Regrettably, existing devices come at a considerable expense and remain out of reach for many. The exorbitant costs associated with current tactile displays stem from their intricate design and the multitude of components needed for their construction. This underscores the pressing need for technological innovation that can enhance tactile displays, making them more accessible and available to individuals with visual impairments. This research thesis delves into the development of a novel tactile display technology known as Tacilia. This technology's necessity and prerequisites are informed by in-depth qualitative engagements with students who have visual impairments, alongside a systematic analysis of the prevailing architectures underpinning existing tactile display technologies. The evolution of Tacilia unfolds through iterative processes encompassing conceptualisation, prototyping, and evaluation. With Tacilia, three distinct products and interactive experiences are explored, empowering individuals to manually draw tactile graphics, generate digitally designed media through printing, and display these creations on a dynamic pin array display. This innovation underscores Tacilia's capability to streamline the creation of refreshable tactile displays, rendering them more fitting, usable, and economically viable for people with visual impairments

    INNOVATIVE DIGITAL START-UPS AND THEIR VENTURE CREATION PROCESS WITH ENABLING DIGITAL PLATFORMS

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    Start-ups have gained media attention since Google, Facebook and Amazon were launched in the 1990s. The book Lean Start-up, published in 2011, was another important milestone for digital start-up literature. As unicorn companies emerge around the world, topics highlighted in the news include the vast amount of capital that digital start-ups are raising, the ways in which these digital ventures are disrupting industries, and their global impact on digital economy. However, digital start-ups, digital venture ideas, and their venture creation process lack a unified venture creation model, as there is a gap in the re-search on entrepreneurial processes in a digital context. This research is an explorative study of the venture creation process of innovative digital start-ups that examines what is missing from entrepreneurial process models in a digital technology context and investi-gates how early stage digital start-ups conduct the venture creation process, starting with the pre-phase of antecedents and ending with the launch and scaling of the venture. The research proposes a novel process model of innovative digital start-up venture crea-tion and describes the nature and patterns of the process. A conceptual model was devel-oped based on the entrepreneurship, information systems, and digital innovation litera-ture and empirically assessed with a multi-method qualitative research design. The data collected from semi-structured interviews, internet sources, and observation field notes covered 34 innovative digital start-ups and their founders. Interviews were conducted in-ternationally in high-ranking start-up ecosystems, and the data were analysed with the-matic analysis and fact-checked by triangulating internet data sources. The contribution to entrepreneurship theory is a new illustrative model of the venture creation process of innovative digital start-ups, including the emergent outcome of the process having a digi-tal artefact at its core (e.g., mobile apps, web-based solutions, digital platforms, software solutions, and digital ecosystems). Digital platforms and their multiple roles in the process are presented, as well as the role of critical events as moderators of the process which trigger new development cycles. During the venture creation process, the recombining of digital technologies, modules, and components enabled by digital infrastructures, plat-forms, and ecosystem partners represent digital technology affordances. This recombina-tion provides opportunities for asset-free development of digital venture ideas

    Computational and Causal Approaches on Social Media and Multimodal Sensing Data: Examining Wellbeing in Situated Contexts

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    A core aspect of our lives is often embedded in the communities we are situated in. The interconnectedness of our interactions and experiences intertwines our situated context with our wellbeing. A better understanding of wellbeing will help us devise proactive and tailored support strategies. However, existing methodologies to assess wellbeing suffer from limitations of scale and timeliness. These limitations are surmountable by social and ubiquitous technologies. Given its ubiquity and wide use, social media can be considered a “passive sensor” that can act as a complementary source of unobtrusive, real-time, and naturalistic data to infer wellbeing. This dissertation leverages social media in concert with multimodal sensing data, which facilitate analyzing dense and longitudinal behavior at scale. This work adopts machine learning, natural language, and causal inference analysis to infer wellbeing of individuals and collectives, particularly in situated communities, such as college campuses and workplaces. Before incorporating sensing modalities in practice, we need to account for confounds. One such confound that might impact behavior change is the phenomenon of “observer effect” --- that individuals may deviate from their typical or otherwise normal behavior because of the awareness of being “monitored”. I study this problem by leveraging the potential of longitudinal and historical behavioral data through social media. Focused on a multimodal sensing study, I conduct a causal study to measure observer effect in social media behavior, and explain the observations through existing theory in psychology and social science. The findings provide recommendations to correcting biases due to observer effect in social media sensing for human behavior and wellbeing. The novelties and contributions of this dissertation are four-fold. First, I use social media data that uniquely captures the behavior of situated communities. Second, I adopt theory-driven computational and causal methods to make conclusive research claims on wellbeing dynamics. Third, I address major challenges with methods to combine social media with multimodal sensing data for a comprehensive understanding of human behavior. Fourth, I draw interpretations and explanations of online-data-driven offline inferences. This dissertation situates the findings in an interdisciplinary context, including psychology and social science, and bears implications from theoretical, practical, design, methodological, and ethical perspectives catering to various stakeholders, including researchers, practitioners, and policymakers.Ph.D

    Investigating communicative dissonance within relationships of adults with Asperger’s Syndrome (ASD Level 1)

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    The key features of Autism Spectrum Conditions (ASC) include marked and lifelong impairments in social interaction. Social interaction is a fundamental component of relationships. Despite the momentum of worldwide research on ASC, there is insufficient empirical study on adults with ASC and their relationships. Therefore, numerous myths, misunderstandings and confusion exist, especially in the area of adults with ASC, and autism-based impacts on the adults with ASC themselves, their relationships, and on the people who are in relationship with them. Relationships that involve people with an ASC are often described as neurodiverse. Neurodiverse relationships that include one person with an ASC and one person without an ASC (i.e., a person who is considered neurotypical) may encounter considerable challenges, given that individuals with ASC have social impairments that interfere with their capacity to engage in, contribute to, and persevere with, the ongoing reciprocal interaction necessary to sustain relationship health. On the other hand, people who are neurotypical (NT) tend to have instinctive social skills. Customarily, for NT individuals, the giving and receiving of emotional support through reciprocity is a fundamental component of interpersonal interaction. These different interaction capacities and requirements, when integrated in one relationship, may be an extensive source of miscommunication. Based on a prior study, this research focused on adults with Asperger’s Syndrome (AS), their close relationships, and characteristics of prompt dependency; (a behaviour that can develop due to lack of independent task initiation skills), accompanied by prompting; (a behaviour used to persuade, encourage, or remind a person to do or say something). The use of an advocacy/participatory approach, in combination with a Dynamic Systems Theory framework, allowed for an investigation of the characteristics of prompting and prompt dependency and/or prompt avoidance within a dynamic system of interpersonal communication. Utilising a concurrent, embedded, transformative mixed methods research design, through a pilot study, and an Internet-based survey complemented by case study interviews, enabled understanding to be gained about the interaction experiences within these relationships. The main conclusions drawn from the study were that the association between different needs, expectancies, and capabilities of the participants within neurodiverse relationships were the catalyst to a requirement to prompt for interaction accompanied by the formation of prompt dependency characteristics. Findings confirmed that unresponsiveness to, and avoidance of, reciprocal interaction on the part of adults with AS and, as a consequence, an absence of emotional connection, were the dominant impetus behind each element of prompting on the part of the adults who are NT (adults who are NT – AWANT) and prompt dependency and/or prompt avoidance on the part of the adults with AS (adults with AS – AWAS). These aspects became intertwined to form a prompt dependency cycle within the interaction of the participants. Entanglement in a prompt dependency cycle was found to trigger additional discordant interaction cycles. An expanded model illustrating the storyline of the prompt dependency cycle and interrelated interaction cycles developed in this study, detailed how entangled interaction can become when caught within the context of a prompt dependency cycle. The findings and related expanded model provide relevant implications for counsellors and therapists working with this population and their relationships. Further investigation of prompt dependency will also benefit student-teacher relationships and assist classroom educators to understand that prompt dependency has the potential to become a lifelong issue which requires extensive attention in the classroom in order to prevent its continuation into adulthood. Greater community awareness regarding the issues faced by individuals within these relationships was also found to be of particular concern

    ICTERI 2020: ІКТ в освіті, дослідженнях та промислових застосуваннях. Інтеграція, гармонізація та передача знань 2020: Матеріали 16-ї Міжнародної конференції. Том II: Семінари. Харків, Україна, 06-10 жовтня 2020 р.

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    This volume represents the proceedings of the Workshops co-located with the 16th International Conference on ICT in Education, Research, and Industrial Applications, held in Kharkiv, Ukraine, in October 2020. It comprises 101 contributed papers that were carefully peer-reviewed and selected from 233 submissions for the five workshops: RMSEBT, TheRMIT, ITER, 3L-Person, CoSinE, MROL. The volume is structured in six parts, each presenting the contributions for a particular workshop. The topical scope of the volume is aligned with the thematic tracks of ICTERI 2020: (I) Advances in ICT Research; (II) Information Systems: Technology and Applications; (III) Academia/Industry ICT Cooperation; and (IV) ICT in Education.Цей збірник представляє матеріали семінарів, які були проведені в рамках 16-ї Міжнародної конференції з ІКТ в освіті, наукових дослідженнях та промислових застосуваннях, що відбулася в Харкові, Україна, у жовтні 2020 року. Він містить 101 доповідь, які були ретельно рецензовані та відібрані з 233 заявок на участь у п'яти воркшопах: RMSEBT, TheRMIT, ITER, 3L-Person, CoSinE, MROL. Збірник складається з шести частин, кожна з яких представляє матеріали для певного семінару. Тематична спрямованість збірника узгоджена з тематичними напрямками ICTERI 2020: (I) Досягнення в галузі досліджень ІКТ; (II) Інформаційні системи: Технології і застосування; (ІІІ) Співпраця в галузі ІКТ між академічними і промисловими колами; і (IV) ІКТ в освіті

    The benefits of biodiversity: Human-wildlife interactions in urban Guyana

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    Worldwide, human populations are growing, the climate is changing, and natural habitat is being converted to alternative land-uses. In particular, urbanisation has both positive and negative implications for society and biodiversity conservation. Within cities, there is increasing evidence that green (e.g. parks, gardens) and blue spaces (e.g. rivers, coast) can benefit human subjective wellbeing by restoring attentional fatigue and reducing stress, while also providing resources to support biodiversity. However, it remains unclear how biodiversity, and other specific features of urban green and blue spaces, enhance or detract from wellbeing. These details are crucial to informing land-use management and policy decisions in towns and cities. Much of the existing evidence originates from the global North, despite biodiversity loss, population growth, and urbanisation rates accelerating in the global South. Drawing on theories and methods from multiple disciplines, this thesis empirically explores relationships between green and blue spaces and human wellbeing in Georgetown, the capital city of Guyana. This biodiversity-rich country in northern South America has the highest rate of suicide worldwide and is poised to transform due to the discovery of vast quantities of off-shore oil. First, I expose a dose-response relationship between patterns of visitor use to urban green and blue spaces and experiential wellbeing, finding that age, safety concerns, and nature-relatedness dictate patterns of use. Second, I show that green and coastal blue spaces are important for bird diversity and human wellbeing respectively, although the two do not relate. Third, I assess how human perceptions of bird diversity, naturalness, sounds, and safety affect wellbeing, influenced by how restorative these spaces are perceived to be. Finally, I use participatory video to triangulate earlier findings, discovering that biodiversity provides a multisensory experience, with place attachment, personal insecurity, and cultural beliefs contributing to wellbeing in green and coastal blue space. This interdisciplinary thesis makes important empirical contributions to the field of biodiversity-wellbeing research, representing the first evidence gathered from neotropical South America. Overall, my results provide a valuable evidence-base to inform the development of interventions (e.g. targeted public health and educational campaigns) in biodiversity-rich cities like Georgetown. From a wider perspective, these findings could be harnessed by policy-makers striving to meet international targets on sustainability while maximising human quality of life at a national scale

    Consortium for Robotics and Unmanned Systems Education and Research (CRUSER) 2019 Annual Report

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    Prepared for: Dr. Brian Bingham, CRUSER DirectorThe Naval Postgraduate School (NPS) Consortium for Robotics and Unmanned Systems Education and Research (CRUSER) provides a collaborative environment and community of interest for the advancement of unmanned systems (UxS) education and research endeavors across the Navy (USN), Marine Corps (USMC) and Department of Defense (DoD). CRUSER is a Secretary of the Navy (SECNAV) initiative to build an inclusive community of interest on the application of unmanned systems (UxS) in military and naval operations. This 2019 annual report summarizes CRUSER activities in its eighth year of operations and highlights future plans.Deputy Undersecretary of the Navy PPOIOffice of Naval Research (ONR)Approved for public release; distribution is unlimited

    Psychoeducational Role of Coaching in developing Emotional Intelligence and Well-Being

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    Istnieje coraz więcej dowodów na to, że coaching może wpłynąć na poprawę inteligencji emocjonalnej i dobrostanu jednostki. Celem niniejszego badania jest analiza roli coachingu jako podejścia wzmacniającego inteligencję emocjonalną i dobrostanu, ze szczególnym uwzględnieniem roli aspektów psychoedukacyjnych w tym procesie. Niniejszą pracę otwiera Część I, w której przedstawiono kontekst badania, dokonano dokładnego przeglądu literatury naukowej dotyczącej pojęć coachingu, dobrostanu, inteligencji emocjonalnej i psychoedukacji, a także umiejscowienia coachingu w różnych kontekstach pedagogicznych. Część II pracy zawiera dokładny opis metodologii badań: projektowania badań, metod, technik i narzędzi badawczych, projektu badań empirycznych oraz procedur gromadzenia i przetwarzania danych. Wyniki badań są następnie zaprezentowane i omówione w części III pracy. Do badań wykorzystano metodę quasi-eksperymentu i ankietę. Ogólna populacja liczyła 300 osób dorosłych na wczesnym etapie kariery w branży technicznej. Grupa Eksperymentalna do badania została wybrana spośród 200 pracowników start-upu z branży technicznej w Barcelonie - wszyscy dorośli na wczesnym etapie kariery (24-35 lat). Rozdano ankiety diagnostyczne w celu pomiaru poziomu inteligencji emocjonalnej i dobrostanu w dużej populacji oraz w Grupie Eksperymentalnej na początku badania. Poziomy inteligencji emocjonalnej i dobrostanu uczestników eksperymentu zostały zmierzone po zakończeniu programu coachingu i porównane z poziomami ex ante , a także z poziomami wyjściowymi populacji ogólnej. W końcowej części opracowania załączono dyskusje ograniczeń wybranych metod i procedury badawczej, omówiono kierunki przyszłych badań oraz praktyczne zastosowania uzyskanych wyników. Wyniki pokazały, że program coachingowy doprowadził do zwiększenia inteligencji emocjonalnej i dobrostanu we wszystkich ich wymiarach. Praca dostarcza dowodów na to, że coaching może być skutecznym podejściem do poprawy inteligencji emocjonalnej i dobrostanu. Uzyskane wyniki mają zatem zasadnicze znaczenie dla rozwoju różnych metod pracy z jednostką - takich jak coaching - służących poprawie inteligencji emocjonalnej i dobrostanu w różnych obszarach życia osobistego, a także w sferze zawodowej

    Consortium for Robotics and Unmanned Systems Education and Research (CRUSER) 2019 Annual Report

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    Prepared for: Dr. Brian Bingham, CRUSER DirectorThe Naval Postgraduate School (NPS) Consortium for Robotics and Unmanned Systems Education and Research (CRUSER) provides a collaborative environment and community of interest for the advancement of unmanned systems (UxS) education and research endeavors across the Navy (USN), Marine Corps (USMC) and Department of Defense (DoD). CRUSER is a Secretary of the Navy (SECNAV) initiative to build an inclusive community of interest on the application of unmanned systems (UxS) in military and naval operations. This 2019 annual report summarizes CRUSER activities in its eighth year of operations and highlights future plans.Deputy Undersecretary of the Navy PPOIOffice of Naval Research (ONR)Approved for public release; distribution is unlimited
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