723 research outputs found

    Design and Implementation of an Android Sleep Monitoring Framework

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    Smartphones were originally mainly used for making phone calls and playing games, but as they become more powerful and are equipped with a wide variety of sensors new use cases become interesting. One of these use cases is sleep monitoring, which is interesting for many different research areas. The goal of this bachelor thesis is to develop a sleep monitoring framework for the Android platform which can be used easily by third party applications. The framework takes care of detecting sleep related events like snoring and movement as well as monitoring the ambient light during the night. Additionally, a demo application is developed to demonstrate the functionality of the framework and to highlight some best practices regarding Android background services as they are essential for monitoring sleep

    Emerging technologies for learning report (volume 3)

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    Produtização de uma aplicação móvel: design participativo e desenvolvimento

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    The advent of smartphones changed the way we communicate and collaborate. During the last years mobile applications have experienced an exponential growth, representing new technological challenges that require effective solutions. The internet has plenty of information about building applications, but many aspects are ignored or simplified to present a simple solution to who is starting. The construction of a prototype is relatively straightforward, but there are several challenges faced when building an application with higher standards. Considering the target audience, does it meet the user needs? Is it easy to use? Knowing that it can potentially be downloaded by a growing number of users, is it scalable? What is the right deployment? How to handle frequent updates? These are some of the questions that nourished the research agenda in this dissertation. It starts from an idea for a mobile application and goes through some of the aspects to consider when conceiving and transforming that application in a product ready to be delivered to the customers, available in the Google Play Store or Apple App Store. Thus, this document reports on all the steps that were followed during this project, regarding aspects mainly related to the design, development and deployment stages. The beta version of the app is currently available in the Play Store, with more than 300 users registered. It is expected that the application is sufficiently representative of the challenges it involves, so the co-design and development process could be adapted to other applications. Hopefully, the ideas discussed here can be an example of what might be the problems to keep in mind when starting to develop an application, what might be the solutions for these problems and what will be the mistakes to avoid. The future work includes the necessary improvements to reach the version 1.0 and the further exploration of some topics, such as gamification and A/B testing to improve the user interface and optimize the user experience.O advento dos smartphones mudou a forma como comunicamos e colaboramos. Durante os últimos anos houve um aumento exponencial de aplicações móveis, representando novos desafios tecnológicos que exigem soluções eficazes. A internet está repleta de informação sobre a criação de aplicações, mas muitos aspetos são ignorados ou simplificados para apresentar uma solução simples para quem está a começar. A construção de um protótipo é relativamente simples, mas há diversos desafios a enfrentar quando se constrói uma aplicação com padrões mais elevados. Tendo em conta o público-alvo, será que vai ao encontro das suas necessidades? Será fácil de utilizar? Sabendo que potencialmente será instalada por um número crescente de utilizadores, será que é escalável? Qual será o deployment adequado? Como lidar com atualizações frequentes? Estas são algumas das questões que guiaram o plano de trabalhos desta dissertação. O documento parte de uma ideia para uma aplicação móvel e aborda os diversos aspetos a ter em consideração na conceção e transformação dessa aplicação num produto pronto para ser disponibilizado aos utilizadores, na Google Play Store ou na Apple App Store. Nesse sentido, este documento reporta todas as decisões tomadas durante este projeto, principalmente no que respeita a aspetos relacionados com as fases de design, desenvolvimento e deployment. A versão beta está atualmente disponível na Play Store, com mais de 300 utilizadores registados. Espera-se que a aplicação seja suficientemente representativa nos desafios que envolve, pelo que o processo de design participativo e respetivo desenvolvimento poderá ser adaptado a outras aplicações. Espera-se ainda que as ideias aqui discutidas possam servir de exemplo quanto ao que poderão ser os problemas a ter em conta quando se começa a desenvolver uma aplicação, quais poderão ser as soluções para esses problemas e quais serão os erros a evitar. O trabalho futuro inclui as melhorias necessárias até à versão 1.0 e a exploração mais detalhada de alguns tópicos, tais como gamificação e A/B testing, de modo a melhorar a interface e otimizar a experiência de utilização.Mestrado em Engenharia Informátic

    What the Web Has Wrought

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    In 1989, Sir Tim Berners-Lee proposed the development of ‘a large hypertext database with typed links’, which eventually became The World Wide Web. It was rightly heralded at the time as a significant development and a boon for one-and-all as the digital age flourished both in terms of universal accessibility and affordability. The general anticipation was that this could herald an era of universal friendship and knowledge-sharing, ushering in global cooperation and mutual regard. In November 2019, marking 30 years of the Web, Berners-Lee lamented that its initial promise was being largely undermined, and that we were in danger of heading towards a ‘digital dystopia’: What happened

    Responses to Catastrophic AGI Risk: A Survey

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    Many researchers have argued that humanity will create artificial general intelligence (AGI) within the next twenty to one hundred years. It has been suggested that AGI may inflict serious damage to human well-being on a global scale ('catastrophic risk'). After summarizing the arguments for why AGI may pose such a risk, we review the fieldʼs proposed responses to AGI risk. We consider societal proposals, proposals for external constraints on AGI behaviors and proposals for creating AGIs that are safe due to their internal design

    Mobile phone technology as an aid to contemporary transport questions in walkability, in the context of developing countries

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    The emerging global middle class, which is expected to double by 2050 desires more walkable, liveable neighbourhoods, and as distances between work and other amenities increases, cities are becoming less monocentric and becoming more polycentric. African cities could be described as walking cities, based on the number of people that walk to their destinations as opposed to other means of mobility but are often not walkable. Walking is by far the most popular form of transportation in Africa’s rapidly urbanising cities, although it is not often by choice rather a necessity. Facilitating this primary mode, while curbing the growth of less sustainable mobility uses requires special attention for the safety and convenience of walking in view of a Global South context. In this regard, to further promote walking as a sustainable mobility option, there is a need to assess the current state of its supporting infrastructure and begin giving it higher priority, focus and emphasis. Mobile phones have emerged as a useful alternative tool to collect this data and audit the state of walkability in cities. They eliminate the inaccuracies and inefficiencies of human memories because smartphone sensors such as GPS provides information with accuracies within 5m, providing superior accuracy and precision compared to other traditional methods. The data is also spatial in nature, allowing for a range of possible applications and use cases. Traditional inventory approaches in walkability often only revealed the perceived walkability and accessibility for only a subset of journeys. Crowdsourcing the perceived walkability and accessibility of points of interest in African cities could address this, albeit aspects such as ease-of-use and road safety should also be considered. A tool that crowdsources individual pedestrian experiences; availability and state of pedestrian infrastructure and amenities, using state-of-the-art smartphone technology, would over time also result in complete surveys of the walking environment provided such a tool is popular and safe. This research will illustrate how mobile phone applications currently in the market can be improved to offer more functionality that factors in multiple sensory modalities for enhanced visual appeal, ease of use, and aesthetics. The overarching aim of this research is, therefore, to develop the framework for and test a pilot-version mobile phone-based data collection tool that incorporates emerging technologies in collecting data on walkability. This research project will assess the effectiveness of the mobile application and test the technical capabilities of the system to experience how it operates within an existing infrastructure. It will continue to investigate the use of mobile phone technology in the collection of user perceptions of walkability, and the limitations of current transportation-based mobile applications, with the aim of developing an application that is an improvement to current offerings in the market. The prototype application will be tested and later piloted in different locations around the globe. Past studies are primarily focused on the development of transport-based mobile phone applications with basic features and limited functionality. Although limited progress has been made in integrating emerging advanced technologies such as Augmented Reality (AR), Machine Learning (ML), Big Data analytics, amongst others into mobile phone applications; what is missing from these past examples is a comprehensive and structured application in the transportation sphere. In turn, the full research will offer a broader understanding of the iii information gathered from these smart devices, and how that large volume of varied data can be better and more quickly interpreted to discover trends, patterns, and aid in decision making and planning. This research project attempts to fill this gap and also bring new insights, thus promote the research field of transportation data collection audits, with particular emphasis on walkability audits. In this regard, this research seeks to provide insights into how such a tool could be applied in assessing and promoting walkability as a sustainable and equitable mobility option. In order to get policy-makers, analysts, and practitioners in urban transport planning and provision in cities to pay closer attention to making better, more walkable places, appealing to them from an efficiency and business perspective is vital. This crowdsourced data is of great interest to industry practitioners, local governments and research communities as Big Data, and to urban communities and civil society as an input in their advocacy activities. The general findings from the results of this research show clear evidence that transport-based mobile phone applications currently available in the market are increasingly getting outdated and are not keeping up with new and emerging technologies and innovations. It is also evident from the results that mobile smartphones have revolutionised the collection of transport-related information hence the need for new initiatives to help take advantage of this emerging opportunity. The implications of these findings are that more attention needs to be paid to this niche going forward. This research project recommends that more studies, particularly on what technologies and functionalities can realistically be incorporated into mobile phone applications in the near future be done as well as on improving the hardware specifications of mobile phone devices to facilitate and support these emerging technologies whilst keeping the cost of mobile devices as low as possible

    Recognition of Japanese handwritten characters with Machine learning techniques

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    The recognition of Japanese handwritten characters has always been a challenge for researchers. A large number of classes, their graphic complexity, and the existence of three different writing systems make this problem particularly difficult compared to Western writing. For decades, attempts have been made to address the problem using traditional OCR (Optical Character Recognition) techniques, with mixed results. With the recent popularization of machine learning techniques through neural networks, this research has been revitalized, bringing new approaches to the problem. These new results achieve performance levels comparable to human recognition. Furthermore, these new techniques have allowed collaboration with very different disciplines, such as the Humanities or East Asian studies, achieving advances in them that would not have been possible without this interdisciplinary work. In this thesis, these techniques are explored until reaching a sufficient level of understanding that allows us to carry out our own experiments, training neural network models with public datasets of Japanese characters. However, the scarcity of public datasets makes the task of researchers remarkably difficult. Our proposal to minimize this problem is the development of a web application that allows researchers to easily collect samples of Japanese characters through the collaboration of any user. Once the application is fully operational, the examples collected until that point will be used to create a new dataset in a specific format. Finally, we can use the new data to carry out comparative experiments with the previous neural network models

    Mediated Cognition: Information Technologies and the Sciences of Mind

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    This dissertation investigates the interconnections between minds, media, and the cognitive sciences. It asks what it means for media to have effects upon the mind: do our tools influence the ways that we think? It considers what scientific evidence can be brought to bear on the question: how can we know and measure these effects? Ultimately, it looks to the looping pathways by which science employs technological media in understanding the mind, and the public comes to understand and respond to these scientific discourses. I contend that like human cognition itself, the enterprise of cognitive science is a deeply and distinctively mediated phenomenon. This casts a different light on contemporary debates about whether television, computers, or the Internet are changing our brains, for better or for worse. Rather than imagining media effects as befalling a fictive natural mind, I draw on multiple disciplines to situate mind and the sciences thereof as shaped from their origins through interaction with technology. Our task is then to interrogate the forms of cognition and attention fostered by different media, alongside their attendant costs and benefits. The first chapter positions this dissertation between the fields of media studies and STS, developing a case for the reality of media effects without the implication of technological determinism. The second considers the history of technological metaphor in scientific characterizations of the mind. The third section consists of three separate chapters on the history of cognitive science, presenting the core of my case for its uniquely mediated character. Across three distinct eras, what unifies cognitive science is the quest to understand the mind using computational systems, operating by turns as generative metaphors and tangible models. I then evaluate the contemporary cognitive-scientific research on the question of media effects, and the growing role of electronic media in science. My fifth and final section develops a content analysis: what is said in the media about the popular theory that media themselves, in one way or another, are causing attention deficit disorders? The work concludes with a summary and some reflections on mind, culture, technoscience and markets as recursively interwoven causal systems

    Awakening The Potential of Positive Computing: A Transversal, Heliotropic Design Paradigm for Human Flourishing

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    Positive Computing literature does not consider the complex implications stemming from the evidence of computing technologies’ harmful effects. Moreover, present approaches to integrating well-being science into the design of interactive systems are built on deficit-oriented models. In response, a transversal, social constructionist paradigm of Positive Computing sensitive to the social complex and views technology as a part ofcivilization as a living, human construction is explored as a means of advancing the Positive Computing domain. The work argues the well-being of civilization needs to be routinely re-secured through the development of a metacognitive, affirmative competency that recognizessocial systems as capable of creating their own realities. To effectuate the change, adoption of an integral awareness of the socio-technical complex and a new, positively oriented model of design for interactive computing technologies are proposed
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