5,178 research outputs found

    Proceedings of the 10th International congress on architectural technology (ICAT 2024): architectural technology transformation.

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    The profession of architectural technology is influential in the transformation of the built environment regionally, nationally, and internationally. The congress provides a platform for industry, educators, researchers, and the next generation of built environment students and professionals to showcase where their influence is transforming the built environment through novel ideas, businesses, leadership, innovation, digital transformation, research and development, and sustainable forward-thinking technological and construction assembly design

    Beam scanning by liquid-crystal biasing in a modified SIW structure

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    A fixed-frequency beam-scanning 1D antenna based on Liquid Crystals (LCs) is designed for application in 2D scanning with lateral alignment. The 2D array environment imposes full decoupling of adjacent 1D antennas, which often conflicts with the LC requirement of DC biasing: the proposed design accommodates both. The LC medium is placed inside a Substrate Integrated Waveguide (SIW) modified to work as a Groove Gap Waveguide, with radiating slots etched on the upper broad wall, that radiates as a Leaky-Wave Antenna (LWA). This allows effective application of the DC bias voltage needed for tuning the LCs. At the same time, the RF field remains laterally confined, enabling the possibility to lay several antennas in parallel and achieve 2D beam scanning. The design is validated by simulation employing the actual properties of a commercial LC medium

    Seamless Multimodal Biometrics for Continuous Personalised Wellbeing Monitoring

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    Artificially intelligent perception is increasingly present in the lives of every one of us. Vehicles are no exception, (...) In the near future, pattern recognition will have an even stronger role in vehicles, as self-driving cars will require automated ways to understand what is happening around (and within) them and act accordingly. (...) This doctoral work focused on advancing in-vehicle sensing through the research of novel computer vision and pattern recognition methodologies for both biometrics and wellbeing monitoring. The main focus has been on electrocardiogram (ECG) biometrics, a trait well-known for its potential for seamless driver monitoring. Major efforts were devoted to achieving improved performance in identification and identity verification in off-the-person scenarios, well-known for increased noise and variability. Here, end-to-end deep learning ECG biometric solutions were proposed and important topics were addressed such as cross-database and long-term performance, waveform relevance through explainability, and interlead conversion. Face biometrics, a natural complement to the ECG in seamless unconstrained scenarios, was also studied in this work. The open challenges of masked face recognition and interpretability in biometrics were tackled in an effort to evolve towards algorithms that are more transparent, trustworthy, and robust to significant occlusions. Within the topic of wellbeing monitoring, improved solutions to multimodal emotion recognition in groups of people and activity/violence recognition in in-vehicle scenarios were proposed. At last, we also proposed a novel way to learn template security within end-to-end models, dismissing additional separate encryption processes, and a self-supervised learning approach tailored to sequential data, in order to ensure data security and optimal performance. (...)Comment: Doctoral thesis presented and approved on the 21st of December 2022 to the University of Port

    Sensing Collectives: Aesthetic and Political Practices Intertwined

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    Are aesthetics and politics really two different things? The book takes a new look at how they intertwine, by turning from theory to practice. Case studies trace how sensory experiences are created and how collective interests are shaped. They investigate how aesthetics and politics are entangled, both in building and disrupting collective orders, in governance and innovation. This ranges from populist rallies and artistic activism over alternative lifestyles and consumer culture to corporate PR and governmental policies. Authors are academics and artists. The result is a new mapping of the intermingling and co-constitution of aesthetics and politics in engagements with collective orders

    Metaverse: A Vision, Architectural Elements, and Future Directions for Scalable and Realtime Virtual Worlds

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    With the emergence of Cloud computing, Internet of Things-enabled Human-Computer Interfaces, Generative Artificial Intelligence, and high-accurate Machine and Deep-learning recognition and predictive models, along with the Post Covid-19 proliferation of social networking, and remote communications, the Metaverse gained a lot of popularity. Metaverse has the prospective to extend the physical world using virtual and augmented reality so the users can interact seamlessly with the real and virtual worlds using avatars and holograms. It has the potential to impact people in the way they interact on social media, collaborate in their work, perform marketing and business, teach, learn, and even access personalized healthcare. Several works in the literature examine Metaverse in terms of hardware wearable devices, and virtual reality gaming applications. However, the requirements of realizing the Metaverse in realtime and at a large-scale need yet to be examined for the technology to be usable. To address this limitation, this paper presents the temporal evolution of Metaverse definitions and captures its evolving requirements. Consequently, we provide insights into Metaverse requirements. In addition to enabling technologies, we lay out architectural elements for scalable, reliable, and efficient Metaverse systems, and a classification of existing Metaverse applications along with proposing required future research directions

    The Effect of Television and Electronic Advertisements on The Mental Image of Women Among A Group of Female Media Professionals

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    The study aimed to know the effect of television and electronic advertisements broadcast on Arab television screens and on websites on the mental image formed by a group of female media professionals affiliated with the Arab Media Center about women, by answering the sub-questions of the study, the study adopted the descriptive approach through the study tool, which is the questionnaire designed to answer the questions of the study through the respondents, that consisted of 200 female individuals who watch TV advertisements and follow them on the website, and after filling out the questionnaires, analyzing and interpreting them, the following conclusions were reached, the reasons for the respondentā€™s viewing of advertisements varied, but the largest percentage 94%, was that they watch advertisements involuntarily while watching TV or electronically presented material. This is what is classified as accidental exposure. The percentage of those who believe that the use of women in advertising greatly distorts the image of women is 66.5%. 91% of respondents agreed that women's rights associations and organizations must exert pressure to preserve the image of women and to educate society about their true role through various media, with a rate of 89.5%, the respondents expressed that they were shy when watching an advertisement that aroused in front of family members. 89% of the respondents believe that the ads that appear on social media and YouTube contain in their content greater freedom, and therefore the size of their distance from Arab values is greater, and in the same percentage came the emphasis on the need for some competent authorities to implement training courses for Arab ad directors to comply with our customs and traditions. The percentage of supporters decreased to 30% for the idea that advertising can only be successful by showing the charms of women, the woman's mind by presenting her as a consumer who does not care and only thinks about her elegance and beauty 30%. The study recommended that if a woman must appear in the advertisement, then this appearance should be appropriate to her reality and reflect the real role of women in society. Women's rights associations and organizations must exert pressure to preserve the image of women and educate society about their true role through the various media

    Ergonomics in laparoscopic surgery: a work system analysis to reduce work-related musculoskeletal disorders across surgeons in Peruvian hospitals

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    Laparoscopic surgery, also called minimally invasive surgery, is a type of surgery in which the surgeon operates by viewing the surgery on a screen that projects images from a camera inserted into the patient's abdomen. Laparoscopic tools are long (usually up to 35 cm) and require fine motor skills and visual perception for manipulation, restricting the degrees of freedom to move within the patient. This restriction causes surgeons to operate with limited vision and restricted movement and force them to work with assistants who assist in conducting the cameras, acting as "the surgeons' eyes". Because of its minimally invasive nature, laparoscopic surgery is well accepted by patients but is challenging and complex for the surgeon. This is due to the restriction of movement and perception that forces surgeons to adopt awkward postures with high exposition, which increases the likelihood of work-related musculoskeletal disorders (WRMSD). WRMSDs are detrimental to surgeons' health and potentially may impact patient safety. Studies often highlight the problems of surgeons in high-income countries, whose solutions and clinical guides often cannot be applied to countries like Peru, which have severe deficiencies in its healthcare system. For this reason, the thesis proposes a contextualised investigation of the Peruvian surgical work system to investigate the main factors contributing to the development of WRMSD in laparoscopic surgeons, which may affect patient safety. The analysis aimed to propose possible recommendations to support redesigning the laparoscopic surgery work system in Peruvian hospitals. Five studies were developed to achieve the aims based on the Systems Engineering Initiative for patient safety model, an ergonomics model for healthcare systems analysis. The first three studies were developed parallel with a mixed convergent design approach concluding in an integrating study. The last two studies (study four and five) had a quantitative approach. The first study used a qualitative approach by collecting information through interviews with laparoscopic surgeons and observing their work in real surgeries. The second study adopted a quantitative approach through a questionnaire-based survey applied to 140 surgeons in Peru. The third study analysed the extent to which the postures adopted by surgeons in real surgeries increase the risk of WRMSD and their association with factors in the work system using the RULA method. The results of the three studies were integrated into an integrative study, concluding that the raised height of the operating table and other system factors related to tasks, person and technology raises the risk of WRMSD. Based on these results, the fourth study analysed the relationship between surgeons and operating tables to understand how many surgeons could reach suitable working heights. The study concluded that no operating table available in Peruvian hospitals nor in the market would be suitable for 90% of Peruvian surgeons. The tables were too high to accommodate surgeons with optimal working surface height to perform laparoscopic surgery. Then, a fifth study was conducted to determine an acceptable working height based on surgeon preferences and system factors and concluded that surgeons would accept a working height between 49 cm to 70 cm in height, which is lower than current operating tables. The lowest height was reached when surgeons had to operate on obese patients and perform intracorporeal suturing tasks. Finally, the thesis concludes with recommendations for redesigning working heights for 90% of the Peruvian medical population, considering work system elements of the Peruvian context

    IMAGINING, GUIDING, PLAYING INTIMACY: - A Theory of Character Intimacy Games -

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    Within the landscape of Japanese media production, and video game production in particular, there is a niche comprising video games centered around establishing, developing, and fulfilling imagined intimate relationships with anime-manga characters. Such niche, although very significant in production volume and lifespan, is left unexplored or underexplored. When it is not, it is subsumed within the scope of wider anime-manga media. This obscures the nature of such video games, alternatively identified with descriptors including but not limited to ā€˜visual novelā€™, ā€˜dating simulatorā€™ and ā€˜adult computer gameā€™. As games centered around developing intimacy with characters, they present specific ensembles of narrative content, aesthetics and software mechanics. These ensembles are aimed at eliciting in users what are, by all intents and purposes, parasocial phenomena towards the gameā€™s characters. In other words, these software products encourage players to develop affective and bodily responses towards characters. They are set in a way that is coherent with shared, circulating scripts for sexual and intimate interaction to guide player imaginative action. This study defines games such as the above as ā€˜character intimacy gamesā€™, video game software where traversal is contingent on players knowingly establishing, developing, and fulfilling intimate bonds with fictional characters. To do so, however, player must recognize themselves as playing that type of game, and to be looking to develop that kind of response towards the gameā€™s characters. Character Intimacy Games are contingent upon player developing affective and bodily responses, and thus presume that players are, at the very least, non-hostile towards their development. This study approaches Japanese character intimacy games as its corpus, and operates at the intersection of studies of communication, AMO studies and games studies. The study articulates a research approach based on the double need of approaching single works of significance amidst a general scarcity of scholarly background on the subject. It juxtaposes data-driven approaches derived from fan-curated databases ā€“ The Visual Novel Database and Erogescape -Erogē Hyōron KÅ«kan ā€“ with a purpose-created ludo-hermeneutic process. By deploying an observation of character intimacy games through fan-curated data and building ludo-hermeneutics on the resulting ontology, this study argues that character intimacy games are video games where traversal is contingent on players knowingly establishing, developing, and fulfilling intimate bonds with fictional characters and recognizing themselves as doing so. To produce such conditions, the assemblage of software mechanics and narrative content in such games facilitates intimacy between player and characters. This is, ultimately, conductive to the emergence of parasocial phenomena. Parasocial phenomena, in turn, are deployed as an integral assumption regarding player activity within the gameā€™s wider assemblage of narrative content and software mechanics

    The Eruption of Disruption: The Manifestation of Disrupting whiteness in Secondary Social Studies in Appalachia

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    This phenomenological dissertation explores the lived experiences of secondary social studies educators situated in the Appalachian region. Hermeneutic phenomenology was used as a philosophical and methodological approach to gather insights into this phenomenon. Interviews were conducted with three educators to capture their experiences from their childhoods, to their teaching careers, and into their current personal lives. These experiences were analyzed using a Whole-Part-Whole process to understand how they came to disrupt whiteness, the ways they did so, and their understanding of the impact disrupting whiteness for creating learning environments, developing curriculum and making instructional decisions. The findings revealed how these educators came to recognize the importance of acknowledging differences and race, and how they faced and navigated instances of racism and racist structures within the education system. The use of physics as a metaphor highlighted how educators disrupted whiteness through spatial disruptions, curriculum design, advocacy and activism, and creating an environment for students to question their understanding of racism. The implications for social studies education suggest the importance of directly exposing racist foundations, providing educators with instructional tools to disrupt problematic ideologies, and utilizing important resources. As teacher education continues to evolve, a focus on tapping into students\u27 lived experiences can help students move closer to addressing the phenomenon in their future classrooms. Finally, an important part of growth could be seen within educatorsā€™ discomfort and reflection. White people can begin their journey toward dismantling white supremacy by examining their privilege and power
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