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Making sense of assets: Community asset mapping and related approaches for cultivating capacities
This working paper critically reviews some main aspects from asset based approaches highlights key strengths and weaknesses for future research/development. Drawing on a large body of reports and relevant literature we draw on different theoretical traditions and critiques, as well as practices and processes embedded within a broad range of approaches including, widely acknowledged frameworks such Asset Based Community Development (ABCD), Appreciative Inquiry (AI), Sustainable Livelihood Approaches (SLA) and Community Capitals Framework (CCF). Although these are presented as distinct approaches, there is a sense of evolution through them and many of them overlap (in terms of both theories and methodologies). We also include emerging frameworks, including geographical, socio-spatial, visual and creative approaches, stemming from a number of projects within AHRC’s Connected Communities programme and additional collaborations
Customer-engineer relationship management for converged ICT service companies
Thanks to the advent of converged communications services (often referred to as ‘triple play’), the next generation Service Engineer will need radically different skills, processes and tools from today’s counterpart. Why? in order to meet the challenges of installing and maintaining services based on multi-vendor software and hardware components in an IP-based network environment. The converged services environment is likely to be ‘smart’ and support flexible and dynamic interoperability between appliances and computing devices. These radical changes in the working environment will inevitably force managers to rethink the role of Service Engineers in relation to customer relationship management. This paper aims to identify requirements for an information system to support converged communications service engineers with regard to customer-engineer relationship management. Furthermore, an architecture for such a system is proposed and how it meets these requirements is discussed
From skepticism to mutual support: towards a structural change in the relations between participatory budgeting and the information and communication technologies?
Until three years ago, ICT Technologies represented a main “subordinate clause” within the “grammar” of Participatory Budgeting (PB), the tool made famous by the experience of Porto Alegre and today expanded to more than 1400 cities across the planet. In fact, PB – born to enhance deliberation and exchanges among citizens and local institutions – has long looked at ICTS as a sort of “pollution factor” which could be useful to foster transparency and to support the spreading of information but could also lead to a lowering in quality of public discussion, turning its “instantaneity” into “immediatism,” and its “time-saving accessibility” into “reductionism” and laziness in facing the complexity of public decision-making through citizens’ participation. At the same time, ICTs often regarded Participatory Budgeting as a tool that was too-complex and too-charged with ideology to cooperate with. But in the last three years, the barriers which prevented ICTs and Participatory Budgeting to establish a constructive dialogue started to shrink thanks to several experiences which demonstrated that technologies can help overcome some “cognitive injustices” if not just used as a means to “make simpler” the organization of participatory processes and to bring “larger numbers” of intervenients to the process. In fact, ICTs could be valorized as a space adding “diversity” to the processes and increasing outreach capacity. Paradoxically, the experiences helping to overcome the mutual skepticism between ICTs and PB did not come from the centre of the Global North, but were implemented in peripheral or semiperipheral countries (Democratic Republic of Congo, Brazil, Dominican Republic and Portugal in Europe), sometimes in cities where the “digital divide” is still high (at least in terms of Internet connections) and a significant part of the population lives in informal settlements and/or areas with low indicators of “connection.” Somehow, these experiences were able to demystify the “scary monolithicism” of ICTs, showing that some instruments (like mobile phones, and especially the use of SMS text messaging) could grant a higher degree of connectivity, diffusion and accountability, while other dimensions (which could risk jeopardizing social inclusion) could be minimized through creativity. The paper tries to depict a possible panorama of collaboration for the near future, starting from descriptions of some of the above mentioned “turning-point” experiences – both in the Global North as well as in the Global South
Mapping for the Masses: Accessing Web 2.0 through Crowdsourcing
The authors describe how we are harnessing the power of web 2.0 technologies to create new approaches to collecting, mapping, and sharing geocoded data. The authors begin with GMapCreator that lets users fashion new maps using Google Maps as a base. The authors then describe MapTube that enables users to archive maps and demonstrate how it can be used in a variety of contexts to share map information, to put existing maps into a form that can be shared, and to create new maps from the bottom-up using a combination of crowdcasting, crowdsourcing, and traditional broadcasting. The authors conclude by arguing that such tools are helping to define a neogeography that is essentially "mapping for the masses,'' while noting that there are many issues of quality, accuracy, copyright, and trust that will influence the impact of these tools on map-based communication
Contextual contact tracing based spatio enhanced compartment modelling & spatial risk assessment
Dissertation submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Science in Geospatial TechnologiesThe current situation of COVID-19 appears as a paradigm shift that seems to have farreaching
impacts on the way humans will now continue with their daily routine. The
overall scenario highlights the paramount importance of infectious disease surveillance,
which necessitates immediate monitoring for effective preparedness and efficient response.
Policymakers are interested in data insights identifying high-risk areas as well as individuals
to be quarantined, especially as the public gets back to their normal routine. This
thesis research investigates both requirements in a hybrid approach by the implementation
of disease outbreak modelling and exploring its induced dynamic spatial risk in
the form of Risk Assessment, along with its real-time integration back into the disease
model. The study implements human mobility based contact tracing in the form of an
event-based stochastic SIR model as a baseline and further modifies the existing setup
to be inclusive of the spatial risk. This modification of each individual-level contact’s
intensity to be dependent on its spatial location has been termed as Contextual Contact
Tracing. The results suggest that the Spatio-SIR model tends to perform more meaningful
events concerned with the Susceptible population rather than events to the Infected or
Quarantined. With an example of a real-world scenario of induced spatial high-risk, it is
highlighted that the new Spatio-SIR model can empower the analyst with a capability to
explore disease dynamics from an additional perspective. The study concludes that even
if this domain is hindered due to lack of data availability, the investigation process related
to it should keep on exploring methods to effectively understand the disease dynamics
A European research agenda for lifelong learning
It is a generally accepted truth that without a proper educational system no country will prosper, nor will its inhabitants. With the arrival of the post-industrial society, in Europe and elsewhere, it has become increasingly clear that people should continue learning over their entire life-spans lest they or their society suffer the dire consequences. But what does this future lifelong learning society exactly look like? And how then should education prepare for it? What should people learn and how should they do so? How can we afford to pay for all this, what are the socio-economic constraints of the move towards a lifelong-learning society? And, of course, what role can and should the educational establishment of schools and universities play? This are questions that demand serious research efforts, which is what this paper argues for
Trail records and navigational learning
An emerging wave of 'ambient' technologies has the potential to support learning in new and particular ways. In this paper we propose a 'trail model' of 'navigational learning' which links some particular learning needs to the potentialities of these technologies. In this context, we outline the design and use of an 'experience recorder', a technology to support learning in museums. In terms of policy for the e-society, these proposals are relevant to the need for personalised and individualised learning support
Beyond the computer: changing medium from digital to physical
How can organizations use digital infrastructure to realise physical outcomes? The design and construction of London Heathrow Terminal 5 is analysed to build new theoretical understanding of visualization and materialization practices in the transition from digital design to physical realisation. In the project studied, an integrated software solution is introduced as an infrastructure for delivery. The analyses articulate the work done to maintain this digital infrastructure and also to move designs beyond the closed world of the computer to a physical reality. In changing medium, engineers use heterogeneous trials to interrogate and address the limitations of an integrated digital model. The paper explains why such trials, which involve the reconciliation of digital and physical data through parallel and iterative forms of work, provide a robust practice for realizing goals that have physical outcomes. It argues that this practice is temporally different from, and at times in conflict with, building a comprehensive dataset within the digital medium. The paper concludes by discussing the implications for organizations that use digital infrastructures in seeking to accomplish goals in digital and physical media
The VOISE Algorithm: a Versatile Tool for Automatic Segmentation of Astronomical Images
The auroras on Jupiter and Saturn can be studied with a high sensitivity and
resolution by the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) ultraviolet (UV) and
far-ultraviolet (FUV) Space Telescope spectrograph (STIS) and Advanced Camera
for Surveys (ACS) instruments. We present results of automatic detection and
segmentation of Jupiter's auroral emissions as observed by HST ACS instrument
with VOronoi Image SEgmentation (VOISE). VOISE is a dynamic algorithm for
partitioning the underlying pixel grid of an image into regions according to a
prescribed homogeneity criterion. The algorithm consists of an iterative
procedure that dynamically constructs a tessellation of the image plane based
on a Voronoi Diagram, until the intensity of the underlying image within each
region is classified as homogeneous. The computed tessellations allow the
extraction of quantitative information about the auroral features such as mean
intensity, latitudinal and longitudinal extents and length scales. These
outputs thus represent a more automated and objective method of characterising
auroral emissions than manual inspection.Comment: 9 pages, 7 figures; accepted for publication in MNRA
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