Exploring Mindsight via Email Communication in Learning Environment

This paper explores mindsight in virtual communication, examining problems people face while communicating in virtual spaces with a focusing on email communication. Many have documented the problems encountered when they are communicating with others on email. Face to face communication includes facial and interpersonal clues that enhances interaction. Other problems people face include misunderstanding in communication and information overload. These problems disrupt workflow, and can cause stress among workers, which in turn reduces job satisfaction and production. These problems are common in academic world, especially among people found in learning environment, who have to use email communicate continuously because of the nature of their job and activities. It is believed that every learning environment utilizes one form of email communication or the other on several levels and for different purposes. Scholars have put forward suggested technical solutions that are mainly software and policy inclined. This paper attempts to understand the human in-depth factors to the problem. Data collection for the study commenced by sending questionnaires to students to assess the levels of their communication in relation to their environment, personal tendencies, being understood and understanding others during email communication etc. Evidence in the data analysis suggested that most of the students found it difficult to retain attention while doing their emails and they were unable to understand how others felt. It was also discovered that people do not necessarily seek to be understood when they send email communication. Based on the findings, it was concluded, that an intervention, such as mindsight, might enable people to retain attention with some level of personal and environmental awareness that might enhance their ability to understand their feelings and that of others while communicating on email. Therefore, it is recommended that a more rigorous application of mindsight exercise should be explored by students who engage in virtual communication in learning environments

A Light-speed Linear Program Solver for Personalized Recommendation with Diversity Constraints

We study a structured linear program (LP) that emerges in the need of ranking candidates or items in personalized recommender systems. Since the candidate set is only known in real time, the LP also needs to be formed and solved in real time. Latency and user experience are major considerations, requiring the LP to be solved within just a few milliseconds. Although typical instances of the problem are not very large in size, this stringent time limit appears to be beyond the capability of most existing (commercial) LP solvers, which can take $20$ milliseconds or more to find a solution. Thus, reliable methods that address the real-world complication of latency become necessary. In this paper, we propose a fast specialized LP solver for a structured problem with diversity constraints. Our method solves the dual problem, making use of the piece-wise affine structure of the dual objective function, with an additional screening technique that helps reduce the dimensionality of the problem as the algorithm progresses. Experiments reveal that our method can solve the problem within roughly 1 millisecond, yielding a 20x improvement in speed over efficient off-the-shelf LP solvers. This speed-up can help improve the quality of recommendations without affecting user experience, highlighting how optimization can provide solid orthogonal value to machine-learned recommender systems

An exploratory study of the application of mindsight in virtual communication: the case of email

Virtual communication is powerful because it gives the ability to communicate with one another instantly: overcoming time and distance barriers. As well as providing such opportunities as immediacy and reachability, it poses challenges such as articulation and discernment of content, issues relating to frequency of use, as well as the emotional and social intelligence of users. Many scholars have documented the problems encountered when people engage with virtual communication. These problems may include misunderstanding and information overload. Such problems can disrupt workflow and cause stress among workers. These problems are common in both the corporate and academic world, especially among people who have to use email communication continuously due to the nature of their jobs and activities. It is believed that every work environment utilizes one form of email communication or another on several levels and for different purposes. Researchers have suggested technical and policy-related solutions to virtual communication problems. They have not, however, taken into cognisance the holistic views of issues such as sensory, bodily, mental and social states of individuals. Therefore, recent research has attempted to gain an in depth understanding of human issues which are connected with virtual communication and have explored what it means to address the challenges mention above (such as emotional, environmental issues and self-awareness of users). In order to address this gap, Mindsight Theory (Siegel 1999 to 2016) has been suggested. The Mindsight Theory centres around mental health issues but has not yet been applied to virtual communication. This approach has used the combination of mindfultech email observation developed by David Levy and Mindsight Theory formulated by Daniel Siegel. The combined practise and theory were adopted to form the Mindsight utility for virtual communication. The crux of the exercise was to encourage people to cultivate empathy, compassion, emotional intelligence and self-reflection on virtual communication in particular on email communication. This was developed to engage users in experiencing self-awareness and awareness of others. It allowed them to develop their guidelines for virtual communication. The email observation practice is a set of exercises that has been developed to enable people to identify their email habits over a duration of time to establish a change of attitude towards electronic communication. In this research, an exploratory study has been conducted using an interpretive paradigm to understand the implications of the theory of Mindsight on self-awareness and awareness of others on virtual communication. A pilot study was conducted to streamline the exercise. Three case studies were completed: two with university students and one with a social entrepreneurship organisation. The findings suggest that heightened awareness of sensory, bodily, mental activities and social awareness were experienced among the participants. The findings correlate with the personal guidelines formulated by the participants. The outcomes of the research addressed the gaps identified