London Creative and Digital Fusion

date-added: 2015-03-24 04:16:59 +0000 date-modified: 2015-03-24 04:16:59 +0000date-added: 2015-03-24 04:16:59 +0000 date-modified: 2015-03-24 04:16:59 +0000The London Creative and Digital Fusion programme of interactive, tailored and in-depth support was designed to support the UK capital’s creative and digital companies to collaborate, innovate and grow. London is a globally recognised hub for technology, design and creative genius. While many cities around the world can claim to be hubs for technology entrepreneurship, London’s distinctive potential lies in the successful fusion of world-leading technology with world-leading design and creativity. As innovation thrives at the edge, where better to innovate than across the boundaries of these two clusters and cultures? This booklet tells the story of Fusion’s innovation journey, its partners and its unique business support. Most importantly of all it tells stories of companies that, having worked with London Fusion, have innovated and grown. We hope that it will inspire others to follow and build on our beginnings.European Regional Development Fund 2007-13

“No powers, man!”: A student perspective on designing university smart building interactions

Smart buildings offer an opportunity for better performance and enhanced experience by contextualising services and interactions to the needs and practices of occupants. Yet, this vision is limited by established approaches to building management, delivered top-down through professional facilities management teams, opening up an interaction-gap between occupants and the spaces they inhabit. To address the challenge of how smart buildings might be more inclusively managed, we present the results of a qualitative study with student occupants of a smart building, with design workshops including building walks and speculative futuring. We develop new understandings of how student occupants conceptualise and evaluate spaces as they experience them, and of how building management practices might evolve with new sociotechnical systems that better leverage occupant agency. Our findings point to important directions for HCI research in this nascent area, including the need for HBI (Human-Building Interaction) design to challenge entrenched roles in building management

Synchronous wearable wireless body sensor network composed of autonomous textile nodes

A novel, fully-autonomous, wearable, wireless sensor network is presented, where each flexible textile node performs cooperative synchronous acquisition and distributed event detection. Computationally efficient situational-awareness algorithms are implemented on the low-power microcontroller present on each flexible node. The detected events are wirelessly transmitted to a base station, directly, as well as forwarded by other on-body nodes. For each node, a dual-polarized textile patch antenna serves as a platform for the flexible electronic circuitry. Therefore, the system is particularly suitable for comfortable and unobtrusive integration into garments. In the meantime, polarization diversity can be exploited to improve the reliability and energy-efficiency of the wireless transmission. Extensive experiments in realistic conditions have demonstrated that this new autonomous, body-centric, textile-antenna, wireless sensor network is able to correctly detect different operating conditions of a firefighter during an intervention. By relying on four network nodes integrated into the protective garment, this functionality is implemented locally, on the body, and in real time. In addition, the received sensor data are reliably transferred to a central access point at the command post, for more detailed and more comprehensive real-time visualization. This information provides coordinators and commanders with situational awareness of the entire rescue operation. A statistical analysis of measured on-body node-to-node, as well as off-body person-to-person channels is included, confirming the reliability of the communication system

Self-tracking modes: reflexive self-monitoring and data practices

The concept of ‘self-tracking’ (also referred to as life-logging, the quantified self, personal analytics and personal informatics) has recently begun to emerge in discussions of ways in which people can voluntarily monitor and record specific features of their lives, often using digital technologies. There is evidence that the personal data that are derived from individuals engaging in such reflexive self-monitoring are now beginning to be used by actors, agencies and organisations beyond the personal and privatised realm. Self-tracking rationales and sites are proliferating as part of a ‘function creep’ of the technology and ethos of self-tracking. The detail offered by these data on individuals and the growing commodification and commercial value of digital data have led government, managerial and commercial enterprises to explore ways of appropriating self-tracking for their own purposes. In some contexts people are encouraged, ‘nudged’, obliged or coerced into using digital devices to produce personal data which are then used by others. This paper examines these issues, outlining five modes of self-tracking that have emerged: private, communal, pushed, imposed and exploited. The analysis draws upon theoretical perspectives on concepts of selfhood, citizenship, biopolitics and data practices and assemblages in discussing the wider sociocultural implications of the emergence and development of these modes of self-tracking

Minds Online: The Interface between Web Science, Cognitive Science, and the Philosophy of Mind

Alongside existing research into the social, political and economic impacts of the Web, there is a need to study the Web from a cognitive and epistemic perspective. This is particularly so as new and emerging technologies alter the nature of our interactive engagements with the Web, transforming the extent to which our thoughts and actions are shaped by the online environment. Situated and ecological approaches to cognition are relevant to understanding the cognitive significance of the Web because of the emphasis they place on forces and factors that reside at the level of agent–world interactions. In particular, by adopting a situated or ecological approach to cognition, we are able to assess the significance of the Web from the perspective of research into embodied, extended, embedded, social and collective cognition. The results of this analysis help to reshape the interdisciplinary configuration of Web Science, expanding its theoretical and empirical remit to include the disciplines of both cognitive science and the philosophy of mind

Extended-XRI Body Interfaces for Hyper-Connected Metaverse Environments

Hybrid mixed-reality (XR) internet-of-things (IoT) research, here called XRI, aims at a strong integration between physical and virtual objects, environments, and agents wherein IoT-enabled edge devices are deployed for sensing, context understanding, networked communication and control of device actuators. Likewise, as augmented reality systems provide an immersive overlay on the environments, and virtual reality provides fully immersive environments, the merger of these domains leads to immersive smart spaces that are hyper-connected, adaptive and dynamic components that anchor the metaverse to real-world constructs. Enabling the human-in-the-loop to remain engaged and connected across these virtual-physical hybrid environments requires advances in user interaction that are multi-dimensional. This work investigates the potential to transition the user interface to the human body as an extended-reality avatar with hybrid extended-body interfaces that can interact both with the physical and virtual sides of the metaverse. It contributes: i) an overview of metaverses, XRI, and avatarization concepts, ii) a taxonomy landscape for extended XRI body interfaces, iii) an architecture and potential interactions for XRI body designs, iv) a prototype XRI body implementation based on the architecture, v) a design-science evaluation, toward enabling future design research directions

Smart nudging: How cognitive technologies enable choice architectures for value co-creation

Abstract People make decisions and take actions to improve their viability everyday, and they increasingly turn to artificial intelligence (AI) to assist with their decision making. Such trends suggest the need to determine how AI and other cognitive technologies affect value co-creation. An integrative framework, based on the service-dominant logic and nudge theory, conceptualizes smart nudging as uses of cognitive technologies to affect people's behaviour predictably, without limiting their options or altering their economic incentives. Several choice architectures and nudges affect value co-creation, by (1) widening resource accessibility, (2) extending engagement, or (3) augmenting human actors' agency. Although cognitive technologies are unlikely to engender smart outcomes alone, they enable designs of conditions and contexts that promote smart behaviours, by amplifying capacities for self-understanding, control, and action. This study offers a conceptualization of actors' value co-creation prompted by AI-driven nudged choices, in terms of re-institutionalizing processes that affect agency and practices

Mobile Learning Revolution: Implications for Language Pedagogy

Mobile technologies including cell phones and tablets are a pervasive feature of everyday life with potential impact on teaching and learning. “Mobile pedagogy” may seem like a contradiction in terms, since mobile learning often takes place physically beyond the teacher's reach, outside the walls of the classroom. While pedagogy implies careful planning, mobility exposes learners to the unexpected. A thoughtful pedagogical response to this reality involves new conceptualizations of what is to be learned and new activity designs. This approach recognizes that learners may act in more self-determined ways beyond the classroom walls, where online interactions and mobile encounters influence their target language communication needs and interests. The chapter sets out a range of opportunities for out-of-class mobile language learning that give learners an active role and promote communication. It then considers the implications of these developments for language content and curricula and the evolving roles and competences of teachers

Enabling peer-to-peer collaboration within online learning environments and virtual laboratories.

This literature review will provide a foundation for future research into the emerging cloud campus within The University of Glasgow. I have previously described the cloud campus concept as a working definition, used to describe the node between located (face-to-face) learning and virtual learning through the use of digital technologies (Dunn, 2016:29). There have been similar constructs established by other academics in the past (Knowles, 1984; Kopp and Hill, 2008; Urban-Woldron, 2013). These constructs tend to be based on recognised theories of learning; for example, connectivism (Siemens, 2005) and the time-tested epistemological frameworks described by Piaget (1963) and Vygotsky (1978) through cognitivism and constructivism (including social- constructivism). This review will provide a synthesis of key papers and it will argue the case for peer-to-peer collaboration within virtual spaces. Specifically, it will argue for the use of technology to support such collaboration within online virtual learning environments and within physical learning spaces as newly defined ‘virtual laboratories’. The paper will present the arguments by illustrating the opportunities and challenges within teacher agency and in physical space design