Dimensions of wellbeing and recognitional justice of migrant workers during the COVID-19 lockdown in Kerala, India

The lockdown of March 2020 in India witnessed one of the largest movements of migrants in the country. The state of Kerala was quick and efficient in responding to the challenges posed by the lockdown on its migrant population and in supporting its ‘guest workers’. While many studies have researched the material resources of migrants during the pandemic, such as income and food, few have investigated the subjective measures and emphasised the lived experiences of migrant workers. Drawing on the Wellbeing in Developing Countries (WeD) approach which examines three dimensions of wellbeing, namely, (a) material, (b) relational and (c) subjective wellbeing, this article focuses on the mental health and wellbeing experiences of migrant workers during the first lockdown in Kerala. By deploying these wellbeing dimensions, the study looks at how migrant workers perceived and experienced the various interventions put in place by state and local governments, as well as voluntary initiatives aimed at supporting them. The study elaborates around migrants’ relations of love, care, and trust, and their reasons to remain in Kerala or return home during the lockdown. The study found that a paradigm shift, where ‘migrant workers’ are becoming ‘guest workers’, was at the forefront of the captured narratives. The key findings in this way contribute to the understanding of migrants’ lived experiences, wellbeing, and perceptions of the different lockdown interventions. We argue that an increased attention to subjective factors helps us understand migrant needs at times of crisis through their lived experiences and thereby enhances policy planning for disaster preparedness

A Ranking Approach to Summarising Twitter Home Timelines

The rise of social media services has changed the ways in which users can communicate and consume content online. Whilst online social networks allow for fast and convenient delivery of knowledge, users are prone to information overload when too much information is presented for them to read and process. Automatic text summarisation is a tool to help mitigate information overload. In automatic text summarisation, short summaries are generated algorithmically from extended text, such as news articles or scientific papers. This thesis addresses the challenges in applying text summarisation to the Twitter social network. It also goes beyond text, exploiting additional information that is unique to social networks to create summaries which are personal to an intended reader. Unlike previous work in tweet summarisation, the experiments here address the home timelines of readers, which contain the incoming posts from authors to whom they have explicitly subscribed. A novel contribution is made in this work the form of a large gold standard ($19,350$ tweets), the majority of which will be shared with the research community. The gold standard is a collection of timelines that have been subjectively annotated by the readers to whom they belong, allowing fair evaluation of summaries which are not limited to tweets of general interest, but which are specific to the reader. Where the home timeline is used by professional users for social media analysis, automatic text summarisation can be applied to give results which beat all baselines. In the general case, where no limitation is placed on the types of readers, personalisation features which exploit the relationship between author and reader and the reader's own previous posts, were shown to outperform both automatic text summarisation and all baselines

Spidious: Improving User's Efficiency on Email with Machine Learning and a Better Visualization Approach

A comunicação está presente na vida humana desde os seus primórdios, inicialmente em pe- quena escala com recurso a pinturas rupestres e gestos, e mais tarde nomeadamente no século XX, em grande escala através do uso da tecnologia. No entanto, foi sempre um meio fundamental na vida das pessoas que sofreu, e sofre, uma evolução contínua.Em virtude desta necessidade constante surgiu, em 1969, uma das ferramentas de comunicação mais duradouras e mais usadas: o email. Este, da forma como o conhecemos, está extraordinari- amente enraizado um pouco por todo o mundo ao ponto de serem enviados cerca de 196 biliões de emails por dia estimando-se ainda que, até 2018, existam aproximadamente 5.2 biliões de con- tas registadas. Aquando da sua projeção, o email foi pensado para resolver um problema: o de comunicar entre pessoas à distância. E a verdade é que conseguiu resolvê-lo de forma eficaz.No entanto, à medida que esta solução se tornou mais popular, aliada a um ritmo gritante ve- rificado no trabalho e na vida das pessoas, originou a criação de um outro problema, de maior gravidade, ainda não resolvido: o da falta de eficiência no uso do email. Este mesmo problema potencia a existência de níveis de entropia assustadores nas contas de email e, consequentemente, leva a uma perda de tempo importantíssimo para o utilizador, tempo esse que em situações empre- sariais se materializa em custos elevados.Note-se que este é um problema com uma importância indiscritível e pouco estudado, que indubitavelmente não pode continuar sem uma solução confiável. É estimado que, o email con- suma cerca de 25% do tempo de trabalho dos seus utilizadores. E se, no passado, o ser humano conseguiu melhorar a sua comunicação presencial dado que a mesma era essencial, sendo a comu- nicação através do email também ela fulcral no presente, porque não haveremos nós de a melhorar também?De facto, atualmente, tem-se assistido a um grande interesse por parte das empresas tecnoló- gicas relativamente ao tema do email, interesse esse que, tem levado ao aparecimento de algumas tentativas de solução aos problemas apresentados pelo email. De entre esses podemos destacar, por exemplo, o Inbox da Google, o ActiveInbox ou até mesmo o Boomerang for Gmail da BaydIn. No entanto, e infelizmente para todos os utilizadores, cada uma destas soluções apenas resolve pe- quenos pormenores ou partes do problema e, por essas razões, nenhuma delas é uma alternativa viável para resolver a questão científica em estudo.Desta forma, esta dissertação pretende afirmar-se como uma solução assertiva que permita re- solver o problema de eficiência atual do email. Para isso, a mesma passará por duas fases distintas. A primeira, pela criação de uma nova forma de visualização para o email, assente em novos pa- radigmas, que dote o utilizador de ferramentas imprescindíveis para gerir facilmente um grande volume de mensagens. E a segunda, a de conferir ao email um determinado nível de inteligência através de modelos estatísticos que se vão moldando com as próprias ações do utilizador, fazendo com que, seja o email a trabalhar para o utilizador e não o utilizador a trabalhar para o email, tornando-o dessa forma, um bom servo e um bom mestre.Communication is present in human life since the beginning, initially at a small scale using the cave paintings and gestures and later, viz. in the twentieth century, at a much larger scale through the use of technology.In 1969, by the virtue of this constant need, came into existence on of the most durable and more used tools of communication: the email. This, in the way we know it, is deeply rooted all over the world to the point that it is estimated that about 196 billion emails are sent on a daily basis, and it is also estimated that the number of email accounts to be approximately 5.2 billion by 2018. At the time of its projection, the email was thought to solve a problem: to communicate with people at a distance. And the truth is that it was solved effectively.However, as this solution has become more popular, associated with a very high pace checked at work and in people's lives, it afforded the creation of another problem, more serious, not solved yet: the lack of efficiency in the use of email. This same problem enhances the existence of high levels of entropy in e-mail accounts and, consequently, it leads to a very considerable loss of time for the user, and in business situations materializes in high costs.Note that this is a problem with an unsurmountable importance and understudied, that certainly cannot continue without a reliable solution. It is estimated that the email consumes about 25% of the working time of its users. And if, in the past, the human being improved its face-to-face communication, once that it was essential, being the communication through email important in the present, why we can't improve that too?In fact, currently, we have seen a great interest from technology companies, in relation to email subject, that it has led to the appearance of some attempted solutions to the problems posed by email. Among these we can highlight, for example, the Inbox by Google. The ActiveInbox, or even the Boomerang for Google da BaydIn. However, and unfortunately for all users, each one of these solutions solves only small details or parts of the problem and, for these reasons, none of them is an alternative feasible to resolve the scientific question under study.Thus, this MSc thesis aims to be an assertive solution that solves the problem of current email efficiency. To this, it will go through two distinct phases. The first involves the creation of a new way of viewing for email, based on new paradigms, which will provide the user essential tools to easily manage a large volume messages. And the second, gives the email a certain level of intelligence using statistical models will shaping with their own user actions, causing the email work for the user and not the user for the email, making it a good servant and a good master

FASIL Email summarisation system

Email summarisation presents a unique set of requirements that are different from general text summarisation. This work describes the implementation of an email summarisation system for use in a voice-based Virtual Personal Assistant developed for the EU FASiL Project. Evaluation results from the first integrated version of the project are presented.

‘Dobraia Staraia Angliia’ in Russian Perception: Literary Representations of Englishness in Translated Children's Literature in Soviet and Post-Soviet Russia

This thesis explores Englishness and its representation in translated children’s literature in Russia during the Soviet period (from 1917 until 1991) and the post-Soviet period (from 1992 until 2015). It focuses on Russian translations of English children’s classics published between the late-Victorian period and the Second World War. It studies how Russian translations of English children’s literature construct literary portrayals of Englishness in varied socio-cultural and historical contexts. It investigates the complex processes involved in re-creating national specificities of English literary texts in Russian culture. The Anglo-centric essence of Englishness – or ‘dobraia staraia Angliia’ [good old England] – is expressed to a greater degree in the classics of English children’s literature. It is this particular idealised Englishness that is represented in the Russian translations. This thesis demonstrates that various manifestations of Englishness are modified in Russian translations and that the degree of modification varies according to changes in the political climate in Russia. A significant role is played by ideology – of a prevailing political nature during in the Soviet Union and a commercial ideology in post-Soviet Russia. The first chapter lays the theoretical foundation for the whole thesis and outlines the methodology adopted. Chapters 2 and 3 set out the contextual background for understanding Englishness by focusing on the question of Englishness perceived from English and Russian perspectives, and discussing the main tendencies of representing Englishness in both cultures. Chapter 4 presents the historical background by highlighting the political and cultural circumstances in which Russian translations were made. The second half of the thesis (chapters five, six and seven) focuses on the analysis of the representation of Englishness in Russian translations. Chapter 5 discusses which English children’s books, published between the late-Victorian period and the Second World War, were selected for translation and at what point between 1918 and 2015. Chapters 6 and 7 present the case studies in this thesis. These provide an analysis of how different manifestations of Englishness were translated and, taking into account the Soviet and post-Soviet historical contexts, examine why they were translated in certain ways.Arts and Humanities Research Counci