Policy representation and reasoning with preferences and reactivity

[no abstract

Application Platforms for the Internet of Things: Theory, Architecture, Protocols, Data Formats, and Privacy

The Internet of Things (IoT) is the next industrial revolution: we will interact naturally with real and virtual devices as a key part of our daily life. This technology shift is expected to be greater than the Web and Mobile combined. As extremely different technologies are needed to build connected devices, the Internet of Things field is a junction between electronics, telecommunications and software engineering. Internet of Things application development happens in silos, often using proprietary and closed communication protocols. There is the common belief that only if we can solve the interoperability problem we can have a real Internet of Things. After a deep analysis of the IoT protocols, we identified a set of primitives for IoT applications. We argue that each IoT protocol can be expressed in term of those primitives, thus solving the interoperability problem at the application protocol level. Moreover, the primitives are network and transport independent and make no assumption in that regard. This dissertation presents our implementation of an IoT platform: the Ponte project. Privacy issues follows the rise of the Internet of Things: it is clear that the IoT must ensure resilience to attacks, data authentication, access control and client privacy. We argue that it is not possible to solve the privacy issue without solving the interoperability problem: enforcing privacy rules implies the need to limit and filter the data delivery process. However, filtering data require knowledge of how the format and the semantics of the data: after an analysis of the possible data formats and representations for the IoT, we identify JSON-LD and the Semantic Web as the best solution for IoT applications. Then, this dissertation present our approach to increase the throughput of filtering semantic data by a factor of ten

Capturing perceived everyday lived landscapes through gamification and active crowdsourcing

Summary Landscapes are distinguishable areas of the earth with distinct characters comprised of tangible and intangible dimensions and entities. Interactions between humans and landscapes influence social, physical and mental well-being as well as guide behaviour. Understanding how landscapes are perceived has thus gained traction in sustainable and inclusive policy and decision making processes and public participation is called for. The recognised importance of understanding landscapes from an experiential and perceptual perspective and incorporating public participation in data generation efforts is reflected in overarching conventions, policy guidelines and frameworks including the European Landscape Convention (ELC), the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MEA), Natures Contributions to People (NCP) and the Landscape Character Assessment (LCA) framework. Major challenges for these conventions and frameworks are 1) how to collect data on landscape experiences and perceptions from a diverse group of individuals, 2) how to integrate and link physical entities, sensory experiences and intangible dimensions of landscapes and 3) how to identify other potential sources of landscape relevant information. The abundance of storage space and the accessibility of broadband internet have led to a burgeoning of user generated natural language content. In parallel, various paradigms of exploiting ubiquitous internet access for research purposes have emerged, including crowdsourcing, citizen science, volunteered geographic information and public participation geographic information systems. These low cost approaches have shown great potential in generating large amounts of data, however, they struggle with motivating and retaining participants. Gamification - broadly defined as adding entertaining or playful elements to applications or processes - has been found to increase user motivation and has explicitly been called for in landscape perception and preference research to diversify participant demographics. Meanwhile, natural language has been found to be deeply intertwined with thought and emotion and has been identified as a rich source of semantic data on how landscapes are perceived and experienced. Written texts and the ways in which these can be analysed have gained particular interest. Therefore, the overall goal of this thesis is to develop and implement a gamified crowdsourcing application to collect natural language landscape descriptions and to analyse and explore the contributions in terms of how landscapes are perceived through sensory experiences and how additional landscape relevant natural language can be identified. To approach this goal, I first elicit key data and feature requirements to collect landscape relevant information from a heterogeneous audience. Guided by the identified requirements, I develop and implement Window Expeditions, a gamified active crowdsourcing platform geared towards collecting natural language descriptions of everyday lived landscapes. The generated corpus of natural language is explored using computational methods and I present and discuss the results in light of who the contributors are, the locations from which participants contribute and salient terms found in English and German. In a further step I annotate a subset of English contributions according to the contained biophysical elements, sensory experiences and cultural ecosystem (dis)services and explore these in terms of how they are linked. Finally, I present a novel approach of using a curated high quality landscape specific dataset to computationally identify similar documents in other corpora using sentence-transformers. Using the Mechanics, Dynamics and Aesthetics (MDA) framework, the aesthetics of discovery, expression and fellowship were identified as most fitting for an active crowdsourcing platform. In addition, four groups of main dynamics were found, namely general dynamics of user interactions, contribution dynamics, exploration dynamics and moderation dynamics. The application was gamified by introducing points and leader boards and the platform was implemented in German and English (with French being added at a later point) to collect landscape descriptions in multiple languages. Demographic information was collected about the users including their year of birth, their gender, if they were at home whilst contributing and what languages users believed to be fluent in. Using the Mechanics, Dynamics and Aesthetics (MDA) framework, the aesthetics of discovery, expression and fellowship were identified as most fitting for an active crowdsourcing platform. In addition, four groups of main dynamics were found, namely general dynamics of user interactions, contribution dynamics, exploration dynamics and moderation dynamics. The application was gamified by introducing points and leader boards and the platform was implemented in German and English (with French being added at a later point) to collect landscape descriptions in multiple languages. Demographic information was collected about the users including their year of birth, their gender, if they were at home whilst contributing and what languages users believed to be fluent in reporting not being at home (n = 172) who were more likely to contribute from areas of herbaceous vegetation. Terms describing salient elements of everyday lived environments such as "tree", "house", "garden" and "street", as well as weather related phenomena and colours were found frequently in both English and German contributions in the generated corpus. Further, terms related to space, time and people were found significantly more frequently in the generated corpus compared to general natural language and representative landscape image descriptions highlighting the importance of spatial features as well as people and the times at which these were observed. Notably, descriptions referring to trees and birds were frequently found in the contributed texts, underlining their saliency in everyday lived landscapes. The results show biophyiscal terms related to vegetation (n = 556) and the built environment (n = 468) as well as weather related terms (n = 452) to be most prominent. Further, contributions referencing visual (n = 186) and auditory (n = 96) sensory experiences were found most often with positive sensory experiences being most common (n = 168) followed by neutral (n = 86) and negative (n = 68). In regards to the intangible dimensions captured in the contributed landscape descriptions, recreation (n = 68) was found most often followed by heritage (n = 36), identity (n = 26) and tranquillity (n = 23). Through linking biophysical elements, sensory experiences and cultural ecosystem (dis)services, the results show that the biophysical category of animals appears often with the sensory experience of smell/taste and the biophysical category of moving objects appears more than expected with the sensory experience of sound. Further, the results show the cultural ecosystem service of inspiration to often appear with the biophysical category of natural features and tranquillity with weather. Using a curated subcorpus of English natural language landscape descriptions (n = 428) collected with Window Expeditions, similar documents in other collections were identified. Through translating documents to vectors by means of sentence-transformers and calculating cosine similarity scores, a total of 6075 to 8172 documents were identified to be similar to contributions to Window Expeditions, depending on if the initial dataset was prefiltered for biophysical noun lemmas (a list of biophysical landscape elements derived from the Window Expeditions corpus) and Craik’s list adjectives (a list of common adjectives used to describe landscapes). Latent Dirichlet allocation topic modelling, a clustering approach which is commonly used to identify overarching topics or themes in collections of natural language, shows four distinct clusters in both Window Expeditions as well as in the corpus of identified similar documents, namely urban and residential, rural and natural, autumn and colours and snow and weather. Overall, the results presented in this thesis provide further evidence to work that natural language is a rich source of landscape specific information, capturing underlying semantics of a multitude of referenced landscape dimensions. In particular, this thesis demonstrates that computationally aided approaches to analysing and exploring landscape relevant textual data can give detailed insights into salient features of landscapes and how individuals perceive and experience these. Especially when complemented by human annotation, natural language landscape descriptions are a welcome source of data about a landscape’s biophysical elements, individual sensory experiences in landscapes and the perceived cultural ecosystem (dis)services. The findings of this thesis are accompanied by various limitations, chief amongst which are the possibilities of users to falsify their locations, the rather small amount of data that was collected through Window Expeditions and the Eurocentric definitions and approaches common in landscape perception research. The former two limitations can be addressed through implementational reiterations and promotional efforts, whereas the latter limitation calls for further consideration of the socio-culturally induced construction of landscape perception research and a rethinking of holistic approaches, especially in multicultural participatory contexts. The work presented in this thesis shows great potential in complementing landscape perception research with gamified methods of data generation. Active crowdsourcing can be a cost efficient and scalable approach of generating much needed data from a diverse audience. Exploring landscape relevant natural language with both quantitative and qualitative methods from various disciplines including geographic information science, linguistics and machine learning can lead to new insights into landscape perception, sensory landscape experiences and how these are expressed

The structural approach to city image (Al-Madinah Al-Munawarah)

Today there are huge and radical changes taking place in the development of almost all the cities of the Muslim world, among them the city of Al- Madinah Al- Munawarah. These have brought profound changes in ways of life, urban structure and styles of architecture which have permeated and transformed the very social and physical fabric of the cities and are destroying the quality of the urban environment and Muslim way of life. The Muslim city is in danger of becoming a mere copy of the worst elements of many Western cities: ugliness, noise, air pollution, a frenetic way of life and all the associated social problems. Meanwhile it is felt fundamental to approach Islamic civilisation not as a mere object of investigation, with the Muslim city as its museum of historical heritage, but as a living reality, a faith and an inspiration to milliards of people in the world of Islam who do not separate their ethical values and their cultural identity from their demands for social welfare, justice and a humane quality of life within the modern process of economic development. Since we live in the world of the mind, it follows that the problems can be seen as a battle for the mind. In this realm of persuasion and stimulation it is the image which assumes the key role and it is the image makers - the authors, controllers and artists, among them the built environment professionals - who hold a special responsibility. Furthermore it is the reasons and processes underlying the formation of particular interests and images that take on special significance. This is critical if one tries to solve the problems of the formation and development of the symbolic patterns in a historical city such as the city of Al- Madinah, which is known as the City of the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him). The author aims to propound a comprehensive study of the patterns of tradition and historic events of the Prophet's time which inspired and generated the form of the city of Al- Madinah. The study focuses on the preservation of the deep images embedded in people's perception of the city in order to project them to sustain its form in the future. Therefore, the author has in mind the objective of conserving Islamic architectural heritage in general, and the necessity of impressing, on the consciousness of the powers that be, the urgency of preserving the heritage of the city of Al- Madinah before it in particular is destroyed. The City of the Prophet must be considered as being on no account expendable, regardless of the gains made in replacing the old by the new. Finally the present study forms a sequel to the findings extracted from literature and from the case study, as related to the Islamic Legal System. Common to all these fields is the view that architecture represents a means to give man an existential foothold, similar to the view of phenomenological approaches. The author's primary aim is therefore to investigate the psychic implications of architecture rather than its practical side, although he certainly admits that there exists an interrelationship between the two aspects. In reviewing the literature, the "structural" dimension is discussed as part of a comprehensive system in transformation. At the same time, the thesis stresses that the environment influences human beings, implying that the purpose of architecture transcends the definition given by structuralism. A discussion of perception and image has been therefore included emphasising that man cannot gain a foothold through scientific understanding alone. He needs symbols, that is, works of art which represent life- situations. It is one of the basic needs of man to experience his life -situations as meaningful, and the purpose of the work of art is to reflect meanings. The concept of "meaning" is also a strong theme throughout thesis

Dictionary of privacy, data protection and information security

The Dictionary of Privacy, Data Protection and Information Security explains the complex technical terms, legal concepts, privacy management techniques, conceptual matters and vocabulary that inform public debate about privacy. The revolutionary and pervasive influence of digital technology affects numerous disciplines and sectors of society, and concerns about its potential threats to privacy are growing. With over a thousand terms meticulously set out, described and cross-referenced, this Dictionary enables productive discussion by covering the full range of fields accessibly and comprehensively. In the ever-evolving debate surrounding privacy, this Dictionary takes a longer view, transcending the details of today''s problems, technology, and the law to examine the wider principles that underlie privacy discourse. Interdisciplinary in scope, this Dictionary is invaluable to students, scholars and researchers in law, technology and computing, cybersecurity, sociology, public policy and administration, and regulation. It is also a vital reference for diverse practitioners including data scientists, lawyers, policymakers and regulators

Media and information literate citizens: think critically, click wisely!

Can we improve our societies by clicking wisely? Content providers such as libraries, archives, museums, media and digital communications companies can enable inclusive and sustainable development. However, they do not always live up to these ideals, which creates challenges for the users of these services. Content providers of all types open up new opportunities for lifelong learning. But at the same time, they open up challenges such as misinformation and disinformation, hate speech, and infringement of online privacy, among others. Media and information literacy is a set of competencies that help people to maximize advantages and minimize harms. Media and information literacy covers competencies that enable people to critically and effectively engage with: communications content; the institutions that facilitate this content; and the use of digital technologies. Capacities in these areas are indispensable for all citizens regardless of their ages or backgrounds. This pioneering curriculum presents a comprehensive competency framework of media and information literacy and offers educators and learners structured pedagogical suggestions. It features various detailed modules covering the range of competencies needed to navigate today’s communications ecosystem. This resource links media and information literacy to emerging issues, such as artificial intelligence, digital citizenship education, education for sustainable development, cultural literacy and the exponential rise in misinformation and disinformation. With effective use of this media and information literacy curriculum, everyone can become media and information literate as well as peer-educators of media and information literacy

Against remediation

No description supplie

2019 Oklahoma Research Day Full Program

Oklahoma Research Day 2019 - SWOSU Celebrating 20 years of Undergraduate Research Successes