Implications of the Information Technology Revolution for People with Disabilities

The paper focuses on opportunities for the integration of persons with different types of disabilities in the information technology (IT) labour market. Recent IT developments are identified and examined for their potentially harmful or beneficial effects on access to the IT labour market for persons with disabilities. The opportunities created by new job creation, new forms of training, teleworking, and the role of assistive technologies in facilitating workplace accommodations are briefly described. The focus is on new options for the design and implementation of computer-related assistive technologies in the workplace, and the impact of teleworking and the World Wide Web on employability and work-related training of persons with disabilities. The paper closes with a brief discussion of the roles that government agencies, business firms, labour unions, non-governmental organisations and education can play to help people with disabilities join the IT revolution and share its benefits

Information for the People

Bibliography and photographs of a display of government documents from the Minneapolis Public Library.https://cornerstone.lib.mnsu.edu/lib-services-govdoc-display-govdocs/1006/thumbnail.jp

E-education, information investors in people for relaunch economy

The paper addresses the issue of modern concepts of "e-education and e-learning", plus the models and the recovery of investment. The following are educational approach focusing on e-learning, using principles androgogic system E-learning, models for implementation of e-learning, plus a comparative analysis of standards and norms of global e-learning. Insertion peculiarities of international standards for e-learning(defining the standards and norms of international e-learning, the use of e-learning on the job market and the realization of e-learning focused on the correlation between strategic business objectives, infrastructure and evaluation system preparing staff). End of paper plays Six-Sigma methodology and the recovery of investment specific e-learning, the level of competence of the actors in the e-learning paradigm and implementation and benefits of online learning.e-education, web-based learning, open and distance learning, androgogic model of e-learning

Curriculum Vitae

Kort biografi for Prof. David Budtz PedersenShort bio for Prof. David Budtz Pederse

Health Information Services Available for People Living With HIV/AIDS: Perspectives of Library and Information Professionals

There is an urgent need for availability of life-saving health information services as well as adequate marketing, advertising, and dissemination strategies to people living with HIV/AIDS (PLWHAs), and to the broader public at large, especially in the context of a recent UNAIDS estimation that the number of people living with HIV in the United States, at the end of 2003, exceeded one million for the first time. This study explores the HIV/AIDS health information services that are available within the local community of Knoxville, Tennessee, and presents focus group perspectives of nine library and information professionals about awareness and use of these services by PLWHAs. The study forms part of a larger plan to apply a community informatics (CI) approach to examine the provision of health information services for PLWHAs in terms of how PLWHAs and other stakeholders including health care service providers, academic community at the University of Tennessee, community leaders and activists, and faith-based organizations, use and apply information and communication technologies (ICTs) to empower and enable PLWHAs to meet their information needs, goals, and aspirations. Here we report findings from the project’s first phase of documenting perspectives of library and information professionals about existing HIV/AIDS information services, users of these services, barriers and challenges to effective use, and the role of health information professionals in the context of developing ideal information support services for PLWHAs

Orientation Information in Encoding Facial Expressions for People With Central Vision Loss.

Purpose:Patients with central vision loss face daily challenges on performing various visual tasks. Categorizing facial expressions is one of the essential daily activities. The knowledge of what visual information is crucial for facial expression categorization is important to the understanding of the functional performance of these patients. Here we asked how the performance for categorizing facial expressions depends on the spatial information along different orientations for patients with central vision loss. Methods:Eight observers with central vision loss and five age-matched normally sighted observers categorized face images into four expressions: angry, fearful, happy, and sad. An orientation filter (bandwidth = 23°) was applied to restrict the spatial information within the face images, with the center of the filter ranged from horizontal (0°) to 150° in steps of 30°. Face images without filtering were also tested. Results:When the stimulus visibility was matched, observers with central vision loss categorized facial expressions just as well as their normally sighted counterparts, and showed similar confusion and bias patterns. For all four expressions, performance (normalized d'), uncorrelated with any of the observers' visual characteristics, peaked between -30° and 30° filter orientations and declined systematically as the filter orientation approached vertical (90°). Like normally sighted observers, observers with central vision loss also relied mainly on mouth and eye regions to categorize facial expressions. Conclusions:Similar to people with normal vision, people with central vision loss rely primarily on the spatial information around the horizontal orientation, in particular the regions around the mouth and eyes, for recognizing facial expressions

Coarse-to-Fine Adaptive People Detection for Video Sequences by Maximizing Mutual Information

Applying people detectors to unseen data is challenging since patterns distributions, such as viewpoints, motion, poses, backgrounds, occlusions and people sizes, may significantly differ from the ones of the training dataset. In this paper, we propose a coarse-to-fine framework to adapt frame by frame people detectors during runtime classification, without requiring any additional manually labeled ground truth apart from the offline training of the detection model. Such adaptation make use of multiple detectors mutual information, i.e., similarities and dissimilarities of detectors estimated and agreed by pair-wise correlating their outputs. Globally, the proposed adaptation discriminates between relevant instants in a video sequence, i.e., identifies the representative frames for an adaptation of the system. Locally, the proposed adaptation identifies the best configuration (i.e., detection threshold) of each detector under analysis, maximizing the mutual information to obtain the detection threshold of each detector. The proposed coarse-to-fine approach does not require training the detectors for each new scenario and uses standard people detector outputs, i.e., bounding boxes. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach outperforms state-of-the-art detectors whose optimal threshold configurations are previously determined and fixed from offline training dataThis work has been partially supported by the Spanish government under the project TEC2014-53176-R (HAVideo

Presenting evidence-based health information for people with multiple sclerosis : the IN-DEEP project protocol

Background - Increasingly, evidence-based health information, in particular evidence from systematic reviews, is being made available to lay audiences, in addition to health professionals. Research efforts have focused on different formats for the lay presentation of health information. However, there is a paucity of data on how patients integrate evidence-based health information with other factors such as their preferences for information and experiences with information-seeking. The aim of this project is to explore how people with multiple sclerosis (MS) integrate health information with their needs, experiences, preferences and values and how these factors can be incorporated into an online resource of evidence-based health information provision for people with MS and their families.Methods - This project is an Australian-Italian collaboration between researchers, MS societies and people with MS. Using a four-stage mixed methods design, a model will be developed for presenting evidence-based health information on the Internet for people with MS and their families. This evidence-based health information will draw upon systematic reviews of MS interventions from The Cochrane Library. Each stage of the project will build on the last. After conducting focus groups with people with MS and their family members (Stage 1), we will develop a model for summarising and presenting Cochrane MS reviews that is integrated with supporting information to aid understanding and decision making. This will be reviewed and finalised with people with MS, family members, health professionals and MS Society staff (Stage 2), before being uploaded to the Internet and evaluated (Stages 3 and 4).Discussion - This project aims to produce accessible and meaningful evidence-based health information about MS for use in the varied decision making and management situations people encounter in everyday life. It is expected that the findings will be relevant to broader efforts to provide evidence-based health information for patients and the general public. The international collaboration also permits exploration of cultural differences that could inform international practice.<br /