Ambient video awareness: “It’s great, but I still don’t want it”

Video instant messaging tools are not as widely used as we would have predicted and have so far failed to fulfill their promise to become an indispensable tool of social presence, interacting within the workgroup environment and creating a sense of community. Whilst users are becoming comfortable with videoconferencing and software video meetings, the use of video in “awareness” is still very uncommon. Over a 2-year period, we have run 8 discrete Hexagon room studies on naturalistic “ambient video awareness”. Only one of these studies can be considered to be a (limited) success. This paper discusses some of the factors inhibiting the use of such tools in e-learning environments, based on users’ feedback on issues, such as the tool promotion, user interface, size of community and visibility concerns

Supporting Knowledge Sharing Visibility: A Qualitative Analysis

Knowledge sharing visibility is a critical environmental factor which can reduce social loafing in knowledge sharing. This is especially true in IT-based knowledge sharing. As such, it is imperative that we better understand how to design IT-based Knowledge Management Systems (KMS) to support high knowledge sharing visibility. This paper examines the impact of knowledge management technology functions (e.g., tracking, knowledge storing) on knowledge sharing visibility through qualitative analysis of semi-structured interviews with participants in a Chinese company. Impact and implications of use for their existing KMS are examined. Results encourage applied statistical, tracking, knowledge distribution and knowledge storing functions for monitoring explicit knowledge sharing, and suggest integration of knowledge maps with communication tools (e.g., instant messenger) to support visibility for implicit knowledge sharing. Extension to use of web 2.0 technologies (e.g., weblogs) in KMS is also explored

The Effect of Covert Advertising on Brand Patronage

The use of covert advertising in film production is an emerging brand communication strategy in the Nigerian society. In this advertising strategy, it integrates an advertiser's product into movies and TV shows on-screen visibility; it involves the inclusion of a product, brand name or the name of a firm in a movie for increasing awareness of the brand and instant recognition at the point of purchase. This paper examines the effect of covert advertising on brand purchase, using the movie 'Letter to a stranger'. The study also examined if the products advertised were noticed; their level of awareness as well as if the placements contributed to the patronage of the product towards the advertised products. The paper suggests that Nigerian movie producers and advertisers should work together to create more placements in Nollywood movies, but these placements should be creatively done so as to be able to recapture the hearts of many Nigerians

The F@ Framework of Designing Awareness Mechanisms in Instant Messaging

This paper presents our research on awareness support in Instant Messaging (IM). The paper starts with a brief overview of empirical study of IM, using an online survey and face-to-face interviews to identify user needs for awareness support. The study identified a need for supporting four aspects of awareness, awareness of multiple concurrent conversations, conversational awareness, presence awareness of a group conversation, and visibility of moment-to-moment listeners and viewers. Based on the empirical study and existing research on awareness, we have developed the F@ (read as fat) framework of awareness. F@ comprises of the abstract level and the concrete level. The former includes an in-depth description of various awareness aspects in IM, whilst the latter utilises temporal logic to formalise fundamental time-related awareness aspects. F@ helps developers gain a better understanding of awareness and thereby design usable mechanisms to support awareness. Applying F@, we have designed several mechanisms to support various aspect of awareness in IM

Optimal Probabilistic Ring Exploration by Asynchronous Oblivious Robots

We consider a team of $k$ identical, oblivious, asynchronous mobile robots that are able to sense (\emph{i.e.}, view) their environment, yet are unable to communicate, and evolve on a constrained path. Previous results in this weak scenario show that initial symmetry yields high lower bounds when problems are to be solved by \emph{deterministic} robots. In this paper, we initiate research on probabilistic bounds and solutions in this context, and focus on the \emph{exploration} problem of anonymous unoriented rings of any size. It is known that $\Theta(\log n)$ robots are necessary and sufficient to solve the problem with $k$ deterministic robots, provided that $k$ and $n$ are coprime. By contrast, we show that \emph{four} identical probabilistic robots are necessary and sufficient to solve the same problem, also removing the coprime constraint. Our positive results are constructive

Gathering on Rings for Myopic Asynchronous Robots With Lights

We investigate gathering algorithms for asynchronous autonomous mobile robots moving in uniform ring-shaped networks. Different from most work using the Look-Compute-Move (LCM) model, we assume that robots have limited visibility and lights. That is, robots can observe nodes only within a certain fixed distance, and emit a color from a set of constant number of colors. We consider gathering algorithms depending on two parameters related to the initial configuration: M_{init}, which denotes the number of nodes between two border nodes, and O_{init}, which denotes the number of nodes hosting robots between two border nodes. In both cases, a border node is a node hosting one or more robots that cannot see other robots on at least one side. Our main contribution is to prove that, if M_{init} or O_{init} is odd, gathering is always feasible with three or four colors. The proposed algorithms do not require additional assumptions, such as knowledge of the number of robots, multiplicity detection capabilities, or the assumption of towerless initial configurations. These results demonstrate the power of lights to achieve gathering of robots with limited visibility

PSR B0329+54: Statistics of Substructure Discovered within the Scattering Disk on RadioAstron Baselines of up to 235,000 km

We discovered fine-scale structure within the scattering disk of PSR B0329+54 in observations with the RadioAstron ground-space radio interferometer. Here, we describe this phenomenon, characterize it with averages and correlation functions, and interpret it as the result of decorrelation of the impulse-response function of interstellar scattering between the widely-separated antennas. This instrument included the 10-m Space Radio Telescope, the 110-m Green Bank Telescope, the 14x25-m Westerbork Synthesis Radio Telescope, and the 64-m Kalyazin Radio Telescope. The observations were performed at 324 MHz, on baselines of up to 235,000 km in November 2012 and January 2014. In the delay domain, on long baselines the interferometric visibility consists of many discrete spikes within a limited range of delays. On short baselines it consists of a sharp spike surrounded by lower spikes. The average envelope of correlations of the visibility function show two exponential scales, with characteristic delays of $\tau_1=4.1\pm 0.3\ \mu{\rm s}$ and $\tau_2=23\pm 3\ \mu{\rm s}$, indicating the presence of two scales of scattering in the interstellar medium. These two scales are present in the pulse-broadening function. The longer scale contains 0.38 times the scattered power of the shorter one. We suggest that the longer tail arises from highly-scattered paths, possibly from anisotropic scattering or from substructure at large angles.Comment: 15 pages, 6 figures, 3 tables; accepted by Astrophysical journa