Education and Skill Development through the Reconfiguration of Discarded Hardware: Turning Base Metal into intellectual Capital

This paper examines an intervention in Europe which enables untypical individuals to acquire skills and competences in order to enter IT related employment. To do this they need to acquire a threshold level of intellectual capital so that they are considered sufficiently competent to gain employment. This can therefore provide the industry with a solid foundation of the necessary support staff, capable of providing services to the local community supporting such educational initiatives. This initiative can then release the more conventionally educated to work at the cutting edge of industry. As a driver for wealth generation in India, the IT industry is remarkable. It demands a wide spectrum of intellectual capital. As diffusion of IT technology is predicted to pervade throughout the subcontinent, the demand for all levels of competence would seem to be buoyant. The training environment covered in this case study complements the traditional educational system and could furnish alternative career opportunities to certain sections of the community. This paper takes a strategic view throughout. The fallacy of composition has to be taken seriously. What is true for a part is not true of the whole. To place this in the context of this paper; whilst a workshop to help unemployed people build computers in Sheffield may work, it is not necessarily appropriate to draw the conclusions that it will be effective when implemented over the whole of the Indian Subcontinent

Guest Editors\u27 Introduction: Best of RESPECT, Part 2

The guest editors introduce best papers on broadening participation in computing from the RESPECT\u2715 conference. The five articles presented here are part two of a two-part series representing research on broadening participation in computing. These articles study participation in intersectional ways, through the perceptions and experiences of African-American middle school girls, the sense of belonging in computing for LGBTQ students, the impact of a STEM scholarship and community development program for low-income and first-generation college students, a leadership development program, and how African-American women individually take leadership to enable their success in computing

Model Cards for Model Reporting

Trained machine learning models are increasingly used to perform high-impact tasks in areas such as law enforcement, medicine, education, and employment. In order to clarify the intended use cases of machine learning models and minimize their usage in contexts for which they are not well suited, we recommend that released models be accompanied by documentation detailing their performance characteristics. In this paper, we propose a framework that we call model cards, to encourage such transparent model reporting. Model cards are short documents accompanying trained machine learning models that provide benchmarked evaluation in a variety of conditions, such as across different cultural, demographic, or phenotypic groups (e.g., race, geographic location, sex, Fitzpatrick skin type) and intersectional groups (e.g., age and race, or sex and Fitzpatrick skin type) that are relevant to the intended application domains. Model cards also disclose the context in which models are intended to be used, details of the performance evaluation procedures, and other relevant information. While we focus primarily on human-centered machine learning models in the application fields of computer vision and natural language processing, this framework can be used to document any trained machine learning model. To solidify the concept, we provide cards for two supervised models: One trained to detect smiling faces in images, and one trained to detect toxic comments in text. We propose model cards as a step towards the responsible democratization of machine learning and related AI technology, increasing transparency into how well AI technology works. We hope this work encourages those releasing trained machine learning models to accompany model releases with similar detailed evaluation numbers and other relevant documentation

Covering rough sets based on neighborhoods: An approach without using neighborhoods

Rough set theory, a mathematical tool to deal with inexact or uncertain knowledge in information systems, has originally described the indiscernibility of elements by equivalence relations. Covering rough sets are a natural extension of classical rough sets by relaxing the partitions arising from equivalence relations to coverings. Recently, some topological concepts such as neighborhood have been applied to covering rough sets. In this paper, we further investigate the covering rough sets based on neighborhoods by approximation operations. We show that the upper approximation based on neighborhoods can be defined equivalently without using neighborhoods. To analyze the coverings themselves, we introduce unary and composition operations on coverings. A notion of homomorphismis provided to relate two covering approximation spaces. We also examine the properties of approximations preserved by the operations and homomorphisms, respectively.Comment: 13 pages; to appear in International Journal of Approximate Reasonin

Heterogeneous Effects in Education: The Promise and Challenge of Incorporating Intersectionality into Quantitative Methodological Approaches

To date, the theory of intersectionality has largely guided qualitative efforts in social science and education research. Translating the construct to new methodological approaches is inherently complex and challenging, but offers the possibility of breaking down silos that keep education researchers with similar interests—but different methodological approaches—from sharing knowledge. Quantitative approaches that emphasize the varied impacts of individual identities on educational outcomes move beyond singular dimensions capturing individual characteristics, drawing a parallel to intersectionality. Scholars interested in heterogeneous effects recognize the shortcomings of focusing on the effect of a single social identity. This integrative review explores techniques used in quantitative research to examine heterogeneous effects across individual background, drawing on methodological literature from the social sciences and education. I examine the goals and challenges of the quantitative techniques and explore how they relate to intersectionality. I conclude by discussing what education researchers can learn from other applied fields that are working to develop a crosswalk across the two disparate, but interconnected, literatures.Educational Leadership and Polic

A Fault-Tolerant Scheme for Mobility Management in PCS Networks

[[abstract]]One of the most important and challenging issues in the design of personal communication service (PCS) systems is the management of location information. In this paper, we propose a new fault-tolerant location management scheme, which is based on the cellular quorum system. Due to quorum's salient set property, our scheme can tolerate the failures of one or more location server(s) without adding or changing the hardware of the systems in the two-tier networks. Meanwhile, with a region-based approach, our scheme stores/retrieves the MH location information in the location servers of a quorum set of the local region as much as possible to avoid long delays caused by the possible long-distance of VLR and HLR. Thus, it yields better connection establishment and update delay.

Troubling Vulnerability: Designing with LGBT Young People's Ambivalence Towards Hate Crime Reporting

HCI is increasingly working with ?vulnerable? people yet there is a danger that the label of vulnerability can alienate and stigmatize the people such work aims to support. We report our study investigating the application of interaction design to increase rates of hate crime reporting amongst Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender young people. During design-led workshops participants expressed ambivalence towards reporting. While recognizing their exposure to hate crime they simultaneously rejected ascription as victim as implied in the act of reporting. We used visual communication design to depict the young people?s ambivalent identities and contribute insights on how these fail and succeed to account for the intersectional, fluid and emergent nature of LGBT identities through the design research process. We argue that by producing ambiguous designed texts, alongside conventional qualitative data, we ?trouble? our design research narratives as a tactic to disrupt static and reductive understandings of vulnerability within HCI

Longitudinal cohort of HIV-negative transgender women of colour in New York City: protocol for the TURNNT ('Trying to Understand Relationships, Networks and Neighbourhoods among Transgender women of colour') study.

IntroductionIn the USA, transgender women are among the most vulnerable to HIV. In particular, transgender women of colour face high rates of infection and low uptake of important HIV prevention tools, including pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP). This paper describes the design, sampling methods, data collection and analyses of the TURNNT ('Trying to Understand Relationships, Networks and Neighbourhoods among Transgender women of colour') study. In collaboration with communities of transgender women of colour, TURNNT aims to explore the complex social and environmental (ie, neighbourhood) structures that affect HIV prevention and other aspects of health in order to identify avenues for intervention.Methods and analysesTURNNT is a prospective cohort study, which will recruit 300 transgender women of colour (150 Black/African American, 100 Latina and 50 Asian/Pacific Islander participants) in New York City. There will be three waves of data collection separated by 6 months. At each wave, participants will provide information on their relationships, social and sexual networks, and neighbourhoods. Global position system technology will be used to generate individual daily path areas in order to estimate neighbourhood-level exposures. Multivariate analyses will be conducted to assess cross-sectional and longitudinal, independent and synergistic associations of personal relationships (notably individual social capital), social and sexual networks, and neighbourhood factors (notably neighbourhood-level social cohesion) with PrEP uptake and discontinuation.Ethics and disseminationThe TURNNT protocol was approved by the Columbia University Institutional Review Board (reference no. AAAS8164). This study will provide novel insights into the relationship, network and neighbourhood factors that influence HIV prevention behaviours among transgender women of colour and facilitate exploration of this population's health and well-being more broadly. Through community-based dissemination events and consultation with policy makers, this foundational work will be used to guide the development and implementation of future interventions with and for transgender women of colour