Business school techspectations Technology in the daily lives and educational experiences of business students

Business School Techspectations is the second in a series of reports based on research by the DCU Leadership, Innovation and Knowledge Research Centre (LInK) at DCU Business School. With its roots in an Irish business school, it is no surprise that LInK’s mission is to strengthen the competitiveness, productivity, innovation and entrepreneurial capacity of the Irish economy. Ireland’s next generation transformation will be enabled by information and communication technologies (ICT) and digital participation by members of Irish society. As a university research centre we have an important role to play in supporting education, industry and government to accelerate this transformation

Pervasive Gaming: Testing Future Context Aware Applications

More and more technical research projects take place that weave together elements of real and virtual life to provide a new experience defined as pervasive. They bank on the development of mobile services to drive the expansion of pervasive applications and in particular pervasive games. Using geolocalisation, local networks and short range radio frequencies technologies like RFID or other tagging technologies, pervasive games rely on a close relationship to the environment and thus explore the space between fiction and reality. This is their main quality but possibly their main weakness as the development relies on the production of specific contents in relation to the context of use. In this article, we propose to explore what this entirely new paradigm for game design implies in terms of production and how to overcome the limitations due to this dependency of contents and context. Based on our experience of three pervasive games developed within research projects on adhoc wifi (ANR-Safari and ANRTranshumance) and RFID networks (ANR-PLUG), this paper presents different options to reducing the cost of content production relying on either traditional editors or grass root contributions.pervasive games, content production, game design, geolocalised technologies.

The Evolution of Telecom Technologies: Current Trends and Near-Future Implications

A project commissioned by The Centre for Cross Border Studies with funding from eirco

Innovation in Mobile Learning: A European Perspective

In the evolving landscape of mobile learning, European researchers have conducted significant mobile learning projects, representing a distinct perspective on mobile learning research and development. Our paper aims to explore how these projects have arisen, showing the driving forces of European innovation in mobile learning. We propose context as a central construct in mobile learning and examine theories of learning for the mobile world, based on physical, technological, conceptual, social and temporal mobility. We also examine the impacts of mobile learning research on educational practices and the implications for policy. Throughout, we identify lessons learnt from European experiences to date

Accessible Information: Advocating the Use of Technology for Individuals with Intellectual Disability on their Path to Individualised Services

Providing people with an intellectual disability (ID), opportunities for social integration have been shown to have a reliable positive influence on their well-being (Wehmeyer et al., 2006; Bunning, 2009). A large percentage of individuals with ID are unable to read and write. For this reason in order for the person to make an informed choice the person needs to have good information presented in a way that they can understand. They may need to see tangible visual aids (video, role play, film, photographs). It may need to be demonstrated to them a number of times. This assists a person in making choices and decisions so that they can actively participate not just in their own lives but in the community. Otherwise the person cannot make the decision, and other people are making it for them. Therefore this research will investigate the viability of developing an internal webbased learning and communication tool for people with an ID. The tool will focus on providing accessible information through image to image navigation and by providing choice of modality when receiving information. (Who, 2011) state that two of the biggest barriers to living an ordinary life are the lack of accessible information and being able to advocate. A person cannot be an active citizen if they cannot access the information or understand the way it is presented. It effects every part of your life. The experiment also evaluated if video conferencing communication tools are accessible for the participants who reside in different locations to communicate with each other. The key issues that must be explored around the development of such a system will be factors such as; Accessible Information, Web Accessibility and Universal Design. The pilot system will involve individuals with mild to moderate ID who attend one of seven training centres in disparate locations. This research will also explore these issues in the context of social models, such as Wolfensberger\u27s theory of Social Role Valorization

The genesis and development of mobile learning in Europe

In the past two decades, European researchers have conducted many significant mobile learning projects. The chapter explores how these projects have arisen and what each one has contributed, so as to show the driving forces and outcomes of European innovation in mobile learning. The authors identify context as a central construct in European researchers’ conceptualizations of mobile learning and examine theories of learning for the mobile world, based on physical, technological, conceptual, social and temporal mobility. The authors also examine the impacts of mobile learning research on educational practices and the implications for policy. Finally, they suggest future challenges for researchers, developers and policy makers in shaping the future of mobile learning

Classification of sporting activities using smartphone accelerometers

In this paper we present a framework that allows for the automatic identification of sporting activities using commonly available smartphones. We extract discriminative informational features from smartphone accelerometers using the Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT). Despite the poor quality of their accelerometers, smartphones were used as capture devices due to their prevalence in today’s society. Successful classification on this basis potentially makes the technology accessible to both elite and non-elite athletes. Extracted features are used to train different categories of classifiers. No one classifier family has a reportable direct advantage in activity classification problems to date; thus we examine classifiers from each of the most widely used classifier families. We investigate three classification approaches; a commonly used SVM-based approach, an optimized classification model and a fusion of classifiers. We also investigate the effect of changing several of the DWT input parameters, including mother wavelets, window lengths and DWT decomposition levels. During the course of this work we created a challenging sports activity analysis dataset, comprised of soccer and field-hockey activities. The average maximum F-measure accuracy of 87% was achieved using a fusion of classifiers, which was 6% better than a single classifier model and 23% better than a standard SVM approach

Virtual Reality Games for Motor Rehabilitation

This paper presents a fuzzy logic based method to track user satisfaction without the need for devices to monitor users physiological conditions. User satisfaction is the key to any product’s acceptance; computer applications and video games provide a unique opportunity to provide a tailored environment for each user to better suit their needs. We have implemented a non-adaptive fuzzy logic model of emotion, based on the emotional component of the Fuzzy Logic Adaptive Model of Emotion (FLAME) proposed by El-Nasr, to estimate player emotion in UnrealTournament 2004. In this paper we describe the implementation of this system and present the results of one of several play tests. Our research contradicts the current literature that suggests physiological measurements are needed. We show that it is possible to use a software only method to estimate user emotion