Eliciting Stakeholders’ Requirements for Future Energy Systems: A Case Study of Heat Decarbonisation in the UK

It is a truism that whole energy system models underpin the development of policies for energy system decarbonisation. However, recent reviews have thrown doubt on the appropriateness of such models for addressing the multiple goals for future energy systems, in the face of emergent real-world complexity and the evolution of stakeholder’s priorities. Without an understanding of the changing priorities of policy makers and expectations of stakeholders for future systems, system objectives and constraints are likely to be ill-defined, and there is a risk that models may be inadvertently instrumentalised. Adopting a system architecture perspective, the authors have undertaken a three-year programme of research to explore strategies for decarbonising heat in the UK, with interaction with and elicitation of needs from stakeholders at its heart. This paper presents the procedure, methods, and results of an exercise in which experts from stakeholder organisations across the energy system were interviewed. Analysis of interview data reveals two broad approaches to heat decarbonisation which can be defined as either adaptive or transformative. Specific insights gained from these interviews enabled our modelling teams to refocus their work for exploration with a wider circle of stakeholders. Results suggests that this iterative approach to formalising model-policy interaction could improve the transparency and legitimacy of modelling and enhance its impact on policy making

TransNets: Learning to Transform for Recommendation

Recently, deep learning methods have been shown to improve the performance of recommender systems over traditional methods, especially when review text is available. For example, a recent model, DeepCoNN, uses neural nets to learn one latent representation for the text of all reviews written by a target user, and a second latent representation for the text of all reviews for a target item, and then combines these latent representations to obtain state-of-the-art performance on recommendation tasks. We show that (unsurprisingly) much of the predictive value of review text comes from reviews of the target user for the target item. We then introduce a way in which this information can be used in recommendation, even when the target user's review for the target item is not available. Our model, called TransNets, extends the DeepCoNN model by introducing an additional latent layer representing the target user-target item pair. We then regularize this layer, at training time, to be similar to another latent representation of the target user's review of the target item. We show that TransNets and extensions of it improve substantially over the previous state-of-the-art.Comment: Accepted for publication in the 11th ACM Conference on Recommender Systems (RecSys 2017

Designing the interface between research, learning and teaching.

Abstract: This paper’s central argument is that teaching and research need to be reshaped so that they connect in a productive way. This will require actions at a whole range of levels, from the individual teacher to the national system and include the international communities of design scholars. To do this, we need to start at the level of the individual teacher and course team. This paper cites some examples of strategies that focus on what students do as learners and how teachers teach and design courses to enhance research-led teaching. The paper commences with an examination of the departmental context of (art and) design education. This is followed by an exploration of what is understood by research-led teaching and a further discussion of the dimensions of research-led teaching. It questions whether these dimensions are evident, and if so to what degree in design departments, programmes and courses. The discussion examines the features of research-led departments and asks if a department is not research-led in its approach to teaching, why it should consider changing strategies

Persuasive technology and digital design for behaviour change

Copyright @ 2012 Social Science Research NetworkThe convergence of the 'digital' and 'real' worlds has been rapid and transformative of everyday life, as well as design practice - to the extent that talking about 'digital design' and 'the digital context' seems anachronistic and redundant. Nevertheless, the arrival of digital technology, the Internet and social media has, from a design perspective, created a new field of a ffordances, constraints, information flows and possibilities. This paper reviews some of the ways in which digital architecture infl uences behaviour, and what the implications could be for designers seeking to infl uence behaviour for social and environmental bene fit. Topics covered include Persuasive Technology, gami fication, Lessig's 'Code is Law' perspective, digital rights management and Zittrain's concept of generativity

On staying grounded and avoiding Quixotic dead ends

The 15 articles in this special issue on The Representation of Concepts illustrate the rich variety of theoretical positions and supporting research that characterize the area. Although much agreement exists among contributors, much disagreement exists as well, especially about the roles of grounding and abstraction in conceptual processing. I first review theoretical approaches raised in these articles that I believe are Quixotic dead ends, namely, approaches that are principled and inspired but likely to fail. In the process, I review various theories of amodal symbols, their distortions of grounded theories, and fallacies in the evidence used to support them. Incorporating further contributions across articles, I then sketch a theoretical approach that I believe is likely to be successful, which includes grounding, abstraction, flexibility, explaining classic conceptual phenomena, and making contact with real-world situations. This account further proposes that (1) a key element of grounding is neural reuse, (2) abstraction takes the forms of multimodal compression, distilled abstraction, and distributed linguistic representation (but not amodal symbols), and (3) flexible context-dependent representations are a hallmark of conceptual processing

Can nudge-interventions address health service overuse and underuse? Protocol for a systematic review

IntroductionNudge-interventions aimed at health professionals are proposed to reduce the overuse and underuse of health services. However, little is known about their effectiveness at changing health professionals’ behaviours in relation to overuse or underuse of tests or treatments.ObjectiveThe aim of this study is to systematically identify and synthesise the studies that have assessed the effect of nudge-interventions aimed at health professionals on the overuse or underuse of health services.Methods and analysisWe will perform a systematic review. All study designs that include a control comparison will be included. Any qualified health professional, across any specialty or setting, will be included. Only nudge-interventions aimed at altering the behaviour of health professionals will be included. We will examine the effect of choice architecture nudges (default options, active choice, framing effects, order effects) and social nudges (accountable justification and pre-commitment or publicly declared pledge/contract). Studies with outcomes relevant to overuse or underuse of health services will be included. Relevant studies will be identified by a computer-aided search of the Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials (CENTRAL) (The Cochrane Library), MEDLINE, CINAHL, Embase and PsycINFO databases. Two independent reviewers will screen studies for eligibility, extract data and perform the risk of bias assessment using the criteria recommended by the Cochrane Effective Practice and Organisation of Care (EPOC) group. We will report our results in a structured synthesis format, as recommended by the Cochrane EPOC group.Ethics and disseminationNo ethical approval is required for this study. Results will be presented at relevant scientific conferences and in peer-reviewed literature

Reviews

Managing Change in Higher Education: A Learning Environment Architecture by Peter Ford and eight other authors, Buckingham: Society for Research into Higher Education and the Open University Press, 1996. ISBN 0–335–19791–4. 161 pages, paperback. No price indicated