Developing New Indicators To Describe Digital Technology Infrastructure In Primary And Secondary Education

Provides sets of metrics for describing digital technology provision in primary and secondary education (schools and beyond) based on analysis of the literature and testing against a range of vignettes representing a wide range of settings in 'developing world' contexts

Proposal of a conceptual model to represent urban-industrial systems from the analysis of existing worldwide experiences

The adoption of Industrial Symbiosis (IS) practices within urban areas is gaining interest due to the environmental impacts entailed by the development of cities. However, there is still a lack of knowledge about how the relationships between industrial and urban areas can be modelled. In this context, this research aimed at posing a conceptual model to understand and represent Urban-Industrial Systems (UIS). To this end, a set of worldwide previous UIS experiences were overviewed to identify the agents, dynamics, and collaboration opportunities that characterize them. The multi-perspective analysis of these cases indicated that UIS are complex systems, which means that they are autonomous, self-organized, responsive, nonlinear, and willing to consolidate their resilience. As such, Agent-Based Models (ABM) were suggested to be the most suitable approach for their representation.This research was funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities, grant number DPI2017-88127-R (AEI/FEDER, UE)

A Domain Specific Graphical User Interface Framework

Since the early days of software development, there has been an ongoing trend towards higher-order or higher level abstractions in programming languages, software libraries and application frameworks. Some of the arguments for software development tools with higher levels of abstraction include simpler software development, improved portability and better maintainability. Higher level abstractions can however lead to reduced performance. This thesis presents an innovative graphical user interface software solution that mixes high-level and low-level approaches to achieve acceptable performance while retaining good maintainability. The solution is an extension to a graphical application framework called JavaFX. The scope of this thesis is defined by a software development project which goal is to create a graphical user interface framework. The framework is used in the creation of customer specific user interfaces for an accompanying intralogistics system. The resulting user interfaces must be able to visualize possibly thousands of objects moving on a factory floor. The views must simultaneously support user-initiated zooming, panning, and tilting of the two-dimensional view. Meeting these requirements while maintaining acceptable performance, requires an unconventional solution and a deviation from idiomatic JavaFX. The user interface framework in question is developed using a high-level graphical user interface application framework called JavaFX. JavaFX is the most recent graphical user interface toolkit included in the official Java Development Kit. It has many reactive traits and other modern high-level properties. Overcoming performance challenges with JavaFX when producing views with thousands of animated items was the key research challenge in this research. Some attention is also given to replacing JavaFX built-in dependency injection system with Spring framework to improve JavaFX suitability to the task at hand. This thesis presents a hybrid solution that overcomes JavaFX’s performance challenges in the problem domain, while retaining as much as possible of the usefulness of the high-level features present in the JavaFX framework. The key innovation is a mechanism that enables automated rendering of sprite-bitmaps from JavaFX scene-graph nodes. The solution includes a system that draws the automatically generated bitmaps to a lower-level JavaFX component called Canvas. The solution enables layered mixing of regular JavaFX views with the custom high-performance views, including seamless resizing and event handling between the two types of views. The solution enables the developers of customer specific user interfaces to choose an appropriate graphics rendering type, such that only objects that cause performance issues, typically items which number exceeds dozens, need to use the more complex high-performance system

PISA and PISA for ‘development’: an inquiry into the OECD’s expansion into low- and middle-income countries

This thesis analyses PISA-D to understand its origins, the legitimation strategies which frame it, and its outcomes. The thesis begins by locating PISA-D within the evolution of OECD after the 1950s. That story, which is told briefly, is one of successful expansion. More specifically, as the global education agenda was being changed after 2015 to emphasise minimum standards of quality for all countries to be delivered by 2030, the OECD has been seeking to expand its most successful policy instrument – PISA – to include low- and middle-income countries. In 2013, it introduced PISA for Development (PISA-D) to help promote PISA as a universal measure of learning. In 2018 the results of PISA-D were released, and in 2019 it was declared a success by OECD. Clearly PISA-D has the potential to have a significant impact on various aspects of education in low-income countries. To explore these themes, this thesis was guided by a number of research questions which included: what are the origins of PISA-D and how have they shaped its contemporary form? How has PISA-D been promoted and what strategies have been employed by OECD to establish a clear role for itself in monitoring Sustainable Development Goal 4? How has PISA-D addressed the challenges that low- and middle-income countries face in engaging in PISA and what policy insights does it provide for the piloting countries? The basic approach of the thesis is through documentary research, but this was supplemented by semi-structured interviews and secondary analysis of the literature. The work has permitted new interpretations of the contributions of OECD to global educational governance, has highlighted the legitimation strategies of OECD as it expands its role, and has made clearer how the PISA-D countries are construed as backward – and as needing to learn from other, especially high-performing, countries participating in PISA

Modeling, enacting, and integrating custom crowdsourcing processes

Crowdsourcing (CS) is the outsourcing of a unit of work to a crowd of people via an open call for contributions. Thanks to the availability of online CS platforms, such as Amazon Mechanical Turk or CrowdFlower, the practice has experienced a tremendous growth over the past few years and demonstrated its viability in a variety of fields, such as data collection and analysis or human computation. Yet it is also increasingly struggling with the inherent limitations of these platforms: each platform has its own logic of how to crowdsource work (e.g., marketplace or contest), there is only very little support for structured work (work that requires the coordination of multiple tasks), and it is hard to integrate crowdsourced tasks into stateof-the-art business process management (BPM) or information systems. We attack these three shortcomings by (1) developing a flexible CS platform (we call it Crowd Computer, or CC) that allows one to program custom CS logics for individual and structured tasks, (2) devising a BPMN-based modeling language that allows one to program CC intuitively, (3) equipping the language with a dedicated visual editor, and (4) implementing CC on top of standard BPM technology that can easily be integrated into existing software and processes. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the approach with a case study on the crowd-based mining of mashup model patterns

Diverse Contributions to Implicit Human-Computer Interaction

Cuando las personas interactúan con los ordenadores, hay mucha información que no se proporciona a propósito. Mediante el estudio de estas interacciones implícitas es posible entender qué características de la interfaz de usuario son beneficiosas (o no), derivando así en implicaciones para el diseño de futuros sistemas interactivos. La principal ventaja de aprovechar datos implícitos del usuario en aplicaciones informáticas es que cualquier interacción con el sistema puede contribuir a mejorar su utilidad. Además, dichos datos eliminan el coste de tener que interrumpir al usuario para que envíe información explícitamente sobre un tema que en principio no tiene por qué guardar relación con la intención de utilizar el sistema. Por el contrario, en ocasiones las interacciones implícitas no proporcionan datos claros y concretos. Por ello, hay que prestar especial atención a la manera de gestionar esta fuente de información. El propósito de esta investigación es doble: 1) aplicar una nueva visión tanto al diseño como al desarrollo de aplicaciones que puedan reaccionar consecuentemente a las interacciones implícitas del usuario, y 2) proporcionar una serie de metodologías para la evaluación de dichos sistemas interactivos. Cinco escenarios sirven para ilustrar la viabilidad y la adecuación del marco de trabajo de la tesis. Resultados empíricos con usuarios reales demuestran que aprovechar la interacción implícita es un medio tanto adecuado como conveniente para mejorar de múltiples maneras los sistemas interactivos.Leiva Torres, LA. (2012). Diverse Contributions to Implicit Human-Computer Interaction [Tesis doctoral no publicada]. Universitat Politècnica de València. https://doi.org/10.4995/Thesis/10251/17803Palanci

From Vendors to Customers

Enterprise Systems (ES) are generally considered the price of entry for running a business. With the increased scope of ESs to encompass nearly every function or business process of a modern organization, an increasing number of different users are adopting and using the systems. These users occupy a number of different organizational roles which include a wide variety of different tasks in organizations and have very different requirements for ESs. To ensure a better fit between users and ESs, a number of ES vendors have begun to focus on reflecting the concept of organizational roles of users in their systems. Limited research has, however, addressed these “role-oriented” ESs; this dissertation attempts to provide a better understanding of them by studying their design, implementation, and use. The research design for this dissertation is based on Case Studies and the Grounded Theory Method with qualitative empirical data collected across three types of actors in an ES ecosystem: Vendors; partner companies; and customers. The findings are primarily presented in six appended research papers that are aimed at both researchers and practitioners. The main contribution of the dissertation is an improved understanding of: Representation of organizational roles in the deep and surface structures of ESs; the mapping, configuration, and tailoring of predefined systems roles to fit actual roles of users in organizations; and the potential benefits and role-related misfits of role-oriented ESs. Through discussion of the findings, the dissertation also illustrates how the design of role-oriented ESs is influenced by the different actors in an ecosystem. The dissertation also illustrates how systems, organizations, processes, and roles can be aligned during implementation by shifting basis and conceptual focus in the requirements analysis. Finally, the dissertation explains the impact of roleoriented technology on organizational performance and how this technology may influence the existing perception of the role taking process in organizations

A comparative analysis of Decide Madrid and vTaiwan, two Digital Platforms for Political Participation

This thesis is a comparative examination of the impacts of two so-called ‘Digital Platforms for Political Participation’ (DPPPs) — Decide Madrid and vTaiwan — on urban policymaking and citizen empowerment. DPPPs are a novel subset of digital platforms which are focused on facilitating online political participation and are designed and implemented by governmental institutions: the two cases under study here are designed by Madrid City Council and the Taiwanese government respectively. This thesis utilises what I term a situated lens, which fuses the idea of relational comparative urbanism, Deleuzian assemblage thinking and theories of empowerment. This situated lens allows me to evaluate, compare and identify the similarities in the forms of digital political participation provided by the two DPPPs under study. It does this by breaking each DPPP down into three sets of assemblages: (1) the design process; (2) the dynamic User Interface (UI); and (3) the process of algorithmic decision-making. The term ‘situated’ is coined to highlight the dynamic and mutating nature of digital political participation. Via this situated lens, I stress that digital empowerment is highly changeable, constrained and opened up by rules set at design stage, the dynamic UI, contingencies introduced by algorithmic interactions with users, and the changing human/institutional contexts in which these processes are embedded. This thesis demonstrates that my comparative study of the two DPPPs can enrich existing studies in digital urbanism and digital participation. Firstly, drawing from theories of empowerment, the situated lens allows me to indicate the level of empowerment a DPPP provides should not be seen just as the provision of a fixed static set of participatory capacities. Rather, a DPPP should be seen as a fluid space in which empowerment is present to a greater or lesser extent, affected by a fast-moving environment in which a user can be disabled or enabled in making informed and collective decisions due to various contingencies (such as the dynamic UI and the processes of user data interacting with algorithms to produce decisions). The wider institutional context also drives this fluidity: the citizen/user’s ability to impact on policymaking through reaching collective decisions through DPPPs is constrained or promoted by subsequent processes of governmental allocation of political legitimacy and resources. Secondly, the situated lens offers a new view in digital urbanism, by deploying an innovative hybrid method to produce ‘flashbacks’ on specific processes of digital political participation. In doing so it reveals and question the ways in which political decisions on legitimating urban issues are mutably (re)configured by algorithmic interactions with users and by subsequent human interpretation in institutional policymaking processes. This serves to question what constitutes fairer and more empowered political decisions by pointing out exclusions which emerge during the decision-making processes of DPPPs