8,782 research outputs found

    Fairness Testing: A Comprehensive Survey and Analysis of Trends

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    Unfair behaviors of Machine Learning (ML) software have garnered increasing attention and concern among software engineers. To tackle this issue, extensive research has been dedicated to conducting fairness testing of ML software, and this paper offers a comprehensive survey of existing studies in this field. We collect 100 papers and organize them based on the testing workflow (i.e., how to test) and testing components (i.e., what to test). Furthermore, we analyze the research focus, trends, and promising directions in the realm of fairness testing. We also identify widely-adopted datasets and open-source tools for fairness testing

    Facilitating prosociality through technology: Design to promote digital volunteerism

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    Volunteerism covers many activities involving no financial rewards for volunteers but which contribute to the common good. There is existing work in designing technology for volunteerism in HumanComputer Interaction (HCI) and related disciplines that focuses on motivation to improve performance, but it does not account for volunteer wellbeing. Here, I investigate digital volunteerism in three case studies with a focus on volunteer motivation, engagement, and wellbeing. My research involved volunteers and others in the volunteering context to generate recommendations for a volunteer-centric design for digital volunteerism. The thesis has three aims: 1. To investigate motivational aspects critical for enhancing digital volunteers’ experiences 2. To identify digital platform attributes linked to volunteer wellbeing 3. To create guidelines for effectively supporting volunteer engagement in digital volunteering platforms In the first case study I investigate the design of a chat widget for volunteers working in an organisation with a view to develop a design that improves their workflow and wellbeing. The second case study investigates the needs, motivations, and wellbeing of volunteers who help medical students improve their medical communication skills. An initial mixed-methods study was followed by an experiment comparing two design strategies to improve volunteer relatedness; an important indicator of wellbeing. The third case study looks into volunteer needs, experiences, motivations, and wellbeing with a focus on volunteer identity and meaning-making on a science-based research platform. I then analyse my findings from these case studies using the lens of care ethics to derive critical insights for design. The key contributions of this thesis are design strategies and critical insights, and a volunteer-centric design framework to enhance the motivation, wellbeing and engagement of digital volunteers

    La escritura colaborativa en la Universidad: Un estudio de casos en español como lengua extranjera

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    Tesis doctoral inédita leída en la Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Facultad de Formación de Profesorado y Educación, Departamento de Filología y su Didáctica. Fecha de lectura : 11-10- 2019Esta tesis tiene embargado el acceso al texto completo hasta el 14-09-202

    Using Crowd-Based Software Repositories to Better Understand Developer-User Interactions

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    Software development is a complex process. To serve the final software product to the end user, developers need to rely on a variety of software artifacts throughout the development process. The term software repository used to denote only containers of source code such as version control systems; more recent usage has generalized the concept to include a plethora of software development artifact kinds and their related meta-data. Broadly speaking, software repositories include version control systems, technical documentation, issue trackers, question and answer sites, distribution information, etc. The software repositories can be based on a specific project (e.g., bug tracker for Firefox), or be crowd-sourced (e.g., questions and answers on technical Q&A websites). Crowd-based software artifacts are created as by-products of developer-user interactions which are sometimes referred to as communication channels. In this thesis, we investigate three distinct crowd-based software repositories that follow different models of developer-user interactions. We believe through a better understanding of the crowd-based software repositories, we can identify challenges in software development and provide insights to improve the software development process. In our first study, we investigate Stack Overflow. It is the largest collection of programming related questions and answers. On Stack Overflow, developers interact with other developers to create crowd-sourced knowledge in the form of questions and answers. The results of the interactions (i.e., the question threads) become valuable information to the entire developer community. Prior research on Stack Overflow tacitly assume that questions receives answers directly on the platform and no need of interaction is required during the process. Meanwhile, the platform allows attaching comments to questions which forms discussions of the question. Our study found that question discussions occur for 59.2% of questions on Stack Overflow. For discussed and solved questions on Stack Overflow, 80.6% of the questions have the discussion begin before the accepted answer is submitted. The results of our study show the importance and nuances of interactions in technical Q&A. We then study dotfiles, a set of publicly shared user-specific configuration files for software tools. There is a culture of sharing dotfiles within the developer community, where the idea is to learn from other developers’ dotfiles and share your variants. The interaction of dotfiles sharing can be viewed as developers sources information from other developers, adapt the information to their own needs, and share their adaptations back to the community. Our study on dotfiles suggests that is a common practice among developers to share dotfiles where 25.8% of the most stared users on GitHub have a dotfiles repository. We provide a taxonomy of the commonly tracked dotfiles and a qualitative study on the commits in dotfiles repositories. We also leveraged the state-of-the-art time-series clustering technique (K-shape) to identify code churn pattern for dotfile edits. This study is the first step towards understanding the practices of maintaining and sharing dotfiles. Finally, we study app stores, the platforms that distribute software products and contain many non-technical attributes (e.g., ratings and reviews) of software products. Three major stakeholders interacts with each other in app stores: the app store owner who governs the operation of the app store; developers who publish applications on the app store; and users who browse and download applications in the app store. App stores often provide means of interaction between all three actors (e.g., app reviews, store policy) and sometimes interactions with in the same actor (e.g., developer forum). We surveyed existing app stores to extract key features from app store operation. We then labeled a representative set of app store collected by web queries. K-means is applied to the labeled app stores to detect natural groupings of app stores. We observed a diverse set of app stores through the process. Instead of a single model that describes all app stores, fundamentally, our observations show that app stores operates differently. This study provide insights in understanding how app stores can affect software development. In summary, we investigated software repositories containing software artifacts created from different developer-user interactions. These software repositories are essential for software development in providing referencing information (i.e., Stack Overflow), improving development productivity (i.e., dotfiles), and help distributing the software products to end users (i.e., app stores)

    "Plant hunting" in the Context of Science, Culture and Mentality in the 19th and Early 20th Century

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    Práce se zabývá fenoménem "plant-huntingu" a "plant-hunterů" (tzv. lovu a lovců rostlin) charakteristickým zejména pro Viktoriánskou a meziválečnou Británii. Tento fenomén definuji, personálně vymezuji a zasazuji do času a prostoru. Následně se jej pokouším vysvětlit. Zaměřuji se především na otázky, proč fenomén vznikl v dané době a místě, proč a zda vůbec zanikl a zda byl eventuálně něčím substituován a čím. Ptám se, co existence tohoto fenoménu vypovídá o lidském vztahu k rostlinám a živému světu jako takovému. Fenomén se při tom pokouším nahlédnout prostřednictvím rostliny představující objekty zájmu, tj. úlovky "plant-hunterů." Právě ty považuji za klíč k pochopení fenoménu. Proto se snažím ukázat, co je odlišuje od ostatních rostlin. Konfrontuji tyto rostliny s výsledky recentních výzkumů fytofilie a se schématy v obecnější lidské percepci přírodního světa. Dále se pro ně pokouším nalézt vhodné funkčně typologické pojmenování a zařadit je do teoretického výkladového rámce. Celý fenomén nahlížím v kontextu dobové vědy, technologie, politiky a společnosti.This dissertation examines the phenomenon of 'plant-hunting' and 'plant-hunters' characteristic of Victorian and interwar Britain in particular. It defines and situates this phenomenon in time and space, and attempts to explain it. It primarily focuses on the questions of why the phenomenon arose in the given time and place, why and whether it disappeared at all, and whether it was eventually replaced by something and by what. It also examines what the existence of this phenomenon says about people's relationship to plants and the living world as such. The phenomenon is thus viewed through the plants sought by the plant-hunters themselves, and the plants are taken as the key to understanding the phenomenon. The work shows what distinguishes these particular plants from other plants. They are juxtaposed with the results of recent research on phytophilia, as well as with patterns in the more general human perception of the natural world. Furthermore, the work attempts to find appropriate functional-typological comprehensions, and places them within a theoretical explanatory framework. The whole phenomenon of plant-hunting is approached in the context of its era and contemporary science, technology, politics, and society.Katedra filosofie a dějin přírodních vědDepartment of Philosophy and History of SciencePřírodovědecká fakultaFaculty of Scienc

    The Ephemeral City : Songs for the Ghost Quarters

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    The towers of the Stockholm skyline twine with radio transmissions, flying out over the city, drifting down through the streets and sinking into the underground telephone system below. Stockholm has buildings that have been there for centuries, but is also full of modern and contemporary architectures, all jostling for their place in parallel collective memory. In taking the city up as a subject, this artistic PhD project in music expands allegories to these architectural instruments into the world of the mechanical and the electrical. By taking up and transforming the materials of the cityscape, this project spins ephemeral cities more subtle than the colossal forces transforming the cityscape. The aim is to empower urban dwellers with another kind of ownership of their city.The materials in the project are drawn around themes of urban memory and transformation, psychogeography and the ghosts of the imagined city. There are three questions the artistic works of this project reflect on and address. The first is about the ability of city-dwellers to regain or create some sense of place, history or belonging through the power of their imaginations. The second reflects on the possibility for imagined alternatives to re-empower a sense of place for the people who encounter them. The third seeks out the points where stories, memories, or alternative futures are collective, at what point are they wholly individual, and how the interplay between them plays out in listening.There is an improvisatory practice in how we relate to urban environments: an ever-transforming inter-play between the animate and inanimate. Each individual draws phantoms of memory and imagination onto the cityscape, and this yields subtle ways people can be empowered in their surroundings. The artistic works of this project are made to illuminate those subtleties, centering around a group of compositions, improvisations, artistic collaborations and sound installations in music and sound, utilizing modular synthesizers, field recordings, pipe organs, multi-channel settings; PureData and SuperCollider programs, string ensembles with hurdy-gurdy and nyckelharpa or violin, and sound installations. This choice of instruments is as an allegory to the architecture of Stockholm. The final result is a collection of music and sound works, made to illuminate the imagined city. Taken as a whole, the works of the project create an imaginary city–The Ephemeral City–in order to argue that this evocation of ephemeral space is a way to empower urban dwellers through force of imagination, immune to the vast forces tearing through the fabric of Stockholm life by virtue of the ghostly, transitory and mercurial, as compelling to the inner eye as brick and mortar to the outer life

    Cultivating Collaboration: Optimizing Communication Between Designers and Non-Designers

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    Clients and designers, having different tacit knowledge, fail to effectively communicate with each other during the design process. These inadequacies risk relationships, reputations, and project success. This issue has long been recognized in the field of design, often as a concern with client involvement. This research aims to identify these complications in the design process and inform how they might be amended. Specifically, it investigates how the relationship between designers and clients can be improved in order to garner better communication and greater project success. In this context, clients are defined as non-designers that commission design professionals. A literature review as well as several case studies and visual analyses conclude that collaboration, empathy, and project structure improve communication and project outcomes. These findings will inform a proposed visual solution that aims to provide knowledge and structure to client-designer partnerships in order to facilitate these benefits

    Learning to express, learning as self-expression: a multimethod investigation of the L2 selves of distance adult Irish L2 learners

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    This multimethod study is an exploration of the validity and interpretive utility of Dörnyei’s (2009) ‘L2 motivational self-system’ (L2MSS), as it applies to adult, non-formal learners of Irish, who are learning through Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). It is grounded in the psychology of language learning motivation (LLM), assessing whether non-formal adult Irish L2 learners are motivated by future L2 guides, both Ideal, reflecting hopes and dreams, and Ought-to, representing obligations and responsibilities. Three research questions are addressed, i) exploring the theory’s validity at a general level and examining whether ii) the L2 learning experience and iii) learner heritage background, are meaningful in predicting, and understanding, the motivations of learners. Using distinct samples from an iterated quantitative survey instrument (final n=638) and narrative interviews (n=42), evidence demonstrates the theory’s utility in an underexplored context, while raising questions regarding adult Irish language learners and theories of self. Learners endorsed and articulated internalised reasons to learn, encompassing personal hopes and obligations, with social others less directly impactful on their motivation. The futures learners described often referenced non-L2 related aspirations of self, and were less-directly related to L2 proficiency, in many cases. Challenges in relation to the latter, due to contextual difficulties, low efficacy beliefs, and limited contact with L2 speakers and learners, are described. Recommendations to encourage sustained L2 learning and support adult learners in fostering and developing L2 selves are made, to aid them in realising their personal language learning goals

    Producing performance collectively in austere times (UK 2008-2018)

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    This thesis examines collective and artist-run performance producing practices in the UK in the period of austerity from 2008-2018. This thesis examines collective practices in opposition to the rhetoric, logic, and impacts of neoliberal austerity, while examining how they are, at one and the same time, caught up within them, and frequently complicit with them. I argue that collectives can temporarily reverse and rework the negative material and affective impacts of austerity through gathering artists and producers with similar practices and concerns together in the same space, producing social and affective spaces that feel and operate differently to the rest of the artistic infrastructure, and sharing material and immaterial resources. As I go on to establish, austerity works by making people feel precarious, uncared for, alone, indebted, hopeless, and disentitled. At their best, collectives work by making people feel the opposite. In gathering together in their own space, these artists and producers feel and imagine the possibility of a different way of doing things. These spaces exist to present the performance of others, to support the organisers’ individual practices and administrative work, to run festivals and performance events, and to organise around particular issues. An analysis of these functions of collective practice structure the main body of this thesis, which begins by examining collective and artist-run models of performance venues, then studios, then festivals, and finally, networks. In each chapter I examine a specific negative affect of austerity which these groups seek to resist. These are: insecurity or precarity, neglect or a lack of care, isolation or disconnectedness, and hopelessness or a lack of access to futurity. I show, using Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of field, Henri Lefebvre’s production of space, and Sara Ahmed’s work on affect, how the practices of each structural model of collective and artist-run organisation responds to and reworks these conditions by producing affective spaces of security, care, communitas, and hope. These spaces, and the practices that create them, are embedded within the wider context of neoliberalism and austerity which they oppose, and are thus temporary and susceptible to reproducing exploitative and exclusive practices. The task of this thesis is to reveal the immediate positive affective and material impacts of these collectives in opposition to austerity, as well as the complexity of the problems that arise as these groups interact with a wider context over which they have no control. Despite the limitations of collective practice, this thesis argues that through providing relief from the negative affective impacts of austerity, it can provide vital support to artists, practices, and communities during difficult economic conditions, and allow them to survive, to organise, and to imagine and enact better and more liveable futures in the field of performance
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