Service Reconfiguration in the DANAH Assistive System

International audienceSmart Homes are pervasive systems that interact with the user using a service offer paradigm to provide fully automated daily repetitive tasks. When services are augmented with semantic relationships, one can build adaptive services and systems. In this paper we deal with service failures and propose a recovering method, which we call service reconfiguration, to ensure service availability in smart homes. Both off-line and on-line reconfigurations are considered. This method has been implemented in the DANAH assistive system

Multi-Level Reconfiguration in the DANAH Assistive System

International audienceNowadays, interaction with our surrounding environment has increased due to the presence of numerous devices that provide us with services. This is especially true in Smart Homes and can be of great help for the disabled people and the elderly that can no longer perform daily tasks they used to. However, in case of failure, corrective actions can be heavy to take, thus the need for the system to recover by itself and ensure service availability. Service availability is provided through service reconfiguration. This papers deals with service reconfiguration in smart homes. It presents a multi-level approach in which both off-line and on-line reconfiguration schemes are used to gradually recover from failed services. Static, effect-based, path and resource reconfiguration levels are described. They have been successfully implemented in the DANAH assistive system, which combines both navigation and service provision for smart homes

Music for AI Reports: Dual Prospects in Music Production

Recent developments in artificial intelligence (AI) technology have led to industrial attempts at applying AI to music making, namely AI music. In the context of the history of music technology, AI music raises the prospect of a new phase that extends digital technology’s role as central mode of music production. The computer has become an essential metamedium in contemporary cultural production, leading in the field of music to the digitization of tools and content and the digitalization of social institutions and relationships. This technological change had the dual effect of decentralizing music production while reinforcing capitalist logic in it. The rise of AI foreshadows an intensification of this dual technological potential, as projects like Google Magenta that offer new affordances demonstrate

Disability 2.0, student dis/connections: a study of student experiences of disability and social networks on campus in higher education

For many young people, social networks are an essential part of their student experience. Using a Foucauldian perspective, this qualitative study explores the networked experiences of disabled students to examine how dis/ability difference is ascribed and negotiated within social networks. Data comprises 34 internet-enabled interviews with 18 participants from three English universities. Accessible field methods recognise participant preferences and circumstances. Data is analysed using discourse analysis, with an attention to context framed by activity theory. Disabled students’ networked experiences are found to be complex and diverse. For a proportion, the network shifts the boundaries of disability, creating non-disabled subjectivities. For these students, the network represents the opportunity to mobilise new ways of being, building social capital and mitigating impairment. Other participants experience the network as punitive and disabling. Disability is socio-technically ascribed by the social networking site and the networked public. Each inducts norms that constitute disability as a visible, deviant and deficit identity. In the highly normative conditions of the network, where every action is open to scrutiny, impairment is subjected to an unequal gaze that produces disabled subjectivities. For some students with unseen impairments, a social experience of disability is inducted for the first time. As a result, students deploy diverse strategies to retain control and resist deviant status. Self-surveillance, self-discipline and self-advocacy are evoked, each involving numerous social, cognitive and technological tactics for self-determination, including disconnection. I conclude that networks function both as Technologies of the Self and as Technologies of Power. For some disabled students, the network supports ‘normal’ status. For others, it must be resisted as a form of social domination. Importantly, in each instance, the network propels students towards disciplinary techniques that mask diversity, rendering disability and the possibility of disability invisible. Consequently, disability is both produced and suppressed by the network

Disability 2.0, student dis/connections: a study of student experiences of disability and social networks on campus in higher education

For many young people, social networks are an essential part of their student experience. Using a Foucauldian perspective, this qualitative study explores the networked experiences of disabled students to examine how dis/ability difference is ascribed and negotiated within social networks. Data comprises 34 internet-enabled interviews with 18 participants from three English universities. Accessible field methods recognise participant preferences and circumstances. Data is analysed using discourse analysis, with an attention to context framed by activity theory. Disabled students’ networked experiences are found to be complex and diverse. For a proportion, the network shifts the boundaries of disability, creating non-disabled subjectivities. For these students, the network represents the opportunity to mobilise new ways of being, building social capital and mitigating impairment. Other participants experience the network as punitive and disabling. Disability is socio-technically ascribed by the social networking site and the networked public. Each inducts norms that constitute disability as a visible, deviant and deficit identity. In the highly normative conditions of the network, where every action is open to scrutiny, impairment is subjected to an unequal gaze that produces disabled subjectivities. For some students with unseen impairments, a social experience of disability is inducted for the first time. As a result, students deploy diverse strategies to retain control and resist deviant status. Self-surveillance, self-discipline and self-advocacy are evoked, each involving numerous social, cognitive and technological tactics for self-determination, including disconnection. I conclude that networks function both as Technologies of the Self and as Technologies of Power. For some disabled students, the network supports ‘normal’ status. For others, it must be resisted as a form of social domination. Importantly, in each instance, the network propels students towards disciplinary techniques that mask diversity, rendering disability and the possibility of disability invisible. Consequently, disability is both produced and suppressed by the network

Disability 2.0, student dis/connections: a study of student experiences of disability and social networks on campus in higher education

For many young people, social networks are an essential part of their student experience. Using a Foucauldian perspective, this qualitative study explores the networked experiences of disabled students to examine how dis/ability difference is ascribed and negotiated within social networks. Data comprises 34 internet-enabled interviews with 18 participants from three English universities. Accessible field methods recognise participant preferences and circumstances. Data is analysed using discourse analysis, with an attention to context framed by activity theory. Disabled students’ networked experiences are found to be complex and diverse. For a proportion, the network shifts the boundaries of disability, creating non-disabled subjectivities. For these students, the network represents the opportunity to mobilise new ways of being, building social capital and mitigating impairment. Other participants experience the network as punitive and disabling. Disability is socio-technically ascribed by the social networking site and the networked public. Each inducts norms that constitute disability as a visible, deviant and deficit identity. In the highly normative conditions of the network, where every action is open to scrutiny, impairment is subjected to an unequal gaze that produces disabled subjectivities. For some students with unseen impairments, a social experience of disability is inducted for the first time. As a result, students deploy diverse strategies to retain control and resist deviant status. Self-surveillance, self-discipline and self-advocacy are evoked, each involving numerous social, cognitive and technological tactics for self-determination, including disconnection. I conclude that networks function both as Technologies of the Self and as Technologies of Power. For some disabled students, the network supports ‘normal’ status. For others, it must be resisted as a form of social domination. Importantly, in each instance, the network propels students towards disciplinary techniques that mask diversity, rendering disability and the possibility of disability invisible. Consequently, disability is both produced and suppressed by the network

Visualization and Human-Machine Interaction

The digital age offers a lot of challenges in the eld of visualization. Visual imagery has been effectively used to communicate messages through the ages, to express both abstract and concrete ideas. Today, visualization has ever-expanding applications in science, engineering, education, medicine, entertainment and many other areas. Different areas of research contribute to the innovation in the eld of interactive visualization, such as data science, visual technology, Internet of things and many more. Among them, two areas of renowned importance are Augmented Reality and Visual Analytics. This thesis presents my research in the fields of visualization and human-machine interaction. The purpose of the proposed work is to investigate existing solutions in the area of Augmented Reality (AR) for maintenance. A smaller section of this thesis presents a minor research project on an equally important theme, Visual Analytics. Overall, the main goal is to identify the most important existing problems and then design and develop innovative solutions to address them. The maintenance application domain has been chosen since it is historically one of the first fields of application for Augmented Reality and it offers all the most common and important challenges that AR can arise, as described in chapter 2. Since one of the main problem in AR application deployment is reconfigurability of the application, a framework has been designed and developed that allows the user to create, deploy and update in real-time AR applications. Furthermore, the research focused on the problems related to hand-free interaction, thus investigating the area of speech-recognition interfaces and designing innovative solutions to address the problems of intuitiveness and robustness of the interface. On the other hand, the area of Visual Analytics has been investigated: among the different areas of research, multidimensional data visualization, similarly to AR, poses specific problems related to the interaction between the user and the machine. An analysis of the existing solutions has been carried out in order to identify their limitations and to point out possible improvements. Since this analysis delineates the scatterplot as a renowned visualization tool worthy of further research, different techniques for adapting its usage to multidimensional data are analyzed. A multidimensional scatterplot has been designed and developed in order to perform a comparison with another multidimensional visualization tool, the ScatterDice. The first chapters of my thesis describe my investigations in the area of Augmented Reality for maintenance. Chapter 1 provides definitions for the most important terms and an introduction to AR. The second chapter focuses on maintenance, depicting the motivations that led to choose this application domain. Moreover, the analysis concerning open problems and related works is described along with the methodology adopted to design and develop the proposed solutions. The third chapter illustrates how the adopted methodology has been applied in order to assess the problems described in the previous one. Chapter 4 describes the methodology adopted to carry out the tests and outlines the experimental results, whereas the fifth chapter illustrates the conclusions and points out possible future developments. Chapter 6 describes the analysis and research work performed in the eld of Visual Analytics, more specifically on multidimensional data visualizations. Overall, this thesis illustrates how the proposed solutions address common problems of visualization and human-machine interaction, such as interface de- sign, robustness of the interface and acceptance of new technology, whereas other problems are related to the specific research domain, such as pose tracking and reconfigurability of the procedure for the AR domain

Seeing affect: knowledge infrastructures in facial expression recognition systems

Efforts to process and simulate human affect have come to occupy a prominent role in Human-Computer Interaction as well as developments in machine learning systems. Affective computing applications promise to decode human affective experience and provide objective insights into usersʼ affective behaviors, ranging from frustration and boredom to states of clinical relevance such as depression and anxiety. While these projects are often grounded in psychological theories that have been contested both within scholarly and public domains, practitioners have remained largely agnostic to this debate, focusing instead on the development of either applicable technical systems or advancements of the fieldʼs state of the art. I take this controversy as an entry point to investigate the tensions related to the classification of affective behaviors and how practitioners validate these classification choices. This work offers an empirical examination of the discursive and material repertoires ‒ the infrastructures of knowledge ‒ that affective computing practitioners mobilize to legitimize and validate their practice. I build on feminist studies of science and technology to interrogate and challenge the claims of objectivity on which affective computing applications rest. By looking at research practices and commercial developments of Facial Expression Recognition (FER) systems, the findings unpack the interplay of knowledge, vision, and power underpinning the development of machine learning applications of affective computing. The thesis begins with an analysis of historical efforts to quantify affective behaviors and how these are reflected in modern affective computing practice. Here, three main themes emerge that will guide and orient the empirical findings: 1) the role that framings of science and scientific practice play in constructing affective behaviors as “objective” scientific facts, 2) the role of human interpretation and mediation required to make sense of affective data, and 3) the prescriptive and performative dimensions of these quantification efforts. This analysis forms the historical backdrop for the empirical core of the thesis: semi-structured interviews with affective computing practitioners across the academic and industry sectors, including the data annotators labelling the modelsʼ training datasets. My findings reveal the discursive and material strategies that participants adopt to validate affective classification, including forms of boundary work to establish credibility as well as the local and contingent work of human interpretation and standardization involved in the process of making sense of affective data. Here, I show how, despite their professed agnosticism, practitioners must make normative choices in order to ʻseeʼ (and teach machines how to see) affect. I apply the notion of knowledge infrastructures to conceptualize the scaffolding of data practices, norms and routines, psychological theories, and historical and epistemological assumptions that shape practitionersʼ vision and inform FER design. Finally, I return to the problem of agnosticism and its socio-ethical relevance to the broader field of machine learning. Here, I argue that agnosticism can make it difficult to locate the technologyʼs historical and epistemological lineages and, therefore, obscure accountability. I conclude by arguing that both policy and practice would benefit from a nuanced examination of the plurality of visions and forms of knowledge involved in the automation of affect

Re-envisioning access for the digital preservation community: challenges, opportunities and recommendations

Digital material is not new and has been preserved for a couple of decades now. With a growing digital preservation community, and a growing number of practitioners identifying as doing something digital, there is an understanding that this material is here to stay. More and more institutions are publishing digital strategies or creating networks focusing on digital material. However, when looking at this in practice there seems to be a disconnect between what is being stated within these networks and strategies and what is being made accessible to the public. This thesis will explore this disconnect by first understanding how the digital preservation community has been providing access to this material and how they are envisioning it in the future. This exploration surfaces both a) how digital material can no longer be seen as separate from the infrastructure that ensures its materiality and b) how the provision of access is not just a technological question, but also a social, legal and ethical one. This thesis will also seek to explore the ways in which those who identify as digital preservation practitioners articulate their role and responsibilities. It will do so by drawing on relevant literature and gaining perspectives from practitioners and other relevant participants through in-depth interviews. Building from this exploration, this thesis will offer recommendations for how this practice can move forward in negotiating the provision of access to digital material in the online public space of the internet. This research is part of a collaborative project with The National Archives, UK where a number of the ideas encountered during this work were explored in practice. Some of these results have helped shape the recommendations given in the final chapters of this thesis