Reconceptualising Personas Across Cultures: Archetypes, Stereotypes & Collective Personas in Pastoral Namibia

The paucity of projects where persona is the research foci and a lack of consensus on this artefact keep many reticent about its purpose and value. Besides crafting personas is expected to differ across cultures, which contrasts the advancements in Western theory with studies and progress in other sites. We postulate User-Created Personas reveal specific characteristics of situated contexts by allowing laypeople to design persona artefacts in their own terms. Hence analysing four persona sessions with an ethnic group in pastoral Namibia –ovaHerero– brought up a set of fundamental questions around the persona artefact regarding stereotypes, archetypes, and collective persona representations: (1) to what extent user depictions are stereotypical or archetypal? If stereotypes prime (2) to what degree are current personas a useful method to represent end-users in technology design? And, (3) how can we ultimately read accounts not conforming to mainstream individual persona descriptions but to collectives

A hermeneutic inquiry into user-created personas in different Namibian locales

Persona is a tool broadly used in technology design to support communicational interactions between designers and users. Different Persona types and methods have evolved mostly in the Global North, and been partially deployed in the Global South every so often in its original User-Centred Design methodology. We postulate persona conceptualizations are expected to differ across cultures. We demonstrate this with an exploratory-case study on user-created persona co-designed with four Namibian ethnic groups: ovaHerero, Ovambo, ovaHimba and Khoisan. We follow a hermeneutic inquiry approach to discern cultural nuances from diverse human conducts. Findings reveal diverse self-representations whereby for each ethnic group results emerge in unalike fashions, viewpoints, recounts and storylines. This paper ultimately argues User-Created Persona as a potentially valid approach for pursuing cross-cultural depictions of personas that communicate cultural features and user experiences paramount to designing acceptable and gratifying technologies in dissimilar locales

Rural farmers' perception of the use of agricultural mechanization in agricultural production in Delta State Nigeria

The study looked at rural farmers' perceptions of agricultural mechanization in agricultural productivity in Delta State. The respondents' opinions were gathered using a descriptive survey design. The study's participants were rural farmers in Delta State's 25 local government districts. 612 rural farmers were randomly chosen from 6 local government regions for a total sample size of 102. The data was evaluated using mean and standard deviation, with a 3.00 acceptance mean value. The numerous findings reveled the advantages of using agricultural mechanization in farming which includes increased productivity, reduced operating time, more income creation options, and more stable food system growth. The study also found that a lack of machinery, a shortage of replacement parts, farmer illiteracy, fragmentation, and a lack of money are obstacles to agricultural mechanization in rural areas. However, the study recommended that the government make agricultural mechanization available and accessible to farmers to encourage and motivate them to use it to maximize production; large areas of land should also be made available to willing farmers who want to engage in large-scale production

Morphological Evolution of Physical Robots through Model-Free Phenotype Development.

Artificial evolution of physical systems is a stochastic optimization method in which physical machines are iteratively adapted to a target function. The key for a meaningful design optimization is the capability to build variations of physical machines through the course of the evolutionary process. The optimization in turn no longer relies on complex physics models that are prone to the reality gap, a mismatch between simulated and real-world behavior. We report model-free development and evaluation of phenotypes in the artificial evolution of physical systems, in which a mother robot autonomously designs and assembles locomotion agents. The locomotion agents are automatically placed in the testing environment and their locomotion behavior is analyzed in the real world. This feedback is used for the design of the next iteration. Through experiments with a total of 500 autonomously built locomotion agents, this article shows diversification of morphology and behavior of physical robots for the improvement of functionality with limited resources.This study was supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation Grant No. PP00P2123387/1 and the ETH Zurich Research Grant ETH-23-10-3. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.This is the final version of the article. It first appeared from [publisher] via http://dx.doi.org/1371/journal.pone.012844

Commentary on the Portfolio of Compositions submitted for the degree of PhD in Composition: Heart of Light, Light of Heart, Spanish Ladies, Down Among the Dead Men, Pavanne, Christ ist Erstanden, Rezoplucker, Cliqbuz, Circle Theory.

The portfolio contains various works which explore the interplay between live performance of electroacoustic music and performance of pre-written work. Control of real-time parameters in computer generated music is now so prevalent that it can be used in the compositional process. This shift in possibilities is the focus of this commentary. It is not the intention of this commentary to either tell the reader how to interpret the music or to discuss aesthetic issues. This commentary should be used more like a construction manual to aid the listener where they might not be familiar with the concepts and techniques employed in the music. The introduction sets out the music aims, the conclusion explains how these aims are achieved in various ways and each chapter in between focuses on a different piece in the portfolio

A general architecture for robotic swarms

Swarms are large groups of simplistic individuals that collectively solve disproportionately complex tasks. Individual swarm agents are limited in perception, mechanically simple, have no global knowledge and are cheap, disposable and fallible. They rely exclusively on local observations and local communications. A swarm has no centralised control. These features are typifed by eusocial insects such as ants and termites, who construct nests, forage and build complex societies comprised of primitive agents. This project created the basis of a general swarm architecture for the control of insect-like robots. The Swarm Architecture is inspired by threshold models of insect behaviour and attempts to capture the salient features of the hive in a closely defined computer program that is hardware agnostic, swarm size indifferent and intended to be applicable to a wide range of swarm tasks. This was achieved by exploiting the inherent limitations of swarm agents. Individual insects were modelled as a machine capable only of perception, locomotion and manipulation. This approximation reduced behaviour primitives to a fixed tractable number and abstracted sensor interpretation. Cooperation was achieved through stigmergy and decisions made via a behaviour threshold model. The Architecture represents an advance on previous robotic swarms in its generality - swarm control software has often been tied to one task and robot configuration. The Architecture's exclusive focus on swarms, sets it apart from existing general cooperative systems, which are not usually explicitly swarm orientated. The Architecture was implemented successfully on both simulated and real-world swarms

Partial aggregation for collective communication in distributed memory machines

High Performance Computing (HPC) systems interconnect a large number of Processing Elements (PEs) in high-bandwidth networks to simulate complex scientific problems. The increasing scale of HPC systems poses great challenges on algorithm designers. As the average distance between PEs increases, data movement across hierarchical memory subsystems introduces high latency. Minimizing latency is particularly challenging in collective communications, where many PEs may interact in complex communication patterns. Although collective communications can be optimized for network-level parallelism, occasional synchronization delays due to dependencies in the communication pattern degrade application performance. To reduce the performance impact of communication and synchronization costs, parallel algorithms are designed with sophisticated latency hiding techniques. The principle is to interleave computation with asynchronous communication, which increases the overall occupancy of compute cores. However, collective communication primitives abstract parallelism which limits the integration of latency hiding techniques. Approaches to work around these limitations either modify the algorithmic structure of application codes, or replace collective primitives with verbose low-level communication calls. While these approaches give fine-grained control for latency hiding, implementing collective communication algorithms is challenging and requires expertise knowledge about HPC network topologies. A collective communication pattern is commonly described as a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) where a set of PEs, represented as vertices, resolve data dependencies through communication along the edges. Our approach improves latency hiding in collective communication through partial aggregation. Based on mathematical rules of binary operations and homomorphism, we expose data parallelism in a respective DAG to overlap computation with communication. The proposed concepts are implemented and evaluated with a subset of collective primitives in the Message Passing Interface (MPI), an established communication standard in scientific computing. An experimental analysis with communication-bound microbenchmarks shows considerable performance benefits for the evaluated collective primitives. A detailed case study with a large-scale distributed sort algorithm demonstrates, how partial aggregation significantly improves performance in data-intensive scenarios. Besides better latency hiding capabilities with collective communication primitives, our approach enables further optimizations of their implementations within MPI libraries. The vast amount of asynchronous programming models, which are actively studied in the HPC community, benefit from partial aggregation in collective communication patterns. Future work can utilize partial aggregation to improve the interaction of MPI collectives with acclerator architectures, and to design more efficient communication algorithms