Using mobile technology to engage sexual and gender minorities in clinical research.

IntroductionHistorical and current stigmatizing and discriminatory experiences drive sexual and gender minority (SGM) people away from health care and clinical research. Being medically underserved, they face numerous disparities that make them vulnerable to poor health outcomes. Effective methods to engage and recruit SGM people into clinical research studies are needed.ObjectivesTo promote health equity and understand SGM health needs, we sought to design an online, national, longitudinal cohort study entitled The PRIDE (Population Research in Identity and Disparities for Equality) Study that enabled SGM people to safely participate, provide demographic and health data, and generate SGM health-related research ideas.MethodsWe developed an iPhone mobile application ("app") to engage and recruit SGM people to The PRIDE Study-Phase 1. Participants completed demographic and health surveys and joined in asynchronous discussions about SGM health-related topics important to them for future study.ResultsThe PRIDE Study-Phase 1 consented 18,099 participants. Of them, 16,394 provided data. More than 98% identified as a sexual minority, and more than 15% identified as a gender minority. The sample was diverse in terms of sexual orientation, gender identity, age, race, ethnicity, geographic location, education, and individual income. Participants completed 24,022 surveys, provided 3,544 health topics important to them, and cast 60,522 votes indicating their opinion of a particular health topic.ConclusionsWe developed an iPhone app that recruited SGM adults and collected demographic and health data for a new national online cohort study. Digital engagement features empowered participants to become committed stakeholders in the research development process. We believe this is the first time that a mobile app has been used to specifically engage and recruit large numbers of an underrepresented population for clinical research. Similar approaches may be successful, convenient, and cost-effective at engaging and recruiting other vulnerable populations into clinical research studies

A gentle transition from Java programming to Web Services using XML-RPC

Exposing students to leading edge vocational areas of relevance such as Web Services can be difficult. We show a lightweight approach by embedding a key component of Web Services within a Level 3 BSc module in Distributed Computing. We present a ready to use collection of lecture slides and student activities based on XML-RPC. In addition we show that this material addresses the central topics in the context of web services as identified by Draganova (2003)

TLAD 2011 Proceedings:9th international workshop on teaching, learning and assesment of databases (TLAD)

This is the ninth in the series of highly successful international workshops on the Teaching, Learning and Assessment of Databases (TLAD 2011), which once again is held as a workshop of BNCOD 2011 - the 28th British National Conference on Databases. TLAD 2011 is held on the 11th July at Manchester University, just before BNCOD, and hopes to be just as successful as its predecessors.The teaching of databases is central to all Computing Science, Software Engineering, Information Systems and Information Technology courses, and this year, the workshop aims to continue the tradition of bringing together both database teachers and researchers, in order to share good learning, teaching and assessment practice and experience, and further the growing community amongst database academics. As well as attracting academics from the UK community, the workshop has also been successful in attracting academics from the wider international community, through serving on the programme committee, and attending and presenting papers.Due to the healthy number of high quality submissions this year, the workshop will present eight peer reviewed papers. Of these, six will be presented as full papers and two as short papers. These papers cover a number of themes, including: the teaching of data mining and data warehousing, databases and the cloud, and novel uses of technology in teaching and assessment. It is expected that these papers will stimulate discussion at the workshop itself and beyond. This year, the focus on providing a forum for discussion is enhanced through a panel discussion on assessment in database modules, with David Nelson (of the University of Sunderland), Al Monger (of Southampton Solent University) and Charles Boisvert (of Sheffield Hallam University) as the expert panel

TLAD 2011 Proceedings:9th international workshop on teaching, learning and assesment of databases (TLAD)

This is the ninth in the series of highly successful international workshops on the Teaching, Learning and Assessment of Databases (TLAD 2011), which once again is held as a workshop of BNCOD 2011 - the 28th British National Conference on Databases. TLAD 2011 is held on the 11th July at Manchester University, just before BNCOD, and hopes to be just as successful as its predecessors.The teaching of databases is central to all Computing Science, Software Engineering, Information Systems and Information Technology courses, and this year, the workshop aims to continue the tradition of bringing together both database teachers and researchers, in order to share good learning, teaching and assessment practice and experience, and further the growing community amongst database academics. As well as attracting academics from the UK community, the workshop has also been successful in attracting academics from the wider international community, through serving on the programme committee, and attending and presenting papers.Due to the healthy number of high quality submissions this year, the workshop will present eight peer reviewed papers. Of these, six will be presented as full papers and two as short papers. These papers cover a number of themes, including: the teaching of data mining and data warehousing, databases and the cloud, and novel uses of technology in teaching and assessment. It is expected that these papers will stimulate discussion at the workshop itself and beyond. This year, the focus on providing a forum for discussion is enhanced through a panel discussion on assessment in database modules, with David Nelson (of the University of Sunderland), Al Monger (of Southampton Solent University) and Charles Boisvert (of Sheffield Hallam University) as the expert panel

Scenario-Driven Development of Service-Oriented Systems

Service-oriented architecture (SOA) is a software architectural style, which relies on reusable and composable services. In addition to software-orientation, SOA includes a business viewpoint, so that business requirements can be captured as high level business processes. Business processes can be implemented, for example, as an orchestration of different service components. Individual services participate in the overall execution of business processes by providing elementary service activities. In addition to flexibility and services reuse, bridging of business and information technology (IT) views is one of the claimed benefits of SOA. Development of service-based systems includes a range of different activities. However, development of service-based systems is still lacking systematic and tool vendor independent practices and development methods. In this thesis, a development process for a service provider, called Service Product Development Process (SPDP), is presented. It consists of several development phases and related activities. The input for SPDP includes high level business process requirements. The result of the process is a new service-based product to be added to the service provider’s product portfolio. The purpose of this thesis is to study the applicability and the benefits of applying a scenario-driven approach, a type of requirement-driven development, for the development of service-based systems. Scenarios are used to capture functional system requirements as simple message sequences given as UML sequence diagrams. The scenario-driven approach is applied to different phases of SPDP including business process development, service specification, and service realization. The proposed scenario-driven approach is not limited to the SPDP context. It is rather a general purpose framework for development of service-based systems or products, called SceDA. SceDA includes three independent scenario-based methods, which are targeted to support different development phases of service-based systems. One of the three methods is used for scenario-based business process development. The other two methods are targeted at service development, in particular, service specification and service realization. Service specification is supported by a method for automatically mining and re-documenting the development rules as scenarios. To support service realization, a method for generating source code for individual service and client applications has been developed. Each method includes a description of the developed tool support and a case study.Case studies are used for constructing and evaluating the three scenario-based methods developed. Each method is applied as a case study in the context of development phases of SPDP. In the first case study, scenario-driven business process development method is applied. Two other case studies concern constructing and using scenarios for application development. One case study utilizes the scenario mining method. In the other case study, the code generation method is applied

How to engage customers in game development? : a qualitative research on mobile games industry

This study aimed at ensuring the customer engagement in games development for the interests of both parties involved; customers and companies. Nowadays, engaging customers in product and service development has become a common practice for its importance. It is obvious that there are bi-modal motives behind it. While trying to fulfill their motives, both customers and companies encounter some unavoidable challenges during the engagement process. This research set a main research question which demonstrates how to engage customers in games development followed by three sub-research questions which include motives, challenges and solutions to the challenges for customer engagement. In this research, a semi-structured qualitative study was followed where data was collected from different sources; taking interviews of different responsible persons from various firms, attending multiple community gatherings of the industry, relevant internet pages and reports etc. The findings of this study suggested that mobile games companies give considerable importance on customer engagement for various reasons including getting continuous feedback, marketing tool and feasibility analysis. Whereas, primary motives of customers have been identified as recognition, opportunity to play reputed studios games early and opportunity to be a part of developers. There have been several challenges identified notably biased opinions due to the relationship they hold, finding the right comments and difficulty in managing the community. The major problems customers encounter during engagement are lack of appropriate preparation and lack of interest. Thus the study recommended that companies take effective measures for ensuring customers participation, such as building strong community around the brand, motivating customers by offering various rewards, providing necessary trainings, adopting the most advanced technology for filtering the feedbacks from customers as well as appreciating them for their efforts towards the games development. Like the companies, customers should be sincere enough to solve their problems. For example, besides training provided by the companies, customers must take appropriate preparation prior to giving any feedback for new games development. Moreover, they also ought to engage themselves voluntarily as they are the ultimate people for whom games are developed. Therefore, customer engagement in games development has multiple aspects; both the customers and the companies are beneficiaries of making it happen, thus both parties should be cooperative to each other. Further research can be done with a suitable method to come up with strong and efficient solutions for existing and potential obstacles

A biography of open source software: community participation and individuation of open source code in the context of microfinance NGOs in North Africa and the Middle East

For many, microfinance is about building inclusive financial systems to help the poor gain direct access to financial services. Hundreds of grassroots have specialised in the provision of microfinance services worldwide. Most of them are adhoc organisations, which suffer severe organisational and informational deficiencies. Over the past decades, policy makers and consortia of microfinance experts have attempted to improve their capacity building through ICTs. In particular, there is strong emphasis on open source software (OSS) initiatives, as it is commonly believed that MFIs are uniquely positioned to benefit from the advantages of openness and free access. Furthermore, OSS approaches have recently become extremely popular. The OSS gurus are convinced there is a business case for a purely open source approach, especially across international development spheres. Nonetheless, getting people to agree on what is meant by OSS remains hard to achieve. On the one hand scholarly software research shows a lack of consensus and documents stories in which the OSS meaning is negotiated locally. On the other, the growing literature on ICT-for-international development does not provide answers as research, especially in the microfinance context, presents little empirical scrutiny. This thesis therefore critically explores the OSS in the microfinance context in order to understand itslong-term development and what might be some of the implications for MFIs. Theoretically I draw on the 3rd wave of research within the field of Science and Technology Studies –studies of Expertise and Experience (SEE). I couple the software ‘biography’ approach (Pollock and Williams 2009) with concepts from Simondon’s thesis on the individuation of technical beings (1958) as an integrated framework. I also design a single case study, which is supported by an extensive and longitudinal collection of data and a three-stage approach, including the analysis of sociograms, and email content. This case provides a rich empirical setting that challenges the current understanding of the ontology of software and goes beyond the instrumental views of design, building a comprehensive framework for community participation and software sustainability in the context of the microfinance global industry