Speaking to twin children: evidence against the "impoverishment" thesis

It is often claimed that parents’ talk to twins is less rich than talk to singletons and that this delays their language development. This case study suggests that talk to twins need not be impoverished. We identify highly sophisticated ways in which a mother responds to her 4-year-old twin children, both individually and jointly, as a way of ensuring an inclusive interactional environment. She uses gaze to demonstrate concurrent recipiency in response to simultaneous competition for attention from both children, and we see how the twins constantly monitor the ongoing interaction in order to appropriately position their own contributions to talk. In conclusion, we argue for the need to take twins’ interactional abilities into account when drawing linguistic comparisons between twins and singletons. Data are in Australian English

A multimodal conversation analytic study of word-searches in L2 interaction

PhD ThesisStudies on face-to-face interactions have demonstrated how spoken language involves not only verbal but also a mutual collaboration with embodied actions. Embodied actions, such as gaze, gestures, body posture and physical movement are part and parcel of the details of ordered social interaction, and they can be significant resources in interaction (Hazel et al., 2014). This study has investigated the embodied actions displayed in word search phenomenon in L2 interaction. Word search is regarded as a type of self-initiation repair in which the progressivity of the speaker’s turn is momentarily ceased due to an item (i.e. word) is not available to the speaker when due (Schegloff et al., 1977). The context of the study is a non-educational context (Firth and Wagner, 1997; Firth and Wagner, 2007; Gardner and Wagner, 2004) where casual conversation among international university students having dinner at a cafe is recorded. Furthermore, the study is a multiactivity setting in which multiparty participants are engaged in talking, eating and drinking. The L2 speakers are from different countries, and most of them have a different first language background. This study examines conversations between L2-L2 speakers communicating in English as it is the most common language that international students resort to when speaking with someone who has a different language background. Using multimodal Conversation Analysis (CA), this study aims to explore how participants with different language proficiency exploit embodied actions as resources in word search sequences. The analyses start with investigating how participants get into a word search and then moves to enquiring how participants use embodied actions for constructing a joint solution. The final analysis focuses on how embodied actions are used as a resource to resolve a word search when the targeted word is not attained. The findings from the investigation suggest that there is a relationship between talk and embodied actions in word search sequences among L2-L2 speakers. Based on the findings, six salient themes will be discussed; (1) the interactional phenomenon of a ‘word search’, (2) resources that are recognised as opportunities for co-participation, (3) joint solutions by non-speaking participants, (4) meaning-making through embodied interaction, (5) achieving mutual understanding through embodied negotiation, and ii (6) language use or learning in the wild. Overall, this study advocates the need for an in-depth exploration of multimodal resources in word search sequences, which can have significant implications to understand that language use is fundamentally multimodal (Seyfeddinipur and Gullberg, 2014).Ministry of Higher Education of Malaysi

The need for greater integration in philanthropy in multiparty social change efforts: a case study of Portland\u27s collective impact initiative

Many social change groups employ formalized multiparty collaborative efforts to create sustainable social change around today\u27s complex public issues. This study investigates the role and perspective of foundations in these interorganizational collaboratives, specifically collective impact initiatives. It highlights a disconnect between the traditional culture of philanthropy that provides only short-term funding and the long-term nature of systems change. This paradox hinders the impact that foundations and nonprofits alike can make toward addressing complex issues. The study recommends that nonprofits and foundations take active roles in changing the narrative of separatism between philanthropy and nonprofits and begin seeing themselves as part of one interconnected system. This will require foundations to become more active participants and make longer term investments in interorganizational change efforts. Social change groups in turn must consider foundations as more than a funding stream and include them in the cocreation of the collective impact effort and evaluation

Democratization or Business As Usual? Evaluating Long Term Impact of Africa’s Watershed Elections

In many African countries, “watershed” elections led to political liberalization, and to democratization in a handful of cases. However, years later, many liberalized regimes backslid into authoritarianism. This paper evaluates the long-term impact of these election outcomes. Using a transitology framework, it shows that the reforms implemented at this crucial time dictated the course of liberalization well into the 2010s. Countries where a cohesive opposition managed to wrestle power from the elites have retained their liberalization gains to date. Countries where the opposition was more disorganized and where civil society was weaker remain, at best, hybrid regimes

Mechanism design for distributed task and resource allocation among self-interested agents in virtual organizations

The aggregate power of all resources on the Internet is enormous. The Internet can be viewed as a massive virtual organization that holds tremendous amounts of information and resources with different ownerships. However, little is known about how to run this organization efficiently. This dissertation studies the problems of distributed task and resource allocation among self-interested agents in virtual organizations. The developed solutions are not allocation mechanisms that can be imposed by a centralized designer, but decentralized interaction mechanisms that provide incentives to self-interested agents to behave cooperatively. These mechanisms also take computational tractability into consideration due to the inherent complexity of distributed task and resource allocation problems. Targeted allocation mechanisms can achieve global task allocation efficiency in a virtual organization and establish stable resource-sharing communities based on agentsâÃÂàown decisions about whether or not to behave cooperatively. This high level goal requires solving the following problems: synthetic task allocation, decentralized coalition formation and automated multiparty negotiation. For synthetic task allocation, in which each task needs to be accomplished by a virtual team composed of self-interested agents from different real organizations, my approach is to formalize the synthetic task allocation problem as an algorithmic mechanism design optimization problem. I have developed two approximation mechanisms that I prove are incentive compatible for a synthetic task allocation problem. This dissertation also develops a decentralized coalition formation mechanism, which is based on explicit negotiation among self-interested agents. Each agent makes its own decisions about whether or not to join a candidate coalition. The resulting coalitions are stable in the core in terms of coalition rationality. I have applied this mechanism to form resource sharing coalitions in computational grids and buyer coalitions in electronic markets. The developed negotiation mechanism in the decentralized coalition formation mechanism realizes automated multilateral negotiation among self-interested agents who have symmetric authority (i.e., no mediator exists and agents are peers). In combination, the decentralized allocation mechanisms presented in this dissertation lay a foundation for realizing automated resource management in open and scalable virtual organizations

ODIN: Obfuscation-based privacy-preserving consensus algorithm for Decentralized Information fusion in smart device Networks

The large spread of sensors and smart devices in urban infrastructures are motivating research in the area of the Internet of Things (IoT) to develop new services and improve citizens’ quality of life. Sensors and smart devices generate large amounts of measurement data from sensing the environment, which is used to enable services such as control of power consumption or traffic density. To deal with such a large amount of information and provide accurate measurements, service providers can adopt information fusion, which given the decentralized nature of urban deployments can be performed by means of consensus algorithms. These algorithms allow distributed agents to (iteratively) compute linear functions on the exchanged data, and take decisions based on the outcome, without the need for the support of a central entity. However, the use of consensus algorithms raises several security concerns, especially when private or security critical information is involved in the computation. In this article we propose ODIN, a novel algorithm allowing information fusion over encrypted data. ODIN is a privacy-preserving extension of the popular consensus gossip algorithm, which prevents distributed agents from having direct access to the data while they iteratively reach consensus; agents cannot access even the final consensus value but can only retrieve partial information (e.g., a binary decision). ODIN uses efficient additive obfuscation and proxy re-encryption during the update steps and garbled circuits to make final decisions on the obfuscated consensus. We discuss the security of our proposal and show its practicability and efficiency on real-world resource-constrained devices, developing a prototype implementation for Raspberry Pi devices

ODIN: Obfuscation-based privacy-preserving consensus algorithm for Decentralized Information fusion in smart device Networks

The large spread of sensors and smart devices in urban infrastructures are motivating research in the area of the Internet of Things (IoT) to develop new services and improve citizens’ quality of life. Sensors and smart devices generate large amounts of measurement data from sensing the environment, which is used to enable services such as control of power consumption or traffic density. To deal with such a large amount of information and provide accurate measurements, service providers can adopt information fusion, which given the decentralized nature of urban deployments can be performed by means of consensus algorithms. These algorithms allow distributed agents to (iteratively) compute linear functions on the exchanged data, and take decisions based on the outcome, without the need for the support of a central entity. However, the use of consensus algorithms raises several security concerns, especially when private or security critical information is involved in the computation. In this article we propose ODIN, a novel algorithm allowing information fusion over encrypted data. ODIN is a privacy-preserving extension of the popular consensus gossip algorithm, which prevents distributed agents from having direct access to the data while they iteratively reach consensus; agents cannot access even the final consensus value but can only retrieve partial information (e.g., a binary decision). ODIN uses efficient additive obfuscation and proxy re-encryption during the update steps and garbled circuits to make final decisions on the obfuscated consensus. We discuss the security of our proposal and show its practicability and efficiency on real-world resource-constrained devices, developing a prototype implementation for Raspberry Pi devices

Multiparty motion coordination: from choreographies to robotics programs

We present a programming model and typing discipline for complex multi-robot coordination programming. Our model encompasses both synchronisation through message passing and continuous-time dynamic motion primitives in physical space. We specify continuous-time motion primitives in an assume-guarantee logic that ensures compatibility of motion primitives as well as collision freedom. We specify global behaviour of programs in a choreographic type system that extends multiparty session types with jointly executed motion primitives, predicated refinements, as well as a separating conjunction that allows reasoning about subsets of interacting robots. We describe a notion of well-formedness for global types that ensures motion and communication can be correctly synchronised and provide algorithms for checking well-formedness, projecting a type, and local type checking. A well-typed program is communication safe, motion compatible, and collision free. Our type system provides a compositional approach to ensuring these properties. We have implemented our model on top of the ROS framework. This allows us to program multi-robot coordination scenarios on top of commercial and custom robotics hardware platforms. We show through case studies that we can model and statically verify quite complex manoeuvres involving multiple manipulators and mobile robots---such examples are beyond the scope of previous approaches