Index to Library Trends Volume 33

published or submitted for publicatio

Star-rating evaluation model for rating the energy-efficiency level of android google play apps

The tremendous increase in smartphone usage is accompanied by an increase in the need for more energy. This preoperational relationship between modern technology and energy generates energy-greedy apps, and therefore power-hungry end users. With many apps falling under the same category in an app store, these apps usually share similar functionality. Because developers follow different design and development schools, each app has its energy-consumption habits. Since apps share similar features, an end-user with limited access to recharging resources would prefer an energy-friendly app rather than a popular energy-greedy app. However, app stores do not indicate the energy behavior of the apps they offer, which causes users to randomly choose apps without understanding their energy-consumption behavior. A review of the relevant literature was provided covering various energy-saving techniques. The results gave an initial impression about the popularity of the usage of two power-saving modes where the average usage of these modes did not exceed 31% among the total 443 Android users. To address this issue, we propose a star-rating evaluation model (SREM), an approach that generates a tentative energy rating label for each app. The model was tested on 7 open-source apps to act as a primary evaluation sample. To that end, SREM adapts current energy-aware refactoring tools to demonstrate the level of energy consumption of an app and presents it in a star-rating schema similar to the Ecolabels used on electrical home appliances. As per our results, SREM helped in saving 35% of smartphone energy

Towards human-compatible autonomous car: A study of non-verbal Turing test in automated driving with affective transition modelling

Autonomous cars are indispensable when humans go further down the hands-free route. Although existing literature highlights that the acceptance of the autonomous car will increase if it drives in a human-like manner, sparse research offers the naturalistic experience from a passenger's seat perspective to examine the human likeness of current autonomous cars. The present study tested whether the AI driver could create a human-like ride experience for passengers based on 69 participants' feedback in a real-road scenario. We designed a ride experience-based version of the non-verbal Turing test for automated driving. Participants rode in autonomous cars (driven by either human or AI drivers) as a passenger and judged whether the driver was human or AI. The AI driver failed to pass our test because passengers detected the AI driver above chance. In contrast, when the human driver drove the car, the passengers' judgement was around chance. We further investigated how human passengers ascribe humanness in our test. Based on Lewin's field theory, we advanced a computational model combining signal detection theory with pre-trained language models to predict passengers' humanness rating behaviour. We employed affective transition between pre-study baseline emotions and corresponding post-stage emotions as the signal strength of our model. Results showed that the passengers' ascription of humanness would increase with the greater affective transition. Our study suggested an important role of affective transition in passengers' ascription of humanness, which might become a future direction for autonomous driving.Comment: 16 pages, 9 figures, 3 table

Analysis on the Administration and Governance of the South African Case Docket

The minor dissertation is a desktop literature study on the debates and research on the matter of docket management and administration in South Africa. The purpose of the minor dissertation is to understand the latest developments and trends that have transformed the administration and governance of case dockets globally and particularly in South Africa. A compendium of literature including governmental reports, scholarly journal articles and newspaper reports were utilised as the basis for this minor dissertation. The limitation to this study is primarily the paucity of South African literature on the subject matter as well as data gaps in empirical research. Effective case management has been the focal point for courts facing burgeoning bottlenecks throughout the world. Hence, techniques such as case screening or docket control, judicial intervention, attorney and advocate support, specialisation of courts and the integration of Information and Communications Technology (ICT) have been employed globally to expedite case flow. This research paper will draw on global paradigms and world’s best practices for case docket management from North America, Europe and Namibia. Thereafter the research turns to administrative reform from a South African perspective; what will be examined is the transition from policing practices under the apartheid regime to case docket management under the constitutional dispensation of democratic governance. As part of an Integrated Justice System (IJS) strategy, South African policymakers have drawn from the pool of experience by adopting ICT projects within the Criminal Justice System (CJS), primarily giving rise to the electronic or e-Docket system. The e-Docket system, which is said to take up to at least 10 to 20 years to fully implement, faces its own hurdles and dilemmas, not least as a result of police officials preferring the old traditional paper-based dossiers, thereby resisting the technological movement. In addition to the e-Docket system, the CJS has reeled in principles from the private sector such as outsourcing and New Public Management (NPM) philosophies in order to effectively regulate docket management as well as accelerate court processes. The research problem, which is twofold, first aims at examining case docket reform ie how case dockets have transitioned from the apartheid era to the constitutional dispensation and whether or not this has been effective. This issue will be answered in Chapter Two, in which case chronology will be discussed. The second concerns the adoption and implementation of techniques borrowed from the West, such as the implementation of ICT projects and the success of first world systems in a country like South Africa with a turbulent socio-economic background. This problem will be addressed in Chapters Two and Three in which the eDocket will be introduced and critically examined against South Africa’s CJS strategies. Arguably, the adoption and implementation of Western ideologies and first world best practices in South Africa may not be feasible given the current landscape of constrained and limited resources, both financial and in the field of human capital. Additionally, the climate is further exacerbated by low levels of computer literacy and an overall scarcity of skilled and knowledgeable workers required to operate sophisticated ICT systems. Until the e-Docket system is fully implemented and effectively operational, the labour intensive paper-based dockets will continue to bear negative ramifications including mismanagement: ie negligent docket handling, lost or stolen dockets and the practice of bartering dockets in exchange for gratuities. The latter provides a host of repercussions for the interests of stakeholders including egregious violations of fundamental human rights. The aim of this research is to understand the rationale behind maladministration and ineffective governance of dockets in the democratic era, as well as the effect it has on stakeholders. The research provides recommendations in which the administration of dockets may be adequately regulated. Therefore, police dockets represent much more than a kneejerk reaction to crime; dockets regulate the entry points into the criminal justice system pipeline. South Africa needs to invest in its greatest asset of all − its human capital, by developing and equipping its people to embrace the technological revolution. Have we sunk our heels in too far into the ‘splendor’ of Western ideologies of technology and privatisation or is it time that South African leadership adopts accountability and charters a course with an authentic framework best suited for South African problems

Identifying idiolect in forensic authorship attribution: an n-gram textbite approach

Forensic authorship attribution is concerned with identifying authors of disputed or anonymous documents, which are potentially evidential in legal cases, through the analysis of linguistic clues left behind by writers. The forensic linguist “approaches this problem of questioned authorship from the theoretical position that every native speaker has their own distinct and individual version of the language [. . . ], their own idiolect” (Coulthard, 2004: 31). However, given the diXculty in empirically substantiating a theory of idiolect, there is growing concern in the Veld that it remains too abstract to be of practical use (Kredens, 2002; Grant, 2010; Turell, 2010). Stylistic, corpus, and computational approaches to text, however, are able to identify repeated collocational patterns, or n-grams, two to six word chunks of language, similar to the popular notion of soundbites: small segments of no more than a few seconds of speech that journalists are able to recognise as having news value and which characterise the important moments of talk. The soundbite oUers an intriguing parallel for authorship attribution studies, with the following question arising: looking at any set of texts by any author, is it possible to identify ‘n-gram textbites’, small textual segments that characterise that author’s writing, providing DNA-like chunks of identifying material

Detecting order-disorder transitions in discourse : implications for schizophrenia

Abstract Several psychiatric and neurological conditions affect the semantic organization and content of a patient's speech. Specifically, the discourse of patients with schizophrenia is frequently characterized as lacking coherence. The evaluation of disturbances in discourse is often used in diagnosis and in assessing treatment efficacy, and is an important factor in prognosis. Measuring these deviations, such as “loss of meaning” and incoherence, is difficult and requires substantial human effort. Computational procedures can be employed to characterize the nature of the anomalies in discourse. We present a set of new tools derived from network theory and information science that may assist in empirical and clinical studies of communication patterns in patients, and provide the foundation for future automatic procedures. First we review information science and complex network approaches to measuring semantic coherence, and then we introduce a representation of discourse that allows for the computation of measures of disorganization. Finally we apply these tools to speech transcriptions from patients and a healthy participant, illustrating the implications and potential of this novel framework