Taking real-life seriously : an approach to decomposing context beyond 'environment' in living labs

The maturity of Living Labs has grown and several researchers have tried to create a uniform definition of what Living Labs are by emphasizing the multi-method and real-life, contextual approach. Although researchers thus recognize the importance of context in Living Labs, they do not provide insights into how context can be taken into account. The real-life context predominantly focuses on the in-situ use of a product during field trials where users are observed in their everyday life. The contribution of this paper will be twofold. By means of a case study we will show how context can be evaluated in the front end of design, so Living Lab researchers are no longer dependent on the readiness level of a product, and we will show how field trials can be evaluated in a more structured way to cover all components of context. By using a framework to evaluate the impact of context on product use, Living Lab researchers can improve the overall effectiveness of data gathering and analysis methods in a Living Lab project

Global trends in professional learning and performance & development

This report was completed by the Innovation Unit on behalf of the Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership (AITSL). It set out to discover innovative practice in professional learning and performance and development in new or transformational sectors including, but not limited to, education. Based on an extensive ‘horizon scan’ of more than 50 cross-sectoral organisations (including education, arts, technology, business, and health), the report identifies five global trends in innovative approaches to professional learning: Integrated, Immersive, Design-led, Market-led and Open. For each of these trends the report identifies a spectrum of practices from ‘almost/already here’ to ‘next wave’ and ‘on the horizon’, providing illustrative examples for implementation in the education sector. This scan offers insight into the processes that successful and innovative organisations use to support professional growth. These findings encourage all educators, policy makers, system administrators and professional learning providers to go beyond what is currently known. They provide stimulus to consider new and different ways of engaging and supporting educators’ growth, while retaining the best of current practice

Towards a Scalable Hardware/Software Co-Design Platform for Real-time Pedestrian Tracking Based on a ZYNQ-7000 Device

Currently, most designers face a daunting task to research different design flows and learn the intricacies of specific software from various manufacturers in hardware/software co-design. An urgent need of creating a scalable hardware/software co-design platform has become a key strategic element for developing hardware/software integrated systems. In this paper, we propose a new design flow for building a scalable co-design platform on FPGA-based system-on-chip. We employ an integrated approach to implement a histogram oriented gradients (HOG) and a support vector machine (SVM) classification on a programmable device for pedestrian tracking. Not only was hardware resource analysis reported, but the precision and success rates of pedestrian tracking on nine open access image data sets are also analysed. Finally, our proposed design flow can be used for any real-time image processingrelated products on programmable ZYNQ-based embedded systems, which benefits from a reduced design time and provide a scalable solution for embedded image processing products

Effects of codesign on consumer acceptance of a wearable technology using the Lilypad Arduino, The

2019 Fall.Includes bibliographical references.Wearable technology is increasing in popularity, but research shows that significant challenges still exist in user acceptance. Meanwhile, new tools and design and development contexts are becoming accessible to the average consumer, through which they may more actively engage in the creation of products. This experimental study utilized a mixed-method approach to examine the effect of a codesign context on user acceptance of a wearable technology using the open-source wearable microcontroller, the Lilypad Arduino. Data were collected via two codesign sessions held for 17 adult participants in a western region of the United States; each session comprised a hands-on codesign activity, focus group discussion, and pre- and post-assessment surveys. Direct content analysis was conducted based on the extended Technology Acceptance Model (perceived ease of use, perceived usefulness, and perceived playfulness) as a theoretical framework upon which qualitative data from focus group discussions were arranged; paired-samples comparison analyses were conducted for survey data. Results from both the quantitative and qualitative data revealed that the codesign activity prompted a positive increase in all variables tested; implications are discussed as well as recommendations for further study

Digital information support for concept design

This paper outlines the issues in effective utilisation of digital resources in conceptual design. Access to appropriate information acts as stimuli and can lead to better substantiated concepts. This paper addresses the issues of presenting such information in a digital form for effective use, exploring digital libraries and groupware as relevant literature areas, and argues that improved integration of these two technologies is necessary to better support the concept generation task. The development of the LauLima learning environment and digital library is consequently outlined. Despite its attempts to integrate the designers' working space and digital resources, continuing issues in library utilisation and migration of information to design concepts are highlighted through a class study. In light of this, new models of interaction to increase information use are explored

Intelligent Embedded Software: New Perspectives and Challenges

Intelligent embedded systems (IES) represent a novel and promising generation of embedded systems (ES). IES have the capacity of reasoning about their external environments and adapt their behavior accordingly. Such systems are situated in the intersection of two different branches that are the embedded computing and the intelligent computing. On the other hand, intelligent embedded software (IESo) is becoming a large part of the engineering cost of intelligent embedded systems. IESo can include some artificial intelligence (AI)-based systems such as expert systems, neural networks and other sophisticated artificial intelligence (AI) models to guarantee some important characteristics such as self-learning, self-optimizing and self-repairing. Despite the widespread of such systems, some design challenging issues are arising. Designing a resource-constrained software and at the same time intelligent is not a trivial task especially in a real-time context. To deal with this dilemma, embedded system researchers have profited from the progress in semiconductor technology to develop specific hardware to support well AI models and render the integration of AI with the embedded world a reality