Using computer-mediated communication as a tool for mentoring to Latina/o sophomore college students

The sophomore year of college can be challenging for many students specifically Latina/o students. New initiatives are being created to increase Latina/o enrollment, retention, and completion of higher education with research indicating Latinas/os are successful academically when they had a mentor or perceived someone on campus cared about them. Mentoring programs use various tools to communicate, but computer-mediated communication (CMC) tools have not been examined in Latina/o peer mentoring relationships. The current research study examined secondary data to see if Latina/o sophomore college students in a peer mentoring program were academically successful when using CMC to communicate with their mentor. Results were mixed; more students used CMC than face-to-face when communicating with their mentor and those who used CMC had a higher chance of being retained, but GPA was not correlated to CMC use. Additional analysis revealed mentoring to have a significant impact on GPA when compared to non-mentored students

Personal Memory and Digital Mobile Media: How A Product and A Web Platform Can Improve Digital Memory Archiving

Our technology has been evolving so rapidly and our ability to capture our moments has been become so accessible, we are creating hundreds of thousands of digital files. When we were operating with analog methods of memory making and archiving it was much easier to organize our files because we had fewer or them and they were often all sentimental because of their value. Today, it is hard to distinguish between all of our digital files to determine which ones are most important and even to determine where they are. The creation of social media has created an interesting dynamic for our memory making because we are capturing moments and posting them to online social networks, allowing these digital artifacts to create a life of their own. These social networks sites can also act as a place for identity creation and curation, and a new phenomena. During the research phase of this project my goal was to better understand the topic of memory making and archiving, both physical and digital. We have been capturing memories and archiving them since the beginning of our existence but with this rapid change in technology we are starting to move away from analyzing our physical presence more and are becoming enveloped in our digital worlds. I explored the ways in which we could bring ourselves back to physical world through the creation of a digital legacy that creates a narrative of one’s life. I launched surveys and research activities to learn more about people’s current habits and what they might want to change about their digital legacies. After the research phase, where I defined my design objectives, I moved into the design phase where I began talking with users and creating products that could assist in this process. I developed a physical product and a web platform that allows users to begin creating their own digital legacies that are more organized and can be shared with others if they were to die. The physical product acts as a storage device for the user’s digital legacy and the web platform acts as the shoebox or scrapbook, it is where the creation, organizing and viewing of the digital legacy occurs. Together the user is able to create and store a legacy that is sharable with others. The topic of digital archiving and digital legacies for millennials who are the biggest user group of the internet and social media sites is a rising topic. There are several groups trying to tackle the issue and social media companies are adapting their platforms to accommodate better memory recall. The inclusion of artificial intelligence and smart products in the home is also a growing field, with products like amazon echo and siri. As we progress as a society we are going to be living with technology, it is going to be all around us. Through Totem, my goal is to spark conversation about the growing topics of memory recall, digital archiving, digital legacies and death prep

On data-driven systems analyzing, supporting and enhancing users’ interaction and experience

[EN]The research areas of Human-Computer Interaction and Software Architectures have been traditionally treated separately, but in the literature, many authors made efforts to merge them to build better software systems. One of the common gaps between software engineering and usability is the lack of strategies to apply usability principles in the initial design of software architectures. Including these principles since the early phases of software design would help to avoid later architectural changes to include user experience requirements. The combination of both fields (software architectures and Human-Computer Interaction) would contribute to building better interactive software that should include the best from both the systems and user-centered designs. In that combination, the software architectures should enclose the fundamental structure and ideas of the system to offer the desired quality based on sound design decisions. Moreover, the information kept within a system is an opportunity to extract knowledge about the system itself, its components, the software included, the users or the interaction occurring inside. The knowledge gained from the information generated in a software environment can be used to improve the system itself, its software, the users’ experience, and the results. So, the combination of the areas of Knowledge Discovery and Human-Computer Interaction offers ideal conditions to address Human-Computer-Interaction-related challenges. The Human-Computer Interaction focuses on human intelligence, the Knowledge Discovery in computational intelligence, and the combination of both can raise the support of human intelligence with machine intelligence to discover new insights in a world crowded of data. This Ph.D. Thesis deals with these kinds of challenges: how approaches like data-driven software architectures (using Knowledge Discovery techniques) can help to improve the users' interaction and experience within an interactive system. Specifically, it deals with how to improve the human-computer interaction processes of different kind of stakeholders to improve different aspects such as the user experience or the easiness to accomplish a specific task. Several research actions and experiments support this investigation. These research actions included performing a systematic literature review and mapping of the literature that was aimed at finding how the software architectures in the literature have been used to support, analyze or enhance the human-computer interaction. Also, the actions included work on four different research scenarios that presented common challenges in the Human- Computer Interaction knowledge area. The case studies that fit into the scenarios selected were chosen based on the Human-Computer Interaction challenges they present, and on the authors’ accessibility to them. The four case studies were: an educational laboratory virtual world, a Massive Open Online Course and the social networks where the students discuss and learn, a system that includes very large web forms, and an environment where programmers develop code in the context of quantum computing. The development of the experiences involved the review of more than 2700 papers (only in the literature review phase), the analysis of the interaction of 6000 users in four different contexts or the analysis of 500,000 quantum computing programs. As outcomes from the experiences, some solutions are presented regarding the minimal software artifacts to include in software architectures, the behavior they should exhibit, the features desired in the extended software architecture, some analytic workflows and approaches to use, or the different kinds of feedback needed to reinforce the users’ interaction and experience. The results achieved led to the conclusion that, despite this is not a standard practice in the literature, the software environments should embrace Knowledge Discovery and datadriven principles to analyze and respond appropriately to the users’ needs and improve or support the interaction. To adopt Knowledge Discovery and data-driven principles, the software environments need to extend their software architectures to cover also the challenges related to Human-Computer Interaction. Finally, to tackle the current challenges related to the users’ interaction and experience and aiming to automate the software response to users’ actions, desires, and behaviors, the interactive systems should also include intelligent behaviors through embracing the Artificial Intelligence procedures and techniques

A Removal of Eye Movement and Blink Artifacts from EEG Data Using Morphological Component Analysis

EEG signals contain a large amount of ocular artifacts with different time-frequency properties mixing together in EEGs of interest. The artifact removal has been substantially dealt with by existing decomposition methods known as PCA and ICA based on the orthogonality of signal vectors or statistical independence of signal components. We focused on the signal morphology and proposed a systematic decomposition method to identify the type of signal components on the basis of sparsity in the time-frequency domain based on Morphological Component Analysis (MCA), which provides a way of reconstruction that guarantees accuracy in reconstruction by using multiple bases in accordance with the concept of “dictionary.” MCA was applied to decompose the real EEG signal and clarified the best combination of dictionaries for this purpose. In our proposed semirealistic biological signal analysis with iEEGs recorded from the brain intracranially, those signals were successfully decomposed into original types by a linear expansion of waveforms, such as redundant transforms: UDWT, DCT, LDCT, DST, and DIRAC. Our result demonstrated that the most suitable combination for EEG data analysis was UDWT, DST, and DIRAC to represent the baseline envelope, multifrequency wave-forms, and spiking activities individually as representative types of EEG morphologies

Entropia

O Volume III Entropia da Coleção InterLocuções apresenta quatro entrevistas de pesquisadores que fizeram parte da programação do Entropia 2022, que reuniu três eventos internacionais o IX SIIMI - Simpósio Internacional de Inovação em Mídias Interativas -, 21#ART - Encontro Internacional de Arte e Tecnologia -, e o 9th Balance- Unbalance - art + science x technology = environment / responsibility. Esse evento foi realizado no período de 3 a 5 de novembro de 2022, no Museu de Arte Contemporânea da Universidad de Chile, em Santiago. Entropia (SIIMI + ART + BunB) convidou pesquisadores a apresentarem suas pesquisas na edição 2022 dos eventos, no Chile. O vocábulo Entropia é originário da termodinâmica, o termo entropia expressa a medida de desordem das partículas de um sistema físico. Tomado de empréstimo por várias outras áreas de conhecimento, como as teorias hermenêuticas, estéticas e do caos, entropia passa a nomear a medida de desordem em vários outros sistemas, como da comunicação, da computação, da arte etc, alcançando a carga de subjetividade e a intencionalidade interpretativa. Após Entropia 2022, os pesquisadores Silvia Laurentiz (Brasil); Ricardo Dal Farra (Canadá); Rebecca Cummins (Estados Unidos da América); e Daniel Cruz (Chile) foram convidados para a realização de quatro entrevistas em suas línguas maternas, contemplando oito perguntas em cada entrevista, para a composição do terceiro volume da Coleção InterLocuções 2023. Desse modo, Entropia - III Volume dessa Coleção - é apresentado em três idiomas: português, espanhol e inglês. Recentemente, com a pandemia da Covid-19, a entropia foi largamente discutida, não apenas na propagação do vírus SARS CoV 2, mas também nas redes sociais e na proliferação de fake news, notadamente na política, alterando o comportamento social. Para tanto, a leitura desse volume estabelece um panorama internacional do estado da arte da pesquisa, em uma perspectiva dialógica. Fruídos (re)conhecimentos, a partir de fluidas reflexões dessa obra!Volume III Entropia from the InterLocuções Collection features four interviews by researchers who were part of the Entropia 2022 program, which brought together three international events: the IX SIIMI - International Symposium on Innovation in Interactive Media -, 21#ART - International Art and Technology Meeting - , and the 9th Balance-Unbalance - art + science x technology = environment / responsibility. This event was held from November 3 to 5, 2022, at the Museum of Contemporary Art of the Universidad de Chile, in Santiago. Entropia (SIIMI + ART + BunB) invited researchers to present their research at the 2022 edition of the events in Chile. The word Entropy originates from thermodynamics, the term entropy expresses the measure of disorder of the particles of a physical system. Borrowed by several other areas of knowledge, such as hermeneutic, aesthetic and chaos theories, entropy starts to name the measure of disorder in several other systems, such as communication, computing, art, etc., reaching the charge of subjectivity and interpretive intentionality. After Entropy 2022, researchers Silvia Laurentiz (Brazil); Ricardo Dal Farra (Canada); Rebecca Cummins (United States of America); and Daniel Cruz (Chile) were invited to conduct four interviews in their mother tongues, including eight questions in each interview, for the composition of the third volume of the 2023 InterLocuções Collection. three languages: Portuguese, Spanish and English. Recently, with the Covid-19 pandemic, entropy was widely discussed, not only in the spread of the SARS CoV 2 virus, but also in social networks and in the proliferation of fake news, notably in politics, changing social behavior. Therefore, reading this volume establishes an international panorama of the state of the art of research, in a dialogic perspective. Fruitful (re)knowledge, from fluid reflections of this work

Improving accessibility for people with dementia: web content and research

The Internet can provide a means of communication, searching for information, support groups and entertainment, amongst other services, and as a technology, can help to promote independence for people with dementia. However, the effectiveness of this technology relies on the users’ ability to use it. Web content, websites and online services need to be designed to meet the abilities and needs of people with dementia, and thus the difficulties that these users encounter must be explored and understood.The primary aim of this thesis is to investigate web content accessibility for People with Dementia and develop recommendations for improving current guidelines based on accessibility needs. The secondary aim is to support people with dementia having a voice within research through development of accessible ethical processes.Qualitative data were collected with a scoping study using questionnaires about everyday technology use (people with dementia and older adults without dementia); and in-depth interviews to explore difficulties and web accessibility issues. A document analysis was conducted on Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (ISO/IEC40500:2012) for inclusion of the needs of people with dementia followed by review of Web Usability Guidance (ISO9241-151:2008) to consider how gaps relating to the unmet accessibility needs for people with dementia could be met. The scoping study found that both people with dementia and older adults without dementia use everyday ICT to access the Web. Both groups described difficulties with web interface interactions, which refined the research scope to web content accessibility. The interview data with people with dementia (n=16) and older adults without dementia (n=9) were analysed using Grounded Theory techniques. It was found that both user groups experienced the same types of difficulties using the Web, but that dementia symptoms could exacerbate the difficulties from usability issues (older adults without dementia) into accessibility issues for people with dementia. Navigation was a key issue for both groups, with a range of web content design elements contributing to accessibility issues with navigation for people with dementia. The document analysis found that the accessibility guidance did not address all the accessibility issues encountered by people with dementia. However, the usability guidance did address many of the accessibility issues for web content navigation experienced by people with dementia. The research provides recommendations for improvements to web content accessibility guidelines including content from usability guidelines, and amendments to current guidelines and success criteria. A new ethical recruitment/consent process was developed and tested as part of the research process and is recommended for use in future research to support engagement of people with dementia.</div