10,903 research outputs found
Design and Characterization of Crossbar architecture Velostat-based Flexible Writing Pad
Pressure sensors are popular in a large variety of industries. For some
applications, it is critical for these sensors to come in a flexible form
factor. With the development of new synthetic polymers and novel fabrication
techniques, flexible pressure sensing arrays are more easily accessible and can
serve a variety of applications. As part of this dissertation, we demonstrate
one such application of the same by developing a low-cost flexible writing pad
and doing crosstalk analysis on sensors with similar working principles. We
present a low-cost, flexible writing pad that uses a 16x16 pressure sensing
matrix based on the piezoresistive thin film of velostat. The writing area is 5
cm x 5 cm with an effective pixel area of 0.06 mm^2. A read-out circuit is
designed to detect the change in resistance of the velostat pixel using a
voltage divider. A microprocessor raster scans through the sensor pixel matrix
to obtain a data frame of 256 numbers. This data is processed using techniques
like squaring and normalising (S\&N), Gaussian blurring, and adaptive
thresholding to generate a more readable output. The writing pad is able to
resolve characters larger than 2 cm in length. The flexible writing pad
produces legible output while flexed at a bending radius of up to 4 cm. Such
flexibility promises to enhance the usability and portability of the writing
pad significantly. We noticed that the raw data produced by the writing pad had
a lot of crosstalk which we were subsequently able to resolve using the
algorithms mentioned above. Such crosstalk has been reported in literature
multiple times and is common, especially for sensors of the crossbar
architecture.Crosstalk, in a sensor matrix, is the unwanted signal obtained at
a sensor pixel that is not directly related to the stimulus. This paper
presents a novel approach towards quantifying the crosstalk characteristics of
a sensor matrix
The Globalization of Artificial Intelligence: African Imaginaries of Technoscientific Futures
Imaginaries of artificial intelligence (AI) have transcended geographies of the Global North and become increasingly entangled with narratives of economic growth, progress, and modernity in Africa. This raises several issues such as the entanglement of AI with global technoscientific capitalism and its impact on the dissemination of AI in Africa. The lack of African perspectives on the development of AI exacerbates concerns of raciality and inclusion in the scientific research, circulation, and adoption of AI. My argument in this dissertation is that innovation in AI, in both its sociotechnical imaginaries and political economies, excludes marginalized countries, nations and communities in ways that not only bar their participation in the reception of AI, but also as being part and parcel of its creation.
Underpinned by decolonial thinking, and perspectives from science and technology studies and African studies, this dissertation looks at how AI is reconfiguring the debate about development and modernization in Africa and the implications for local sociotechnical practices of AI innovation and governance. I examined AI in international development and industry across Kenya, Ghana, and Nigeria, by tracing Canada’s AI4D Africa program and following AI start-ups at AfriLabs. I used multi-sited case studies and discourse analysis to examine the data collected from interviews, participant observations, and documents.
In the empirical chapters, I first examine how local actors understand the notion of decolonizing AI and show that it has become a sociotechnical imaginary. I then investigate the political economy of AI in Africa and argue that despite Western efforts to integrate the African AI ecosystem globally, the AI epistemic communities in the continent continue to be excluded from dominant AI innovation spaces. Finally, I examine the emergence of a Pan-African AI imaginary and argue that AI governance can be understood as a state-building experiment in post-colonial Africa. The main issue at stake is that the lack of African perspectives in AI leads to negative impacts on innovation and limits the fair distribution of the benefits of AI across nations, countries, and communities, while at the same time excludes globally marginalized epistemic communities from the imagination and creation of AI
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The impact of employees' working relations in creating and retaining trust: the case of the Bahrain Olympic Committee
Introduction: This thesis investigates the impact of employees’ working relations in creating, maintaining and retaining trust in the Bahrain Olympic Committee (BOC).
Aim: The main aim of this thesis is to determine how the three groups of Organisational Trust variables, namely Social System Elements (SSE), Factors of Trustworthiness (FoT) and Third-Party Gossip (TPG), affect employees’ Organisational Trust (OTR) in the BOC and promote Organisational Citizenship Behaviour (OCB). To answer this main aim, a conceptual framework was created that focused on exploring the following research aims: (1) the interrelationship between SSE and FoT, (2) the effect of SSE on OTR, (3) the impact of TPG on OTR and (4) the effect of OTR on overall OCB.
Methodology: The study uses a mixed-method case study research style that included in-depth semi-structured interviews with 17 managers, an online questionnaire survey with 320 employees of the BOC and an analysis of the BOC’s Annual Reports from 2015 to 2018.
Results: The qualitative and quantitative findings indicate, firstly, that there is a significant interrelationship between SSE and FoT, establishing that SSE’s perception of organisational justice (OJ), including that FoTs benevolence and integrity as the most important factors in yielding employees’ trust in the BOC. Secondly, it has been established that SSEs have significant direct and indirect effects on OTR. Thirdly, negative and positive TPG concurrently occurred in the BOC and the prevalence of negative TPG poses more impact on OTR. Finally, this study’s findings demonstrated OTR’s effect in generating OCB, including that Civic Virtue was rated as the most preferred of the five OCB themes; this indicates the managers’ and the employees’ strong emotional attachment and support of the activities taking place at the BOC.
Contributions: Overall, this thesis substantially contributes to OTR literature, particularly in the context of the Middle East. It also proposes several insightful recommendations for future research and practical implications for practitioners in the field of Organisational Trust
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The Role of Interactive Web Broadcasts in Fostering Distance Learning Students’ Engagement with Practical Lab and Fieldwork
Practical work in science and technology disciplines is crucial for students’ understanding and mastery. For educators who teach those disciplines at a distance and for students who learn remotely, this endeavour may be challenging.
The study presented in this thesis investigates the use of Interactive Web Broadcasts (IWBs) in five undergraduate practical science and technology modules at The Open University. The study examines the reasons for using IWBs, as well as the strategies and types of interactions that staff and students use to engage and interact with one another. The study gathered perspectives from academics (n=18); associate lecturers (n=10); technical production team (n=3); students (n=88), and an external guest expert about the purposes, strategies and motivations of participating in IWBs. The study used a qualitatively mixed-methods design. An adapted protocol of Flanders’s Interaction Analysis Categories was used to analyse the interaction patterns in the web broadcast transcripts and text-chat logs, and a discourse analysis coding scheme was applied to analyse the text-chat. Student online questionnaires were administered towards the end of the modules to capture the student perceptions of IWBs. Student interviews and staff focus groups were also conducted to gain a fuller picture of experiences of using and engaging with IWBs.
Findings show that the purposes and aims of using IWBs are to facilitate student engagement, foster a sense of community, and demonstrate an authentic practice of the sciences in real-world contexts. The communicative strategies were primarily affective and met students’ interests and expectations. The IWBs mitigated feelings of isolation that are common in distance education environments. IWBs had positive impacts on professional teaching practices and fostered collegiality and collaboration among staff. The findings are relevant to other distance and traditional campus-based universities that teach practical science and technology, those who teach online using synchronous technology-mediated systems, and those who are interested in student engagement and practical work
Ab Initio Language Teaching in British Higher Education
Drawing extensively on the expertise of teachers of German in universities across the UK, this volume offers an overview of recent trends, new pedagogical approaches and practical guidance for teaching at beginners level in the higher education classroom. At a time when entries for UK school exams in modern foreign languages are decreasing, this book serves the urgent need for research and guidance on ab initio learning and teaching in HE. Using the example of teaching German, it offers theoretical reflections on teaching ab initio and practice-oriented approaches that will be useful for teachers of both German and other languages in higher education.
The first chapters assess the role of ab initio provision within the wider context of modern languages departments and language centres. They are followed by sections on teaching methods and innovative approaches in the ab initio classroom that include chapters on the use of music, textbook evaluation, the effective use of a flipped classroom and the contribution of language apps. Finally, the book focuses on the learner in the ab initio context and explores issues around autonomy and learner strengths. The whole builds into a theoretically grounded guide that sketches out perspectives for teaching and learning ab initio languages that will benefit current and future generations of students
Affinity-Based Reinforcement Learning : A New Paradigm for Agent Interpretability
The steady increase in complexity of reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms is accompanied by a corresponding increase in opacity that obfuscates insights into their devised strategies. Methods in explainable artificial intelligence seek to mitigate this opacity by either creating transparent algorithms or extracting explanations post hoc. A third category exists that allows the developer to affect what agents learn: constrained RL has been used in safety-critical applications and prohibits agents from visiting certain states; preference-based RL agents have been used in robotics applications and learn state-action preferences instead of traditional reward functions. We propose a new affinity-based RL paradigm in which agents learn strategies that are partially decoupled from reward functions. Unlike entropy regularisation, we regularise the objective function with a distinct action distribution that represents a desired behaviour; we encourage the agent to act according to a prior while learning to maximise rewards. The result is an inherently interpretable agent that solves problems with an intrinsic affinity for certain actions. We demonstrate the utility of our method in a financial application: we learn continuous time-variant compositions of prototypical policies, each interpretable by its action affinities, that are globally interpretable according to customers’ financial personalities.
Our method combines advantages from both constrained RL and preferencebased RL: it retains the reward function but generalises the policy to match a defined behaviour, thus avoiding problems such as reward shaping and hacking. Unlike Boolean task composition, our method is a fuzzy superposition of different prototypical strategies to arrive at a more complex, yet interpretable, strategy.publishedVersio
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