Reflected Bodies: Women’s Perspectives on the Marital Experience and the Transformation of the Maternal Body. A Case Study of Middle-Class Women in Suburban Romania

Even if concepts of marriage and motherhood are subject to continuous changes and reinterpretations, women and men still marry and have children following more traditional or more unconventional patterns. My major interest in this research was to unveil Romanian middle-class women’s narratives regarding their perceptions over their own bodies and identities, by focusing my analysis on lived experiences, intimate scenes, daily practices and activities within marriage and motherhood. Qualitative empirical work was conducted in 2012 and 2015 in a post-socialist suburban neighbourhood, known as a place mostly inhabited by young, middle-class families. The analysis unfolds women’s class affinities and dispositions, their perception of the marital experience, identity and corporeal transformations, and their reflections on maternity as a transformative stage in terms of subjectivity, agency and body

Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Human–Computer Interaction

The International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction - RoCHI, has reached its 17th edition in 2020. RoCHI is the premier scientific forum on research and development of user interfaces and human-computer interaction in Romania providing the opportunity for exchange of ideas, expertise and research results in the field of human-computer interaction. The invited paper authored by Professor Philippe Palanque (Université Toulouse III – Paul Sabatier, France) is entitled User Tasks Description: a Retrospective, Recent Contributions and some Research Challenges. The second invited talk is entitled Computational Modeling of Handwriting Movements and is presented by Dr. Luis A. Leiva (Aalto University, Finland). The 24 accepted papers to RoCHI 2020 were selected from a total of 34 submissions (70% acceptance rate) after a careful review process, each submission being assigned to a minimum of three and maximum of six reviewers

Gamepad Vibration Methods to Help Blind People Perceive Colors

ABSTRACT Visually impaired people, completely or partially blind cannot perceive the surrounding environment as normal healthy people can. Not knowing how colors and shapes look like is a serious penalty and they have to live with it an entire life. It is known that the human brain adapts and compensates with greater capabilities for hearing and touch when vision is low or missing, that is why blind people develop special skills and perform so good when it comes to music and kinetotherapy. Based on this information we are proposing a method that explains colors using vibrations. In this paper we would like to present a new way of transforming an image to vibration by using the capabilities of an Xbox gamepad. During the study on real blind volunteers, this kind of approach proved to be very effective and promising, allowing them to slightly understand how an image, painting or friend looks like

CultReal—A Rapid Development Platform for AR Cultural Spaces, with Fused Localization

Virtual and augmented reality technologies have known an impressive market evolution due to their potential to provide immersive experiences. However, they still have significant difficulties to enable fully fledged, consumer-ready applications that can handle complex tasks such as multi-user collaboration or time-persistent experiences. In this context, CultReal is a rapid creation and deployment platform for augmented reality (AR), aiming to revitalize cultural spaces. The platform’s content management system stores a representation of the environment, together with a database of multimedia objects that can be associated with a location. The localization component fuses data from beacons and from video cameras, providing an accurate estimation of the position and orientation of the visitor’s smartphone. A mobile application running the localization component displays the augmented content, which is seamlessly integrated with the real world. The paper focuses on the series of steps required to compute the position and orientation of the user’s mobile device, providing a comprehensive evaluation with both virtual and real data. Pilot implementations of the system are also described in the paper, revealing the potential of the platform to enable rapid deployment in new cultural spaces. Offering these functionalities, CultReal will allow for the fast development of AR solutions in any location

A Comprehensive Survey of Indoor Localization Methods Based on Computer Vision

Computer vision based indoor localization methods use either an infrastructure of static cameras to track mobile entities (e.g., people, robots) or cameras attached to the mobile entities. Methods in the first category employ object tracking, while the others map images from mobile cameras with images acquired during a configuration stage or extracted from 3D reconstructed models of the space. This paper offers an overview of the computer vision based indoor localization domain, presenting application areas, commercial tools, existing benchmarks, and other reviews. It provides a survey of indoor localization research solutions, proposing a new classification based on the configuration stage (use of known environment data), sensing devices, type of detected elements, and localization method. It groups 70 of the most recent and relevant image based indoor localization methods according to the proposed classification and discusses their advantages and drawbacks. It highlights localization methods that also offer orientation information, as this is required by an increasing number of applications of indoor localization (e.g., augmented reality)

Removal of Paracetamol from Aqueous Solutions by Photocatalytic Ozonation over TiO2-MexOy Thin Films

Analgesics and nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) such as paracetamol, diclofenac, and ibuprofen are frequently encountered in surface and ground water, thereby posing a significant risk to aquatic ecosystems. Our study reports the catalytic performances of nanosystems TiO2-MexOy (Me = Ce, Sn) prepared by the sol-gel method and deposited onto glass slides by a dip-coating approach in the removal of paracetamol from aqueous solutions by catalytic ozonation. The effect of catalyst type and operation parameters on oxidation efficiency was assessed. In addition to improving this process, the present work simplifies it by avoiding the difficult step of catalyst separation. It was found that the thin films were capable of removing all pollutants from target compounds to the oxidation products

Spontaneous helping behavior of autistic and non‐autistic (Pre‐)adolescents: A matter of motivation?

Young autistic people have a range of social difficulties, but it is not yet clear how these difficulties can be explained. In addition, emerging research is suggesting that autistic girls may differ from boys in terms of their social behaviors, but yet unknown is if they differ in terms of their pro‐social behavior, such as helping. The present study investigated spontaneous helping behavior using an in vivo paradigm and related this to participants' levels of social motivation (based on parent reports). Participants were 233 autistic and non‐autistic (pre‐)adolescents (M = 12.46 years, SD = 15.54 months). Our results demonstrated that autistic girls and boys have lower levels of social motivation compared to their non‐autistic peers, but social motivation was unrelated to helping behavior in both groups. Furthermore, when the experimenter needed help, the autistic boys and girls looked and smiled to the same extent as their peers of the same gender, but they actually helped significantly less than their non‐autistic peers. However, most autistic youngsters did help, highlighting the great individual differences in autistic individuals. We discuss the possibility that lower levels of helping behavior are due to difficulty initiating action in a social context, rather than lower social motivation