What causes an organisation to be what it is and to become what it could be: A philosophical expedition

This work represents the evolution of a thesis asking the question what causes an organisation to be what it is and to become what it could be. The author \u27 s thought development is integral to the project and is highlighted throughout. Conversation and relationship become privileged as the transformative cause of change; of being. This study faithfully reproduces how a thesis actually happens, with all the inherent uncertainty and messiness. The life experiences of the author are brought to bear in this autoethnographic study of the business world

Adaptive Information Cluster at Dublin City University

The Adaptive Information Cluster (AIC) is a collaboration between Dublin City University and University College Dublin, and in the AIC at DCU, we investigate and develop as one stream of our research activities, various content analysis tools that can automatically index and structure video information. This includes movies or CCTV footage and the motivation is to support useful searching and browsing features for the envisaged end-users of such systems. We bring in the HCI perspective to this highly-technically-oriented research by brainstorming, generating scenarios, sketching and prototyping the user-interfaces to the resulting video retrieval systems we develop, and we conduct usability studies to better understand the usage and opinions of such systems so as to guide the future direction of our technological research

Protective effects of certain lythraceae alkaloids and homologs in croton oil- and carrageenan-induced inflammation

Cryogenine\u27s immunosuppressive activity was first evaluated by Kosersky, et al. (21) who, impressed by the drug\u27s ability to inhibit both the irritant- and immune- mediated phases of adjuvant-induced polyarthritis (11), quantitatively confirmed this activity and clearly differentiated the action of cryogenine from that displayed by 6-mercaptopurine. A definitive study by Watson and Malone (22) confirmed cryogenine\u27s lack of immunosuppressive capacity at effective anti-inflammatory dose levels. The molecular complexity of the lythraceae alkaloids suggests that several active centers may account for their unique pharmacological profile. To assess these potentially active sites, two standard models of acute inflammation were selected for use in this present study -- the carrageenan-induced rat pedal edema assay and the croton oil-induced mouse ear edema assay. While the oral anti-inflammatory capacity of several of the lythraceae alkaloids has been well documented, their topical antiphlogistic capacity has not been evaluated. Moreover, the specific function or functions of the molecule which account for this anti-inflammatory capacity remain a mystery. The present study was undertaken: (i) to asses the topical anti-inflammatory potential of cryogenine, lythrine and two selected lythraceae intermediates and (ii) to investigate the possible molecular compounds which produce this established, yet enigmatic anti-inflammatory effect

K-Space Interactive Search

In this paper we will present the K-Space1 Interactive Search system for content-based video information retrieval to be demonstrated in the VideOlympics. This system is an exten-sion of the system we developed as part of our participation in TRECVID 2007 [1]. In TRECVID 2007 we created two interfaces, known as the ‘Shot’ based and ‘Broadcast’ based interfaces. Our VideOlympics submission takes these two in-terfaces and the lessons learned from our user experiments, to create a single user interface which attempts to leverage the best aspects of both

Guidelines for the presentation and visualisation of lifelog content

Lifelogs offer rich voluminous sources of personal and social data for which visualisation is ideally suited to providing access, overview, and navigation. We explore through examples of our visualisation work within the domain of lifelogging the major axes on which lifelogs operate, and therefore, on which their visualisations should be contingent. We also explore the concept of ‘events’ as a way to significantly reduce the complexity of the lifelog for presentation and make it more human-oriented. Finally we present some guidelines and goals which should be considered when designing presentation modes for lifelog conten

Mobile, ubiquitous information seeking, as a group: the iBingo collaborative video retrieval system

iBingo features two or more users performing collaborative information seeking tasks, using mobile devices, Apple iPod iTouch in our case. The novelty in our work is that the system, called iBingo, mediates the collaborative searches among the users and performs a realtime division of labour among co-searchers so users are presented with documents which are both unique and tailored to the individual. This enables each user to explore unique subsets of the retrieved information space. We demonstrate iBingo mobile collabo-rative search on a video collection from TRECVid 2007

Visualising Bluetooth interactions: combining the Arc Diagram and DocuBurst techniques

Within the Bluetooth mobile space, overwhelmingly large sets of interaction and encounter data can very quickly be accumulated. This presents a challenge to gaining an understanding and overview of the dataset as a whole. In order to overcome this problem, we have designed a visualisation which provides an informative overview of the dataset. The visualisation combines existing Arc Diagram and DocuBurst techniques into a radial space-filling layout capable of conveying a rich understanding of Bluetooth interaction data, and clearly represents social networks and relationships established among encountered devices. The end result enables a user to visually interpret the relative importance of individual devices encountered, the relationships established between them and the usage of Bluetooth 'friendly names' (or device labels) within the data

Bluetooth friendly names: bringing classic HCI questions into the mobile space

We explore the use of Bluetooth friendly names within the mobile space. Each Bluetooth-enabled device possesses a short string known as a 'friendly name' used to help identify a device to human users. In our analysis, we collected friendly names in use on 9,854 Bluetooth-enabled devices over a 7-month period. These names were then classified and the results analysed. We discovered that a broad range of HCI themes are applicable to the domain of Bluetooth friendly names, including previous work on personalisation, naming strategies and anonymity in computer mediated communication. We also found that Bluetooth is already being used as a platform for social interaction and communication amongst collocated groups and has moved beyond its original intention of file exchange

iBingo mobile collaborative search

This paper describes a collaborative video search system for mobile devices, 'iBingo'. It supports division of labour among users, providing search results to colocated iPod Touch devices

Classifying public display systems: an input/output channel perspective

Public display screens are relatively recent additions to our world, and while they may be as simple as a large screen with minimal input/output features, more recent developments have introduced much richer interaction possibilities supporting a variety of interaction styles. In this paper we propose a framework for classifying public display systems with a view to better understanding how they differ in terms of their interaction channels and how future installations are likely to evolve. This framework is explored through 15 existing public display systems which use mobile phones for interaction in the display space