Empowering Participation Within Structures of Dependency

Participatory Design (PD) seeks political change to support people's democratic control over processes, solutions, and, in general, matters of concern to them. A particular challenge remains in supporting vulnerable groups to gain power and control when they are dependent on organizations and external structures. We reflect on our five-year engagement with survivors of sex trafficking in Nepal and an anti-trafficking organization that supports the survivors. Arguing that the prevalence of deficit perspective in the setting promotes dependency and robs the survivors' agency, we sought to bring change by exploring possibilities based on the survivors' existing assets. Three configurations illuminate how our design decisions and collective exploration operate to empower participation while attending to the substantial power implicitly and explicitly manifest in existing structures. We highlight the challenges we faced, uncovering actions that PD practitioners can take, including an emphasis on collaborative entanglements, attending to contingent factors, and encouraging provisional collectives.Comment: 12 pages, 3 figures, 1 table. In Participatory Design Conference 2022: Volume 1 (pp. 75-86

Design and Evaluation of Techniques to Utilize Implicit Rating Data in Complex Information Systems.

Research in personalization, including recommender systems, focuses on applications such as in online shopping malls and simple information systems. These systems consider user profile and item information obtained from data explicitly entered by users - where it is possible to classify items involved and to make personalization based on a direct mapping from user or user group to item or item group. However, in complex, dynamic, and professional information systems, such as Digital Libraries, additional capabilities are needed to achieve personalization to support their distinctive features: large numbers of digital objects, dynamic updates, sparse rating data, biased rating data on specific items, and challenges in getting explicit rating data from users. In this report, we present techniques for collecting, storing, processing, and utilizing implicit rating data of Digital Libraries for analysis and decision support. We present our pilot study to find virtual user groups using implicit rating data. We demonstrate the effectiveness of implicit rating data for characterizing users and finding virtual user communities, through statistical hypothesis testing. Further, we describe a visual data mining tool named VUDM (Visual User model Data Mining tool) that utilizes implicit rating data. We provide the results of formative evaluation of VUDM and discuss the problems raised and plans for further studies

Coordinating Networked Learning Activities with a General-Purpose Interface

Classrooms equipped with wirelessly networked tablets and handhelds can engage students in powerful collaborative learning activities that are otherwise impractical or impossible. However, the system must fulfill certain technological and pedagogical requirements such as tolerance for latecomers, supporting disconnected mode gracefully, robustness across dropped connections, promotion of both positive interdependence and individual accountability, and accommodation of differential rates of task completion. Two approaches to making a Tuple Space-based computer architecture for connectivity into an inviting environment for the generation and creation of novel coordinated activities were attempted. One approach made the technological “bones” of the system very clear but assumed user vision of the complex goals and settings of real education. The more satisfactory approach made clear how Tuple Spaces matches the complex goals and settings of real education, but backgrounded technical complexity. This approach provides users with a system, Group Scribbles, which may inspire a wide range of uses.SRI International Virginia Tech Newport Universit

The Next Generation of Human-Drone Partnerships: Co-Designing an Emergency Response System

The use of semi-autonomous Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) to support emergency response scenarios, such as fire surveillance and search and rescue, offers the potential for huge societal benefits. However, designing an effective solution in this complex domain represents a "wicked design" problem, requiring a careful balance between trade-offs associated with drone autonomy versus human control, mission functionality versus safety, and the diverse needs of different stakeholders. This paper focuses on designing for situational awareness (SA) using a scenario-driven, participatory design process. We developed SA cards describing six common design-problems, known as SA demons, and three new demons of importance to our domain. We then used these SA cards to equip domain experts with SA knowledge so that they could more fully engage in the design process. We designed a potentially reusable solution for achieving SA in multi-stakeholder, multi-UAV, emergency response applications.Comment: 10 Pages, 5 Figures, 2 Tables. This article is publishing in CHI202

PDK1 and HR46 Gene Homologs Tie Social Behavior to Ovary Signals

The genetic basis of division of labor in social insects is a central question in evolutionary and behavioral biology. The honey bee is a model for studying evolutionary behavioral genetics because of its well characterized age-correlated division of labor. After an initial period of within-nest tasks, 2–3 week-old worker bees begin foraging outside the nest. Individuals often specialize by biasing their foraging efforts toward collecting pollen or nectar. Efforts to explain the origins of foraging specialization suggest that division of labor between nectar and pollen foraging specialists is influenced by genes with effects on reproductive physiology. Quantitative trait loci (QTL) mapping of foraging behavior also reveals candidate genes for reproductive traits. Here, we address the linkage of reproductive anatomy to behavior, using backcross QTL analysis, behavioral and anatomical phenotyping, candidate gene expression studies, and backcross confirmation of gene-to-anatomical trait associations. Our data show for the first time that the activity of two positional candidate genes for behavior, PDK1 and HR46, have direct genetic relationships to ovary size, a central reproductive trait that correlates with the nectar and pollen foraging bias of workers. These findings implicate two genes that were not known previously to influence complex social behavior. Also, they outline how selection may have acted on gene networks that affect reproductive resource allocation and behavior to facilitate the evolution of social foraging in honey bees

Excavating Childhood: Fairytales, Monsters and Abuse Survival in Lynda Barry’s What It Is

This article investigates the excavation of abused childhood in Lynda Barry’s What It Is. Looking at the centrality of childish play, fairy tales and the Gorgon in the protagonist’s effort to cope with maternal abuse, it argues that comics complicate the life narrative and allow the feminist reconfiguration of the monstrous mother of Western psychoanalysis and art

Optimasi Portofolio Resiko Menggunakan Model Markowitz MVO Dikaitkan dengan Keterbatasan Manusia dalam Memprediksi Masa Depan dalam Perspektif Al-Qur`an

Risk portfolio on modern finance has become increasingly technical, requiring the use of sophisticated mathematical tools in both research and practice. Since companies cannot insure themselves completely against risk, as human incompetence in predicting the future precisely that written in Al-Quran surah Luqman verse 34, they have to manage it to yield an optimal portfolio. The objective here is to minimize the variance among all portfolios, or alternatively, to maximize expected return among all portfolios that has at least a certain expected return. Furthermore, this study focuses on optimizing risk portfolio so called Markowitz MVO (Mean-Variance Optimization). Some theoretical frameworks for analysis are arithmetic mean, geometric mean, variance, covariance, linear programming, and quadratic programming. Moreover, finding a minimum variance portfolio produces a convex quadratic programming, that is minimizing the objective function ðð¥with constraintsð ð 𥠥 ðandð´ð¥ = ð. The outcome of this research is the solution of optimal risk portofolio in some investments that could be finished smoothly using MATLAB R2007b software together with its graphic analysis

Search for heavy resonances decaying to two Higgs bosons in final states containing four b quarks

A search is presented for narrow heavy resonances X decaying into pairs of Higgs bosons (H) in proton-proton collisions collected by the CMS experiment at the LHC at root s = 8 TeV. The data correspond to an integrated luminosity of 19.7 fb(-1). The search considers HH resonances with masses between 1 and 3 TeV, having final states of two b quark pairs. Each Higgs boson is produced with large momentum, and the hadronization products of the pair of b quarks can usually be reconstructed as single large jets. The background from multijet and t (t) over bar events is significantly reduced by applying requirements related to the flavor of the jet, its mass, and its substructure. The signal would be identified as a peak on top of the dijet invariant mass spectrum of the remaining background events. No evidence is observed for such a signal. Upper limits obtained at 95 confidence level for the product of the production cross section and branching fraction sigma(gg -> X) B(X -> HH -> b (b) over barb (b) over bar) range from 10 to 1.5 fb for the mass of X from 1.15 to 2.0 TeV, significantly extending previous searches. For a warped extra dimension theory with amass scale Lambda(R) = 1 TeV, the data exclude radion scalar masses between 1.15 and 1.55 TeV

Search for supersymmetry in events with one lepton and multiple jets in proton-proton collisions at root s=13 TeV

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