Design for the Right to the Smart City in More-than-Human Worlds

Environmental concerns have driven an interest in sustainable smart cities, through the monitoring and optimisation of networked infrastructure processes. At the same time, there are concerns about who these interventions and services are for, and who benefits. HCI researchers and designers interested in civic life have started to call for the democratisation of urban space through resistance and political action to challenge state and corporate claims. This paper aims to add to the growing body of critical and civic led smart city literature in HCI by leveraging concepts from the environmental humanities about more than human worlds, as a way to shift understandings within HCI of smart cities away from the exceptional and human centered, towards a more inclusive understanding that incorporates and designs for other others and other species. We illustrate through a case study that involved codesigning Internet of Things with urban agricultural communities, possibilities for creating more environmentally and socially just smart cities

The drawing board

textThe composition The Drawing Board is an extended three-movement work for jazz orchestra, approximately twenty-six minutes in length. The Drawing Board is a musical portrayal of an imaginary artist as he undertakes his work, exploring the emotions inherent to the artistic process, including the uneasiness of staring at a blank canvas, the magical feeling of abstract ideas coalescing into something concrete, the frustration of an unfinished or imperfect work, and the unique sensation of artwork gradually revealing itself to the artist. The introductory section of the accompanying dissertation outlines my overall musical approach and philosophy, and describes the compositional goals behind this work. The core of the dissertation is a musical analysis that provides insight into various compositional techniques and strategies, showing relationships between the three movements. Topics include form, harmony, melody, orchestration, counterpoint, and contexts for improvisation.Musi

The transcriptome of the invasive eel swimbladder nematode parasite Anguillicola crassus

BACKGROUND: Anguillicola crassus is an economically and ecologically important parasitic nematode of eels. The native range of A. crassus is in East Asia, where it infects Anguilla japonica, the Japanese eel. A. crassus was introduced into European eels, Anguilla anguilla, 30 years ago. The parasite is more pathogenic in its new host than in its native one, and is thought to threaten the endangered An. anguilla across its range. The molecular bases for the increased pathogenicity of the nematodes in their new hosts is not known. RESULTS: A reference transcriptome was assembled for A. crassus from Roche 454 pyrosequencing data. Raw reads (756,363 total) from nematodes from An. japonica and An. anguilla hosts were filtered for likely host contaminants and ribosomal RNAs. The remaining 353,055 reads were assembled into 11,372 contigs of a high confidence assembly (spanning 6.6 Mb) and an additional 21,153 singletons and contigs of a lower confidence assembly (spanning an additional 6.2 Mb). Roughly 55% of the high confidence assembly contigs were annotated with domain- or protein sequence similarity derived functional information. Sequences conserved only in nematodes, or unique to A. crassus were more likely to have secretory signal peptides. Thousands of high quality single nucleotide polymorphisms were identified, and coding polymorphism was correlated with differential expression between individual nematodes. Transcripts identified as being under positive selection were enriched in peptidases. Enzymes involved in energy metabolism were enriched in the set of genes differentially expressed between European and Asian A. crassus. CONCLUSIONS: The reference transcriptome of A. crassus is of high quality, and will serve as a basis for future work on the invasion biology of this important parasite. The polymorphisms identified will provide a key tool set for analysis of population structure and identification of genes likely to be involved in increased pathogenicity in European eel hosts. The identification of peptidases under positive selection is a first step in this programme

Shifting focus from resistance to disease tolerance

Parasites have been proposed to modulate the fitness of hybridizing hosts in part based on observations in the European house mouse hybrid zone (HMHZ), a tension zone in which hybrids show reduced fitness. We here review evidence (1) for parasite load differences in hybrid versus parental mice and (2) for health and fitness effects of parasites promoting or preventing introgression and hybridization. The question of relative resistance or susceptibility of hybrids to parasites in the HMHZ has long been controversial. Recent field studies found hybrids to be more resistant than mice from parental subspecies against infections with pinworms and protozoans (Eimeria spp.). We argue that the field studies underlying the contradictory impression of hybrid susceptibility have limitations in sample size, statistical analysis and scope, focusing only on macroparasites. We suggest that weighted evidence from field studies indicate hybrid resistance. Health is a fitness component through which resistance can modulate overall fitness. Resistance, however, should not be extrapolated directly to a fitness effect, as the relationship between resistance and health can be modulated by tolerance. In our own recent work, we found that the relationship between health and resistance (tolerance) differs between infections with the related species E. falciformis and E. ferrisi. Health and tolerance need to be assessed directly and the choice of parasite has made this difficult in previous experimental studies of house mice. We discuss how experimental Eimeria spp. infections in hybrid house mice can address resistance, health and tolerance in conjunction

Good Robot, Bad Robot: Customer Responses to Norm-Compliant and Norm-Violating Service Robots

Service robots that interact with customers have penetrated various industries. With a basis in social identity theory, this study examines how customers respond to frontline service robots (FSRs) by investigating norm-compliant versus norm-violating behaviors compared with similar behaviors by human frontline employees (FLEs). In experimental studies, a black sheep effect occurs, such that customers downgrade norm-violating FLE behaviors more than similar behaviors by FSRs. They also upgrade norm-compliant behaviors by human FLEs more than those of FSRs. In service failures, this effect manifests as greater anger and frustration toward the FLE. We establish the underlying mechanism driving the black sheep effect: customers assign FSRs to an outgroup but categorize FLEs to their social ingroup, across different service encounters and independent of interaction frequency

Talking Plants and a Bug Hotel: Participatory Design of ludic encounters with an urban farming community

Due to environmental concerns, sustainability is a growing field of research in HCI. But utilitarian approaches for individual behaviour change that are typical within HCI have been criticised as being too simplistic and failing to take into account the complexity of people’s lives. This thesis contributes a design approach grounded in community-based Participatory Design, and drawing on ludic design, to expand the design space of sustainable HCI beyond individual behaviour change. The thesis demonstrates how the commitments, practices and values of community based Participatory Design and ludic design can be used effectively with a diverse and non-settled urban agricultural community. The research outlines how this approach can support the values, needs and practices of the community, and allow for holistic understandings of sustainability to emerge. This is achieved through three case studies conducted at Spitalfields City Farm, in inner East London. The first study was a way to get to know the farming community and to ground the subsequent work in the values, practices and needs of the farm. This was followed by two research through design studies to investigate designing ludic encounters with and for the community: i) the Talking Plants, a playful encounter with edible plants to support community engagement and learning, and ii) the Bug Hotel, a large musical sculpture for interspecies living, reflection and relaxation. After describing each case study individually in rich detail I turn to a comparison of their respective processes and the artefacts that each produced in the final chapter. These reflections include a manifesto for community-based sustainable HCI, through a Ludic Participatory Design methdology, as well as strategies and challenges to serve as guidance and inspiration for other researchers wishing to do similar kinds of work with similar kinds of communities

Making Data Work Count

In this paper, we examine the work of data annotation. Specifically, we focus on the role of counting or quantification in organising annotation work. Based on an ethnographic study of data annotation in two outsourcing centres in India, we observe that counting practices and its associated logics are an integral part of day-to-day annotation activities. In particular, we call attention to the presumption of total countability observed in annotation - the notion that everything, from tasks, datasets and deliverables, to workers, work time, quality and performance, can be managed by applying the logics of counting. To examine this, we draw on sociological and socio-technical scholarship on quantification and develop the lens of a 'regime of counting' that makes explicit the specific counts, practices, actors and structures that underpin the pervasive counting in annotation. We find that within the AI supply chain and data work, counting regimes aid the assertion of authority by the AI clients (also called requesters) over annotation processes, constituting them as reductive, standardised, and homogenous. We illustrate how this has implications for i) how annotation work and workers get valued, ii) the role human discretion plays in annotation, and iii) broader efforts to introduce accountable and more just practices in AI. Through these implications, we illustrate the limits of operating within the logic of total countability. Instead, we argue for a view of counting as partial - located in distinct geographies, shaped by specific interests and accountable in only limited ways. This, we propose, sets the stage for a fundamentally different orientation to counting and what counts in data annotation.Comment: Accepted for publication at CSCW 2024. Forthcoming in the Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interactio

Divergence of an introduced population of the swimbladder-nematode Anguillicola crassus - a transcriptomic perspective

Differential gene-expression in A. crassus populations was assessed using next generation sequencing on the 454 and Illumina platforms and genetic components of differences were isolated in cross-inoculation experiments with both Asian and European host-species and parasite populations. Heritable change was large in comparison to the effect of modification in different host-environments. Subunits of the respiratory chain showed divergent expression patterns in European vs. Asian parasites