Living with Hearing Loss in a Connected Home: White Paper

This paper provides insights into the requirements and expectations of people with hearing loss in engagement with connected devices at home, derived from a questionnaire and a stakeholder workshop, and supported by relevant literature. The paper details challenges facing people with hearing loss in engagement with connected technologies and identifies priority areas for technology intervention and development. The workshop was organised by the PETRAS National Centre of Excellence for IoT Systems Cybersecurity. It was attended by representatives from technology companies and various UK groups for people with hearing loss (both profoundly deaf and hard-of-hearing, as well as cochlear implant users), some individual end-users with various types of hearing loss, and researchers. Whether they like it or not, people with hearing loss may depend on a hearing person or technologies (e.g. hearing aid and voice recognition to text) to communicate and interact with the hearing world. While technology intervention can reduce needs for help from hearing people, it inevitably increases dependency on technologies. This can lead to people with hearing loss feeling out of control, especially when communication technologies do not function as expected, often without any back-up, failsafe or contingency plans. Without reliable technologies – mainstream and/or specialist – to bridge the gap between visual- and voice-based (oral) communications, people with hearing loss are at risk of isolation and exclusion

Autonomous Distributed Energy Systems: Problematising the Invisible through Design, Drama and Deliberation

Technologies such as blockchains, smart contracts and programmable batteries facilitate emerging models of energy distribution, trade and consumption, and generate a considerable number of opportunities for energy markets. However, these developments complicate relationships between stakeholders, disrupting traditional notions of value, control and ownership. Discussing these issues with the public is particularly challenging as energy consumption habits often obscure the competing values and interests that shape stakeholders' relationships. To make such difficult discussions more approachable and examine the missing relational aspect of autonomous energy systems, we combined the design of speculative hairdryers with performance and deliberation. This integrated method of inquiry makes visible the competing values and interests, eliciting people's wishes to negotiate these terms. We argue that the complexity of mediated energy distribution and its convoluted stakeholder relationships requires more sophisticated methods of inquiry to engage people in debates concerning distributed energy systems

Diet and Physical Activity Among College Students

Dietary habits and physical activity behavior will be analyzed among college students to determine a relationship between food choice and engaging in physical activity. Students will be asked to participate in a semi-structured survey questionnaire that will determine their eating habits, lifestyle, physical activity behaviors, as well as basic information regarding their age, height, and weight. The study will be presented at different college campuses. The research will also determine whether food choices play a major role in how students feel when they engage in any sort of physical activity. The study will also consider the nutritional aspect of data and determine the foods that provide positive or negative health benefits

Reuters Institute digital news report 2016: Asia-Pacific supplementary report

This report presents an analysis of news and media use in Hong Kong, Malaysia, Singapore, and Taiwan based on a survey on online news users. It compliments the 2016 Reuters Institute Digital News Report with additional data from these highly developed markets that differ in some ways from other Asia-Pacific markets as well as those in Europe and North America. Our data indicate that these markets are mobile-oriented markets with a wide use of social media and search engines for news. However, across all these markets, news media organisations with strong brands and developed strategies using channels like newsletters and mobile alerts still retain a strong connection with a large number of users. The level of trust in news and perceptions of whether news is subject to undue political and commercial influences vary across these markets in ways that bear no simple relationship with freedom of the press

Dramatizing Deliberation: A method for encouraging young people to think about their rights

Nine ‘youth juries’ were established across three major British cities – London, Leeds and Nottingham -, each comprising twelve 12-to-17 year-olds who were invited to act as ‘jurors’ with a view to ‘putting the Internet on trial’. This article outlines the method that was designed for conducting these juries, focusing upon two innovative features: the organisation of deliberative juries, based upon a four-step process for arriving at policy recommendations; and the use of dramatic scenarios, intended to make relatable to personal experience what might otherwise have been regarded as abstract policy principles

Introduction to the Research Handbook on Political Propaganda

Propaganda remains a powerful source of influence, and this collection of essays demonstrates that propaganda continues to evolve as new communication technologies and practices emerge and develop. These new communication technologies have diversified communicative practices and democratised the production and distribution of political propaganda, thus broadening the range of 'the messengers' beyond the states and other political institutions. For messengers more democratised access to the 'message' production and distribution machinery means fragmented power over their audiences' opinions and behaviours, but they will always seek control over public opinion. For audiences the accelerating volume of propaganda cloaked among news items and social media content means a crisis of trust in in the veracity of information and its sources. This requires a greater awareness of media literacy and new critical thinking skills to differentiate fact from opinion, and it identify 'alternative facts'. © Gary D. Rawnsley, Yiben Ma and Kruakae Pothong 2021. All rights reserved

Navigating and Informing the IoT Standards Landscape: A Guide for SMEs and Start-ups

The world of IoT standards and policy making is moving very quickly and in a good direction. However, research conducted by BSI and the PETRAS IoT Research Hub into both formal and informal standards making reiterates the difficulties that companies, whether large or small, face in finding and implementing standards

IoT Standards, Governance and Policy

The IoT ecosystem is characterised by ‘a proliferation of visible and hidden sensors that collect and transmit data, systems that process, interpret and make use of the aggregate information, and actuators that, on the basis of this information, take action without direct human intervention’ (Tanczer et al., 2019). The added ability of connected objects to sense and communicate with other objects and people presents exciting opportunities for society and the economy

Making IoT security policies relevant, inclusive and practical for people: A multi-dimensional method

Growing amounts of research on IoT and its implications for security, privacy, economy and society has been carried out to inform policies and design. However, ordinary people who are citizens and users of these emerging technologies have rarely been involved in the processes that inform these policies, governance mechanisms and design due to the institutionalised processes that prioritise objective knowledge over subjective ones. People's subjective experiences are often discarded. This priority is likely to further widen the gap between people, technology policies and design as technologies advance towards delegated human agencies, which decreases human interfaces in technology-mediated relationships with objects, systems, services, trade and other (often) unknown third-party beneficiaries. Such a disconnection can have serious implications for policy implementation, especially when it involves human limitations. To address this disconnection, we argue that a space for people to meaningfully contribute their subjective knowledge - experienceto complex technology policies that, in turn, shape their experience and well-being needs to be constructed. To this end, our paper contributes the design and pilot implementation of a method to reconnect and involve people in IoT security policymaking and development