288 research outputs found

    Delivering a graphic design course online: simulating a real classroom situation and speculating what technologies can ideally offer in this virtual situation

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    This thesis examines a new way to simplify online education and to simulate a real classroom situation. It explores how a graphic design class can be conducted online where the students from different geographical locations and faculty can interact instantaneously with the aid of video, chat and whiteboard. For the most part, the potential for Macromedia Flash Communication Server to deliver chat, whiteboard and video functionality are assessed. It is speculated that video images are slightly jerky among Modem users whereas sharp video images are obtained with high-speed Internet connection. The survey findings among the design students and faculty at R.I.T reveal the following: 75% agreed that the project can be Functional; 68% esteem the Esthetic value of the web site and 48% are in favor of its Usability features. The whole project is executed in Flash MX 2004, making use of User Interface Components and Communication Components

    Myasthenia Gravis: Clinical and Immunological Aspects

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    Autoimmune diseases such as myasthenia gravis (MG) result from an altered balance between the processes of activation and regulation of immune response. MG is the most common autoimmune disorder characterized by failure of transmission at the neuromuscular junction (NMJ). Autoantibodies in MG target the acetylcholine receptors (AChRs) as well as non-AChR components like muscle-specific tyrosine kinase (MuSK). Autoantibodies against AChRs are produced by B cells in the germinal centres (GCs), formed in the medulla of MG thymus and circulated to the post-synaptic side of the neuromuscular junction (NMJ) leading to complement-mediated destruction of the post-synaptic folds of NMJ and internalization of AChRs. The incidence and prevalence of MG have increased particularly in elderly, but clinical presentations vary substantially and recognition depends on classic disease phenotype. This chapter focuses on clinical and immunological aspects of MG and its subgroups based on its characterization of the antigenic targets

    The effect of Visual Design Quality on Player Experience Components in Tablet Games

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    Research in the field of Human Computer Interaction Design indicates that there is a need to develop further methods, tools, and frameworks for the design and evaluation of digital game interfaces. This thesis aims to design, develop, and evaluate two different types of tablet games with varying visual design quality interfaces to examine users’ perceptions of hedonic quality, visual design, emotions, and game enjoyment in different channels of experience. The design-oriented approach was adopted to combine both creative practice and scientific inquiry in the game design process and empirical evaluation. Hypotheses were formulated to explore the significance of visual design quality in relation to the components of player experience. The study entailed two phases. In the first phase, participatory design methods were employed to design and develop the tablet games encompassing mind-mapping techniques, focus groups, iterative prototyping with multiple cycles of usability testing of user interfaces. In the second phase, survey instruments were applied to collect and analyze data from 111 participants using tablet games as stimuli in a controlled experimental condition. The main contribution of this research is creation of a player experience model, validated in the domain of tablet gaming, to serve as a new theory. This research will allow for game researchers and practitioners to obtain a deeper understanding of the significance of the player experience framework components to create optimal player experience in tablet games. The finding shows that highly attractive game user interfaces were perceived to have higher utility and ease of use. Participants exhibited higher levels of arousal and valence in the high visual design quality interfaces mediated by hedonic quality. Participants who were highly sensitive to visual design did not necessarily derive the highest level of game enjoyment. Participants derived a heightened level of engagement in the arousal channel of experience and the highest level of enjoyment in the flow state. The use of 2.5D graphics and analogous color schemes created a spatial illusion that captivated users' attention. Practitioners are encouraged to design game artifacts with feature sets and mechanics capable of transporting players into the state of flow, as this is the stage where they experience game control, excitement and relaxation in addition to game immersion in the state of arousal

    Understanding and Measuring Psychological Stress using Social Media

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    A body of literature has demonstrated that users' mental health conditions, such as depression and anxiety, can be predicted from their social media language. There is still a gap in the scientific understanding of how psychological stress is expressed on social media. Stress is one of the primary underlying causes and correlates of chronic physical illnesses and mental health conditions. In this paper, we explore the language of psychological stress with a dataset of 601 social media users, who answered the Perceived Stress Scale questionnaire and also consented to share their Facebook and Twitter data. Firstly, we find that stressed users post about exhaustion, losing control, increased self-focus and physical pain as compared to posts about breakfast, family-time, and travel by users who are not stressed. Secondly, we find that Facebook language is more predictive of stress than Twitter language. Thirdly, we demonstrate how the language based models thus developed can be adapted and be scaled to measure county-level trends. Since county-level language is easily available on Twitter using the Streaming API, we explore multiple domain adaptation algorithms to adapt user-level Facebook models to Twitter language. We find that domain-adapted and scaled social media-based measurements of stress outperform sociodemographic variables (age, gender, race, education, and income), against ground-truth survey-based stress measurements, both at the user- and the county-level in the U.S. Twitter language that scores higher in stress is also predictive of poorer health, less access to facilities and lower socioeconomic status in counties. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of using social media as a new tool for monitoring stress levels of both individuals and counties.Comment: Accepted for publication in the proceedings of ICWSM 201

    PSO Algorithm Based Resource Allocation for OFDM Cognitive Radio

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    With the development of remote correspondences, the issue of data transmission lack has turned out to be more conspicuous. Then again, to sense the presence of authorized clients, range detecting procedures are utilized. Vitality recognition, Matched channel identification and Cyclo-stationary component location are the three ordinary techniques utilized for range detecting. However there are a few downsides of these strategies. The execution of vitality indicator is helpless to instability in noise power. Coordinated channel range detecting strategies require a devoted collector for each essential client. Cyclo-stationary element Detection requires parcel of calculation exertion and long perception time. This proposition talks about the routine vitality location strategy and proposed enhanced vitality identification technique utilizing cubing operation. Additionally, cyclic prefix based range detecting is talked about in this theory. Scientific Description of vitality location and cyclic prefix based range detecting strategies is likewise delineated for fading channels

    LLMs and Finetuning: Benchmarking cross-domain performance for hate speech detection

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    This paper compares different pre-trained and fine-tuned large language models (LLMs) for hate speech detection. Our research underscores challenges in LLMs' cross-domain validity and overfitting risks. Through evaluations, we highlight the need for fine-tuned models that grasp the nuances of hate speech through greater label heterogeneity. We conclude with a vision for the future of hate speech detection, emphasizing cross-domain generalizability and appropriate benchmarking practices.Comment: 9 pages, 3 figures, 4 table

    It Takes Two to Negotiate: Modeling Social Exchange in Online Multiplayer Games

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    Online games are dynamic environments where players interact with each other, which offers a rich setting for understanding how players negotiate their way through the game to an ultimate victory. This work studies online player interactions during the turn-based strategy game, Diplomacy. We annotated a dataset of over 10,000 chat messages for different negotiation strategies and empirically examined their importance in predicting long- and short-term game outcomes. Although negotiation strategies can be predicted reasonably accurately through the linguistic modeling of the chat messages, more is needed for predicting short-term outcomes such as trustworthiness. On the other hand, they are essential in graph-aware reinforcement learning approaches to predict long-term outcomes, such as a player's success, based on their prior negotiation history. We close with a discussion of the implications and impact of our work. The dataset is available at https://github.com/kj2013/claff-diplomacy.Comment: 28 pages, 11 figures. Accepted to CSCW '24 and forthcoming the Proceedings of ACM HCI '2

    Social Media and Electoral Predictions: A Meta-Analytic Review

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    Can social media data be used to make reasonably accurate estimates of electoral outcomes? We conducted a meta-analytic review to examine the predictive performance of different features of social media posts and different methods in predicting political elections: (1) content features; and (2) structural features. Across 45 published studies, we find significant variance in the quality of predictions, which on average still lag behind those in traditional survey research. More specifically, our findings that machine learning-based approaches generally outperform lexicon-based analyses, while combining structural and content features yields most accurate predictions
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