JOY AND OTHER STORIES

Four short stories and the first chapter of a novel

Contextual awareness, messaging and communication in nomadic audio environments

Thesis (M.S.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Program in Media Arts & Sciences, 1998.Includes bibliographical references (p. 119-122).Nitin Sawhney.M.S

Cooperative innovation in the commons : rethinking distributed collaboration and intellectual property for sustainable design innovation

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2003.Includes bibliographical references (p. 125-127).Addressing global design challenges in the environment and underserved communities requires a cooperative approach towards sustainable design innovation, one that embraces multidisciplinary expertise, participatory design and rapid dissemination of critical innovations in the field. How can a rural farmer in Botswana cooperatively develop appropriate solutions for his community with external research expertise? How can a doctor in Sao Paulo access a network of medical device companies to help manufacture her design innovation? While there is a great emphasis on large breakthrough R&D innovations, there is often little support for developing and disseminating small-scale, affordable, and locally sustainable designs. The open source phenomenon has been influential in the software community, however distributed collaboration in engineering design requires awareness and sharing of physical artifacts, design tools and working environments as well as novel mechanisms to support social norms, communities of practice, and intellectual property rights for product innovations. ThinkCycle was created as a web-based collaboration platform with tools and shared online spaces for designers, domain experts and stakeholders to discuss, develop and peer-review evolving design solutions in critical domains. Over 2000 users worldwide access and contribute hundreds of concepts, resources, projects and publications on the site. ThinkCycle is emerging as a collaborative platform, open design repository and global community for innovations in sustainable design: http.//www. thinkcycle.org. Studies were conducted on the nature of design interaction, learning and intellectual property emerging from studio courses run at MIT in 2001-2002.(cont.) Cooperative design is best understood when viewed as a "social process", which is better sustained in online settings by peer-review from remote participants. There is a need for lightweight asynchronous interfaces with existing modes of communication like email. Social inquiry into notions of intellectual property reveal a typology of patterns with distinct forms of protection and disclosure, including patents and open source, adopted under different conditions. However, there is much ambiguity and conflict regarding how to deal with cooperative innovations as they evolve from being subpatentable learning experiments to functional and commercially viable solutions with potentially great social impact. The thesis provides a framework within which we can begin to explore these challenges.by Nitin Sawhney.Ph.D

Participatory Design for Whom? Designing Conversational User Interfaces for Sensitive Settings and Vulnerable Populations

Conversational User Interfaces (CUIs) are becoming increasingly applied in a broad range of sensitive settings to address the needs and struggles of vulnerable or marginalized users. Sensitive settings include, for instance, CUIs mediating the communication difficulties of people with dementia or supporting refugees to cope with new cultural practices as a chatbot on a government website. While researchers are increasingly designing CUIs for such sensitive set tings, methods and participatory design approaches to address vulnerable user groups’ highly sensitive needs and struggles are sparse in research thus far. This workshop aims to explore how we can design CUIs for and in sensitive settings with vulnerable users in mind through the participatory design process. We aim to establish a working definition of vulnerability, sensitive settings, and how practice-oriented design of CUIs can be inclusive of diverse users

Can Electronic Notebooks Enhance the Classroom?

We are interested in prototyping future computing environments that will enhance the classroom experience and empower both teacher and student. In this paper, we describe the Classroom 2000 project at Georgia Tech which is integrating personal and group pen-based technology, audio services and the World-Wide Web to record in-class interactions for later review

Global, regional, and national sex-specific burden and control of the HIV epidemic, 1990-2019, for 204 countries and territories: the Global Burden of Diseases Study 2019

Background: The sustainable development goals (SDGs) aim to end HIV/AIDS as a public health threat by 2030. Understanding the current state of the HIV epidemic and its change over time is essential to this effort. This study assesses the current sex-specific HIV burden in 204 countries and territories and measures progress in the control of the epidemic. Methods: To estimate age-specific and sex-specific trends in 48 of 204 countries, we extended the Estimation and Projection Package Age-Sex Model to also implement the spectrum paediatric model. We used this model in cases where age and sex specific HIV-seroprevalence surveys and antenatal care-clinic sentinel surveillance data were available. For the remaining 156 of 204 locations, we developed a cohort-incidence bias adjustment to derive incidence as a function of cause-of-death data from vital registration systems. The incidence was input to a custom Spectrum model. To assess progress, we measured the percentage change in incident cases and deaths between 2010 and 2019 (threshold >75% decline), the ratio of incident cases to number of people living with HIV (incidence-to-prevalence ratio threshold <0·03), and the ratio of incident cases to deaths (incidence-to-mortality ratio threshold <1·0). Findings: In 2019, there were 36·8 million (95% uncertainty interval [UI] 35·1–38·9) people living with HIV worldwide. There were 0·84 males (95% UI 0·78–0·91) per female living with HIV in 2019, 0·99 male infections (0·91–1·10) for every female infection, and 1·02 male deaths (0·95–1·10) per female death. Global progress in incident cases and deaths between 2010 and 2019 was driven by sub-Saharan Africa (with a 28·52% decrease in incident cases, 95% UI 19·58–35·43, and a 39·66% decrease in deaths, 36·49–42·36). Elsewhere, the incidence remained stable or increased, whereas deaths generally decreased. In 2019, the global incidence-to-prevalence ratio was 0·05 (95% UI 0·05–0·06) and the global incidence-to-mortality ratio was 1·94 (1·76–2·12). No regions met suggested thresholds for progress. Interpretation: Sub-Saharan Africa had both the highest HIV burden and the greatest progress between 1990 and 2019. The number of incident cases and deaths in males and females approached parity in 2019, although there remained more females with HIV than males with HIV. Globally, the HIV epidemic is far from the UNAIDS benchmarks on progress metrics. Funding: The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the National Institute of Mental Health of the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), and the National Institute on Aging of the NIH

Global injury morbidity and mortality from 1990 to 2017 : results from the Global Burden of Disease Study 2017

Correction:Background Past research in population health trends has shown that injuries form a substantial burden of population health loss. Regular updates to injury burden assessments are critical. We report Global Burden of Disease (GBD) 2017 Study estimates on morbidity and mortality for all injuries. Methods We reviewed results for injuries from the GBD 2017 study. GBD 2017 measured injury-specific mortality and years of life lost (YLLs) using the Cause of Death Ensemble model. To measure non-fatal injuries, GBD 2017 modelled injury-specific incidence and converted this to prevalence and years lived with disability (YLDs). YLLs and YLDs were summed to calculate disability-adjusted life years (DALYs). Findings In 1990, there were 4 260 493 (4 085 700 to 4 396 138) injury deaths, which increased to 4 484 722 (4 332 010 to 4 585 554) deaths in 2017, while age-standardised mortality decreased from 1079 (1073 to 1086) to 738 (730 to 745) per 100 000. In 1990, there were 354 064 302 (95% uncertainty interval: 338 174 876 to 371 610 802) new cases of injury globally, which increased to 520 710 288 (493 430 247 to 547 988 635) new cases in 2017. During this time, age-standardised incidence decreased non-significantly from 6824 (6534 to 7147) to 6763 (6412 to 7118) per 100 000. Between 1990 and 2017, age-standardised DALYs decreased from 4947 (4655 to 5233) per 100 000 to 3267 (3058 to 3505). Interpretation Injuries are an important cause of health loss globally, though mortality has declined between 1990 and 2017. Future research in injury burden should focus on prevention in high-burden populations, improving data collection and ensuring access to medical care.Peer reviewe