Mobile Sound Recognition for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing

Human perception of surrounding events is strongly dependent on audio cues. Thus, acoustic insulation can seriously impact situational awareness. We present an exploratory study in the domain of assistive computing, eliciting requirements and presenting solutions to problems found in the development of an environmental sound recognition system, which aims to assist deaf and hard of hearing people in the perception of sounds. To take advantage of smartphones computational ubiquity, we propose a system that executes all processing on the device itself, from audio features extraction to recognition and visual presentation of results. Our application also presents the confidence level of the classification to the user. A test of the system conducted with deaf users provided important and inspiring feedback from participants.Comment: 25 pages, 8 figure

Improving Emergency Plans through Public Engagement

Emergency plans are fundamental for the speedy and effective response in disaster situations. Plans are often constructed by teams of experts, who apply their knowledge to define response procedures, but lack part of location-specific knowledge that can be very relevant to make decisions during responses. Such knowledge is, however, in the minds of people who use those spaces every day, but are not involved in the planning processes. In this paper, we advocate for citizens' involvement in emergency plan elaboration via Public Participation, a mechanism long time used in other areas of e-government. We define a process for the elicitation of citizen's knowledge via public participation, and present the results of a study on its potential impact, where individuals used different collaborative tools to volunteer knowledge to be used in emergency plan improvement.Penadés Gramage, MC.; Vivacqua, AS.; Borges, M.; Canos Cerda, JH. (2011). Improving Emergency Plans through Public Engagement. http://hdl.handle.net/10251/1133

Collaboration and Decision Making in Crisis Situations

[EN] Emergencies are critical situations that demand immediate action to avoid adverse consequences to life and property. Recent events around the world highlight the importance of the theme. A key challenge in Emergency Management is decision-making under time pressure, with an overload of unconfirmed, uncertain and conflicting information, including the management of many people, with distinct and possibly fluid roles, in different places. Collaboration in these settings is an interesting element, since emergency response generally involves multiple agencies and the public, which, having different views, protocols and priorities, must act in concert to handle the situation. In addition, an increasing amount of virtual information is necessary to inform and manage volunteers. The goal of this workshop is to identify and map the main challenges of collaboration in crisis situations, review current research methods and approaches to address them and address the lack of formal processes, structures, methodologies and tools.Adriana S Vivacqua is partially supported by CNPq grant 308425/2012-0 and FAPERJ grant E26/103.029/2012. Vaninha Vieira is partially supported by CNPq grant 490084/2013-3Vivacqua, AS.; Garcia, ACB.; Canos Cerda, JH.; Comes, M.; Vieira, V. (2016). Collaboration and Decision Making in Crisis Situations. ACM. 503-508. https://doi.org/10.1145/2818052.2855520S50350

Crowdsourcing as a way to increase situational awareness of C&C Centers for emergency response

Rescue operations in most disasters are heavily dependent on accurate situational awareness. Having accurate and complete information is the key for making good decisions. A large amount of such information is contextual, that is, it is variable and needs to be taken from the disaster scenario by different means. While "Be safe! Stay away! Let professionals do the work!" is the typical approach of rescue operators with regard to people, there are also advantages of public engagement considering that Citizens generally have a better knowledge of the stricken area and know the daily routines of their family, friends and neighbors. This means that they can help in describing affected areas as well as in localizing possible victims. Inspired by the last sentence, we propose a framework based on these concepts and describe the set of actions that would make it possible. The framework named PENSAD stands for Public Engagement to increase Situational Awareness in Disasters .Da Silva Borges, M.; Vivacqua, AS.; Canos Cerda, JH.; Penades Gramage, MC.; Ruiza-Zafra, Á. (2014). Crowdsourcing as a way to increase situational awareness of C&C Centers for emergency response. ACM Digital Library. http://hdl.handle.net/10251/65293

Agents for Expertise Location

The problem of finding someone who might be able to help with a particular task or knowledge area exists everywhere, be it in groups of students or corporate settings. Time and effort are spent looking for relevant information when another person in the community could easily provide assistance. We have chosen to tackle this problem. Our approach to addressing the problem of finding people who can help is to use software agents to assist the search for expertise and mediate the information exchange process. Issues of availability, user profiling, privacy and incentives are involved. We chose the Java Programming domain for initial implementation and testing of the system. Other researchers have taken stabs at this problem, most without the use of agent technology. We are building agents, called Expert Finders, to help people find help. Introduction 1 A person may find him/herself in need of help even when performing routine tasks. Very often, help is hard to find. The person ends up ..

CreEx: A Framework for Creativity in Cooperative Problem Solving

Abstract. Creativity has become an important factor in recent years, as companies need to be able to quickly adapt to take advantage of new opportunities and handle fast paced changes in their environment. Creativity theorists have proposed models to explain creative thought that go beyond the individual to encompass social aspects of creativity. However, most existing research concerns an individual and doesn’t address group aspects of creativity: interactions between team members that lead to innovative solutions for problems and new ideas. We are interested in computer support for collaborative creativity in problem solving. In this paper, we present CreEx, a framework to foster group creativity. By creating appropriate environments for the exploration of problems and discussion of ideas, we hope to enable users not only to generate novel solutions and capture decisions made, but also to learn about each other’s domains and think differently.