Analysing Pedestrian Traffic Around Public Displays

This paper presents a powerful approach to evaluating public technologies by capturing and analysing pedestrian traffic using computer vision. This approach is highly flexible and scales better than traditional ethnographic techniques often used to evaluate technology in public spaces. This technique can be used to evaluate a wide variety of public installations and the data collected complements existing approaches. Our technique allows behavioural analysis of both interacting users and non-interacting passers-by. This gives us the tools to understand how technology changes public spaces, how passers-by approach or avoid public technologies, and how different interaction styles work in public spaces. In the paper, we apply this technique to two large public displays and a street performance. The results demonstrate how metrics such as walking speed and proximity can be used for analysis, and how this can be used to capture disruption to pedestrian traffic and passer-by approach patterns

Understanding Public Evaluation: Quantifying Experimenter Intervention

Public evaluations are popular because some research questions can only be answered by turning “to the wild.” Different approaches place experimenters in different roles during deployment, which has implications for the kinds of data that can be collected and the potential bias introduced by the experimenter. This paper expands our understanding of how experimenter roles impact public evaluations and provides an empirical basis to consider different evaluation approaches. We completed an evaluation of a playful gesture-controlled display – not to understand interaction at the display but to compare different evaluation approaches. The conditions placed the experimenter in three roles, steward observer, overt observer, and covert observer, to measure the effect of experimenter presence and analyse the strengths and weaknesses of each approach

On an analogue of the James conjecture

We give a counterexample to the most optimistic analogue (due to Kleshchev and Ram) of the James conjecture for Khovanov-Lauda-Rouquier algebras associated to simply-laced Dynkin diagrams. The first counterexample occurs in type A_5 for p = 2 and involves the same singularity used by Kashiwara and Saito to show the reducibility of the characteristic variety of an intersection cohomology D-module on a quiver variety. Using recent results of Polo one can give counterexamples in type A in all characteristics.Comment: 12 pages. v2: final versio

The think-tank model has passed its use by date. We need an alternative model for quality research to impact on evidence-based policy-making

Think-tanks are in crisis yet there is still a need for evidence-based policy prescriptions. Dr Andy Williamson believes that if think-tanks are to have a greater impact, they must embrace principles of quality, transparency and balance