Design Ltd.: Renovated Myths for the Development of Socially Embedded Technologies

This paper argues that traditional and mainstream mythologies, which have been continually told within the Information Technology domain among designers and advocators of conceptual modelling since the 1960s in different fields of computing sciences, could now be renovated or substituted in the mould of more recent discourses about performativity, complexity and end-user creativity that have been constructed across different fields in the meanwhile. In the paper, it is submitted that these discourses could motivate IT professionals in undertaking alternative approaches toward the co-construction of socio-technical systems, i.e., social settings where humans cooperate to reach common goals by means of mediating computational tools. The authors advocate further discussion about and consolidation of some concepts in design research, design practice and more generally Information Technology (IT) development, like those of: task-artifact entanglement, universatility (sic) of End-User Development (EUD) environments, bricolant/bricoleur end-user, logic of bricolage, maieuta-designers (sic), and laissez-faire method to socio-technical construction. Points backing these and similar concepts are made to promote further discussion on the need to rethink the main assumptions underlying IT design and development some fifty years later the coming of age of software and modern IT in the organizational domain.Comment: This is the peer-unreviewed of a manuscript that is to appear in D. Randall, K. Schmidt, & V. Wulf (Eds.), Designing Socially Embedded Technologies: A European Challenge (2013, forthcoming) with the title "Building Socially Embedded Technologies: Implications on Design" within an EUSSET editorial initiative (www.eusset.eu/

Active control of the wake from a rectangular-sectioned body

This work of thesis is part of a wider research project with the aim of developing an aerodynamic active device for drag reduction of ground vehicles. The system, previously studied on a bullet-shaped body by Qubain (2009) and Oxlade (2013), is applied to a bluff body that idealises a long vehicle, such as an articulated lorry or a coach. The model, tested in the Honda wind tunnel of the Department of Aeronautics at Imperial College, is equipped with a synthetic jet, or zero net-mass-flux actuator, composed of a cavity, a plate with a slot, and an oscillating diaphragm, placed at the rear end of the body. The effects produced by the actuator are studied by monitoring the base pressure on the model, and by measuring the aerodynamic forces and the moments acting on the body. During the experiments, performed at a constant ReH=UH/ν=4.1x10^5, a parametric study of the response of the mean base pressure, forces and moments to changes in the forcing parameters (frequency and amplitude), and slot width is performed. The unforced wake is characterised by two main structures: the bubble-pumping mode, with Strouhal number StH≈0.08, and the vortex shedding, with StH≈0.17 and StH≈0.20 on the vertical and horizontal plane, respectively. These structures, still visible in the forced wake at low forcing amplitudes, are almost completely suppressed when the forcing amplitude is increased. The suppression of the structures in the wake corresponds to a decrease in the integrated energy of the wake itself, associated to base pressure recovery and drag reduction. The optimal values achieved corresponds to 27.3% gain in base pressure and -13.1% reduction of drag. The higher sensitivity to changes in forcing amplitude rather than in frequency displayed by the system confirms the existence of a plateau of optimal base pressure recovery/drag reduction at frequencies around 5 times the characteristic shear layer frequency.Open Acces

Human-Data Interaction in Healthcare

In this paper, we focus on an emerging strand of IT-oriented research, namely Human-Data Interaction (HDI) and how this can be applied to healthcare. HDI regards both how humans create and use data by means of interactive systems, which can both assist and constrain them, as well as to passively collect and proactively generate data. Healthcare provides a challenging arena to test the potential of HDI to provide a new, user-centered perspective on how data work should be supported and assessed, especially in the light of the fact that data are becoming increasingly big and that many tools are now available for the lay people, including doctors and nurses, to interact with health-related data.Comment: 10 pages, 4 Figure

Madura's foot in native of the Philippines immigrant in northern Italy

Clinical case about a man, emigrated from Philippines. The patient presented a single cutaneous lesion on a foot that was thick, swollen and blackish. There were no fistulas. He remenbers a traumatic implantation of wood splinters on the sole foot 10 years ago. Radiography, Magnetic Resonance, tomographic investigation were performed. The exceptional occurrence of the mycetoma in our countries and absence of clear infectious picture were the reason for an initial clinical misinterpretation as a benign neoplasm of soft tissues.We performed surgical removal of neoplasm, with histological examination.Histopathologic exam revealed an unexpected mass of fungal hyphae; diagnosis of Madura’s foot was confirmed. We started pharmacological therapy with “itracozanole”.Our case offers opportunity to stress need for clinical suspicion of fungal infection, considering increase of immigration by the countries with endemic mycetoma, and we must prepare to observe and treat many pathologies now unknown in our practice

MAKING PEOPLE AWARE OF DEVIATIONS FROM STANDARDS IN HEALTH CARE

In this paper we consider the role of standards as a means for interoperability among members of different communities. If we consider, in particular, the healthcare domain, there is an increasing number of efforts to develop explicit and formal representations of medical concepts so as to provide a common infrastructure for the reuse of clinical information and for the integration and the sharing of medical knowledge across the world. A critical issue raises when local customizations of standards are used as standards. If this occurs, standards are no more able to guarantee their supportive function to interoperability. To overcome this problem we propose a solution aiming at making members of different facilities aware of the changes occurred locally in a standard. At architectural level, we propose to build a layer that acts upon the interface of the application by which the articulation of activities across organizational boundaries is mediated (e.g., an handing over between different healthcare facilities). At application level, we provide practitioners with a common visual notation allowing them enrich the artifacts that mediate inter-articulation, by means of a reference to a standard, e.g. a schema of intervention. We claim that this increased awareness can support different people in aligning practices with standards and making standards effective means for coordination and interoperability. Furthermore, we report a case focusing on such a layer and visual notation by which to enrich the interface of the information system that mediates the handingover between an Emergency Service and a hospital emergency department

The unbearable (technical) unreliability of automated facial emotion recognition

Emotion recognition, and in particular acial emotion recognition (FER), is among the most controversial applications of machine learning, not least because of its ethical implications for human subjects. In this article, we address the controversial conjecture that machines can read emotions from our facial expressions by asking whether this task can be performed reliably. This means, rather than considering the potential harms or scientific soundness of facial emotion recognition systems, focusing on the reliability of the ground truths used to develop emotion recognition systems, assessing how well different human observers agree on the emotions they detect in subjects' faces. Additionally, we discuss the extent to which sharing context can help observers agree on the emotions they perceive on subjects' faces. Briefly, we demonstrate that when large and heterogeneous samples of observers are involved, the task of emotion detection from static images crumbles into inconsistency. We thus reveal that any endeavour to understand human behaviour from large sets of labelled patterns is over-ambitious, even if it were technically feasible. We conclude that we cannot speak of actual accuracy for facial emotion recognition systems for any practical purposes

Machine learning in orthopedics: a literature review

In this paper we present the findings of a systematic literature review covering the articles published in the last two decades in which the authors described the application of a machine learning technique and method to an orthopedic problem or purpose. By searching both in the Scopus and Medline databases, we retrieved, screened and analyzed the content of 70 journal articles, and coded these resources following an iterative method within a Grounded Theory approach. We report the survey findings by outlining the articles\u2019 content in terms of the main machine learning techniques mentioned therein, the orthopedic application domains, the source data and the quality of their predictive performance

Machine Learning in Orthopedics: A Literature Review

In this paper we present the findings of a systematic literature review covering the articles published in the last two decades in which the authors described the application of a machine learning technique and method to an orthopedic problem or purpose. By searching both in the Scopus and Medline databases, we retrieved, screened and analyzed the content of 70 journal articles, and coded these resources following an iterative method within a Grounded Theory approach. We report the survey findings by outlining the articles' content in terms of the main machine learning techniques mentioned therein, the orthopedic application domains, the source data and the quality of their predictive performance