Social Navigation in a Location-Based Information System

Much of contextaware application research has dealt with the technical aspects of context capturing and how to interpret the context of a user. Little effort has been spent on the experience and usage of these systems. This thesis will present the general aspects of social awareness and present an example on how these concepts can be implemented into a location-based information system to help users navigate a potential information overload. This thesis also states that giving the users an experience of not being alone in the system increases the pleasure of using such a system. However this implies a decrease in privacy. To demonstrate these ideas I will describe a locationbased information system, GeoNotes, built by a group of researchers at SICS, the Swedish Institute of Computer Science. I will state a set of interaction requirements for how to extend the GeoNotes system with functionality for social awareness. Furthermore I will set up functional requirements for those interaction requirements to after implementation be able to conclude which interaction requirements I have been able to implement for. I will also give suggestions on how to position users in a WLAN. The deliverable from this project is a locationbased information system with functionality for social awareness. However, it was not within this project to test the system on true users. Therefore the statement that this functionality can help users to navigate a potential information overload is still just a hypothesis. To retrieve the position of a user in a W-LAN a packet is sent to all base stations in the network. In the first returning packet the mac address of contacting base station is extracted. Each base station is therefore a unique position. Triangulation was discarded due to its sensitivity to noise and weather circumstances, although a system that uses triangulation would have offered a much higher granularity

What is a place? Allowing users to name and define places

From working with location-based information systems we know that positioning is problematic. A different approach was tested, where users themselves were allowed to name and define the places they wanted to use. The question was if they would do so, and if they would understand the notion of “place”. In a user study, 78 users created 84 place labels. The user study also gave us some unexpected input to the users’ perception of place: not only physical, but also virtual places were created

Designing gestures for affective input: an analysis of shape, effort and valence

We discuss a user-centered approach to incorporating affective expressions in interactive applications, and argue for a design that addresses both body and mind. In particular, we have studied the problem of finding a set of affective gestures. Based on previous work in movement analysis and emotion theory [Davies, Laban and Lawrence, Russell], and a study of an actor expressing emotional states in body movements, we have identified three underlying dimensions of movements and emotions: shape, effort and valence. From these dimensions we have created a new affective interaction model, which we name the affective gestural plane model. We applied this model to the design of gestural affective input to a mobile service for affective messages

GeoNotes: A Location-based Information System for Public Spaces

The basic idea behind location-based information systems is to connect information pieces to positions in outdoor or indoor space. Through position technologies such as Global Positioning System (GPS), GSM positioning, Wireless LAN positioning o

Coordinating the impact of structural genomics on the human α-helical transmembrane proteome

Given the recent successes in determining membrane-protein structures, we explore the tractability of determining representatives for the entire human membrane proteome. This proteome contains 2,925 unique integral α-helical transmembrane-domain sequences that cluster into 1,201 families sharing more than 25% sequence identity. Structures of 100 optimally selected targets would increase the fraction of modelable human α-helical transmembrane domains from 26% to 58%, providing structure and function information not otherwise available

CERT1 mutations perturb human development by disrupting sphingolipid homeostasis

Neural differentiation, synaptic transmission, and action potential propagation depend on membrane sphingolipids, whose metabolism is tightly regulated. Mutations in the ceramide transporter CERT (CERT1), which is involved in sphingolipid biosynthesis, are associated with intellectual disability, but the pathogenic mechanism remains obscure. Here, we characterize 31 individuals with de novo missense variants in CERT1. Several variants fall into a previously uncharacterized dimeric helical domain that enables CERT homeostatic inactivation, without which sphingolipid production goes unchecked. The clinical severity reflects the degree to which CERT autoregulation is disrupted, and inhibiting CERT pharmacologically corrects morphological and motor abnormalities in a Drosophila model of the disease, which we call ceramide transporter (CerTra) syndrome. These findings uncover a central role for CERT autoregulation in the control of sphingolipid biosynthetic flux, provide unexpected insight into the structural organization of CERT, and suggest a possible therapeutic approach for patients with CerTra syndrome.This work was supported by the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS), NIH (R01NS109858, to VAG); the Paul A. Marks Scholar Program at the Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons (to VAG); a TIGER grant from the TAUB Institute at the Columbia Vagelos College of Physicians and Scientists (to VAG); the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNF 31003A-179371, to TH); the European Joint Program on Rare Diseases (EJP RD+SNF 32ER30-187505, to TH); the Swiss Cancer League (KFS-4999-02-2020, to GD); the EPFL institutional fund (to GD); the Kristian Gerhard Jebsen Foundation (to GD); the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) (310030_184926, to GD); the Swiss Foundation for Research on Muscle Disease (FSRMM, to MAL); the Natural Science and Engineering Research Council of Canada (Discovery Grant 2020-04241, to JEB); the Italian Ministry of Health Young Investigator Grant (GR-2011-02347754, to EL); the Fondazione Istituto di Ricerca Pediatrica – Città della Speranza (18-04, to EL); the Wroclaw Medical University (SUB.E160.21.004, to RS); the National Science Centre, Poland (2017/27/B/NZ5/0222, to RS); Telethon Undiagnosed Diseases Program (TUDP) (GSP15001); the Temple Street Foundation/Children’s Health Foundation Ireland (RPAC 19-02, to IK); the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) (PO2366/2–1, to BP); the Instituto de Salud Carlos III, Spain (to ELM, EBS, and BMD); the National Natural Science Foundation of China (81871079 and 81730036, to HG and KX); and the National Institutes of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK), NIH (R01 DK115574, to SSC).The DEFIDIAG study is funded by grants from the French Ministry of Health in the framewok of the national French initiative for genomic medicine. The funders were not involved in the study design, data acquisition, analysis, or writing of the manuscript. Funding for the DECIPHER project was provided by Wellcome. The DDD study presents independent research commissioned by the Health Innovation Challenge Fund (grant number HICF-1009-003), a parallel funding partnership between Wellcome and the Department of Health, and the Wellcome Sanger Institute (grant number WT098051). The views expressed in this publication are those of the author(s) and not necessarily those of Wellcome or the Department of Health. The study has UK Research Ethics Committee approval (10/H0305/83, granted by the Cambridge South REC, and GEN/284/12, granted by the Republic of Ireland REC). The research team acknowledges the support of the National Institute for Health Research, through the Comprehensive Clinical Research Network.S

Effects of eight neuropsychiatric copy number variants on human brain structure

Many copy number variants (CNVs) confer risk for the same range of neurodevelopmental symptoms and psychiatric conditions including autism and schizophrenia. Yet, to date neuroimaging studies have typically been carried out one mutation at a time, showing that CNVs have large effects on brain anatomy. Here, we aimed to characterize and quantify the distinct brain morphometry effects and latent dimensions across 8 neuropsychiatric CNVs. We analyzed T1-weighted MRI data from clinically and non-clinically ascertained CNV carriers (deletion/duplication) at the 1q21.1 (n = 39/28), 16p11.2 (n = 87/78), 22q11.2 (n = 75/30), and 15q11.2 (n = 72/76) loci as well as 1296 non-carriers (controls). Case-control contrasts of all examined genomic loci demonstrated effects on brain anatomy, with deletions and duplications showing mirror effects at the global and regional levels. Although CNVs mainly showed distinct brain patterns, principal component analysis (PCA) loaded subsets of CNVs on two latent brain dimensions, which explained 32 and 29% of the variance of the 8 Cohen’s d maps. The cingulate gyrus, insula, supplementary motor cortex, and cerebellum were identified by PCA and multi-view pattern learning as top regions contributing to latent dimension shared across subsets of CNVs. The large proportion of distinct CNV effects on brain morphology may explain the small neuroimaging effect sizes reported in polygenic psychiatric conditions. Nevertheless, latent gene brain morphology dimensions will help subgroup the rapidly expanding landscape of neuropsychiatric variants and dissect the heterogeneity of idiopathic conditions

GeoNotes: a real-use study of a public location-aware community system

Much of context-aware application research has dealt with the technical aspects of context capturing and how to interpret the context of a user. Little effort, however, has been spent on the experience and usage of these systems. This paper describes a real-use study of a location-aware community system - GeoNotes. Over the one-month trial, 78 users published 283 information items connected to indoor and outdoor places. Users found present people, synchronous situations and activities more interesting to tag than physical objects. Chat turned out to be the major activity in the system. In finding new notes at a place, users found the number of comments pivotal. GeoNotes was conceptualized in terms of newsgroup and IM applications. Implications for design are discussed