Design Communication: Transfer of Design Principles & Practice

The report documents a consultancy undertaken for Traidcraft, UK focused on one of their long-standing suppliers St. Mary's Mahila Shikshan Kendra (SMSK), Ahmedabad in the provision of training in design innovation, to both consolidate and sustain their existing creative practice in embroidered products and to support and facilitate the progressive development of design expertise at SMSK. Traidcraft is the UK’s leading Fairtrade organisation and has had a valued relationship with SMSK that stretches back over thirty years and accounts for 11% of SMSK turnover. A lack design and product innovation expertise and products that are not responsive to rapidly-changing market trends places ‘remote’ suppliers like SMSK at a disadvantage in the volatile conditions of today’s globalised market. In examining the needs of SMSK, the project served to illuminate the challenges of co-collaboration between designer, supplier and a Fair Trade organization, exploring particular characteristics of their market that distinguish it from the mainstream commercial marketplace and issues in respect of consumer perceptions of ‘value for money’ in the purchase of a handcrafted product. The intervention focused on developing the design skills of SMSK’s in-house self taught ‘designer’, facilitating his understanding of design methods as a means to evolve, innovate and enhance the product range, creating new styles and ‘added value’ without losing the key characteristics of fine embroidery skills and attention to quality control reflected in SMSK’s products. The advisory report frames the staged objectives informed by evaluation of existing skills-base, products and market penetration, examining the project methodology and activities undertaken to realize the objectives of project, namely to encourage strengthening and capacity-building of design expertise within the supplier group and puts forward recommendations for further interventions within the supplier group and the transferability of the pilot model to other groups within Traidcraft’s supplier network

Event detection, tracking, and visualization in Twitter: a mention-anomaly-based approach

The ever-growing number of people using Twitter makes it a valuable source of timely information. However, detecting events in Twitter is a difficult task, because tweets that report interesting events are overwhelmed by a large volume of tweets on unrelated topics. Existing methods focus on the textual content of tweets and ignore the social aspect of Twitter. In this paper we propose MABED (i.e. mention-anomaly-based event detection), a novel statistical method that relies solely on tweets and leverages the creation frequency of dynamic links (i.e. mentions) that users insert in tweets to detect significant events and estimate the magnitude of their impact over the crowd. MABED also differs from the literature in that it dynamically estimates the period of time during which each event is discussed, rather than assuming a predefined fixed duration for all events. The experiments we conducted on both English and French Twitter data show that the mention-anomaly-based approach leads to more accurate event detection and improved robustness in presence of noisy Twitter content. Qualitatively speaking, we find that MABED helps with the interpretation of detected events by providing clear textual descriptions and precise temporal descriptions. We also show how MABED can help understanding users' interest. Furthermore, we describe three visualizations designed to favor an efficient exploration of the detected events.Comment: 17 page

Link Prediction with Mutual Attention for Text-Attributed Networks

In this extended abstract, we present an algorithm that learns a similarity measure between documents from the network topology of a structured corpus. We leverage the Scaled Dot-Product Attention, a recently proposed attention mechanism, to design a mutual attention mechanism between pairs of documents. To train its parameters, we use the network links as supervision. We provide preliminary experiment results with a citation dataset on two prediction tasks, demonstrating the capacity of our model to learn a meaningful textual similarity.Comment: Added missing referenc

On the Sample Complexity of Subspace Learning

A large number of algorithms in machine learning, from principal component analysis (PCA), and its non-linear (kernel) extensions, to more recent spectral embedding and support estimation methods, rely on estimating a linear subspace from samples. In this paper we introduce a general formulation of this problem and derive novel learning error estimates. Our results rely on natural assumptions on the spectral properties of the covariance operator associated to the data distribu- tion, and hold for a wide class of metrics between subspaces. As special cases, we discuss sharp error estimates for the reconstruction properties of PCA and spectral support estimation. Key to our analysis is an operator theoretic approach that has broad applicability to spectral learning methods.Comment: Extendend Version of conference pape

Rights & Interests: Trade & Disputes

A review of: Trade Imbalance: The Struggle to Weight Human Rights Concerns in Trade Policy-Making. By Susan Ariel Aaronson & Jamie M. Zimmerman. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008. 337pp. and Public Values & Public Interest: Counterbalancing Economic Individualism. By Barry Bozeman. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2007. 219pp. and The Impact of the WTO: The Environment, Public Health & Sovereignty. By Trish Kelly. Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar, 2007. 220pp

Information diffusion in online social networks

International audienceOnline social networks play a major role in the spread of information at very large scale and it becomes essential to provide means to analyze this phenomenon. Analyzing information diffusion proves to be a challenging task since the raw data produced by users of these networks are a flood of ideas, recommendations, opinions, etc. The aim of this PhD work is to help in the understanding of this phenomenon. So far, our contributions are the following: (i) a survey of developments in the field; (ii) T-BaSIC, a graph-based model for information diffusion prediction; (iii) SONDY, an open source platform that helps understanding social network users' interests and activity by providing emerging topics and events detection as well as network analysis functionalities

The making of political identities in “post-statality ”: a discussion between Agamben, Negri y Laclau

Indexación: Revista UNAB.El presente trabajo se interroga sobre distintos modos de configuración de subjetividades políticas en la actualidad. Para ello, parte del diagnóstico que establece es que, ante la pérdida de centralidad del Estado, la cual se manifiesta en una merma en su capacidad de marcación subjetiva, es necesario pensar modos de subjetivación política alternativos. En este sentido, el artículo presenta las propuestas teóricas de G. Agamben, A. Negri y E. Laclau, en lo referente a esta cuestión, señalando sus alcances y limitaciones. Hacia el final, propone las nociones laclaudianas de articulación y representación como centrales para comprender la configuración de identidades políticas en el escenario contemporáneo.This paper examines three different logics in the configuration of political identities in our days. It starts by considering that in times when the State has losen its centrality, that is, its power to influence and define subjectivity as a whole, it becomes necessary to elaborate alternative ways to configurate political identities. In this sense, the article presents the theoretical proposals made by G. Agamben, A. Negri and E. Laclau regarding this issue, indicating its advantages and limitations. Towards the end it argues that Laclau´s notions of articulation and representation are essential in order to understand the configuration of political identities in the contemporary scene.http://revistahumanidades.unab.cl//wp-content/uploads/2017/06/La-constitucion-de-subjetividades-politicas-en-tiempos-post-estatales.-Un-contrapunto-entre-Agamben-Negri-y-Laclau.pd