Who uses VR in Norway?

Despite much hype, the extent to which VR is accepted and used by the general population is unclear. To shed light on this, we conducted a representative panel survey with 936 respondents in the spring of 2021. The survey revealed that while many know what VR is, only 20 % have tried it, and only 0.6 % use VR more than once a week. This poster explores the demographics of VR users in Norway

Personality filters for online news interest and engagement

Our many online routines leave behind trails of data about our identities, habits, preferences and connections. These data serve as filters when we seek out information, yielding relevant results and content of interest. However, commercial and political parties can use the same data to personalize persuasive messages, and some even use psychological profiles to target individuals. With this revelation come concerns that news can be framed to appeal to individual personalities. This study investigates the relationship between personality and news engagement among predominantly young Norwegian adults across different news angles. It addresses the Big Five personality traits as well as rational and experiential information-processing styles. The results provide support for our hypothesis on the relation between neuroticism and lowered news engagement, although the effect sizes are small. When exploring iso- lated news stories, we find greater differentiation among the participants, suggesting that individuals’ news interest really does start at the headline.Personality filters for online news interest and engagementpublishedVersio

A Gender Perspective on GDPR and Information Privacy

With the introduction of The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in 2018, European citizens were granted stronger privacy protection. Despite privacy and GDPR being frequent topics of discussion, many consumers lack knowledge on how personal data are harvested for business purposes, and they are unaware of their rights. Drawing on a larger survey conducted in a Norwegian university college, this study investigates gender differences in privacy behaviour (n=444). We offer three insights. The results revealed that (1) respondents’ concern for privacy does not differ across gender, but men claimed to experience slightly more control over their personal data compared to women. (2) Exercising privacy rights were comparable across gender as women and men reported the same inclination to act on rights granted by GDPR. (3) Willingness to share information in return for benefits depended on the information in question. Men and women agreed in their willingness to exchange name and e-mail. However, women were less willing than men to give up more sensitive information, yet more willing to give up date of birthday, TV viewing history and shopping history. Our insights bring attention to a possible link between experienced control over own data and willingness to exchange data for benefits, highlighting a potential mediating relationship that could be worthwhile pursuing.publishedVersio

Audiovisual temporal integration in reverberant environments

AbstractWith teleconferencing becoming more accessible as a communication platform, researchers are working to understand the consequences of the interaction between human perception and this unfamiliar environment. Given the enclosed space of a teleconference room, along with the physical separation between the user, microphone and speakers, the transmitted audio often becomes mixed with the reverberating auditory components from the room. As a result, the audio can be perceived as smeared in time, and this can affect the user experience and perceived quality. Moreover, other challenges remain to be solved. For instance, during encoding, compression and transmission, the audio and video streams are typically treated separately. Consequently, the signals are rarely perfectly aligned and synchronous. In effect, timing affects both reverberation and audiovisual synchrony, and the two challenges may well be inter-dependent. This study explores the temporal integration of audiovisual continuous speech and speech syllables, along with a non-speech event, across a range of asynchrony levels for different reverberation conditions. Non-reverberant stimuli are compared to stimuli with added reverberation recordings. Findings reveal that reverberation does not affect the temporal integration of continuous speech. However, reverberation influences the temporal integration of the isolated speech syllables and the action-oriented event, with perceived subjective synchrony skewed towards audio lead asynchrony and away from the more common audio lag direction. Furthermore, less time is spent on simultaneity judgements for the longer sequences when the temporal offsets get longer and when reverberation is introduced, suggesting that both asynchrony and reverberation add to the demands of the task

Exploring the role of social media literacy in adolescents' experiences with personalization: A Norwegian qualitative study

Social media platforms rely on algorithms to filter and select content, thereby personalizing every individual's social media experience. Many use social media without awareness of this personalization and its impact, pointing to a need to both understand and improve literacy among active social media users. This qualitative study addresses adolescents' social media literacy through an investigation of their experiences with personalization on social media, aiming for a nuanced perspective of their outcomes. A thematic analysis of eight focus group interviews with 47 students aged 15–19 years uncovered two main themes: (1) diverse levels of adolescents' awareness and familiarity with personalization and (2) positive, negative, and mixed emotions toward personalization. Theme one uncovered that although the adolescents were largely unfamiliar with the terminology, when prompted, most of them could provide examples of personalization, whereas theme two revealed that adolescents appreciated relevant content and yet were uneasy about certain features.publishedVersio

Exploring the role of social media literacy in adolescents' experiences with personalization: A Norwegian qualitative study

Social media platforms rely on algorithms to filter and select content, thereby personalizing every individual's social media experience. Many use social media without awareness of this personalization and its impact, pointing to a need to both understand and improve literacy among active social media users. This qualitative study addresses adolescents' social media literacy through an investigation of their experiences with personalization on social media, aiming for a nuanced perspective of their outcomes. A thematic analysis of eight focus group interviews with 47 students aged 15–19 years uncovered two main themes: (1) diverse levels of adolescents' awareness and familiarity with personalization and (2) positive, negative, and mixed emotions toward personalization. Theme one uncovered that although the adolescents were largely unfamiliar with the terminology, when prompted, most of them could provide examples of personalization, whereas theme two revealed that adolescents appreciated relevant content and yet were uneasy about certain features.Exploring the role of social media literacy in adolescents' experiences with personalization: A Norwegian qualitative studypublishedVersio

“Just Be Careful, Since Social Media Is Really Not as Safe as It’s Being Portrayed”: Adolescent Views on Adult Support for Safer Social Media Use

Social media is an integral part of the lives of adolescents, but they are also closed arenas concealed from the next of kin and are resistant to parental mediation. Consequently, this study aims to investigate how adolescents reflect on the safe use of social media and the conversations they have with their parents. The present study used data from 8 focus group interviews with adolescents aged from 15 to 19 years in Norway. Data were analysed using systematic text condensation—an inductive thematic cross-case analysis. The results showed three themes: (1) next of kin encourage caution, (2) safety is created through mutual learning, and (3) adolescents expect parental mediation. The present study has important implications for policymakers, media educators, and education institutions and its findings will enable better preparation and targeting of curricula and education from basic to secondary schools on a national level.This research and APC was funded by Kristiania University College, Oslo, Norway grant number 10093 ForskM 2022- SoMeSelf-408T.publishedVersio

Exploring adolescents' experiences with personalized content on social media: A qualitative study

This work-in-progress paper examines adolescents’ experiences with personalized content on social media and how it influences them. Through group interviews with Norwegian students aged 15 to 19 years, we investigated their awareness, comprehension, and emotions towards targeted and personalized content. The sample consisted of 48 participants (20 males and 28 females). The preliminary analysis uncovered three themes: 1) Encounters, awareness, and comprehension, 2) Emotions, and 3) Increasing use and appreciation.publishedVersio

Unveiling the Data Shadow: A Scalable Software Architecture for Public Health and Electronically Assessed Data

In 2017, health expenditure in Norway amounted to 10,4 percent of GDP, and it increases by approx. 0,3 percent annually. Medical treatment and rehabilitation include treatment in hospitals, medical services, dental services, etc., and about half of Norway's health expenses are related to these services. In total, 97 percent of the budget is spent on treating disorders and support functions. Despite studies have shown that the greatest effect on health is within preventive health, only 3 percent of the Norwegian health expenses is used for that purpose. Computer-based technology is used to measure a large amount of health-related information as activity level, heartrate, sleep rhythms, eating habits, exercise habits and emotions. These large amounts of data collected by patients are available in electronic recording equipment and social media but are not shared with the physician or other healthcare professionals – in fact establishing a data shadow. The volume of data is massive, and health personnel do not know how to break the data down to sensible and usable information. This research project is founded in this perspective of preventive health and synthesizes available personal health information by utilizing commodity mobile and wearable hardware to gain a comprehensive insight into the health data shadow of an individual. This is further used to give individuals a fact-based awareness of own health and make informed choices, showcased through a persuasive technologies experiment, and secondly by a built prototype solution upon which health workers and medical doctors can be provided with a comprehensive, unfiltered data foundation to base diagnoses, treatment and council upon. Our major contribution is a proof of concept implementation and leveraging state of the art cloud based function as a service approach to build a scalable software architecture for a ubiquitous and heterogeneous environment harvesting the data shadow through activity tracking devices

Adaptive Media Streaming to Mobile Devices: Challenges, Enhancements, and Recommendations

Video streaming is predicted to become the dominating traffic in mobile broadband networks. At the same time, adaptive HTTP streaming is developing into the preferred way of streaming media over the Internet. In this paper, we evaluate how different components of a streaming system can be optimized when serving content to mobile devices in particular. We first analyze the media traffic from a Norwegian network and media provider. Based on our findings, we outline benefits and challenges for HTTP streaming, on the sender and the receiver side, and we investigate how HTTP-based streaming affects server performance. Furthermore, we discuss various aspects of efficient coding of the video segments from both performance and user perception point of view. The final part of the paper studies efficient adaptation and delivery to mobile devices over wireless networks. We experimentally evaluate and improve adaptation strategies, multilink solutions, and bandwidth prediction techniques. Based on the results from our evaluations, we make recommendations for how an adaptive streaming system should handle mobile devices. Small changes, or simple awareness of how users perceive quality, can often have large effects