A context-based study of serendipity in information research among Chinese scholars

Purpose: The current understanding of serendipity is based primarily on studies employing Westerners as participants, and it remains uncertain whether or not this understanding would be pervasive under different cultures, such as in China. In addition, there is not a sufficient systematic investigation of context during the occurrence of serendipity in current studies. This paper examines the above issues by conducting a follow-up empirical study with a group of Chinese scholars. Design/methodology/approach: The social media application “Wechat” was employed as a research tool. A diary-based study was conducted and 16 participants were required to send to the researchers any cases of serendipity they encountered during a period of two weeks, and this was followed by a post-interview. Findings: Chinese scholars experienced serendipity in line with the three main processes of encountering unexpectedness, connection-making and recognising the value. An updated context-based serendipity model was constructed, where the role of context during each episode of experiencing serendipity was identified, including the external context (e.g. time, location and status), the social context, and the internal context (e.g. precipitating conditions, sagacity/perceptiveness and emotion). Originality/value: The updated context model provides a further understanding of the role played by context during the different processes of serendipity. The framework for experiencing serendipity has been expanded, and this may be used to classify the categories of serendipity

Understanding serendipity and its application in the context of information science and technology

Serendipity is widely experienced in current society, especially in the digital world. According to the Oxford Concise English Dictionary, the term “serendipity” is defined as “the occurrence and development of events by chance in a happy or beneficial way”. This PhD research project aims to understand serendipity in the context of information research, and then attempts to design information technologies which can support the encountering of serendipity in cyberspace. The whole PhD project is organised with two parts. The first part investigates the nature of serendipity by conducting three user studies. After a systematic literature review on existing empirical studies of serendipity, the author finds there are research methodological problems in current studies; for example, the most widely used methods are those conventional ones like interview or survey, and it is mainly the subjective data that can be collected from participants. The author then conducted the first user study, which was an expert interview, where nine experts in the research area of serendipity were interviewed with a focus on the research methodological issues. This study successfully helped the author to gain a broader understanding of the advantages and disadvantages of employing different research methods in studying serendipity. Then the second user study, which was a diary-based study, was performed among a group of Chinese scholars with the aim to have a further investigation on the role of “context” played in the process of serendipity. The study lasted two weeks and successfully collected 62 serendipitous cases from 16 participants. The outcome of this study helped us with a better understanding of how these Chinese scholars experience serendipity, and a context-based research model was constructed, where the role of external context, social context and internal context were identified in detail during the process of serendipity. One interesting finding from the second user study is that emotions played a role in these participants’ experiencing serendipity, which was a part largely ignored by current serendipity researchers; therefore, the author conducted the third user study with the main objective to find out the impact of emotions during serendipitous encountering. This study first employed electrodermal activity (EDA) device to test participants’ psychological signals during the process of serendipity, which was implemented through a self-developed algorithm and the algorithm was embedded through a “Wizard of Oz” approach in a sketch game. The results of the study show that participants are more possible to experience serendipity under the influence of positive emotions and/or with skin conductance responses (SCRs). The second part of the PhD project is the application of serendipity through recommendation technology. A recommender system is an important area that practises serendipity in the digital world, as users in today’s society are no longer satisfied with “accurate” recommendations, and they aim to be recommended with the information that is more serendipitous and interesting to them. However, a review of existing studies on serendipitous recommendation, I have found that the inspiring achievements of understanding the nature of serendipity from information science failed to gain attention by researchers in the area of recommender systems. I then developed a new serendipitous recommendation algorithm by adopting the theory of serendipity from information research and implemented the algorithm in a real data set. The algorithm was implemented in Movielens, which involves 138,493 users with about 20,000,263 ratings across 27,278 movies. The evaluation of the algorithm was conducted in a sub-dataset, which consists of 855,598 ratings from 2,113 users on 10,197 movies. The developed algorithm was compared with another two widely used collaborative filtering algorithms (user-based collaborative filtering and item-based collaborative filtering), and the results demonstrated the developed algorithm is more effective in recommending “unexpected” and “serendipitous” movies to users. A post user study on twelve movie scholars showed that these participants were possible to experience serendipity when they were recommended with movies under the developed algorithm; and compared to user-based collaborative filtering, these participants were more willing to follow the recommended use by the serendipitous algorithm

Improving Crowded Object Detection via Copy-Paste

Crowdedness caused by overlapping among similar objects is a ubiquitous challenge in the field of 2D visual object detection. In this paper, we first underline two main effects of the crowdedness issue: 1) IoU-confidence correlation disturbances (ICD) and 2) confused de-duplication (CDD). Then we explore a pathway of cracking these nuts from the perspective of data augmentation. Primarily, a particular copy-paste scheme is proposed towards making crowded scenes. Based on this operation, we first design a "consensus learning" method to further resist the ICD problem and then find out the pasting process naturally reveals a pseudo "depth" of object in the scene, which can be potentially used for alleviating CDD dilemma. Both methods are derived from magical using of the copy-pasting without extra cost for hand-labeling. Experiments show that our approach can easily improve the state-of-the-art detector in typical crowded detection task by more than 2% without any bells and whistles. Moreover, this work can outperform existing data augmentation strategies in crowded scenario.Comment: Accepted by AAAI202

Synthesis of Porous NiO and ZnO Submicro- and Nanofibers from Electrospun Polymer Fiber Templates

Porous nickel oxide (NiO) and zinc oxide (ZnO) submicro- and nanofibers were synthesized by impregnating electrospun polyacrylonitrile (PAN) fiber templates with corresponding metal nitrate aqueous solutions and subsequent calcination. The diameter of the NiO and ZnO fibers was closely related to that of the template fibers and larger diameters were obtained when using the template fibers with larger diameter. SEM results showed that the NiO and ZnO fibers have a large amount of pores with diameters ranging from 5 nm to 20 nm and 50 nm to 100 nm, respectively. Energy dispersive X-ray (EDX) spectra and X-ray diffraction (XRD) patterns testified that the obtained materials were NiO and ZnO with high purity

A Review of Research Methodologies Employed in Serendipity Studies in the Context of Information Research

Background: The concept of serendipity has become increasingly interesting for those undertaking serendipity research in recent years. However, serendipitous encounters are subjective and rare in a real-world context, making this an extremely challenging subject to study. Methods: Various methods have been proposed to enable researchers to understand and measure serendipity, but there is no broad consensus on which methods to use in different experimental settings. A comprehensive literature review was first conducted, which summarizes the research methods being employed to study serendipity. It was followed by a series of interviews with experts that specified the relative strengths and weaknesses of each method identified in the literature review, in addition to the challenges usually confronted in serendipity research. Results: The findings suggest using mixed research methods to produce a more complete picture of serendipity and contribute to the verification of any research findings. Several challenges and implications relating to empirical studies in the investigation of serendipity have been derived from this study. Conclusions: This paper investigated research methods employed to study serendipity by synthesizing finding from a literature review and the interviews with experts. It provides a methodological contribution to serendipity studies by systematically summarizing the methods employed in the studies of serendipity and identifying the strengths and weakness of each method. It also suggests the novel approach of using mixed research methods to study serendipity. This study has potential limitations related to a small number of experts involved in the expert interview. However, it should be noted that the nature of the topic is a relatively focused area, and it was observed after interviewing the experts that new data seems to not contribute to the findings owing to its repetition of comment