5,764 research outputs found
A hermeneutic inquiry into user-created personas in different Namibian locales
Persona is a tool broadly used in technology design to support communicational interactions between designers and users. Different Persona types and methods have evolved mostly in the Global North, and been partially deployed in the Global South every so often in its original User-Centred Design methodology. We postulate persona conceptualizations are expected to differ across cultures. We demonstrate this with an exploratory-case study on user-created persona co-designed with four Namibian ethnic groups: ovaHerero, Ovambo, ovaHimba and Khoisan. We follow a hermeneutic inquiry approach to discern cultural nuances from diverse human conducts. Findings reveal diverse self-representations whereby for each ethnic group results emerge in unalike fashions, viewpoints, recounts and storylines. This paper ultimately argues User-Created Persona as a potentially valid approach for pursuing cross-cultural depictions of personas that communicate cultural features and user experiences paramount to designing acceptable and gratifying technologies in dissimilar locales
Thresholds for Extreme Orientability
Multiple-choice load balancing has been a topic of intense study since the
seminal paper of Azar, Broder, Karlin, and Upfal. Questions in this area can be
phrased in terms of orientations of a graph, or more generally a k-uniform
random hypergraph. A (d,b)-orientation is an assignment of each edge to d of
its vertices, such that no vertex has more than b edges assigned to it.
Conditions for the existence of such orientations have been completely
documented except for the "extreme" case of (k-1,1)-orientations. We consider
this remaining case, and establish:
- The density threshold below which an orientation exists with high
probability, and above which it does not exist with high probability.
- An algorithm for finding an orientation that runs in linear time with high
probability, with explicit polynomial bounds on the failure probability.
Previously, the only known algorithms for constructing (k-1,1)-orientations
worked for k<=3, and were only shown to have expected linear running time.Comment: Corrected description of relationship to the work of LeLarg
Detecting Floating-Point Errors via Atomic Conditions
This paper tackles the important, difficult problem of detecting program inputs that trigger large floating-point errors in numerical code. It introduces a novel, principled dynamic analysis that leverages the mathematically rigorously analyzed condition numbers for atomic numerical operations, which we call atomic conditions, to effectively guide the search for large floating-point errors. Compared with existing approaches, our work based on atomic conditions has several distinctive benefits: (1) it does not rely on high-precision implementations to act as approximate oracles, which are difficult to obtain in general and computationally costly; and (2) atomic conditions provide accurate, modular search guidance. These benefits in combination lead to a highly effective approach that detects more significant errors in real-world code (e.g., widely-used numerical library functions) and achieves several orders of speedups over the state-of-the-art, thus making error analysis significantly more practical. We expect the methodology and principles behind our approach to benefit other floating-point program analysis tasks such as debugging, repair and synthesis. To facilitate the reproduction of our work, we have made our implementation, evaluation data and results publicly available on GitHub at https://github.com/FP-Analysis/atomic-condition.ISSN:2475-142
Towards Design Principles for Data-Driven Decision Making: An Action Design Research Project in the Maritime Industry
Data-driven decision making (DDD) refers to organizational decision-making practices that emphasize the use of data and statistical analysis instead of relying on human judgment only. Various empirical studies provide evidence for the value of DDD, both on individual decision maker level and the organizational level. Yet, the path from data to value is not always an easy one and various organizational and psychological factors mediate and moderate the translation of data-driven insights into better decisions and, subsequently, effective business actions. The current body of academic literature on DDD lacks prescriptive knowledge on how to successfully employ DDD in complex organizational settings. Against this background, this paper reports on an action design research study aimed at designing and implementing IT artifacts for DDD at one of the largest ship engine manufacturers in the world. Our main contribution is a set of design principles highlighting, besides decision quality, the importance of model comprehensibility, domain knowledge, and actionability of results
An artificial life approach to studying niche differentiation in soundscape ecology
Artificial life simulations are an important tool in the study of ecological
phenomena that can be difficult to examine directly in natural environments.
Recent work has established the soundscape as an ecologically important
resource and it has been proposed that the differentiation of animal
vocalizations within a soundscape is driven by the imperative of intraspecies
communication. The experiments in this paper test that hypothesis in a
simulated soundscape in order to verify the feasibility of intraspecies
communication as a driver of acoustic niche differentiation. The impact of
intraspecies communication is found to be a significant factor in the division
of a soundscape's frequency spectrum when compared to simulations where the
need to identify signals from conspecifics does not drive the evolution of
signalling. The method of simulating the effects of interspecies interactions
on the soundscape is positioned as a tool for developing artificial life agents
that can inhabit and interact with physical ecosystems and soundscapes.Comment: 9 pages, 4 figures, The 2019 Conference on Artificial Lif
Choreographies with Secure Boxes and Compromised Principals
We equip choreography-level session descriptions with a simple abstraction of
a security infrastructure. Message components may be enclosed within (possibly
nested) "boxes" annotated with the intended source and destination of those
components. The boxes are to be implemented with cryptography. Strand spaces
provide a semantics for these choreographies, in which some roles may be played
by compromised principals. A skeleton is a partially ordered structure
containing local behaviors (strands) executed by regular (non-compromised)
principals. A skeleton is realized if it contains enough regular strands so
that it could actually occur, in combination with any possible activity of
compromised principals. It is delivery guaranteed (DG) realized if, in
addition, every message transmitted to a regular participant is also delivered.
We define a novel transition system on skeletons, in which the steps add
regular strands. These steps solve tests, i.e. parts of the skeleton that could
not occur without additional regular behavior. We prove three main results
about the transition system. First, each minimal DG realized skeleton is
reachable, using the transition system, from any skeleton it embeds. Second, if
no step is possible from a skeleton A, then A is DG realized. Finally, if a DG
realized B is accessible from A, then B is minimal. Thus, the transition system
provides a systematic way to construct the possible behaviors of the
choreography, in the presence of compromised principals
Catching up with Method and Process Practice: An Industry-Informed Baseline for Researchers
Software development methods are usually not applied by the book.companies are under pressure to continuously deploy software products that meet market needs and stakeholders\u27 requests. To implement efficient and effective development processes, companies utilize multiple frameworks, methods and practices, and combine these into hybrid methods. A common combination contains a rich management framework to organize and steer projects complemented with a number of smaller practices providing the development teams with tools to complete their tasks. In this paper, based on 732 data points collected through an international survey, we study the software development process use in practice. Our results show that 76.8% of the companies implement hybrid methods.company size as well as the strategy in devising and evolving hybrid methods affect the suitability of the chosen process to reach company or project goals. Our findings show that companies that combine planned improvement programs with process evolution can increase their process\u27 suitability by up to 5%
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