Publikationer från Stockholms universitet
Not a member yet
31237 research outputs found
Sort by
Sign Language as Augmentative and Alternative Communication Intervention to Increase Expressive Language Outcomes in Children with Autism: : A Scoping-Review
No full textMany children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) deviate from expected milestones in terms of speech and language development. While some may develop adequate communication skills, others have limited functional communication. In Sweden, children with ASD are often referred to habilitation centers and commonly evaluated by a speech-language therapist (SLP) to identify a suitable augmentative and alternative communication (AAC). A commonly used AAC is sign language, an early intervention offered by habilitation centers. However, there is a lack of consensus and clarity regarding for whom and how signs are taught most effectively. This scoping review aimed to identify factors that may affect a child with ASD's ability to acquire sign language as part of an intervention. Another aim was to identify aspects that can increase understanding and support SLPs in deciding for what children and in which forms they can recommend sign language as an intervention. A systematic search was conducted of studies published between 1994 and 2024 using the following electronic databases: ERIC, CINAHL, MEDLINE, and PsycINFO. Only twelve studies, primarily conducted in the US, met the inclusion criteria. Findings revealed that most studies identified hand-motor imitation as a potential prerequisite of importance for using sign language as an AAC. The results also indicate that professionals should consider several aspects when recommending, selecting, and implementing signs as part of an AAC intervention. Besides selecting signs through preference assessment, the type of signs is also important. Specifically, signs that refer to specific objects and actions and signs with high iconicity and resemblance to the actual object or action they describe can facilitate the acquisition of sign language. An unexpected finding was that most children (85%) had ASD, only 11% also had an intellectual disability, and all but one (N = 26) were male
Ecological literacy as becoming-with through fieldwork : Exploring practices for ecology education
No full textThis thesis is about fieldwork in ecology education. We live in a troubled era of ecological breakdown and as we witness the effects of the climate crises and the loss of biodiversity, questions of education are brought to the fore. The aim of the thesis is to empirically and theoretically investigate what ecological fieldwork does and what significance ecological fieldwork can have for ecological literacy. Research on ecological literacy includes ecological and socio-political knowledge, awareness of environmental issues, environmentally responsible behaviours, cognitive skills (scientific inquiry and analysis), and affect. Occasionally, critical aspects and holistic and spiritual components are included. Research on fieldwork ecology education highlights the importance of place, opportunities for slow explorations, emotional experiences, the inevitably unpredictable nature of the field, and aesthetic dimensions. New materialist and posthumanist perspectives have had a major impact in research on children’s encounters with other species. I extend these perspectives to older learners and highlight the role of materiality in fieldwork as central to the growth of ecological literacy. The dissertation contributes to the conceptualisation and understanding of ecological literacy and the scope of ecological literacy is broadened to include material relational aspects. The theoretical framework is non-anthropocentric, relational and process oriented. Theoretical positions and analytical concepts of mainly Donna Haraway and Bruno Latour are employed for understanding encounters with other organisms and materiality in ecological fieldwork. The overarching research questions are: How do students establish relationships with other species and non-living things in ecological fieldwork? How are relationships significant for ecological literacy in education?The study is ethnographically inspired and based on researcher participation in two educational fieldwork settings in Sweden. The first study is of an upper secondary school nature guide course. Two teachers and a student group overnight in a nature reserve to experience black grouse lekking and the ecology of a bog. The second is of a folk high school course focusing on sustainability and nature connectedness. This one-year part-time course had outdoor gatherings arranged around different themes one weekend a month. The empirical material consists of video and audio recordings from both locations with a focus on nonhuman–human encounters and relationships. The results show that fieldwork provides opportunities for students to encounter nonhumans in a way that is not possible in a classroom. The practicality of the fieldwork foregrounds the actual nonhuman–human encounters, and the notion of ecological literacy is reformulated and expanded to include a practice of becoming-with grounded in relational materialism. The results can be used to further explore how fieldwork education practices can be developed to acknowledge nonhuman–human relational aspects and to incorporate emotions along the whole register. Contemplative practices and serious playfulness may work as educational means and contribute to emotional fieldwork events. Education must offer spaces for learners to explore and tell new stories of becoming-with, about living in a shared complex world in which grief, loss and suffering are entangled with joy and wonder
Vem analyserar – AI eller eleven? : En kvalitativ studie om lärares syn på elevers AI-användning och dess påverkan på litteraturundervisningen och bedömningspraktiker
No full textDenna studie undersöker svensklärares uppfattningar om elevers användning av artificiell intelligens (AI) i litteraturundervisningen och hur detta påverkar deras bedömningspraxis. Syftet är att förstå de pedagogiska och etiska konsekvenserna som AI medför samt hur dessa hanteras av svensklärare. Studiens teoretiska ramverk består av två perspektiv: litteraturundervisningens värde, som innefattar olika teorier om litteraturens roll och potential att bilda samt utveckla elever, och bedömningspraxis, som erbjuder en förståelse för lärarnas handlingsutrymme och strategier i komplexa och föränderliga utbildningsmiljöer. Med en kvalitativ ansats genomfördes semistrukturerade intervjuer med två svensklärare på gymnasiet. Genom en tematisk innehållsanalys identifierade två huvudsakliga teman: AI i litteraturundervisningen och bedömningspraxis. Resultaten visar att elever ofta använder AI, såsom Chat GPT, för att undvika läsning och analys, vilket enligt lärarna hämmar kritiskt tänkande och fördjupad förståelse. De två lärarna har utformat nödvändiga anpassningar i sin undervisning och bedömning för att motverka AI-användningen, men upplever att dessa förändringar inte stödjer litteraturundervisningens pedagogiska syften. Studien ger en fördjupad förståelse för AI:s påverkan på litteraturundervisningen och lyfter fram behovet av framtida forskning kring detta fenomen, särskilt i relation till bedömning
IT Governance Influence on Digital Transformation
No full textDigital transformation has become a strategic imperative for incumbent companies facing digital disruptions, regulatory changes, competition from digital-born firms, and evolving customer behavior. However, many organizations fail to fully realize its potential due to governance-related challenges. Traditional information technology (IT) governance mechanisms are often seen as insufficient in the digital era, prompting the need for more agile and adaptive approaches. This research investigates how ambidextrous IT governance mechanisms influence digital transformation and organizational performance, focusing on large Indonesian banking and insurance companies. The study offers five main contributions: (1) identifying IT governance mechanisms that influence digital transformation through a systematic literature review; (2) validating and contextualizing these mechanisms for the Indonesian financial sector through expert consensus, a case study, and surveys; (3) demonstrating the positive influence of ambidextrous IT governance mechanisms on organizational performance, fully mediated by digital transformation; (4) providing seven key ambidextrous IT governance mechanisms for successful digital transformation, drawn from the case of a leading Indonesian bank; and (5) proposing a framework of prioritized actions to help Indonesian banking and insurance companies establish IT governance mechanisms that support successful digital transformation. Together, these contributions enrich the knowledge base by identifying essential ambidextrous IT governance mechanisms that influence digital transformation and organizational performance. Additionally, the study offers practical implications for banking and insurance companies embarking on digital transformation journeys
Education and Other Journeys : The Self, the Other and Stanley Cavell’s Moral Perfectionism
No full textThis dissertation has two aspirations. The first one is to highlight specific problems in education and trace their philosophical roots. It points out a tendency in the way we think about and approach education to see it in terms of its instrumental goal rather than its meaning and place in our lives. This approach renders education a reductive and customised concept that exists for the achievement of certain assumed and predetermined ends. To fulfil these ends, educational planning principles rely on assumptions that defuse the complexity of the human experience and overlook the concept of the other. This thesis argues that these problems, which are the reliance on fixed ends and the dismissal of the notion of the other, have roots in the Western philosophical grounding of education. The second aspiration is to present the concept of education as a journey: an alternative non-instrumental approach to education based on Stanley Cavell’s concept of Emersonian Moral Perfectionism. It is an approach that views education as a perpetual, open-ended journey of growth and transcendence that we embark upon together with the other. Through overcoming the notion of fixed ends and placing the other in a neighbouring position on the same level as the self, education as a journey illuminates a way out of the aforementioned problems of education. It does so by, first and foremost, focusing on changing the way we think about and coexist with the concept of education, before we start to consider solutions and applications. Through exploring Cavellian ideas like nonconformity, romanticism, justice, lostness and the ordinary, this dissertation explores the perfectionist concept of education as a journey. This dissertation concludes by suggesting that this journey is always taken on a vehicle of hope: a hope, especially for those who feel powerless, silenced, unseen or unheard in education systems, that it is possible to navigate the difficult condition of education. Embarking on this journey is a process of planting a seed of gradual and soft revolutionary change—a process of finding hardness in the soft and power in the invisible and silent
A comprehensive characterisation of natural aerosol sources in the high Arctic during the onset of sea ice melt
No full textThe interactions between aerosols and clouds are still one of the largest sources of uncertainty in quantifying anthropogenic radiative forcing. To reduce this uncertainty, we must first determine the baseline natural aerosol loading for different environments. In the pristine and hardly accessible polar regions, the exact nature of local aerosol sources remains poorly understood. It is unclear how oceans, including sea ice, control the aerosol budget, influence cloud formation, and determine the cloud phase. One critical question relates to the abundance and characteristics of biological aerosol particles that are important for the formation and microphysical properties of Arctic mixed-phase clouds. Within this work, we conducted a comprehensive analysis of various potential local sources of natural aerosols in the high Arctic over the pack ice during the ARTofMELT expedition in May–June 2023. Samples of snow, sea ice, seawater, and the sea surface microlayer (SML) were analysed for their microphysical, chemical, and fluorescent properties immediately after collection. Accompanied analyses of ice nucleating properties and biological cell quantification were performed at a later stage. We found that increased biological activity in seawater and the SML during the late Arctic spring led to higher emissions of fluorescent primary biological aerosol particles (fPBAPs) and other highly fluorescent particles (OHFPs, here organic-coated sea salt particles). Surprisingly, the concentrations of ice nucleating particles (INPs) in the corresponding liquid samples did not follow this trend. Gradients in OHFPs, fPBAPs, and black carbon indicated an anthropogenic pollution signal in surface samples especially in snow but also in the top layer of the sea ice core and SML samples. Salinity did not affect the aerosolisation of fPBAPs or sample ice nucleating activity. Compared to seawater, INP and fPBAP concentrations were enriched in sea ice samples. All samples showed distinct differences in their biological, chemical, and physical properties, which can be used in future work for an improved source apportionment of natural Arctic aerosol to reduce uncertainties associated with their representation in models and impacts on Arctic mixed-phase clouds
A Literature Review on Challenges of Generative AI-powered Phishing Attacks in Cybersecurity
No full textPhishing attacks are a big problem in our society as the number of attacks is rapidly increasing every year. With the development of generative artificial intelligence, the attackers are getting access to new tools that help them improve their attack strategies and at the same time make them harder to detect. The most common example of such tool is ChatGPT, which can both be manipulated to bypass it is security limitations and used to create powerful attacks such as vishing, improved data breaches and deep fakes. Complete research is limited on how different aspects of generative arti- ficial intelligence-powered phishing attacks interplay with each other and how it affects the cybersecurity field. Therefore, this paper examines the challenges that result from the adaptation of generative artificial intelligence- powered phishing attacks. This work also uncovers which of these chal- lenges are the most prevalent by performing a systematic literature review. A total of 44 articles were selected after a systematic search and screened to help uncover and answer the research question posed in this work, to then get compiled and analyzed through a thematic synthesis and narra- tive analysis. The results were compiled into 12 themes, which further got categorized into 5 modules: Efficiency, Social Engineering and Deception, Vector for Advanced Attacks, Exploitation of GenAI systems and Attacker- Defender Arms Race. The results showed how the adaptation of generative artificial intelligence allows attackers to launch complex phishing attacks with the help of prompt engineering and other types of generated attacks, at greater efficiency than previously seen. This forces defenders to match their technological advancements, often by integrating generative artificial intelligence themselves. This results in an arms-race between the attack- ers and defenders, posing new threats and challenges being prevalent at a higher pace than before
CNN Architecture Comparison for Malware Classification with Limited Training Data
No full textTraditional malware classification methods struggle to keep pace with rapidly evolving threats. Image-based malware classification offers a promising alternative by converting malware binaries into grayscale images for analysis with deep learning. While effective, organizations often face practical constraints in acquiring sufficient training data, especially for newer threats. This thesis investigates dual-path CNN architectures with intermediate feature fusion as a potential enhancement for malware classification, with particular focus on how varying training data size affects their comparative performance against traditional single-path approaches. This research implements and compares two models: a baseline single-path using the pre-trained VGG16 architecture and a dual-path model that combines VGG16 with a custom CNN through intermediate feature fusion. Both architectures are evaluated on a binary classification task distinguishing between two malware families (C2Lop.P trojan and Dialplatform.B worm) from the Malimg dataset. Each model is trained across four different training data proportions (20%, 40%, 60%, and 80%), with three training runs per size to ensure statistical robustness, while being evaluated on complementary test sets of varying sizes. Though both architectures achieved perfect classification performance across all training percentages, the study revealed significant differences in secondary metrics including training efficiency, robustness to noise perturbation, and architectural complexity. By systematically comparing these architectures under varying data constraints, this thesis contributes insights into the practical tradeoffs between architectural complexity and performance. The findings challenge common assumptions about complex architectures, demonstrating that simpler models can offer superior efficiency and robustness without sacrificing classification performance in image-based malware analysis
