1,720,960 research outputs found

    A user-centered approach to artificial sensory substitution for blind People assistance"egalitarian" approach for special users

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    Artificial sensory substitution plays a crucial role in different domains, including prosthetics, rehabilitation and assistive technologies. The sense of touch has historically represented the ideal candidate to convey information on the external environment, both contact-related and visual, when the natural action-perception loop is broken or not available. This is particularly true for blind people assistance, in which touch elicitation has been used to make content perceivable (e.g. Braille text or graphical reproduction), or to deliver informative cues for navigation. However, despite the significant technological advancements for what concerns both devices for touch-mediated access to alphanumeric stimuli, and technology- enabled haptic navigation supports, the majority of the pro- posed solutions has met with scarce acceptance in end users community. Main reason for this, in our opinion, is the poor involvement of the blind people in the design process. In this work, we report on a user-centric approach that we successfully applied for haptics- enabled systems for blind people assistance, whose engineering and validation have received significant inputs from the visually-impaired people. We also present an application of our approach to the design of a single-cell refreshable Braille device and to the development of a wearable haptic system for indoor navigation. After a summary of our previous results, we critically discuss next avenues and propose novel solutions for touch-mediated delivery of information for navigation, whose implementation has been totally driven by the feedback collected from real end-users

    Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis

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    The present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed

    Variations on the Author

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    “Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship

    Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis

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    We provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis

    On the Role of Lateral Force in Texture-Induced Motion Bias during Reaching Tasks

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    In the previous work, we reported that tactile information (tactile slip) during finger sliding and reaching actions over a textured surface contributes to the control of the hand movement. More specifically, we observed a significant bias in the motion trajectories, which was explained by the tactile estimate accounted by the tactile flow model-i.e. a perceived motion direction always perpendicular to the ridge orientation, and its integration with the muscular-skeletal proprioceptive cues. However, to which extent this observed behavior also depends on the reaction force exerted by the surface ridges on the finger pad during the dynamic interaction still represents a largely unexplored research question. If not properly addressed, this point could rise the alternative explanation that the systematic bias is determined by the insufficient compensation of the reaction force by participants. In this article, we investigate the role of the lateral component of the reaction force on the surface plane (lateral force) in texture-related motion bias. We asked participants to slide their finger straight on a lubricated ridged plate towards a target goal displayed in a virtual reality environment. They exerted two different levels of normal force, which produced two different levels of lateral force during the finger interaction with the ridges. The effect of ridge orientation was found to be larger for the high compared to the low force level. However, also in the latter case, we still observed the same biased trajectories reported in our previous work, despite the negligible value of the lateral force. This supports our hypothesis that the motor bias arises from the integration of the tactile motion estimate, biased by the texture, and the other proprioceptive cues

    Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts

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    We conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more sophisticated methods

    Author Index

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    koamabayili/VECTRON-author-checklist: VECTRON author checklist

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    We have done our best to complete the author checklist relating to the use of animals in the hut study. Note that the objective for the hut study was to evaluate the IRS treatment applications for residual efficacy against Anopheles mosquitoes, including the local An. coluzzii mosquito population. Cows were only used to attract mosquitoes into the huts and no tests were carried out directly on the cows. The author checklist is intended for use with studies where experiments are carried out on animals, which is why we have had such difficulty in completing this for the hut study, as many of the questions do not relate to how the cows were used
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