1,721,062 research outputs found
Social Palimpsests - clouding the lens of the personal panopticon
Full text linkThe use of personal data has incredible potential to benefit both society and individuals through increased understanding of behaviour, communication and support for emerging forms of socialisation and connectedness. However, there are risks associated with disclosing personal information, and present systems show a systematic asymmetry between the subjects of the data and those who control and manage the way that data is propagated and used. This leads to a tension between a desire to engage with online society and enjoy its benefits on one hand, and a distrust of those with whom the data is shared on the other. In this chapter, we explore a set of obfuscation techniques which may help to redress the balance of power when sharing personal data, and return agency and choice to users of online services
Provenance Composition in PROV
Full text linkWhen two communicating processes each record their own provenance,what extra information needs to be recorded in order that a satisfactoryaccount can be given, of the combined process? We propose a setof requirements on (i) the kind of information that the processes can shareand (ii) the kind of queries that should be answerable from the combinedprovenance graph. We describe a solution using PROV
Prototyping with uncertainties : data, algorithms, and research through design
Full text linkSeen both as a resource and an obstacle to clarity, uncertainty is a concept that permeates many areas of design. As the concept gains prominence in HCI, this special issue specifically explores the interplay between uncertainty and prototyping in Research through Design (RTD). We first outline three histories of uncertainty in design, in relation to its philosophical significance, its role in statistical and algorithmic processes, and its importance in prototyping. The convergence of these aspects is crucial as design evolves towards more agentive and entangled systems, introducing challenges such as Design As A Probabilistic Outcome. We then investigate the design spaces for engaging with ‘being uncertain’ that emerge from the papers: from nuancing the relationship between designers and quantitative data to blurring the line between humans, fungi, and algorithms. Finally, we illuminate some preliminary threads for how RtD can navigate and engage with these shifting technological and design landscapes thoughtfully.</p
Privacy by obfuscation with personal data management architectures: possibilities and constraints
No full textIn this position paper, we discuss legal and technical aspects of protecting privacy using Personal Data Management Architectures (PDMAs), which include, but are not limited to Personal Data Stores and Personal Information Management Services. We argue that providing false information on occasion is a common strategy online and offline for people to protect their privacy and determine their representation in the world, and we discuss some empirical findings to that effect. We describe a potential, and technically-feasible, ecosystem of digital practices and technologies to facilitate this practice, and consider what legal frameworks would be required to support i
Spatial Robotic Experiences as a Ground for Future HRI Speculations
Full text linkThis work illustrates how artistic robotic systems can provide a reservoir of unfamiliarity and a basis
for speculation, to open the field toward new ways of thinking about HRI. We reflect on a collaborative project between design students, a media art studio, and design researchers working with the baggage handling department of the Schiphol airport. Engaging with the industrial context, we developed ‘meta-behaviours’ - abstracted ideas of processes carried out on the worksite–and passed these over to the students who translated them into robotic enactions using a predefined hardware developed by the media art studio. The resulting visit experience challenges the audience to
decode the installation in terms of meta-behaviours and their possible relations to industrial HRI. We used this to reflect on the value of conducting artistic and speculative work in HRI and to distill actionable recommendations for future research
Computationally mediated pro-social deception
No full textDeception is typically regarded as a morally impoverished choice. However, in the context of increasingly intimate, connected and ramified systems of online interaction, manipulating information in ways that could be considered deceptive is often necessary, useful, and even morally justifiable. In this study, we apply a speculative design approach to explore the idea of tools that assist in pro-social forms of online deception, such as those that conceal, distort, falsify and omit information in ways that promote sociality. In one-on-one semi-structured interviews, we asked 15 participants to respond to a selection of speculations, consisting of imagined tools reifying particular approaches to deception. Participants reflected upon potential practical, ethical, and social implications of the use of such tools, revealing a variety of ways such tools might one day encourage polite behaviour, support individual autonomy, provide a defence against privacy intrusions, navigate social status asymmetries, and even promote more open, honest behaviour
First International Workshop on Worker-Robot Relationships: Exploring Transdisciplinarity for the Future of Work with Robots
Full text linkIn Industry 5.0, cognitive robots and workers will engage in evolving and reciprocal relations, which we call worker-robot relationships (WRRs). To enable evidence-based work futures with workers, we must co-develop WRRs and understand their impact on work, workers, management, and society. To this end, we posit that the HRI field should work beyond disciplines and include value-driven and plural perspectives through transdisciplinary research done with and for workers. However, WRRs and transdisciplinarity pose unique technical, design, and methodological challenges yet to be explored. We propose a workshop to engage the HRI community working on Industry 5.0, aiming at 1) taking stock of current WRR-related challenges in relevant disciplines, 2) collectively kick-off the exploration of a joint research agenda, 3) preliminary examining if and how transdisciplinarity could help the HRI community, and 4) start discussing how to deal with such complex knowledge integration in practice
Social media narratives in non-communicable disease: their dynamics and value for patients, communities and health researchers
Full text linkBackground: Usage of social media is now widespread and growing, as is the number of people living with Non-Communicable Diseases (NCDs) such as diabetes and cancer. This thesis examines how social media are being used to share or discuss NCDs and the benefits, challenges and implications of these trends as a manifestation of digital public health.
Aim and research questions: The aim of this research is to address the gap in empirical, evidence-based research into the secondary use of data from social media to understand patient health issues and inform public health research into NCDs. To this end, seven research questions, each linked to a sub-project, were defined and tested during the course of the six-year programme:
1.What is the status of the existing multi-disciplinary research literature based on analysis of data posted on social media for public health research, and where are the gaps in this research?
2.Can existing systematic review methods be re-purposed and applied to analyse data posted on social media?
3.How are research sponsors and researchers addressing the ethical challenges of analysing data posted on social media?
4.To what extent are diabetes-related posts on Twitter relevant to the clinical condition and what topics and intentions are represented in these posts?
5.In what ways do people affected by Type 1 diabetes use different social media (e.g. for social interaction, support-seeking, information-sharing) and what are the implications for researchers wishing to use these data sources in their studies?
6.Are these differences in platform usage and associated data types also seen in people affected by lung cancer?
7.Can characteristic illness trajectories be seen in a cancer patient’s digital narrative and what insights can be gained to inform palliative care services?
Methods: A range of different qualitative and quantitative methods and frameworks were used to address each of the research questions listed. Arksey and O’Malley’s five-stage scoping review framework and the PRISMA guidelines are applied to the systematic scoping review of existing literature. The PRISMA guidelines and checklist are re-purposed and applied to the manual extraction and analysis of social media posts. Bjerglund-Andersen and Söderqvist’s typology of social media uses in research and Conway’s taxonomy of ethical considerations are used to classify the ethics guidelines available to researchers. The findings of these were used to inform the research design of the four empirical studies.
The methods applied in the conduct of the empirical studies include a content and narrative analysis of cross-sectional and longitudinal data sourced from Twitter, Facebook, the Type 1 diabetes discussion forum on Diabetes.co.uk and the lung cancer discussion forum on Macmillan.org.uk, as well as the application of Bales’ Interaction Process Analysis and Emanuel and Emanuel’s framework for a good death.
Results
: Of the 49 systematic, quasi-systematic and scoping reviews identified, 24 relate to the secondary use of data from social media, with eight of these focused on infectious disease surveillance and only two on NCDs. Existing reviews tend to be fragmented, narrow in scope and siloed in different academic communities, with limited consideration of the different types of data, analytical methods and ethical issues involved, therefore creating a need for further reviews to synthesise the emerging evidence-base.
The rapid increase in the volume of published research is evident, from the results of RQ1, with 87% of the eligible studies published between 2013-2017. Of the 105 eligible empirical studies that focused on NCDs, cancer (54%) and diabetes (20%) dominate the literature. Data is sourced from Twitter (26%), Facebook (14%) and blogs (10%), conducted, published and funded by the medical community. Since 2012, automated methods have increasingly been applied to extract and analyse large volumes of data.
Those that use manual methods for extraction did not apply a consistent approach to doing so; the PRISMA guidelines and checklist were therefore re-purposed and applied to analyse data extracted from social media in response to RQ2. The deficit of ethical guidance available to inform research that involves social media data was also identified as a result of RQ3 and the guidelines provided by the ESRC, BPS, AoIR and NIHR were prioritised for the purposes of this research project.
Results from the four empirical studies (RQ4-7) reveal that different forms of social interaction and support are represented in the variety of social media platforms available and that this is influenced by the type and nature of the condition with which people are affected, as well as the affordances offered by such platforms.
In the pilot study associated with RQ4, Twitter was identified as a ‘noisy’ source of data about diabetes, with only 66% of the sample being relevant to the clinical condition. Twelve per cent of the eligible sample was associated with Type 2 diabetes, compared to 6% for Type 1, and most were information-giving in nature (49%) and correlated with the diagnosis, treatment and management of the condition (44%).
A comparison of Twitter to the Type 1 Diabetes community on Facebook and the discussion forum on Diabetes.co.uk for RQ5 indicated that all three social media platforms were used to disseminate information about the condition. However, the Type 1 Diabetes Group on Facebook and the Type 1 discussion forum on Diabetes.co.uk were also used for social interaction and peer support, hence defying the generalisations made in public health studies, where social media platforms were often considered equal or synonymous.
The results from the third empirical study into lung cancer (RQ6) support this, indicating that, by virtue of their digital architecture, user base and self-moderating communities, the Lung Cancer Support Group on Facebook and the lung cancer discussion forum on Macmillan.org.uk are more successful in their utility for social interaction and emotional and informational support. Meanwhile, the sample derived from Twitter hashtags showed greater companionship support.
The final empirical study in this PhD research project is associated with RQ7 and used longitudinal data posted by a terminally ill patient on Twitter. This revealed that patient activity on social media mirrors the different phases of the end-of-life illness trajectory described in the literature and that it is comparable to or compliments insights garnered using more traditional qualitative research techniques. It also shows the value of such innovative methods for understanding how terminal disease is experienced by and affects individuals, how they cope, how support is sought and obtained and how patients feel about the ability of palliative care services to meet their needs at different stages.
Conclusions: The analysis of health data posted on social media continues to be an expanding and evolving field of multi-disciplinary research. The results of the studies included in this thesis reveal the emergence of new methods and ethical considerations to inform research design as well as ethics policy. The re-purposed PRISMA guidelines and checklist were presented at the 2014 Medicine 2.0 Summit and World Congress whilst the review of ethical guidelines was published in the Research Ethics journal.
The four empirical studies that extracted and analysed data from social media provide novel insight into the social narratives of those impacted by diabetes and cancer and can be used to inform future research and practice. The results of these studies have, to date, been presented at four international conferences and published in npj Digital Medicine and BMC Palliative Care.
Although this thesis and associated publications contribute to an emerging body of knowledge, further research is warranted into the manual versus automated techniques that can be applied and the differences in social interaction and support needed by people affected by different NCDs
Scenarios of shifts in GEnS bioclimate strata based on CIMP5 climate change scenarios for 2050
No full textThis dataset provides an alternative representation of global climate change projections based on shifts in the 125 multivariate strata of the Global Environmental Stratification (Metzger et al. 2013), which are characterised by relatively homogeneous climate. These strata form climate analogues that help in the interpretation of climate change impacts. A Random Forest classifier was calculated and applied to 63 Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 5 (CMIP5) climate scenarios at 5 arcmin resolution. The dataset summarises future environmental change for 2050 and forms a middle ground, conveniently integrating current knowledge of climate change impact with the interpretation advantages of categorical data but with a level of detail that resembles a continuous surface at global and regional scales.Metzger, Marc J; Soteriades, Andreas D; Trabucco, Antonio; Murray-Rust, Dave. (2017). Scenarios of shifts in GEnS bioclimate strata based on CIMP5 climate change scenarios for 2050, 2000-2017 [dataset]. The University of Edinburgh. Edinburgh DataShare https://doi.org/10.7488/ds/200
(Un)making AI Magic: A Design Taxonomy
Full text linkThis paper examines the role that enchantment plays in the design of AI things by constructing a taxonomy of design approaches that increase or decrease the perception of magic and enchantment. We start from the design discourse surrounding recent developments in AI technologies, highlighting specific interaction qualities such as algorithmic uncertainties and errors and articulating relations to the rhetoric of magic and supernatural thinking. Through analyzing and reflecting upon 52 students’ design projects from two editions of a Masters course in design and AI, we identify seven design principles and unpack the effects of each in terms of enchantment and disenchantment. We conclude by articulating ways in which this taxonomy can be approached and appropriated by design/HCI practitioners, especially to support exploration and reflexivity
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