186,221 research outputs found
Machine agency in Human-Machine networks; impacts and trust implications
No full textWe live in an emerging hyper-connected era in which people are in contact and interacting with an increasing number of other people and devices. Increasingly, modern IT systems form networks of humans and machines that interact with one another. As machines take a more active role in such networks, they exert an increasing level of influence on other participants. We review the existing literature on agency and propose a definition of agency that is practical for describing the capabilities and impact human and machine actors may have in a human-machine network. On this basis, we discuss and demonstrate the im-pact and trust implications for machine actors in human-machine networks for emergency decision support, healthcare and future smart homes. We maintain that machine agency not only facilitates human to machine trust, but also inter-personal trust; and that trust must develop to be able to seize the full potential of future technology
The Interplay between human and machine agency
No full textHuman-machine networks affect many aspects of our lives: from sharing experiences with family and friends, knowledge creation and distance learning, and managing utility bills or providing feedback on retail items, to more specialised networks providing decision support to human operators and the delivery of health care via a network of clinicians, family, friends, and both physical and virtual social robots. Such networks rely on increasingly sophisticated machine algorithms, e.g., to recommend friends or purchases, to track our online activities in order to optimise the services available, and assessing risk to help maintain or even enhance people’s health. Users are being offered ever increasing power and reach through these networks by machines which have to support and allow users to be able to achieve goals such as maintaining contact, making better decisions, and monitoring their health. As such, this comes down to a synergy between human and machine agency in which one is dependent in complex ways on the other. With that agency questions arise about trust, risk and regulation, as well as social influence and potential for computer-mediated self-efficacy. In this paper, we explore these constructs and their relationships and present a model based on review of the literature which seeks to identify the various dependencies between them
Business process risk management and simulation modelling for digital audio-visual media preservation
No full textDigitised and born-digital Audio-Visual (AV) content presents new challenges for preservation and Quality Assurance (QA) to ensure that cultural heritage is accessible for the long term. Digital archives have developed strategies for avoiding, mitigating and recovering from digital AV loss using IT-basedsystems, involving QA tools before ingesting files into the archive and utilising file-based replication to repair files that may be damaged while in the archive. However, while existing strategies are effective for addressing issues related to media degradation, issues such as format obsolescence and failures in processes and people pose significant risk to the long-term value of digital AV content. We present a Business Process Risk management framework (BPRisk) designed to support preservation experts in managing risks to long-term digital media preservation. This framework combines workflow and risk specification within a single risk management process designed to support continual improvement of workflows. A semantic model has been developed that allows the framework to incorporate expert knowledge from both preservation and security experts in order to intelligently aid workflow designers in creating and optimising workflows. The framework also provides workflow simulation functionality, allowing users to a) understand the key vulnerabilities in the workflows, b) target investments to address those vulnerabilities, and c) minimise the economic consequences of risks. The application of the BPRisk framework is demonstrated on a use case with the Austrian Broadcasting Corporation (ORF), discussing simulation results and an evaluation against the outcomes of executing the planned workflow
SNS-based eParticipation and cloud computing - a consideration of the issues raised
No full textSocial Networking Systems provide a significant opportunity for governmental policy-makers by allowing them to interact directly with citizens, for example by stimulating new discussions or participating in conversations that are already underway so as to gauge public opinion on a proposal. Because Social Networks are already widely adopted, they provide potential for a much wider citizen base than specialist eParticipation platforms. The WeGov project is building a software toolkit to help policy-makers make effective use of SNSs by stimulating debates, identifying hot and emerging topics and picking out influential individuals or clusters of sentiment. The data storage and processing requirements of these features are significant, and third-party Cloud Computing presented itself as an option to meet them in a way that would be affordable to cash-strapped public-sector organisation. However despite the popularity of Cloud Computing services in the business IT world, concerns about data protection and privacy led us to conclude that political conversations harvested from SNS networks could not legally and ethically be entrusted to such services at the current time. This paper presents our analysis and offers some recommendations to Cloud Providers that we believe must be adopted if the potential of the technology as an economical platform for eParticipation is to be realised
The effects of ageing and visual field loss on pointing to visual targets
No full textPurpose: To investigate the effect of ageing on visuomotor function and subsequently evaluate the effect of visual field loss on such function in older adults. Methods: Two experiments were performed: 1) to determine the effect of ageing on visual localisation and subsequent pointing precision, and 2) to determine the effect of visual field loss on these outcome measures. For Experiment 1, we measured visual localisation and pointing precision radially at visual eccentricities of 5, 10 and 15u in 25 older (60–72 years) and 25 younger (20–31 years) adults. In the pointing task, participants were asked to point to a target on a touchscreen at a natural pace that prioritised accuracy of the touch. In Experiment 2, a subset of these tasks were performed at 15u eccentricity under both monocular and binocular conditions, by 8 glaucoma (55–76 years) and 10 approximately agematched controls (61–72 years). Results: Visual localisation and pointing precision was unaffected by ageing (p.0.05) and visual field loss (p.0.05), although movement time was increased in glaucoma (p = 0.01). Conclusion: Visual localisation and pointing precision to high contrast stimuli within the central 15u of vision are unaffected by ageing. Even in the presence of significant visual field loss, older adults with glaucoma are able perform such tasks with reasonable precision provided the target can be perceived and movement time is not restricted.Nikki J. Rubinstein, Andrew J. Anderson, Anna Ma-Wyatt, Mark J. Walland, Allison M. McKendric
Author-wise bibliometric analysis based on entropy.
No full textAuthor-wise bibliometric analysis based on entropy.</p
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
No full textThe 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
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
No full textWe 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
Pollen profile HOPEFARM, Hope farm Walland marsh, United Kingdom
No full textThis dataset was archived on 2014-09-12 from the EPD database (http://www.europeanpollendatabase.net)
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