Consider the construction of a perspective drawing. The perspective is made by drawing lines between a point of origin and several focal points. A series of lines connect the focal points to one another. The culmination of lines drawn from origin to focal point and focal point to focal point describes a place. The perspective is a view, or window into this place. The relationship of these three elements - the origin, focal points, and view - is analogous to the development of a architectural project. The origin is a point of beginning. Each architect brings a set of experiences and ideas to the project. The project springs from the architects' knowledge and ideals. The focal points involve the design development of a project. They relate to the areas of study and discovery for the project. Some foci are specific to a site or program. Some foci further investigate design intentions and how they relate to a given program. The links between foci create a place. Each drawing or description of this place is a view into the project. This thesis outlines the origins, focal points and views of a design for a visitors' center located in southwestern Virginia. / Master of Architecture

This thesis is an investigation of architecture in terms of its importance to individual and cultural understanding of context and belonging. Architecture should be viewed as more than a mark on the landscape; it is a critical element of identity enabled through a continuous process of discovery, learning, and growth as a function of sensory perception. The project used to illustrate this thesis is the Roanoke Catholic School at the crest of St. Andrew's Hill in Roanoke, Virginia. St. Andrew's Roman Catholic Church serves as an important landmark in the city; therefore, the new school must contribute to the site and enhance the presence of the church as viewed by the residents of Roanoke. Likewise, the design of a private school which accommodates grades pre-Kindergarten through 12, provided the opportunity to show how the built environment may reflect varying needs of students as they grow, intellectually and physically, and the development of a sense of community in the school. Architecture becomes an active participant in the lives of people both inside and outside of its specific content. / Master of Architecture

Research on the autonomic specificity of emotion has spanned several decades. Even though considerable evidence exists for supporting autonomic specificity for discrete emotion states (Kreibig, 2010), there is still an active debate, and conflicting explanations, for these findings (Quigley and Barrett, 2014). There have been several studies employing multivariate pattern classification analytic techniques and calls for those types of studies are still prevalent (Kragel and LaBar, 2014). Although many studies have explored the autonomic specificity of emotions, few have explored what effects the induction methods, themselves, have had in inducing the autonomic change. Autonomic specificity of induction methods might be a meaningful, and confounding, phenomenon in this literature. Based on this unknown variable, the current experiment was designed to see if methods for emotion elicitation could be meaningfully captured by these same pattern classification techniques. This was accomplished using three separate emotion-elicitation methods to elicit five separate emotions. A sample of 64 college-aged students watched film clips, read imagery scripts, and recalled personal memories for five discrete emotions. Using discriminant analysis, the evidence from the current study lent less support for autonomic specificity of emotion than past experiments, and lends some support for providing future exploration into autonomic change that is related to methods for induction. Potential confounds and task fatigue effects are discussed. / Ph. D.

Modern operating systems allow users to organize and refind information using many contextual keys such as timestamps, content, custom tags, origin and even location. As humans naturally engage in activities with people and groups of people, we want to investigate how we can use the context of people's social interactions to support information archiving and refinding. Past research has tracked and used remote, social interactions through email communication; this work will concentrate on using physical, social interactions (i.e., face-to-face) to support information archiving and refinding. Research questions include: (1) How do we effectively associate one's information with one's social world? (2) How do we design a user interface that supports refinding information based on social contexts? and (3) How does our approach (i.e., system) affect the users information archiving and refinding practices? This dissertation presents results from two user studies, exploring two refinding systems. The first, longitudinal study examines three participants using a custom refinding tool that tags information based on the people physically present with the user. Our second, diary-driven study examines a refinding tool that integrates information activity with a person's calendar. Our contributions are threefold: (1) an exploration of adding physical social interactions as contextual keys for information archiving and refinding (2), an examination of two user interface designs that enable users to refind information through their physical-social interactions (i.e., people and groups), and (3), a diary-driven methodology for studying realistic refinding behaviors while reducing participant interruptions. / Ph. D.

Today's technology is becoming more interactive with voice assistants like Siri. However, interactive systems such as Siri make mistakes. The purpose of this thesis is to explore using affect as an implicit feedback channel so that such mistakes would be easily corrected in real time. The CAfFEINE Framework, which was created by Dr. Saha, is a context-aware affective feedback loop in an intelligent environment. For the research described in this thesis, the focus will be on analyzing a user's physiological response to the service provided by an intelligent environment. To test this feedback loop, an experiment was constructed using an on-screen, step-by-step assembly guide for a Tangram puzzle. To categorize the user's response to the experiment, baseline readings were gathered for a user's stressed and non-stressed state. The Paced Stroop Test and two other baseline tests were conducted to gather these two states. The data gathered in the baseline tests was then used to train a support vector machine to predict the user's response to the Tangram experiment. During the data analysis phase of the research, the results for the predictions on the Tangram experiment were not as expected. Multiple trials of training data for the support vector machine were explored, but the data gathered throughout this research was not enough to draw proper conclusions. More focus was then given to analyzing the pre-processed data of the baseline tests in an attempt to find a factor or group of factors to determine if the user's physiological responses would be useful to train the Support Vector Machine. There were trends found when comparing the area under the curves of the Paced Stroop Test phasic driver plots. It was found that these comparison factors might be a useful approach for differentiating users based upon their physiological responses during the Paced Stroop Test. / Master of Science / The purpose of this thesis was to use the CAfFEINE Framework, proposed by Dr. Saha, in a real-world environment. Dr. Saha's Framework utilizes a user's physical responses, i.e. heart rate, in a smart environment to give information to the smart devices. For example, if Siri were to give a user directions to someone's home and told that user to turn right when the user knew they needed to turn left. That user would have a physical reaction as in their heart rate would increase. If the user were wearing a smart watch, Siri would be able to see the heart rate increase and realize, from past experiences with that user, that the information she gave to the user was incorrect. Then she would be able to correct herself. My research focused on measuring user reaction to a smart service provided in a real-world situation using a Tangram puzzle as a mock version of an industrial assembly situation. The users were asked to follow on-screen instructions to assemble the Tangram puzzle. Their reactions were recorded through a smart watch and analyzed post-experiment. Based on the results of a Paced Stroop Test they took before the experiment, a computer algorithm would predict their stress levels for each service provided by the step-by-step instruction guide. However, the results did not turn out as expected. Therefore, the rest of the research focused more on why the results did not support Dr. Saha's previous Framework results.

The union of electronics and textiles to form electronic textiles (e-textiles) provides a promising substrate upon which motion analysis applications can be developed and implemented. Familiarity with clothing allows sensors and computational elements to be naturally integrated into garments such that wearability and usability is preserved. The dynamics of the human body and the wide variety of sensor and processing choices render the typical prototype-based design methodology prohibitively difficult and expensive. Simulation of e-textile systems not only reduces these problems but allows for thorough exploration of the design space, faster design cycles, and more robust applications. Gait analysis, the measurement of various body motion parameters during walking for medical purposes, and context awareness, the recognition of user motions, are two immediate applications that e-textiles can impact and emphasize the feasibility of e-textiles as a medium for sensor deployment on the human body. This thesis presents the design of a simulation environment for wearable e-textile systems and demonstrates the use of the simulation via a prototype pair of e-textile pants. / Master of Science

This thesis is an investigation into the role of architecture as a tool for connections. It explores this idea in four scales: the urban scale, the immediate context, the scale of the building and the interpersonal scale. Architecturally, it addresses the complexities of an intervention in an urban fabric and embraces the contextual it is an attempt to reanimate the core of Downtown Roanoke, through the adaptive reuse of an inert built mass by opening it up to put it in conversation with its surroundings. Programmatically, it responds to a collaborative transient workspace catering to individual entrepreneurs or small groups of independent start-up enthusiasts or simply mobile workers. The thesis focuses on connections as the language through which these stories find their expression. / Master of Architecture

Societal knowledge about issues faced by transgender and gender-diverse individuals has increased; however, the field of forensic anthropology has struggled to keep abreast with ever-evolving perceptions of sex and gender. Specifically, forensic anthropology lacks a codified approach to identifying transgender decedents due to binary assigned sex estimation methods that lack a biocultural approach and divergent perspectives on the role of gender. Using an anonymous survey of forensic anthropologists (n=130), the present research explores the processes of biological profile deployment in forensic casework, along with current perspectives on sex and gender and associated methods, language, and reporting. Regarding the role of gender in casework, most (51.5%) believe identifying gender improves the odds of identification, and many (40.8%) would include such information in a forensic anthropological report, with 59.0% uncertain about testifying to gender. Additionally, 55.4% of respondents report that skeletal sex estimation does not represent a decedent’s gender, and most would cite signs of gender-affirming surgery (59.2%) or material evidence (47.7%) for use in reporting gender despite uncertainties about Daubert compliance (38.5%). Regarding terminology, respondents prefer “sex” (52.3%) or “biological sex” (34.6%) over other arguably more apt descriptors such as “assigned sex” (19.2%). While forensic anthropologists acknowledge the need for clarity in gender-inclusive definitions and mostly maintain that skeletal sex is not equivalent to gender, further studies for a truly biocultural forensic anthropology should focus on the role of sequential evidentiary unmasking and material evidence alongside assigned skeletal sex analyses.

Temporal context memory is a type of episodic memory that refers to memory for the timing of events. Temporal context includes environmental cues that provide information about the time point at which an event happened. The purpose of the present studies is to investigate the brain mechanisms underlying temporal context processing by using both fMRI and ERP techniques. The fMRI study investigated whether hippocampal representations in CA1 and DG/CA3 subfields were sensitive to the flow of physical time, and if so, whether the number of events that occur during a time period influences the temporal representation of a target event. Results showed that both CA1 and DG/CA3 were sensitive to the flow of physical time, which was indicated by higher representational similarity between two pictures that occurred closer in time than those that occurred more distant in time. However, the variety of preceding events did not influence temporal representation, which was demonstrated by the lack of a significant representational similarity difference between two pictures that were interleaved with variable events as opposed to similar events. The ERP study compared the ERP correlates of temporal to spatial context. Results showed that temporal and spatial contexts had overlapping ERP effects except that the ERP effects of temporal context were more frontally distributed than spatial context. Both the fMRI and ERP studies indicate that temporal context is associated with similar neural correlates to other types of context in episodic memory. / Ph. D. / Episodic memory is memory for where and when an event happened. The ability to memorize the timing of events relies on one type of episodic memory: temporal context memory. Temporal context includes environmental cues that provide information about the time point at which an event happened. The purpose of the present studies was to investigate the brain mechanisms underlying temporal context processing by using both functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and event and event-related potential (ERP) techniques. The fMRI study focused on hippocampus, one of the key brain regions process non-temporal contexts (i.e. spatial context, which refers to where an event happened), and investigated which subfields (CA1 and DG/CA3) in the hippocampus were sensitive to the flow of physical time. And the second purpose of the fMRI study was to examine whether the variety of events that occur during a time period influences the temporal representation. Results showed that both CA1 and DG/CA3 were sensitive to the flow of physical time. However, the variety of events did not influence temporal representation. Since CA1 and DG/CA3 are also critical for non-temporal context processing, these results indicate that temporal context has same neural mechanisms as non-temporal contexts. The ERP study investigated the brain activity as a whole and directly compared the ERP correlates of temporal to non-temporal context. Results showed that temporal and nontemporal contexts had overlapping ERP correlates except that the ERP effects of temporal context were more frontally brain region distributed than spatial context. Therefore, both the fMRI and ERP studies indicate that temporal context is associated with similar neural correlates to other types of context in episodic memory.

Yes / This article examines a ‘deprived’ UK community to identify how (dis)connections between context and enterprise are produced within accounts of a particular locality. We used a discursive psychological approach to examine how the community depicted itself as a context for enterprise. Our analysis identified three discursive repertoires mobilised by a range of voices in the community which combined to portray an unenterprising community and create a conceptual deadlock for enterprise. We suggest it is too deterministic to assume context is fixed and controls the potential for entrepreneurial development. Instead, we should consider social practices, including talk, that help construct the contexts in which entrepreneurship is expected to occur. / The research resorted in this article was funded by an Economic and Social Research Council studentship.