Os profissionais em design de exposição, em sua responsabilidade enquanto projetistas devem pensar sobre como desenvolver sistemas e/ou recursos para fruição artística que atendam a pessoas com deficiência visual, incluindo a forma como uma pessoa totalmente habilitada utiliza este objeto/ambiente. Assim, apresenta-­‐se a pesquisa intitulada Design para experiência multissensorial em museus: fruição de objetos culturais por pessoas com deficiência visual. Seu objetivo é propor os requisitos para o projeto e desenvolvimento de recursos multimodais táteis e sonoros para fruição de objetos culturais pelo usuário com deficiência visual em museus, segundo uma abordagem integrada com base no design para a experiência. Para tanto busca-­‐se referências em áreas como o Design para Experiência e Design Emocional, Museologia, Fabricação Digital, Comunicação Acessível, Semiótica Social e Multimodalidade, entre outros. O embasamento metodológico ampara-­‐se nas abordagens de pesquisa qualitativa e pesquisa aplicada para coleta e análise de dados referente a aferição da experiência do usuário. Assim, são empregadas as técnicas de observação direta, entrevistas e Engenharia Kansei para caracterizar e compreender as experiências dos sujeitos da pesquisa, bem como para compreender os processos de desenvolvimento e os materiais para produção de recursos para acessibilidade em museus e sua consequente avaliação. A verificação do trabalho ocorreu no Museu de Porto Alegre – Joaquim Felizardo. Os requisitos de projeto para promoção da experiência multissensorial por pessoas com deficiência visual validaram a hipótese elencada em resposta ao problema de pesquisa. Além dos requisitos de projeto, chegou-­‐se a novos instrumentos para o auxílio no projeto de recursos de acessibilidade, tal como: metodologia proposta para o desenvolvimento de recursos multimodais táteis e sonoros segundo uma abordagem integrada; diretrizes para o desenvolvimento de recursos táteis e sonoros para pessoas com deficiência visual em museus; instrumento para o relacionamento de elementos táteis e sonoros segundo uma abordagem integrada; e, instrumento para avaliação da experiência pelo usuário por meio de escalas de diferencial semântico. / Professionals in exhibition design, in their responsibility as designers should think about how to develop systems and/or resources for artistic fruition that meets the visually impaired, including how a fully qualified person uses this object/environment. Thus, presents this research entitled Design for multisensory experience in museums: fruition of cultural objects by visually impaired people. This aims to propose the requirements for the design and development of tactile and audible multimodal resources for the fruition of cultural objects by the users with visual impairment in museums, in an integrated approach based on the design for the experience. Therefore look for references in areas as the Design for Experience and Emotional Design, Museology, Digital Manufacturing, Affordable Communication, Social Semiotics and Multimodality, among others. The methodological basis employs the qualitative research approaches and applied research for data collection and analysis concerning user experience’s. Thus, use of the techniques of direct observation, interviews and Kansei Engineering to characterize and understand the experiences of research subjects, as well as understand the development of processes and materials for the production of resources for accessibility in museums and their consequent evaluation. The work of verification took place at the Museum of Porto Alegre -­‐ Joaquim Felizardo. The project requirements elected for the promotion of multisensory experience for the visually impaired validated the hypothesis in response to the research problem. In addition to the project requirements, came to new tools to aid in the project of accessibility resources, such as: proposed methodology for the development of tactile and audible multimodal resources through an integrated approach; guidelines for the development of tactile and sound resources for visually impaired people in museums; instrument for the relationship of tactile and sound elements through an integrated approach; and, tool for evaluation of the experience by the user by semantic differential scales.

Det finns ett behov inom vårdsektorn att på ett mera effektivt sätt kunna bedöma om patienter med Parkinsons sjukdom har rätt medicinering. Behovet ligger i att se om det är möjligt att med hjälp av ett IT-system kunna göra bedömningen på distans och på så sätt effektivisera processen.I och med att Parkinsonpatienter har symptom som t.ex. överrörlighet är inte traditionella lösningar med styrenheter såsom mus och tangentbord lämpliga. Istället har ett användargränssnitt baserat på multimodal interaktion utformats, där användaren interagerar med systemet genom röststyrning och rörelseigenkänning.Detta har gjorts med hjälp av Microsofts Kinect kamera, som är ett verktyg som möjliggör bredare och mer betydelsefull multimodal interaktion mellan människa och dator. Design av gränssnittet har gjorts efter etablerade designprinciper där användbarhet har legat i fokus. Även empiriska undersökningar har genomförts för att skapa en bredare förståelse för hur ett gränssnitt bör utformas för att bli användbart.Resultatet visar att grundprinciperna för ett användbart gränssnitt är väldigt lika oavsett om interaktionen sker på ett traditionellt sätt eller genom nyare teknik som t.ex. röst- och rörelsestyrning. Nyckelaspekter är att systemet ska vara effektivt, lätt att lära sig och förstå, samt att fel ska hanteras på ett korrekt sätt.Utifrån teorin och de empiriska undersökningarna har ett antal riktlinjer tagits fram för utformning av ett användbart multimodalt gränssnitt. Teorierna har även testats mot verkligheten genom en prototyp som använder sig av röst- och rörelsestyrning. / Program: Systemvetarutbildningen

During the past decade, there has been a growing disgust in Thailand with opposition to eating dogs in Asia and activists have unitedly with organizations encouraged the Thai government to adopt stricter animal rights laws in order to prevent the illegal dog meat trade. One of these organizations is the Thai animal welfare organization Soi Dog Foundation (SDF), that has also contributed with a controlled dog population on the Thai island Phuket and officially made it the first rabies free province in Thailand. Since SDF is solely volunteer and donations based it becomes relevant to examine the reasons behind their success as a non-governmental and nonprofit organization in a third world country. The thesis’s speculations regarding SDF’s historical development aims to help SDF and other NGOs in Asia that share the same goals streamline their marketing. This paper is a bachelor’s thesis including a minor field study in Thailand. It is a qualitative study with empirical observation and participation that analyzes SDF’s social marketing strategies. The study also includes a multimodal analysis of the focus organization’s materials fighting the illegal dog-meat trade and smuggling. The chosen materials are published during the beginning and end of the recent decade and are examined in order to determine which semiotic and multimodal tools they have used throughout this time period to spread awareness of the phenomenon. It is also examined whether SDF composes their texts and structures their materials differently depending on the target group. The research questions are answered with the help of semiotics and analytical tools from the systematic-functional grammar method. It will be briefly analyzed whether SDF attempts to build emotional appeals into their materials with the help of a model called ‘emotional branding’. The thesis’s approach to the analysis of SDF’s communication planning is based on the contingency approach, which implies that it takes variating methods in order to achieve a goal. The Four C’s model will be used in this study when discussing strategies NGOs can use to cooperate or create the desired relationship with their nation’s government. The agenda setting theory is implemented in order to examine SDF’s social marketing strategies. The results of this thesis show that SDF has adapted their materials to the ideal layout structures in modern time throughout the decade and frequently adapts them to their culturally variating target groups. The analysis also displays that the organization uses multiple strategies consisting of multiple minor steps in order to reach a certain goal. Results imply that SDF and other NGOs should focus on social media and their relation to the public, in order to eventually affect the majority public opinion and influence the government laws regarding animal rights.

Multimodal systems can represent and manipulate semantics from different human communication modalities at different levels of abstraction, in which multimodal integration is required to integrate the semantics from two or more modalities and generate an interpretable output for further processing. In this work, we develop a framework pertaining to automatic cross-modality semantic integration of multimodal user interactions using speech and pen gestures. It begins by generating partial interpretations for each input event as a ranked list of hypothesized semantics. We devise a cross-modality semantic integration procedure to align the pair of hypothesis lists between every speech input event and every pen input event in a multimodal expression. This is achieved by the Viterbi alignment that enforces the temporal ordering and semantic compatibility constraints of aligned events. The alignment enables generation of a unimodal paraphrase that is semantically equivalent to the original multimodal expression. Our experiments are based on a multimodal corpus in the navigation domain. Application of the integration procedure to manual transcripts shows that correct unimodal paraphrases are generated for around 96% of the multimodal inquiries in the test set. However, if we replace this with automatic speech and pen recognition transcripts, the performance drops to around 53% of the test set. In order to address this issue, we devised the hypothesis rescoring procedure that evaluates all candidates of cross-modality integration derived from multiple recognition hypotheses from each modality. The rescoring function incorporates the integration score, N-best purity of recognized spoken locative references (SLRs), as well as distances between coordinates of recognized pen gestures and their interpreted icons on the map. Application of cross-modality hypothesis rescoring improved the performance to generate correct unimodal paraphrases for over 72% of the multimodal inquiries of the test set. / We have also performed a latent semantic modeling (LSM) for interpreting multimodal user input consisting of speech and pen gestures. Each modality of a multimodal input carries semantics related to a domain-specific task goal (TG). Each input is annotated manually with a TG based on the semantics. Multimodal input usually has a simpler syntactic structure and different order of semantic constituents from unimodal input. Therefore, we proposed to use LSM to derive the latent semantics from the multimodal inputs. In order to achieve this, we characterized the cross-modal integration pattern as 3-tuple multimodal terms taking into account SLR, pen gesture type and their temporal relation. The correlation term matrix is then decomposed using singular value decomposition (SVD) to derive the latent semantics automatically. TG inference on disjoint test set based on the latent semantics achieves accurate performance for 99% of the multimodal inquiries. / Hui, Pui Yu. / Adviser: Helen Meng. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 73-02, Section: B, page: . / Thesis (Ph.D.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2010. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 294-306). / Electronic reproduction. Hong Kong : Chinese University of Hong Kong, [2012] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Electronic reproduction. [Ann Arbor, MI] : ProQuest Information and Learning, [201-] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Abstract also in Chinese.

Parmi les diverses méthodes d’imagerie médicales, les méthodes d’imagerie optique connaissent depuis une vingtaine d’années un développement significatif. Parmi les techniques d’imagerie optique récemment mises en œuvre, la Tomographie Optique Cohérente Plein Champ – ou OCT Plein Champ – présente des caractéristiques remarquables, en particulier en termes de résolution et de simplicité instrumentale, permettant d’envisager son application au domaine du diagnostic du cancer. Cette thèse décrit la conception et la mise en œuvre de dispositifs d’OCT Plein Champ pour utilisation en contexte clinique, afin d’évaluer la performance de la technique pour le diagnostic peropératoire du cancer, en vue de son amélioration et optimisation. Dans cet objectif nous avons réalisé des travaux regroupés en 2 axes : Une partie translationnelle, consistant à développer un dispositif de microscopie optique par OCT Plein Champ répondant au besoin clinique pour le diagnostic peropératoire du cancer sur biopsies, en vue de l’évaluation de ses performances de diagnostic sur plusieurs problématiques cliniques : le diagnostic peropératoire du tissu mammaire, de résection de cerveau, ainsi que la qualification préopératoire de greffons cornéens. Une partie exploratoire, principalement instrumentale, dédiée à l’amélioration des performances de diagnostic de la technique, proposant de nouvelles approches multimodales (contraste de fluorescence, contraste dynamique) et multi-échelles, ou encore la déclinaison du dispositif sous la forme d’un endoscope rigide portable utilisable en contexte clinique. / Among medical imaging techniques, optical imaging methods have been significantly developped during the past decades. More specifically, among recently proposed optical imaging techniques, Full-Field Optical Coherence Tomography – or FFOCT – provides unique capabilities, in particular regarding resolution and instrumental simplicity, which allows to consider its application to cancer diagnosis. This thesis demonstrates the design and implementation of new FFOCT devices for use in a clinical context, targeting improvement and optimization of the technique. Two major development parts have been realized : A translational part, comprising the development of a FFOCT microscope adapted to a clinical use for intraoperative diagnosis of cancer on tissue biopsies, and the assessment of its diagnosis performance for several clinical cases : the intraoperative diagnosis of breast tissue, of brain resections, and the preoperative qualification of corneal grafts. A research part - mainly instrumental - targeting the improvement of the diagnosis performance of the technique, based on new multimodal (fluorescence contrast, dynamic contrast) and multiscale approaches, or on the miniaturization of the device by developing a handheld rigid endoscope for clinical use.

A profusão de textos multimodais presentes na sociedade contemporânea demanda, da escola, um trabalho mais aprofundado no que diz respeito ao letramento multissemiótico. No caso dos adultos, muitas vezes provenientes de uma educação acidentada e com pouco contato com a cultura digital, o desenvolvimento do letramento multissemiótico configura-se não só como uma necessidade acadêmica, mas também profissional e social. Sendo assim, o objetivo geral desta tese foi verificar em que medida a criação de infográficos pode contribuir para o letramento multissemiótico de alunos jovens e adultos. O estudo desenvolvido entre os anos de 2010 e 2013, compoem-se de uma revisão teórica acerca de temas como: letramento e alfabetização, letramento multissemiótico, aprendizagem ao longo da vida, infográficos, pedagogia do letramento multissemiótico e atividades do tipo writing-to-learn; e de uma pesquisa realizada no âmbito do Programa Mulheres Mil. A análise dos infográficos criados evidenciou a presença de elementos indicativos de letramento multissemiótico, bem como da competência comunicativa das alunas. As atividades de resolução de problemas, realizadas antes e depois do curso, mostraram que houve um avanço no letramento das alunas, uma vez que elementos de design que não apareciam na atividade desenvolvida antes do curso puderam ser notados na atividade pós-curso. Também pode-se perceber uma correlação entre elementos utilizados no infográfico e presentes na atividade de resolução de problemas ocorrida após o curso. Com relação ao Prezi, a avaliação das alunas mostrou que esta é uma ferramenta de fácil compreensão e aprendizagem, podendo ser utilizada em ações de letramento junto a alunos com pouco conhecimento de informática. Complementar a estas análises, foi feita uma análise estatística dos questionários de autoavaliação, onde foram utilizados dois testes: o t de Student e o effect size. Os resultados do teste t de Student mostraram que houve uma diferença estatisticamente significante entre os resultados dos questionários aplicados antes e depois do curso. O teste de effect size mostrou que o maior impacto foi na dimensão das atividades ligadas à criação de textos multimodais, evidenciando que a criação de infográficos com o uso do Prezi ensejou o letramento multissemiótico das alunas. / The profusion of multimodal texts presents on the cotemporaneous society requests a more profound effort from schools regarding multimodal literacy. For adults, especially those that had a meager education with little access to the digital culture, the development of the multimodal literacy configure itself, not only as an academic necessity, but also as a professional and social need. Thus, the main purpose of this thesis is to investigate in which degree the creation of infographics can assist the multimodal literacy of youth and adults. The study carried between the years 2010 and 2013, was based in a theoretical revision about: literacy, multimodal literacy, lifelong learning, infographics, pedagogy of multimodal literacy and writing-to-learn activities; and also from a research held under the Mulheres Mil Program. The analysis of the infographics produced showed the presence of indicative elements of multimodal literacy, and also the communicative competence of the students. The activities involving the resolution of problems, performed before and after the course, indicated that there were some progress on the literacy of the students, since that the elements of design that didn’t exist in the activities before the course, were present after it. It could also be noticed a correlation between the elements used in the infographics and those present in the resolution of problems that occurred after the course. Regarding the Prezi, the assessment of the students exposed that this is a mechanism easy to understand and learn, and that it can also be used in literacy actions together with the students that possess little knowledge in computers. In addition to these studies, a statistical analysis of the auto evaluation survey was performed, and two tests were utilized: the Student's t and the effect size. The results of the Student's t tests revealed a significant statistically change among the results of the questionnaires applied before and after the course. The effect size test revealed that the deepest impact was at the dimension of those activities related to the development of multimodal texts, showing that the creation of infographics using Prezi resulted in the multimodal literacy of the students.

This study is conducted due the fact that politicians has started to perform in more celebrated forms of politics. For instance, through Margaux Dietz YouTube-series Partitempen, where all the Swedish party leaders attended. The purpose of the study is to examine the phenomenon celebrity politics, personalization and gender on the social media platform YouTube and how it takes expression in Partitempen. A qualitative approach is applied to the study, and the method used to answer the research questions is a conversation analysis and partly a multimodal method. The result of the study shows that celebrity politics and personalization are visible in the programs of Partitempen. It is also clear that there are both similarities and differences in the questions asked to the female respectively to the male party leaders.

The aim of this study is to analyze the functional beverage NOCCO’s Instagram account. The purpose is to expose how they use discourses of health and fitness in their marketing. In particular we analyze the social actors in the pictures. The theories in this study is based on a social semiotic theory of communication and an assumption that we live in The new public health era. The method applied is a qualitative multimodal critical discourse analysis (MCDA). The study examines how the social actors are used for marketing purposes, how they are represented in the pictures and in which settings they are placed in. The results shows that NOCCO uses discourses of health and exercise in their marketing on Instagram. NOCCO appears as a healthy product due to its association with exercise and fit social actors.

The aim of this study is to analyze how homosexuality is represented in the modern tv-series Riverdale (2016-). Two confirmed homosexual characters from the show, Kevin Keller and Cheryl Blossom have been used to examine this. To showcase how their homosexuality is represented a multimodal discourse analysis was conducted. The method was used to analyze 34 scenes from varying episodes of the currently available three seasons. Queer theory was used as a theoretical point of departure in the study of the characters sexuality. Findings of the analysis shows that Kevin often withers down to stereotype of being a feminine and comedic gay best friend. Cheryl on the other hand is shown being more than just a stereotype but however noticeably lacking in sexual relations with her same-sex partner. Comparisons with previous studies was further used to see how homosexuality is constructed in the show. Through the comparison similar representation could be found from previous gay characters in terms of stereotypes and roles. The study showed however that Cheryl and Kevin’s depiction in the show was noticeably more positive.

Background: Measures of central tendency are one of the foundational concepts of statistics, with the most commonly used measures being mean, median, and mode. While these are all very simple to calculate when data conform to a unimodal symmetric distribution, either discrete or continuous, measures of central tendency are more challenging to calculate for data distributed asymmetrically. There is a gap in the current statistical literature on computing median and mode for most skewed unimodal continuous distributions. For example, for a standardized normal distribution, mean, median, and mode are all equal to 0. The mean, median, and mode are all equal to each other. For a more general normal distribution, the mode and median are still equal to the mean. Unfortunately, the mean is highly affected by extreme values. If the distribution is skewed either positively or negatively, the mean is pulled in the direction of the skew; however, the median and mode are more robust statistics and are not pulled as far as the mean. The traditional response is to provide an estimate of the median and mode as current methodological approaches are limited in determining their exact value once the mean is pulled away. Methods: The purpose of this study is to test a new statistical method, utilizing the first order and second order partial derivatives in Taylor series expansion, for approximating the median and mode of skewed unimodal continuous distributions. Specifically, to compute the approximated mode, the first order derivatives of the sum of the first three terms in the Taylor series expansion is set to zero and then the equation is solved to find the unknown. To compute the approximated median, the integration from negative infinity to the median is set to be one half and then the equation is solved for the median. Finally, to evaluate the accuracy of our derived formulae for computing the mode and median of the skewed unimodal continuous distributions, simulation study will be conducted with respect to skew normal distributions, skew t-distributions, skew exponential distributions, and others, with various parameters. Conclusions: The potential of this study may have a great impact on the advancement of current central tendency measurement, the gold standard used in public health and social science research. The study may answer an important question concerning the precision of median and mode estimates for skewed unimodal continuous distributions of data. If this method proves to be an accurate approximation of the median and mode, then it should become the method of choice when measures of central tendency are required.