This dissertation documents a journey into the design of Ummeli with a community of semi-­‐literate job seekers in Khayelitsha, Cape Town whose primary access to the internet was through their mobile phones. Working closely with this community over many months, we developed Ummeli, a suite of tools that allow the user to build their CVs; browse and apply for employment and training opportunities; recommend and post jobs; get employment tips and connect to other job seekers. To design Ummeli, Ethnographic Action Research (EAR) was embraced, not as a methodology, but as a research approach, a foundation from which to incorporate participatory approaches to designing Information communication technologies for development (ICT4D). User Centered Design (UCD) was incorporated as a design approach. Ummeli was built by a combination of insights drawn from a lived-­‐in experience, and employing UCD informed methods of participatory design (PD). Here we employed Human Access Point (HAP) a form of PD that allows for a member of the community to be a proxy for the design process. Learn to Earn, an NGO based in Khayelitsha became the HAP, and took the critical role in that they, highlighted, translated, evaluated and represented what was most crucial for the community; their input allowed Ummeli to match the community’s need. In the process, we came across concepts such as Umqweno, which represents yearnings and desires, replacing our own perception systems requirements. Siyazenzela, representing a communal participatory approach to doing life; and Ubuntu, which captures the spirit behind Africa’s communal identity, which were all adopted into the original EAR framework. In this document we set out to demonstrate what it means to be a “reflective practitioner” as we adopted appropriated and reconfigured aspects of participatory UCD methods to fit culturally relevant contexts. The process allowed for constant reflections leading to “aha” moments. In the end, we had created Ummeli, with over 80,000 users, and developed Mediated Design, a culturally indoctrinated xii participatory approach to designing interactive system with and for semi-­‐literate people.

I have committed a significant period of time (in my case five years) to the purpose development of learning environments, with the belief that it would improve the self-actualisation and self-motivation of students and teachers alike. I consider it important to record and measure performance as we progressed toward such an outcome. Education researchers and practitioners alike, in the higher (university/tertiary) education systems, are seeking among new challenges to engage students and teachers in learning (James, 2001). However, studies to date show a confusing landscape littered with a multiplicity of interpretations and terms, successes and failures. As the discipline leader of the Information Technology, Systems and Multimedia (ITSM) Discipline, Swinburne University of Technology, Lilydale, I found myself struggling with this paradigm. I also found myself being torn between what presents as pragmatic student learning behaviour and the learner-centred teaching ideal reflected in the Swinburne Lilydale mission statement. The research reported in this folio reflects my theory and practice as discipline leader of the ITSM Discipline and the resulting learning environment evolution during the period 1997/8 to 2003. The study adds to the material evidence of extant research through firstly, a meta analysis of the learning environment implemented by the ITSM Discipline as recorded in peer reviewed and published papers; and secondly, a content analysis of student learning approaches, conducted on data reported from a survey of ‘learning skills inventory’ originally conducted by the ITSM Discipline staff in 2002. In 1997 information and communication technologies (ICT) were beginning to provide plausible means for electronic distribution of learning materials on a flexible and repeatable basis, and to provide answers to the imperative of learning materials distribution relating to an ITSM Discipline new course to begin in 1998. A very short time frame of three months was available prior to teaching the course. The ITSM Discipline learning environment development was an evolutionary process I began in 1997/8 initially from the requirement to publish print-based learning guide materials for the new ITSM Discipline subjects. Learning materials and student-to-teacher reciprocal communication would then be delivered and distributed online as virtual learning guides and virtual lectures, over distance as well as maintaining classroom-based instruction design. Virtual here is used to describe the use of ICT and Internet-based approaches. No longer would it be necessary for students to attend classes simply to access lecture content, or fear missing out on vital information. Assumptions I made as discipline leader for the ITSM Discipline included, firstly, that learning should be an active enterprise for the students, teachers and society; secondly, that each student comes to a learning environment with different learning expectations, learning skills and learning styles; and thirdly, that the provision of a holistic learning environment would encourage students to be self-actualising and self-motivated. Considerable reading of research and publications, as outlined in this folio, supported the update of these assumptions relative to teaching and learning. ITSM Discipline staff were required to quickly and naturally change their teaching styles and communication of values to engage with the emergent ITSM Discipline learning environment and pedagogy, and each new teaching situation. From a student perspective such assumptions meant students needed to move from reliance upon teaching and prescriptive transmission of information to a self-motivated and more self-actualising and reflective set of strategies for learning. In constructing this folio, after the introductory chaperts, there are two distinct component parts; • firstly, a Descriptive Meta analysis (Chapter Three) that draws together several of my peer reviewed professional writings and observations that document the progression of the ITSM Discipline learning environment evolution during the period 1997/8 to 2003. As the learning environment designer and discipline leader, my observations and published papers provide insight into the considerations that are required when providing an active, flexible and multi-modal learning environment for students and teachers; and • secondly, a Dissertation (Chapter Four), as a content analysis of a learning skills inventory data collection, collected by the ITSM Discipline in the 2002 Swinburne Lilydale academic year, where students were encouraged to complete reflective journal entries via the ITSM Discipline virtual learning guide subject web-site. That data collection included all students in a majority of subjects supported by the ITSM Discipline for both semesters one and two 2002. The original purpose of the journal entries was to have students reflectively involved in assessing their learning skills and approaches to learning. Such perceptions were tested using a well-known metric, the ‘learning skills inventory’ (Knowles, 1975), augmented with a short reflective learning approach narrative. The journal entries were used by teaching staff originally and then made available to researchers as a desensitised data in 2003 for statistical and content analysis relative to student learning skills and approaches. The findings of my research support a view of the student and teacher enculturation as utilitarian, dependent and pragmatically self-motivated. This, I argue, shows little sign of abatement in the early part of the 21st Century. My observation suggests that this is also independent of the pedagogical and educational philosophy debate or practice as currently presented. As much as the self-actualising, self-motivated learning environment can be justified philosophically, the findings observed from this research, reported in this folio, cannot. Part of the reason for this originates from the debate by educational researchers as to the relative merits of liberal and vocational philosophies for education combined with the recent introduction of information and communication technologies, and commodification of higher education. Challenging students to be participative and active learners, as proposed by educationalists Meyers and Jones (1993), i.e. self-motivated and self-actualising learners, has proved to be problematic. This, I will argue, will require a change to a variable/s (not yet identified) of higher education enculturation on multiple fronts, by students, teachers and society in order to bridge the gap. This research indicates that tertiary educators and educational researchers should stop thinking simplistically of constructivist and/or technology-enabled approaches, students learning choices and teachers teaching choices. Based on my research I argue for a far more holistic set of explanations of student and staff expectations and behaviour, and therefore pedagogy that supports those expectations.

This thesis has presented a computational model for the combination of bottom-up and top-down attentional mechanisms. Furthermore, the use for this model has been demonstrated in a variety of applications of machine and robotic vision. We have observed that an attentional mechanism is imperative in any active vision system, machine as well as biological, since it not only reduces the amount of information that needs to be further processed (for say recognition, action), but also by only processing the attended image regions, such tasks become more robust to large amounts of clutter and noise in the visual field. Using various feature channels such as color, orientation, texture, depth and symmetry, as input, the presented model is able with a pre-trained artificial neural network to modulate a saliency map for a particular top-down goal, e.g. visual search for a target object. More specifically it dynamically combines the unmodulated bottom-up saliency with the modulated top-down saliency, by means of a biologically and psychophysically motivated temporal differential equation. This way the system is for instance able to detect important bottom-up cues, even while in visual search mode (top-down) for a particular object. All the computational steps for yielding the final attentional map, that ranks regions in images according to their importance for the system, are shown to be biologically plausible. It has also been demonstrated that the presented attentional model facilitates tasks other than visual search. For instance, using the covert attentional peaks that the model returns, we can improve scene understanding and segmentation through clustering or scattering of the 2D/3D components of the scene, depending on the configuration of these attentional peaks and their relations to other attributes of the scene. More specifically this is performed by means of entropy optimization of the scence under varying cluster-configurations, i.e. different groupings of the various components of the scene. Qualitative experiments demonstrated the use of this attentional model on a robotic humanoid platform and in a real-time manner control the overt attention of the robot by specifying the saccadic movements of the robot head. These experiments also exposed another highly important aspect of the model; its temporal variability, as opposed to many other attentional (saliency) models that exclusively deal with static images. Here the dynamic aspects of the attentional mechanism proved to allow for a temporally varying trade-off between top-down and bottom-up influences depending on changes in the environment of the robot. The thesis has also lay forward systematic and quantitative large scale experiments on the actual benefits and uses of this kind of attentional model. To this end a simulated 2D environment was implemented, where the system could not “see” the entire environment and needed to perform overt shifts of attention (a simulated saccade) in order to perfom a visual search task for a pre-defined sought object. This allowed for a simple and rapid substitution of the core attentional-model of the system with comparative computational models designed by other researchers. Nine such contending models were tested and compared with the presented model, in a quantitative manner. Given certain asumptions these experiments showed that the attentional model presented in this work outperforms the other models in simple visualsearch tasks. / QC 20111228

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Wollongong, 2003. / Typescript. Bibliographical references: leaf 201-211.

A Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) is composed of low-cost electronic devices with sensing, data storage and transmitting capabilities, powered by batteries. There are extensive studies in the field of WSN investigating different algorithms and protocols for data collection. A data collector can be static or mobile. Using a mobile data collector can extend network lifetime and can be used to collect sensor data in hardly accessible locations, partitioned networks, and delay-tolerant networks. The implementation of the mobile data collector in our study consists of combining two different platforms: the Crossbow sensor hardware and the NXT Legos. We developed an application for data collection and sensor querying support. Another important contribution is designing a semi-autonomous robot control. This hardware prototype implementation shows the benefits of using a mobile data collector in WSN. It also serves as a reference in developing future applications for mobile WSNs. / by Pedro L. Heshike. / Thesis (M.S.C.S.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2011. / Includes bibliography. / Electronic reproduction. Boca Raton, Fla., 2011. Mode of access: World Wide Web.

This thesis deals with design and realization of the onboard computer for evaluating functional parameters and status of the gas engine. Designed solution is consisted of two main parts. The first part is measuring unit whose obtains actual information on engine especially consumption of fuel, rotate per minutes and temperature of engine head. The second part of the solution is formed by pocket computer with appropriate software. The application for the pocket computer processes data from the measuring unit and from GPS receiver, which is integrated in pocket computer. Wireless bluetooth technology is used for data transfer between measuring unit and pocket computer. The application in pocket computer displays and records each of obtained and computed data.

Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) affects one in every 110 children. Medical and educational research have demonstrated that ASD children's social skills and adaptation can be much improved, provided that interventions are early and intensive enough. The advancement of computer technologies and their ubiquitous penetration in people's life make them widely available to support intensive sociocognitive rehabilitation. Additionally, computer interactions are a natural choice for people with autism who value lawful and "systematizing" tools. A number of computer-aided approaches have been developed, showing effectiveness and generalization, but little quantitative research was conducted to identify the critical factors of engaging and improving the child's interest and performance. This thesis designs an adaptive computer interaction system, called Ying, which detects learning patterns in children with ASD and explores the computer interactive possibilities. The system tailors its content based on periodic performance assessments that offer a more effective learning path for children with ASD. / by Jake Levi Petersen. / Thesis (M.S.C.S.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2011. / Includes bibliography. / Electronic reproduction. Boca Raton, Fla., 2011. Mode of access: World Wide Web. FboU