<div>As part of an increasing interest in a "Turn to Practice," HCI scholars have investigated the felt design complexities and ethical concerns in everyday technology practice, calling for practice-led research approaches. Given the ethical nature of technology design work, practitioners have to often negotiate and mediate their personal values, disciplinary notions of ethics, organizational policies and values, and societal impact of their design work. To tease apart and describe practitioner accounts of ethical aspects of their design work, I used three different approaches to investigate what practitioners from different professional roles communicate about and participate in (potentially) strengthening their ethical engagement in their everyday design work within and across role boundaries: survey, design of co-creation activities, and deployment/pilot of these co-creation activities. </div><div><br></div><div>In the survey study, I identify and describe the differences in disciplinary values, responsibilities, commitments, and alignment in relation to ethics and social responsibility through captured data from 256 technology and design practitioners from a range of professional roles.</div><div><br></div><div>As a part of the design phase of co-creation activities, I design, iterate, and prototype three co-creation activities (A: Tracing the Complexity; B: Dilemma Postcards; and C: Method Heuristics) and sequences of these activities to engage a range of different professional roles to communicate about their ethical action and (potentially) strengthen their ethical engagement in everyday design work. I define design vocabulary/Schemas: 1) <i>A.E.I.O.YOU model</i> to investigate the landscape of ethics in practice and 2) <i>Classifiers</i> to codify the activities and potential variants.</div><div><br></div><div>As a part of the deployment phase of these designed co-creation activities, I piloted four sequences of these activities with twelve practitioners with three different professional roles per sequence, engaging in approx. 23 hours of facilitation, artifact creation, and conversation. I present the results of deployment of the co-creation sessions where practitioners articulated that the co-creation activities helped <i>expand</i> their ethical horizons through self-awareness, <i>learn</i> new approaches to ethics vocabulary, <i>become (re-)aware </i>of their current practice, and <i>imagine</i> trajectories of change in their practice. Practitioners also identified a preliminary set of ethics-related practices that could be better supported such as tools for performance, leadership support, ethics education, and resources for ethical decision making. </div><div><br></div><div>Based on the results from these three approaches, I propose contributions to HCI and design audiences. For HCI researchers, practitioners, and educators, the survey results describe differences in professional notions and valence of ethics, framing the need for translation and transdisciplinary approach to ethics in a practice context. For design researchers, the designing of the co-creation activities is a methodological contribution where I propose and illustrate opportunities for creating novel ways to engage practitioners in co-creation work as a means of communicating their felt ethical concerns and practices. For co-creation researchers and professional ethicists, the engagement of practitioners in the co-creation reveal: 1) complexities to facilitate different disciplinary roles and design a space for ``representing'' a range of practitioners; and 2) gaps and potential synergies in supporting practitioners through practice-resonant ethics-focused methods. </div>

Crowdsourcing has become a popular choice for tackling problems that neither computers nor humans alone can solve with adequate speed, cost, and quality. However, instructing crowds to execute tasks in the manner expected by the requesters is challenging. It depends on not only requesters’ task design abilities but also workers’ understanding of the tasks. Task design bridges the communication gap between workers and requesters, which consists of instructions, payment, time limit on task, and the interface for workers to work on. It remains an underdeveloped but important topic that needs further exploration for improving crowdsourcing experience. My research studies task delivery from requesters to crowd workers. The goal is to improve the communication between the two and, in turn, increase accuracy of results and decrease variability due to differing interpretations and perspectives. Specifically, this dissertation presents a series of studies to show that high-quality results can be obtained from human workers through improved task design, by 1) designing incentives to recruit workers with the appropriate skills for given tasks, 2) designing unambiguous instructions to clearly express task requirements, 3) choosing the correct strategy to communicate the requisite task knowledge with workers, and 4) enhancing requesters’ ability to rapidly prototype Augmented Reality (AR) instructions. This dissertation demonstrates that crowdsourcing quality is improved when the tasks are communicated using mediums and structures that align with workers’ preference and utility

<div>Face redaction is used to deidentify images of people. Most approaches depend on face detection, but automated algorithms are still not adequate for sensitive applications in which even one unredacted face could lead to irreversible harm. Human annotators can potentially provide the most accurate detection, but only trusted annotators should be allowed to see the faces of privacy-sensitive applications. Redacting more images than trusted annotators could accommodate requires a new approach. </div><div>This dissertation leverages the characteristics of human perception of faces in median-filtered images in a human computation algorithm to engage crowd workers to redact faces—without revealing the identities. IntoFocus, a system I developed, permits robust face redaction with probabilistic privacy guarantees. The system's design builds on an experiment that measured the filter levels and conditions where participants could detect and identify faces. </div><div> Pterodactyl is a system that focuses on increasing the productivity of crowd-based face redaction systems. It uses the AdaptiveFocus filter, a filter that combines human perception of faces in median filtered images with a convolutional neural network to estimate a median filter level for each region of the image to allow the faces to be detected and prevent them from being identified.</div>

<p>The accelerated development of mobile computational platforms and artificial intelligence (AI) has led to increase in interconnected products with sensors that are creating smart environments. The smart environment expands the interactive spaces from limited digital screens, such as desktops and phones, to a much broader category that includes everyday objects, smart things, surrounding contexts, robots, and humans. The improvement of personal computing devices including smartphones, watches, and AR glasses further broadens the communication bandwidth between us and the ambient intelligence from the surrounding environment. Additionally in this smart environment people want to pursue personalization and are motivated to design and build their own smart environments and author customized functions.</p> <p> </p> <p>My work in this thesis focuses on investigating workflows and methods to support end-users to create personalized interactive experiences within smart environments. In particular, I designed the authoring systems by inspecting different interaction modalities, namely the direct input, spatial movement, in-situ activity and embodied interactions between users and everyday objects, smart things, robots and virtual mid-air contents. To this end, we explored 1) the software tools, hardware modules, and machines that support users to augment non-smart environments with digital interfaces and functions, and 2) the intelligence and context-awareness powered by the smart environments that deliver automatic and assistance during living and entertaining experiences. In this thesis, I mainly studied the following authoring workflows and systems: 1) customizing interactive interfaces on ordinary objects by surface painted circuits, 2) constructing a spatially aware environment for service robots with IoT modules, 3) authoring robot and IoT applications that can be driven by body actions and daily activities and 4) creating interactive and responsive augmented reality applications and games that can be played through natural input modalities.</p> <p> </p> <p>Takeaways from the main body of the research indicate that the authoring systems greatly lower the barrier for end-users to understand, control, and modify the smart environments. We conclude that seamless, fluent, and intuitive authoring experiences are crucial for building harmonious human-AI symbiotic living environments.</p>

<p>The increase in the use of digital devices, has vastly increased the amount of data used and consequently, has increased the availability and relevance of digital evidence. Typically, digital evidence helps to establish the identity of an offender by identifying the username or the user account logged into the device at the time of offense. Investigating officers need to establish the link between that user and an actual person. This is difficult in the case of computers that are shared or compromised. Also, the increasing amount of data in digital investigations necessitates the use of advanced data analysis approaches like machine learning, while keeping pace with the constantly evolving techniques. It also requires reporting on known error rates for these advanced techniques. There have been several research studies exploring the use of behavioral biometrics to support this user attribution in digital forensics. However, the use of the state-of-the-art XGBoost algorithm, hasn’t been explored yet. This study builds on previously conducted research by modeling user interaction using the XGBoost algorithm, based on features related to keystroke and mouse usage, and verifying the performance for user attribution. With an F1 score and Area Under the Receiver Operating Curve (AUROC) of .95, the algorithm successfully attributes the user event to the right user. The XGBoost model also outperforms other classifiers based on algorithms such as Support Vector Machines (SVM), Boosted SVM and Random Forest.</p>

<p>A role model may play an important role in an individual’s career, such as in the case of faculty of higher education. However, not much is known about how one perceives these role models in an academic setting. There is limited research into the unique attributes that distinguish between</p> <p>types of role models. Hence, this study attempts to better understand faculty role modelsand shed light onto those attributes which set them apart.</p> <p>The purpose of the study can be realized through two research questions, (1) What are some of the role models that academic faculty follow? and (2) What attributes do those role models possess? This study has iteratively developed surveys designed to elicit answers to these questions, and the survey responses will be used to promote a meaningful conversation about faculty role</p> <p>models. The results will contribute towards improving career development programs to create a positive impact on faculty effectiveness and success.</p>

Research indicates children with disabilities benefit from therapeutic horseback riding (TR). This study examined the impact TR had on attention behaviors of five children with various developmental disabilities in a preschool classroom. Children were observed in the classroom setting twice weekly for 10 weeks on a day they participated in TR services and on a day they did not participate in TR. Single case experiments suggested there was not a significant difference in all but one child’s sustained attention in the classroom on days children received TR services. An independent samples t-test suggested there was no significant difference in scores between riding day (M<./I> = 1.78, SD =.247) and non-riding days (M = 1.76, SD = .262); t(87) = -.481, p = .632 for the group as a whole. Further research should be conducted to determine TR’s effect on behaviors in the classroom.

No description available.

In the bustling heart of Chicago's LaSalle Street, the 111 West Monroe site presents a unique narrative of adaptive reuse, encapsulating the thesis of 'Multiplicity of Experiences.' This thesis ventures beyond the conventional restoration, aspiring to reinvigorate and repurpose two distinct architectural forms — a robust brick structure and its transparent steel and glass counterpart — through strategic cuts that foster gathering and community interaction. The manipulation of light at varying intensities becomes the silent choreographer of space, delineating zones of activity and orchestrating the human experience within these revitalized edifices. The old brick building, a testament to historical solidity, now breathes anew as student housing, offering challenges turned opportunities through its dense facade and muted interiors. In contrast, the steel and glass structure, with its morning light and open vistas, evolves into a sanctuary for families, children, and the elderly, promoting a sense of openness and interconnectivity. This architectural duality harmonizes to form a living, dynamic tableau that captures the multiplicity of human experiences, enabled by horizontal and vertical incisions that carve out communal and private spheres. The groundwork of the thesis is the concept of gathering — initiating with the public's allure into the retail and amenity spaces on the lower levels, ascending to the private residences above, and culminating in the shared terraces that bridge different age groups and backgrounds. This thesis demonstrates how spatial intervention, particularly through the nuanced application of light and the deliberate choreography of openings, can script diverse experiences from serendipitous encounters to orchestrated communal activities. It presents a model of adaptive reuse that not only conserves the structural essence but also injects a new pulse into the urban fabric, championing a symbiosis between the old and the new, the individual and the collective, the built and the unbuilt. Through the transformative act of cutting and layering, this study sheds light on the potency of architectural intervention in shaping human and spatial experiences. The result is a rich mosaic of life, where every stratum, every incision, every ray of light adds a verse to the narrative of gathering, from dawn's first light to the tranquil hum of evening, offering a blueprint for reactivating spaces that reach beyond their walls to touch the human soul. / Master of Architecture / This thesis explores adaptive reuse at 111 West Monroe, using architectural cuts to manipulate light and space, thereby creating a multiplicity of experiences that foster community interaction and rejuvenate urban life across diverse generations.

Since before the Neolithic Revolution, when human civilisation first emerged, humans and canines have lived, and died, together. This Scottish study is conducted in the field of animal-human interaction and, using qualitative methods, applies established insights from the sociology of health (born of human-to-human interaction) to a human-animal relationship. Specifically, this thesis explores death and dying in relations between the companion canines, and the human members, of ten families. Nonhuman illness narratives are found in profusion in this study, and it was also found to be possible to apply biographical disruption to nonhumans, when conceptualised as biographical disruption-by-proxy. Unexpectedly, there emerged from the data support for a four-fold model of canine selfhood, as forged within the family. This is, as far as I am aware, the first modelling of a specific nonhuman consciousness, within the discipline. Suffering was found to exist in both physical and non-physical forms for the companions, and a mutual vulnerability to loneliness, and desire for companionship, appears to be a powerful point of connection between the humans and the canines. Being together emerged as both a practice, and as an ideal, that moulded the human-canine relations, and it was regarded as unfitting for a canine to die alone. Companion canine dying comes forth as a negotiated process, shaped by a divide between gradual and sudden death. This work encountered developed narratives of departure, that seem to structure the experience of losing a companion. In particular the role of the expert is a privileged voice in the negotiations of dying, and the biomedical view is treated as being definitive. The role of the expert is not simply submitted to however, but a range of stances to veterinary authority are displayed, being; acquiescence, resistance and invalidation of the veterinary voice. Ultimately, whilst interplays of wellbeing are present, they are less biophysically grounded, than they are rooted in the everyday routines of life, in the rituals of eating, sleeping, walking, and playing together, that compose the shared world of the human and companion canine.