Since forward collision is one of the most common and dangerous types of traffic accidents, many studies and researches have been conducted to develop forward collision avoidance system. To facilitate the tradeoff between comfort and safety for forward collision avoidance, the driver's state needs to be monitored and estimated. Such support is necessary for Forward Collision Warning (FCW) system given human-involved control. Due to the advances of Driver Monitoring System (DMS), the demand for camera-based driver's state estimation has increased. This master thesis project, conducted at Zenuity AB, investigates a method to estimate driver's awareness based on DMS. The estimation of a driver's awareness is expected to help adapt FCW system based on visual attention when facing the unpredictable braking of the leading vehicle. The project consists of three tasks: gaze estimation, Gaze-to-Object Mapping (GTOM), and awareness estimation. A combined Kalman Filter was developed in gaze estimation for compensation of missing data and outliers and reducing the difference to “ground truth” data. The uncertainty matrix from gaze estimation was utilized to extract a gaze-to-object probability signal in GTOM, while the corresponding fixation duration was also obtained in GTOM. The two extracted new features were used in awareness estimation with two methods: Logistic Regression and two-Hidden Markov Model. The comparison between the two methods reveals whether a complex method is preferred or not. Based on the results of this project, Logistic Regression seems to perform better in driver's state estimation, with 92.0% accuracy and 76.3% True Negative rate. However, further research and improvements on the two-Hidden Markov Model are needed to reach a more comprehensive conclusion. The main contribution of this project is an investigation of an end-to-end method for driver's awareness estimation and thereby an identification of challenges for further studies. / Frontkollision (forward collision) är en av de vanligaste och farligaste typerna av trafikolyckor. Många studier och undersökningar har genomförts för att utveckla system för att undvika kollisioner. För att underlätta avvägningar mellan komfort och säkerhet för att undvika Frontkollision måste förarens tillstånd övervakas och skattas. Ett sådant stöd är nödvändigt för Forward Collision Warning (FCW) systemet, som involverar interaktion med människor. Efterfrågan på kamerabaserad uppskattning för föraren har ökat på grund av framsteg Driver Monitoring System (DMS). Det här examensarbete genomfördes på Zenuity AB och undersökte en metod för att skatta förarens medvetenhet baserad på Driver Monitoring System. Uppskattningen av förarens medvetenhet förväntas bidra till att anpassa FCW-systemet. Detta FCW-system är baserat på visuell uppmärksamhet om när oförutsägbar bromsning av det framförvarande fordonet sker. Examensarbetet består av tre uppgifter: blickuppskattning, Gaze-to-Object Mapping (GTOM), och medventenhetsuppskattning. Ett kombinerat Kalman-filter har utvecklats i gaze uppskattning för att kompensera saknade data och outliers samt reducera skillnaden till “ground truth” data. Osäkerhetesmatrisen från gaze uppskattningen användes för att extrahera en gaze-to-object sannolikhetssignal i GTOM. Den motsvarande fixeringsvaraktigheten erhålls också i GTOM. De två extraherade nya egenskaperna användes i medvetenhetsanalys med hjälp av två metoder: logistic regression och two-Hidden Markov Model. Jämförelsen mellan de två metoderna avslöjar om en komplex metod är att föredra eller inte. Resultatet av detta examensarbet visar att logistic regression fungerar bättre i förarens statusuppskattning med 92% noggrannhet och 76.3% True Negative rate. Vidare forskning och förbättringar av den two-hidden Markov modell behövs för att dra en mer omfattande slutsats. Det huvudsakliga bidraget av examensarbetet är en utforskning av en end-to-end metod för att uppskatta förarens medvetenhet och därmed kunna identifiera utmaningar för framtid studie.

Abstract The concept of a woman's value, possibilities and visibility within the world being linked to youthfulness and fertility, is widely discussed in various contexts. This thesis seeks to focus on female aging specifically within lesbian communities, and thus in contrast investigate whether heterosexuality, a heteronormative lifestyle and the male gaze are determining factors in women socio-culturally turning "invisible" after middle age. While there is research done on LGBTQ aging, mainly highlighting vulnerabilites and marginalization, there seems to be a lack of explorations on whether there may be socio-cultural advantages to living a queer, older life. Focusing on how the subject positions are fleeting and ever-changing in time and space, I wish to shed light upon the complex lived experience of being woman, old(er) and LGBTQ.  My research indicates that there are indeed several strengths and advantages related to the quality of life in the generation of current older lesbians. The study is based on qualitative, semi-structured interviews with seven lesbian women aged between 53 and 78.  Keywords: ageism, lhbtq, lesbianism, intersectionality, queer ageing, male gaze

The purpose of this essay is to investigate how cultural symbols are influenced during their remediation to social media platforms. As a case to explore this, this study delves into an examination of the remediation of the Femme Fatale archetype from the visual art tradition to the social media platform TikTok. This thesis aims to explore the remediation of the Femme Fatale archetype from the visual arts tradition to the social media platform TikTok. TikTok has rapidly increased in popularity in recent years, boasting over one billion international users. TikTok's short-form video-sharing platform allows users to sample content from various mediums (such as art and film) and adapt it to the platform. This relationship between content curation and user engagement highlights the importance of exploring Femme Fatale's remediation process on TikTok, mainly how content from the visual arts tradition is portrayed on the platform. This will be achieved by utilizing a feminist perspective, exploring how the remediation process impacts gender role stereotypes and power dynamics within the Femme Fatale archetype. The study will employ remediation as a theoretical and analytical framework. Furthermore, to incorporate the feminist perspective, the concepts of male gaze and performativity will be embedded in the analysis. Thirty TikToks were sourced for analysis and explored through the framework of remediation, the concept of male gaze, and the concept of performativity. The study concludes that the remediation of the Femme Fatale results in a loss of original narrative. The research highlights how TikTok’s participatory culture enables the ongoing performance of the Femme Fatale. Moreover, the majority of the content on the platform reveals a narrative of the Femme Fatale through surface-level aesthetics, allowing for its commodification, which emphasizes visual appeal over in-depth narrative, aligning with traditional tropes found in previous mediums. The study contributes to a further understanding of how the remediation process can influence cultural symbols previously embedded in the tradition of visual arts through social media platforms' medium-specific demands on content creation.

Denna uppsats analyserar tre konstverk av konstnären Vilija Vitkute, med fokus på begreppet The male gaze som myntades av den feministiska filmteoretikern Laura Mulvey genom hennes essä Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema från (1975). Genom en bildsemiotisk analys, som tillkom 1964 av en publicerad bildanalys av semiotikern Roland Barthes, med beaktning på performativitetsteori av språkfilosofen J. L. Austin, diskuteras hur det subliminala uttrycket tar sin form och den Andres uttryck förmedlas vidare. För att kunna särskilja på vad som är normen för en kvinna och en man lyfts genusteorin, som tillkom på 1970 talet för att behovet ökade om en större medvetenhet kring begreppet genus. Undersökningen problematiserar om den Andre, den förtryckte, undermedvetet upprätthåller och sprider sitt eget förtryck utan kännedom genom det konstnärliga uttrycket. Diskussionen leder till hur ett annat seende skulle kunna ta sin form.

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At least 2.6 billion people all over the world suffer from nearsightedness, among whom 312 million are under 19 years old. Just like other vision problems, uncorrected nearsightedness brings inconvenience to many human daily activities including walking. However, the influence of nearsightedness on gait patterns and gaze behaviours remains barely discovered. This project aimed to study the influence of nearsightedness on human visuomotor coordination in different environmental settings. An integrated system combining motion capture and eye-tracking was implemented for measuring gait and gaze simultaneously. Twelve participants were recruited to perform a protocol consisting of walking tasks in various visual and environmental conditions. Nine of the participants were eligible for data analysis. Gaze time distribution and gait cycle parameters were compared between participant groups (five with normal vision, four nearsighted), and among different walking tasks. Results revealed that comparing with the control group, the nearsighted participants made shorter and slower steps, as well as spent more time looking at the walking path. The walking path also affected the gait and gaze behaviours, with shorter step length and longer step time observed when the participants were walking uphill, while increased gaze attention was paid downhill. The practicality of combining gait analysis with eye-tracking was proved in this project, laying a foundation for future studies of visuomotor coordination.

Elisabetta Sirani (1638-1665), a Bolognese artist, significantly contributed to the Italian protofeminist tradition through her three depictions of the classical figure Iole. These images are drastically different than other depictions of the time period because Sirani shows Iole as an isolated figure removed from her turbulent relationship with Hercules. By focusing on Iole as an individual, Sirani allowed Iole to be seen away from the male gaze; in doing so, Iole encompassed masculine characteristics while maintaining her sovereignty and femininity. Sirani's paintings of the strong and confident Iole are clear evidence that not only was Sirani inspired by the receptive environment in which she was raised, but she was also actively empowering women through her art and advancing the protofeminist tradition in early modern Italy.

In both Mexico and the U.S., abortion rights protests have been taking place in recent years, but while Mexico is moving forward with the legalization of abortion, the U.S. is going in the opposite direction with the overturning of Roe v. Wade. Through framing, journalists select salient information, shaping audiences' understandings of social movements. The protest paradigm suggests that due to journalistic norms and routines, journalists tend to focus on disruptive acts, which can stigmatize the protest. Additionally, scholars have stated that men and women photojournalists have different approaches to covering certain topics. This cross-national research combined a content analysis of photographs in U.S. and Mexican media with in-depth interviews with photojournalists to determine if photojournalists in each country are reproducing the protest paradigm and if there are gendered differences in how they photograph abortion rights protests. The results revealed that women and men photograph differently, with women capturing more intimate photos; however, photojournalists' gendered experiences are also influenced by how protesters perceive them. Furthermore, the study suggests that photojournalists from both countries are questioning objectivity and are attempting to move away from the protest paradigm. This research provides valuable insights into visual framing theory, protest news coverage, and gendered norms in photojournalism.

L'ampleur des séries ne fait qu'augmenter, à l'ère où l'image s'érige en maître de la communication. Par l'analyse de trois « focus groups » et au moyen d'une méthodologie « bricolée », empruntant des concepts issus de la théorisation ancrée et de la démarche hypothético-déductive, l'auteure tente de mettre en lumière les différents mécanismes qui expliquent le succès de la série Euphoria malgré la violence de ses images. À la lumière de différents concepts issus de la criminologie culturelle visuelle, des théories féministes et des réflexions sociologiques autour du concept de déni, cinq thèmes émergent des discussions de groupe. Depuis le male gaze appuyant l'hégémonie patriarcale et la Loi du silence; par le queerbaiting, le pinkwashing et l'idéologie transactiviste, ou comment des idées "progressistes" permettent d'obtenir l'assentiment du public pour maintenir les représentations sexistes dans l'ombre; avec la forme de la série, qui par sa mise en scène et son esthétique contribue à maintenir le spectateur dans une forme de déni; ainsi que la création d'un fossé cognitif et des narrations qui entravent l'identification et l'empathie; pour finir par l'éducation au cinéma, ou comment les réflexions collectives offrent une perspective de changement des représentations.

Recent technological developments have ushered in an exciting era for collaborative robots (cobots), which can operate in close proximity with humans, sharing and supporting task goals. While there is increasing research on the biomechanical and ergonomic consequences of using cobots, there is relatively little work on the potential motor-cognitive demand associated with these devices. These cognitive demands primarily stem from the need to form accurate internal (mental) models of robot behavior, while also dealing with the intrinsic motor-cognitive demands of physical co-manipulation tasks, and visually monitoring the environment to ensure safe operation. The primary aim of this work was to investigate the viability of eye-tracking measures for characterizing mental workload during the use of cobots, while accounting for the potential effects of learning, task-type, expertise, and age-differences. While eye-tracking is gaining traction in surgical/rehabilitation robotics domains, systematic investigations of eye tracking for studying interactions with industrial cobots are currently lacking. We conducted three studies in which participants of different ages and expertise levels learned to perform upper- and lower-limb tasks using a dual-armed cobot and a whole-body powered exoskeleton respectively, over multiple trials. Robot-control difficulty was manipulated by changing the joint impedance on one of the robot arms (for the dual-armed cobot). The first study demonstrated that when individuals were learning to interact with a dual-armed cobot to perform an upper-limb co-manipulation task simulated in a virtual reality (VR) environment, pupil dilation (PD) and stationary gaze entropy (SGE) were the most sensitive and reliable measures of mental workload. A combination of eye-tracking measures predicted performance with greater accuracy than experimental task variables. Measures of visual attentional focus were more sensitive to task difficulty manipulations than typical eye-tracking workload measures, and PD was most sensitive to changes in workload over learning. The second study showed that compared to walking freely, walking while using a complex whole-body powered exoskeleton: a) increased PD of novices but not experts, b) led to reduced SGE in both groups and c) led to greater downward focused gaze (on the walking path) in experts compared to novices. In the third study using an upper-limb co-manipulation task similar to Study 1, we found that the PD of younger adults reduced at a faster rate over learning, compared to that of older adults, and older adults showed a significantly greater drop in gaze transition entropy with an increase in task difficulty, compared to younger adults. Also, PD was sensitive to learning and robot-difficulty but not environmental-complexity (collisions with objects in the task environment), and gaze-behavior measures were generally more sensitive to environmental-complexity. This research is the first to conduct a comprehensive analysis of mental workload in physical human-robot interaction using eye-tracking measures. PD was consistently found to show larger effects over learning, compared to task difficulty. Gaze-behavior measures quantifying visual attention towards environmental areas of interest were found to show relatively large effects of task difficulty and should continue to be explored in future research. While walking in a powered exoskeleton, both novices and experts exhibited compensatory gaze strategies. This finding highlights potentially persistent effects of using cobots on visual attention, with potential implications to safety and situational awareness. Older adults were found to apply greater mental effort (indicated by sustained PD) and followed more constrained gaze patterns in order to maintain similar levels of performance to younger adults. Perceived workload measures could not capture these age-differences, thus highlighting the advantages of eye-tracking measures. Lastly, the differential sensitivity of pupillary- and gaze behavior metrics to different types of task demands highlights the need for future research to employ both kinds of measures for evaluating pHRI. Important questions for future research are the potential sensitivity of eye-tracking workload measures over long-term adaptations to cobots, and the potential generalizability of eye-tracking measures to real-world (non-VR) tasks. / Doctor of Philosophy / Collaborative robots (cobots) are an exciting and novel technology that may be used to assist human workers in manual industrial work, reduce physical demand, and potentially enable older adults to re-enter the workforce. However, relatively little is known about the potential cognitive demands that cobots may impose on the human user. Although intended to assist humans, some cobots have been found to be difficult to use, because of the time and effort that is needed to learn their control dynamics (i.e. to learn how to physically control them to perform a complex manual task). Thus, it is important to better understand the potential mental demand/workload that a human operator may experience, while using a cobot, and how this demand may vary over time and learning to use the cobot. Eye-tracking is a promising technique to measure a cobot-operators' mental workload, since it can provide various measures that correlate with the involuntary physiological response to mental workload (e.g. pupil dilation - PD), as well as voluntary gaze strategies (e.g. the durations and patterns of where people look) in order to perform a physical/motor task. Eye-tracking measures may be used to continuously and precisely evaluate whether a cobot imposes excessive workload on the human operator, and if high workload is observed, the cobot may be programmed to adapt its behavior to reduce workload. Although eye-tracking is gaining traction in surgical/rehabilitation robotics domains, systematic investigations of eye tracking for studying interactions with industrial cobots are currently lacking. We designed three studies in which we investigated 1) the ability of eye-tracking measures to measure changes in mental workload while participants learned to use a cobot under different difficulty-levels 2) the changes in pupil diameter and gaze behavior when participants walked while wearing a whole-body powered exoskeleton as opposed to walking freely, and potential differences between novice- and expert exoskeleton-users 3) the differences in mental workload and visual attention between younger and older adults while learning to use a cobot. The first and third studies used virtual reality (VR) to simulate the task environment, to allow for precise control over the presentation of stimuli. In study 1, we found that in higher difficulty-levels, participants' pupils were significantly more dilated, i.e., participants experienced higher mental workload, than in lower-difficulty levels. Also, PD gradually reduced as participants learned to better perform the task. In difficult task-conditions, participants gazed more frequently at the robot, and showed higher randomness (entropy) in their gaze patterns. The proportion of gaze falling on certain objects was at least as sensitive an indicator of task-difficulty, as PD and gaze entropy. In study 2, we found that walking in a whole-body exoskeleton was cognitively demanding, but only for novice participants. However, both novice and expert participants showed changes in their gaze patterns while walking in the exoskeleton – both groups lowered their gaze and focused on the walking path to a greater extent, compared to walking freely. Lastly, in study 3, we also found that older adults applied greater mental effort for maintaining similar levels of performance as younger adults. Older adults also exhibited more repetitive scanning patterns compared to younger adults, when task difficulty increased. This may have been due to potential reduction in the capacity to control attention with age. Our work demonstrates that eye-tracking measures are sensitive and reliable metrics of workload, and that different metrics are sensitive to different sources of workload. Specifically, PD was sensitive to robot-difficulty, and measures of visual attention were generally more sensitive to the complexity of the task environment. Important questions for future research are the potential changes in eye-tracking workload measures over longer time periods of learning to use cobots, and how these results generalize to real-world tasks that are not performed in virtual reality.