Context Of Spaces Research Articles

A Context-based Design Toolkit (CoDeT) for Socially Assistive Robots (SARs): a methodological approach

ABSTRACT This paper presents the Context-based Design Toolkit (CoDeT) methodology – a practical toolkit designed to facilitate collaborative design and evaluation of Socially Assistive Robots (SARs). CoDeT elicits user and other stakeholder needs, perceptions, and preferences. The methodology for creating a CoDeT is three-phased. The first phase is the Contextual space in which the designer generates a use-case-specific toolkit. The second phase is the Investigation space, which refers to utilising the toolkit among different users and stakeholders. The third phase is the Design Space, which returns to the design team to analyse the outcomes and define design guidelines. Rather than an exhaustive research investigation, our work provides guidelines and illustrative examples for using CoDeT effectively. Following the CoDeT methodology enables designers to gain insights regarding stakeholders’ and users’ perceptions and expectations of robotic roles and their most suitable appearances.

Triple-Stream Commonsense Circulation Transformer Network for Image Captioning

Traditional image captioning methods only have a local perspective at the dataset level, allowing them to explore dispersed information within individual images. However, the lack of a global perspective prevents them from capturing common characteristics among similar images. To address the limitation, this paper introduces a novel Triple-stream Commonsense Circulating Transformer Network (TCCTN). It incorporates contextual stream into the encoder, combining enhanced channel stream and spatial stream for comprehensive feature learning. The proposed commonsense-aware contextual attention (CCA) module queries commonsense contextual features from the dataset, obtaining global contextual association information by projecting grid features into the contextual space. The pure semantic channel attention (PSCA) module leverages compressed spatial domain for channel pooling, focusing on attention weights of pure channel features to capture inherent semantic features. The region spatial attention (RSA) module enhances spatial concepts in semantic learning by incorporating region position information. Furthermore, leveraging the complementary differences among the three features, TCCTN introduces the mixture of experts strategy to enhance the unique discriminative ability of features and promote their integration in textual feature learning. Extensive experiments on the MS-COCO dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of contextual commonsense stream and the superior performance of TCCTN.

An interdisciplinary framework of youth participatory action research informed by curricula, youth, adults, and researchers.

Rarely are youth voices incorporated into program and policy development. Youth participatory action research (YPAR) is an opportunity for adolescents to develop research skills by completing projects relevant to their lives and allows participation and decision-making at systems and organizational levels. Attention to YPAR implementation detail, especially a curricular focus, is lacking in the literature. Specifically absent is an all-encompassing YPAR framework, a gap the current study addresses. The current study includes a review of existing YPAR curricula to develop the Youth Researcher Empowerment Framework, including research components, social emotional competencies, and assumptions necessary for completing a YPAR project that centers youth voice and shared power. The study includes a quantitative assessment of the YPAR curricula and qualitative reviews by adult practitioners. In addition, focus group data from youth and teacher audiences across multiple settings confirmed and clarified terms and concepts related to the framework. The study provides empirical evidence to support a revised framework for YPAR curricular implementation. Implications are discussed in terms of aspects of the research process needed for YPAR projects, attention to specific youth developmental skills as outcomes, and underlying principles needed to create a welcoming, contextual space allowing for empowerment, youth voice, and choice.

A Contextual Model for Visual Information Processing

Despite significant achievements in the artificial narrow intelligence sphere, the mechanisms of human-like (general) intelligence are still undeveloped. There is a theory stating that the human brain extracts the meaning of information rather than recognizes the features of a phenomenon. Extracting the meaning is finding a set of transformation rules (context) and applying them to the incoming information, producing an interpretation. Then, the interpretation is compared to something already seen and is stored in memory. Information can have different meanings in different contexts. A mathematical model of a context processor and a differential contextual space which can perform the interpretation is discussed and developed in this paper. This study examines whether the basic principles of differential contextual spaces work in practice. The model is developed with Rust programming language and trained on black and white images which are rotated and shifted both horizontally and vertically according to the saccades and torsion movements of a human eye. Then, a picture that has never been seen in the particular transformation, but has been seen in another one, is exposed to the model. The model considers the image in all known contexts and extracts the meaning. The results show that the program can successfully process black and white images which are transformed by shifts and rotations. This research prepares the grounding for further investigations of the contextual model principles with which general intelligence might operate.

Filmic space

The projects collected here under the banner of Filmic Space are seen as an extension of the ideas brought to light in the publication Interior Cities. Interior Cities represents the outcomes of the last seven years of the program grouped within specific conceptual concerns. The book chronicles ideas of spatial perception, sensing space, elemental space, contextual space, cross cultural space, space of the imagination, incisions into the metropolis and virtual space.

Protecting heritage: Insights into effective flood management using green infrastructure in a highly urbanized environment

Developing flood resilience in heritage cities is an exigent challenge of rapidly urbanizing cities of the Global South. While Green Infrastructure (GI) intervention is generally considered an important flood adaptation measure, the limited space availability combined with complex urban hydrodynamics makes the objective assessment of its efficacy challenging. Our study addresses this by integrating a 1D-2D hydrodynamic model with high-resolution remote sensing datasets, including satellite imageries derived from Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 and flood levels obtained from field surveys to generate contextualized urban flood maps that consider the constraints of heavily urbanized land areas in the city of Ahmedabad, a rapidly urbanizing historic city in western parts of India. Historically, this city has not been flood-prone, but the high intensity of urbanization is rendering the city extremely vulnerable to flooding risks. We investigate the efficacy of four individual Green Infrastructure(GI) facilities in managing urban stormwater based on contextual space and resource availability. The efficiency is quantified based on runoff reduction coefficient, flood extent, and peak flood depth metrics. The results show that permeable pavements are the most efficient, reducing flood volume and flooded area by 23% and 1.5%, respectively. However, these benefits were marginal, challenging the current understanding. Our findings underscore the necessity for location-specific GI solutions in urban flood risk management.

Идеология нового атеизма как вариант «множественных версий современности» постсекулярного общества

The article analyzes the main ideas of Alan Gilbert Nixon, a contemporary sociologist of religion and researcher of the new atheism movement. The subject of the study is the ideology of the new atheism movement as a special anti-religious worldview associated with the work of Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett and Christopher Hitchens, which arose in 2006. Nixon himself, studying this movement, uses an original methodology, which he calls ‘grounded theory’ and explores the development of a new atheism in the actual contextual space of interaction between participants and the prospects of this interaction. The methodology of the authors of this article is based on the principle of the unity of the historical and logical interpretation of the key concepts and positions of A. Nixon in the process of a systematic analysis of historical background, ideological foundation, self-presentation of representatives of the new atheism movement. In addition, in the context of this study, a number of social changes (the globalization of capitalism, the development of the Internet and the related “leaps of communication”, the religious renaissance) are considered as a necessary context for the formation of a special “narrative mythology” of the new atheism, expressed in the idea of the greatness of Nature and Science. and suggesting a kind of piety within the worldview of the new atheism. As the main result of the presented analysis, one can single out the conceptual design of key aspects of the existence of a modern anti-religious worldview: hyperskepticism in the knowledge of the world, nihilism and the denial of classical metaphysics of rationality, criticism of the values of religious morality; a postmodern paradox that erases the boundaries between religious/non-religious and cancels the very possibility of discrimination on religious grounds, which nullifies the confrontational logic of the new atheism; the emergence of secular non-religious missionary work as a result of the process of competition of ideas in the space of “multiple modernities”; and, finally, the fact that the new atheistic message is gaining adherents because the anti-religious worldview is subject to the cultural logic of late capitalism with its postmodern spread of pluralism of cultures, discourses, organizations.

Generalizing supervised deep learning MRI reconstruction to multiple and unseen contrasts using meta-learning hypernetworks

Meta-learning has recently been an emerging data-efficient learning technique for various medical imaging operations and has helped advance contemporary deep learning models. Furthermore, meta-learning enhances the knowledge generalization of the imaging tasks by learning both shared and discriminative weights for various configurations of imaging tasks during training. However, existing meta-learning models attempt to learn a single set of weight initializations of a neural network that might be fundamentally restrictive under the heterogeneous (multimodal) data scenario. This work aims to develop a multimodal meta-learning model for image reconstruction, which augments meta-learning with evolutionary capabilities to encompass diverse acquisition settings of heterogeneous data. Our proposed model called KM-MAML (Kernel Modulation-based Multimodal Meta-Learning), has hypernetworks (auxiliary learners) that evolve to generate mode-specific (or context-specific) weights. These weights provide the mode-specific inductive bias for multiple modes by re-calibrating each kernel of the base network for image reconstruction via a low-rank kernel modulation operation. Furthermore, we incorporate gradient-based meta-learning (GBML) in the contextual space to update the weights of the hypernetworks based on different modes. The hypernetworks and the base reconstruction network in the GBML setting provide discriminative mode-specific features and low-level image features, respectively. We extensively evaluate our model for multi-contrast magnetic resonance image reconstruction considering the essential research directions in fastMRI for multimodal and rich transfer learning capabilities across various MRI contrasts. Our comparative studies show that the proposed model (i) exhibits superior reconstruction performance over joint training, other meta-learning methods, and various context-specific MRI reconstruction architectures, and (ii) better adaptation to 80% and 92% of unseen multi-contrast data contexts with improvement margins of 0.1 to 0.5 dB in PSNR and around 0.01 in SSIM, respectively. Besides, a representation analysis with U-Net as the base network shows that kernel modulation infuses 80% of mode-specific representation changes in the high-resolution layers. Our source code is available at https://github.com/sriprabhar/KM-MAML/.

Актуализация коннотативного компонента в структуре слова при создании юмористического эффекта в высказывании

The study aims to determine the role of the connotative component in the structure of the meaning of a word when creating a humorous effect in an utterance. The paper examines the causes of a humorous effect: the author assigns the leading role in its creation to the connotative component in the structure of the meaning of a word, provided that it is actualized by the contextual space. The study is novel in that it is the first to consider the connotative component in the structure of the meaning of a word as a necessary condition for creating a humorous effect in an utterance. As a result, it has been determined that the foregrounding of the connotative component in the structure of the meaning of a word, which has taken root in society, having become a stereotype, provided it is actualized by the contextual space, allows achieving a humorous effect and impress the addressee, therefore, the connotative component of lexical units affects the occurrence of a humorous effect in an utterance.

Learning Fashion Compatibility With Context Conditioning Embedding

Fashion compatibility predictions have obtained a lot of attention recently. Mining the compatibility between fashion items in an outfit is different from learning the visual similarity, since this relationship is more delicate. Decomposing the outfit compatibility into pairwise item matching is a popular way to treat the problem. However, in most existing methods, the items are matched without considering the context, i.e, the remaining items in the outfit. Recent efforts have been made to learn the underlying high order relationships among items by treating the outfit as a whole. These models could be sensitive to the properties of different datasets, and the item representations in these models are not as compact as those in the pairwise models. In this paper, we propose a context conditioning embedding approach to learn compact representations that preserve the shared information among items under the existence of contextual items. We use two different spaces, the general and the contextual spaces, to embed items, where the representation in the contextual space contains information from the context. We employ mutual information maximization for model learning, which is shown to be more appropriate for the problem. With extensive experiments, we show that our model achieves superior performance than other state-of-the-art methods.

A PROGRAM CALLED "TIME TRAVELLERS" FOR STRENGTHENING RESILIENCE AND STIMULATION OF POST-TRAUMATIC GROWTH IN CHILDREN AND ADOLESCENTS TRAUMATISED BY WAR

Background. The article is focused on the analysis of the results of approbation of the program for strengthening resilience and stimulation of post-traumatic growth in children and adolescents traumatized by war called "Time Travellers". The structure and brief description of the program, its goals and objectives, principles of construction and main content components are presented. Methods. The article shows the main results of approbation of this program, obtained as a result of testing the participants with the help of the Posttraumatic Growth Questionnaire by R. Tedeschi and L. Calhoun (R. Tedeschi, L. Calhoun), adapted by M.S. Magomed-Eminov. Results. The program to increase resilience and stimulate post-traumatic growth in children and adolescents traumatized by the war "Travelers in Time" is a combination of such areas as tourism and psychotherapy, integrating theoretical and practical knowledge of history, geography, cultural studies, biology, ecology. Conclusions. The presented program involves the creation of a coherent contextual space for safe expressive manifestation of experiences, stabilization of the psychophysiological state, reconstruction of the system of values and beliefs, change of coping strategies, strengthening of dominant and activation of potential resource channels.

What do women SIE careers look like?

This presentation aims to highlight the existing literature around self-initiated expatriation (SIE), gender and careers. One novel way of viewing these distinctive areas of literature is through a ‘going gender’ lens. SIE women are increasingly using expatriation as a source of career and lifestyle development. However, little detail is known for the career aspirations and expectations of these highly autonomous women, with a particular focus on the diverse, multi-dynamic factors influencing and impacting these individuals’ decision-making processes. Academics within the international mobility and gendered careers research spaces have identified the value of looking at the multidimensional nature of decision-making, career strategies, and experiences of internationally mobile individuals. Furthermore, recently, a ‘going gender’ framework is designed, an extension of the traditional ‘doing’ and ‘undoing’ gender theory, aiming to conceptualise the dynamic impact on gender that is experienced by women moving between different contextual spaces (Stenbacka & Frosberg, 2020). In this research study, I have adapted this framework to look specifically at the multi-dynamic factors influencing women SIEs and their careers, choosing to unpack the different layers of influence using a network thematic analysis. Using a life story approach, through a narrative inquiry methodology, this research study looks at the live stories of 15 self-identified SIEs. Initial findings align well with the framework identified, going far beyond the concept of intrinsic and extrinsic factors, taking into consideration the impact that mobility has on their gender role identification and finally, how these together, have influenced their career aspirations and experiences between different geographic contexts. The outcome of this research study is to contribute to the ever-growing literature surrounding women SIEs and their diverse experiences, impact on identity, multi-faceted decision making, and lifestyle changes made, in order to pursue their career aspirations in different geographic spaces.

In the Eye of the Tornado: Encounters with Clay—A Relational Materialist Orientation Toward Cultivating Curriculum

This paper follows three student-educators’ journey with clay. Embedded in the contextual space of the studio, the paper considers the complexities and processes involved in cultivating curriculum and thinking with the idea of art as a language. Inspired by the relational materialist approach, Erin, Roselyn, and Colleen enter into a dialogue with clay—embodying one another, entangling with each other, intra-actively doing unto one another, and reaffirming that knowing things is embedded deeply in relational connectivity with the world around us—onto-epistemology. The authors journey together with clay through spinning, twirling, tornadoes, storms, music, chaos, and destruction.

Aesthetic Leadership and Organizational Symbolism Experienced at the Paintbrush Factory in Cluj-Napoca, Romania

The study of organizational symbolism in the 1980s brought into discussion aspects referring to the image, the sentiments, and the representative values of an organization, pointing to an aesthetic sensibility that can generate meaning. This paper is part of a larger endeavor that examines the latest developments of the methodological models pertaining to organizational aesthetics. Starting from the categories of research in the field of organizational aesthetics proposed by Taylor and Hansen in 2005, I attempt to analyze an art space phenomenon, the Paintbrush Factory in Cluj-Napoca, Romania (2009–22). I focused on aspects of aesthetic leadership and the day-to-day experience of those involved in Paintbrush Factory, especially at the peak of its existence (2009–13), with the aim of finding an appropriate methodological model for research such a complex enterprise as well as to discover lessons that can be learned in terms of its impact and legacy.
 The Paintbrush Factory brought a memory of the past to light (through the conversion of a communist space), acquiring an exemplary role in contemporary art (through the type of network developed by this spontaneous, contextual space). The presence of individuals (involved in the management of this art space, artists, or participants in events) was observed in light of the “intelligence of the feeling” and of various symbolic effects. Thus, the Paintbrush Factory is an example of the transformations undergone by an industrial space, which became a creative model of cultural management, a cultural brand with a unique mode of organization: a federation.

Philosophical Anthropology as a Space for the Evolution of Biopolitical Knowledge: From Ancient Natural Philosophy to Modern Microbiopolitics

Purpose. The study aims to substantiate philosophical anthropology as a space for the development of biopolitics, which is a relatively new synthetic scientific knowledge of the political in the biological and the biological in the political, which, however, has its roots in the era of antiquity. The analysis of biopolitics in the context of contemporary global challenges, in particular the COVID-19 pandemic, is carried out, which allows to actualize a new direction of biopolitics – microbiopolitics. Theoretical basis. The study is based on an understanding of the initial, in relation to biopolitics, the nature of philosophical anthropology. While philosophical anthropology seeks an answer to the question – who is Homo sapiens, given the biosocial nature of man, biopolitics specifies the question in the form – who is homo politicus in modern socio-political space with a focus on the imperative of a human-centred approach in the social sciences. The study is based on scientific works by specialists in philosophical anthropology and biopolitics. Originality. The authors substantiate the expediency and relevance of considering philosophical anthropology as a contextual space for the evolution of biopolitical knowledge from the natural philosophy of Antiquity to modern microbiopolitics. Conclusions. Philosophical anthropology is seen as a specific epistemological landscape in which fields of scientific knowledge are formed and developed that are in one way or another involved in the philosophical problems of man: philosophical psychology, social anthropology, philosophy of medicine, humanology, philosophy of education, ethics, as well as biophilosophy, bioethics, and, in particular, biopolitics.

Perceiving Stroke-Semantic Context: Hierarchical Contrastive Learning for Robust Scene Text Recognition

We introduce Perceiving Stroke-Semantic Context (PerSec), a new approach to self-supervised representation learning tailored for Scene Text Recognition (STR) task. Considering scene text images carry both visual and semantic properties, we equip our PerSec with dual context perceivers which can contrast and learn latent representations from low-level stroke and high-level semantic contextual spaces simultaneously via hierarchical contrastive learning on unlabeled text image data. Experiments in un- and semi-supervised learning settings on STR benchmarks demonstrate our proposed framework can yield a more robust representation for both CTC-based and attention-based decoders than other contrastive learning methods. To fully investigate the potential of our method, we also collect a dataset of 100 million unlabeled text images, named UTI-100M, covering 5 scenes and 4 languages. By leveraging hundred-million-level unlabeled data, our PerSec shows significant performance improvement when fine-tuning the learned representation on the labeled data. Furthermore, we observe that the representation learned by PerSec presents great generalization, especially under few labeled data scenes.

Language and identity of a Korean transnational youth in the U.S.

Abstract The importance of multilingual use for the overall personal and educational development of transnational population is well documented, and many scholars have supported that language relates to identity. Given that adolescence is a critical period of identity construction, it is crucial to understand how transnational youth construct their transnational identity in adolescence, bordering across multiple languages and cultures in their everyday lives. Therefore, the current study examines the language and identity of one Korean transnational adolescent who lives with her family in the U.S. The purpose of this study is to explore how one Korean-American transnational adolescent youth navigates her identities utilizing her diverse linguistic and cultural repertoires in a range of contextual spaces. This qualitative case study collected semi-structured interview data to explore the following research questions: 1) How does a second generation Korean American transnational adolescent self-identify? and 2) How is her identity interconnected with her linguistic and cultural investment? This current study found that the participant has sites of specific identities as Korean or American: three distinct contexts of family, school, and community. In addition, the findings showed that the participant’s identity is related to her linguistic and cultural investment in transnational contexts.

СЕМАНТИКА ИГРОВОГО КОДА КУЛЬТУРЫ И ЕГО АКТУАЛИЗАЦИЯ В ОПЕРЕ «ДОН ЖУАН» В.-А. МОЦАРТА

The article investigates the semantics of the game cultural code and its verification in the polycode system of W. A. Mozart's opera "Don Juan". The concept of "game", which reflects the linguistic picture of the world, is considered as the basis of the meaning-generating structure of the code. The semiotic methodological approach becomes the key to the cognition of various, contiguous and interacting with each other information levels of its functioning. Reconstruction of the game cultural code represents historical and contextual space of the opera as an essential element of the author's artistic text. In the extra-musical projection, the game is the basis of the philosophical discourse of the Enlightenment and the dominant of the Austrian national culture. It is attributed as the composer's lifestyle and artistic worldview. The game cultural code reveals the author's idea of the artistic spatial and temporal solution of the opera's scenography, projects the dramaturgical development of artistic images and intercultural communications between them. The study of the phenomenon of playing in binary oppositions reveals the mythological principles of the composer's thinking and the cosmogonic matrix of the opera concept. The study of the multi-stage "ladder" of contexts allows to understand the mechanism of the semantic game case formation and to comprehend the semiotic system of "Don Juan" as an integral part of the broader semiotic structure of musical culture.

The Pragmatics of Political Claims and Social Responses amidst Covid-19 and EndSARS Saga in Nigeria

There have been few stand-alone linguistic studies on the Covid-19 virus and the 2020 EndSARS protests in Nigeria. The present study intersects these two critical events with particular focus on the political claims made by the ruling class and the corresponding social responses in line with the contextual affordances shared by the participants. Searle’s speech act theoretic approach is adopted to analyse the pragmatic intentions of the illocutionary acts which political claims perform while Juvenalian satire is used to discuss the satirical elements embedded in the social responses in a bid to ridicule leadership follies and abuses. Three popular Nigerian online Newspapers and few comments from Facebook are selected for this study. Their selection is based on their coverage of these events, coverage of these political claims and popular readership evidenced in the social responses. In all, a total of 6 political claims and 25 social responses relevant to this study are analysed. The study revealed that the pragmatic relevance of these claims is embedded in its political functions of wielding undue influence over the populace, making promises driven by rhetoric and short of initiative and calculated reticence in response to social issues. Consequently, the social responses highlight and criticise leadership vices and the weak efforts of the government in dispensing its leadership interventions. It also fulfils communicative purposes of the contextual space, promote solidarity among the people while prompting change in the political class and the society at large.

A narrative inquiry of teacher educators’ professional agency, identity renegotiations, and emotional responses amid educational disruption

Employing a narrative inquiry, the study explored the way nine teacher educators responded temporally to the emotionally-laden challenges faced during the disruption to education caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, with a focus on their enactment of professional agency and renegotiation of their identities. Findings revealed seven conflicting themes located within personal, relational, and contextual spaces. Emotional experiences were further found to direct the dynamic forms of agency enacted, and consequently the consolidation or dismissal of renegotiated identities. The study concludes with the need to support teacher educators’ professional agency as a resource for transformative changes and innovations in teacher education.