Ephemeral Interactions Research Articles

Exploring AI intervention points in high-school engineering education: a research through co-design approach

Purpose Challenges in teaching the engineering design process (EDP) at the high-school level, such as promoting good documentation practices, are well-documented. While developments in educational artificial intelligence (AI) systems have the potential to assist in addressing these challenges, the open-ended nature of the EDP leads to challenges that often lack the specificity required for actionable AI development. In addition, conventional educational AI systems (e.g. intelligent tutoring systems) primarily target procedural domain tasks with well-defined outcomes and problem-solving strategies, while the EDP involves open-ended problems and multiple correct solutions, making AI intervention timing and appropriateness complex. Design/methodology/approach Authors conducted a six-week-long Research through Co-Design (RtCD) process (i.e. a co-design process rooted in Research through Design) with two experienced high-school engineering teachers to co-construct actionable insight in the form of AI intervention points (AI-IPs) in engineering education where an AI system can effectively intervene to support them while highlighting their pedagogical practices. Findings This paper leveraged the design of task models to iteratively refine our prior understanding of teachers’ experiences with teaching the EDP into three AI-IPs related to documentation, ephemeral interactions between teachers and students and disruptive failures that can serve as a focus for intelligent educational system designs. Originality/value This paper discusses the implications of these AI-IPs for designing educational AI systems to support engineering education as well as the importance of leveraging RtCD methodologies to engage teachers in developing intelligent educational systems that align with their needs and afford them control over computational interventions in their classrooms.

The Balancing Act of Social Audio Facilitators: When Self-Promotion Overshadows Community Care

Voice-based social media platforms that enable attendees to have real-time, ephemeral interactions with each other—such as X-Spaces, Discord, and Clubhouse—have seen considerable growth in recent years. While prior research on these spaces has predominantly focused on moderating harms, our work seeks to understand emergent practices employed by hosts to proactively shape their discussion space— focusing on the facilitation aspect of moderation duties. Drawing on facilitation strategies, we study these practices through three comprehensive studies using mixed-methods: survey of social-audio users, co-design interviews, and analyzing training sessions for hosts. Our findings reveal insights into the issues faced by hosts and attendees, current facilitation practices, opinions on technological solutions, and factors that could be responsible for some of the identified issues such as the available training for hosts. We found that hosts themselves are often significant sources of issues due to practices such as focusing more on self-promotion than facilitating discussions. In addition, host training sessions seem to encourage behaviors that contribute to the negative perception of hosts. We draw on outcomes from co-design interviews to guide the design of future tools to support hosts in facilitating social-audio spaces. Our findings provide insights that could help create a more positive experience for both hosts and attendees.

Double activation: the ephemeral interaction between body and jewelry

Contemporary jewelry is a niche within the applied arts, yet recent years there has been substantial theoretical development in this field. However, a particular category of jewelry has remained underexplored: pieces that actively assert their presence rather than merely adorning the body passively. These 'active' jewelry pieces have not been theorized, a gap I aim to address by coining the concept 'double activation'. According to Kevin Murray and Rock Hushka, every piece of jewelry becomes ‘activated’ when worn on the body. However, I argue that 'double activation' jewelry also ‘activates’ the body, resulting in a second - 'double' - activation. These pieces induce sensations in the wearer's body that would not be experienced without the jewelry. They achieve this through five mechanisms: (1) restricting movement, (2) interacting with body parts and potentially causing pain, (3) manipulating the body's forms, (4) extend ing the body to generate new sensations, and (5) taking control over the body. Drawing on examples such as Jennifer Crupi’s Ornamental Hands: Figure One and Akiko Shinzato’s Chin Up, this article explores how these works subvert conventional jewelry’s passive role. These pieces demand a temporary relationship between body and object, where control is relinquished to the jewelry. As such, ‘double activation’ can be seen as a performative event — a brief moment in which the wearer’s body and the jewelry coalesce into a singular entity before the interaction becomes unsustainable. This ephemeral relationship challenges the notion of jewelry as static and ornamental, proposing instead a conceptual framework where the focus is placed on transient bodily experiences. In this way, ‘double activation’ shifts the discourse on ephemerality in jewelry from the materiality of the object to the temporality of the interaction itself.

Deriving spatially explicit direct and indirect interaction networks from animal movement data.

Quantifying spatiotemporally explicit interactions within animal populations facilitates the understanding of social structure and its relationship with ecological processes. Data from animal tracking technologies (Global Positioning Systems ["GPS"]) can circumvent longstanding challenges in the estimation of spatiotemporally explicit interactions, but the discrete nature and coarse temporal resolution of data mean that ephemeral interactions that occur between consecutive GPS locations go undetected. Here, we developed a method to quantify individual and spatial patterns of interaction using continuous-time movement models (CTMMs) fit to GPS tracking data. We first applied CTMMs to infer the full movement trajectories at an arbitrarily fine temporal scale before estimating interactions, thus allowing inference of interactions occurring between observed GPS locations. Our framework then infers indirect interactions-individuals occurring at the same location, but at different times-while allowing the identification of indirect interactions to vary with ecological context based on CTMM outputs. We assessed the performance of our new method using simulations and illustrated its implementation by deriving disease-relevant interaction networks for two behaviorally differentiated species, wild pigs (Sus scrofa) that can host African Swine Fever and mule deer (Odocoileus hemionus) that can host chronic wasting disease. Simulations showed that interactions derived from observed GPS data can be substantially underestimated when temporal resolution of movement data exceeds 30-min intervals. Empirical application suggested that underestimation occurred in both interaction rates and their spatial distributions. CTMM-Interaction method, which can introduce uncertainties, recovered majority of true interactions. Our method leverages advances in movement ecology to quantify fine-scale spatiotemporal interactions between individuals from lower temporal resolution GPS data. It can be leveraged to infer dynamic social networks, transmission potential in disease systems, consumer-resource interactions, information sharing, and beyond. The method also sets the stage for future predictive models linking observed spatiotemporal interaction patterns to environmental drivers.

A deep dive into biomolecular condensates using single-droplet surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy.

A deep dive into biomolecular condensates using single-droplet surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy.

A Historical Social Network Analysis of John Pinney’s Nevis–Bristol Network: Change over Time, the “Network Memory,” and Reading Against the Grain of Historical Sources

Social network analysis is an increasingly common tool for historians seeking to understand the interrelations between individuals. A significant concern, however, is how we might measure changes within networks over time and between periods. Historians have favored examining the network as it stands at particular points in time. However, this approach fails to capture the instability within networks and does not incorporate the perceptions of contemporaries. One solution is to integrate network data into a time series that is built around conceptualizations of the “network memory.” In a case study on John Pinney’s late eighteenth-century Nevis–Bristol network, I use a two-year moving total to model the lingering nature of ephemeral interactions on the memories of those involved in the plantation trade. Using this historical social network analysis as the basis for an iterative approach to the primary material, I explore what being a part of this network meant for the enslaved people on Pinney’s plantation and for the women in his family. This article demonstrates the value of the approach and highlights the ways in which historians can use it to contribute to the historiography of early modern business networks.

Single-droplet vibrational raman spectroscopy illuminates the inner workings of phase-separated biomolecular condensates

Single-droplet vibrational raman spectroscopy illuminates the inner workings of phase-separated biomolecular condensates

MobileTrust

Vehicular Ad hoc NETworks (VANET) are becoming popular due to the emergence of the Internet of Things and ambient intelligence applications. In such networks, secure resource sharing functionality is accomplished by incorporating trust schemes. Current solutions adopt peer-to-peer technologies that can cover the large operational area. However, these systems fail to capture some inherent properties of VANETs, such as fast and ephemeral interaction, making robust trust evaluation of crowdsourcing challenging. In this article, we propose MobileTrust—a hybrid trust-based system for secure resource sharing in VANETs. The proposal is a breakthrough in centralized trust computing that utilizes cloud and upcoming 5G technologies to provide robust trust establishment with global scalability. The ad hoc communication is energy-efficient and protects the system against threats that are not countered by the current settings. To evaluate its performance and effectiveness, MobileTrust is modelled in the SUMO simulator and tested on the traffic features of the small-size German city of Eichstatt. Similar schemes are implemented in the same platform to provide a fair comparison. Moreover, MobileTrust is deployed on a typical embedded system platform and applied on a real smart car installation for monitoring traffic and road-state parameters of an urban application. The proposed system is developed under the EU-founded THREAT-ARREST project, to provide security, privacy, and trust in an intelligent and energy-aware transportation scenario, bringing closer the vision of sustainable circular economy.

Variation of interspecific interactions at different ecological levels within an assemblage of Arctic marine predators

How interspecific interactions change across scales is poorly known. Such knowledge might help us understand how species interact within communities and highlight scale-dependent ecological processes in play among species. Here, I propose to analyze the inter-annual variation of a species assemblage at different ecological levels. For this, I joined a two-stage modeling approach and a spatially explicit multivariate model to analyze the interspecies relationships among six species of pelagic seabirds from 2004 to 2015 in the Barents Sea. The large-scale (~400 km) pattern of interactions revealed by the analyses suggests a change in the composition of the seabird community along the climatic gradient from south to north. At medium-scale (~300 km), the community was split into two areas (i.e., Arctic and sub-Arctic areas) suggesting niche differentiation of Arctic and sub-Arctic species driven by resource partitioning and interference competition. At a small-scale (~40 km), species with different body sizes were positively associated suggesting facilitation for accessing food although the species with the smallest body size was negatively associated with the species involved in the facilitation process suggesting interspecific interference competition. Over the years, the large-scale patterns were persistent, suggesting niche establishment, while small-scale patterns were highly variable suggesting only ephemeral interactions among species. My study demonstrates that interspecific relationships are scale-dependent and play major roles in structuring community. Untangling how species are associated with different ecological levels over time is indispensable to better understand how community structure contributes to ecological system dynamics.

Senders, Receivers, and Symbolic Artifacts

A “sender–receiver” framework based on models developed in several fields can provide a general treatment of communicative and symbolic phenomena, replacing traditional semiotic theories that have failed to live up to the hopes of their advocates. Sender–receiver models have mostly been applied to linguistic behavior, gestures, and other ephemeral interactions between individuals. I look at the application of this framework to enduring artifacts, including pictures, using indigenous rock art in Australia as a case study.

Structure of RDE-4 dsRBDs and mutational studies provide insights into dsRNA recognition in the Caenorhabditis elegans RNAi pathway

The association of RDE-4 (RNAi defective 4), a protein containing two dsRBDs (dsRNA-binding domains), with long dsRNA and Dcr-1 (Dicer1 homologue) initiates the siRNA pathway in Caenorhabditis elegans. Unlike its homologues in higher eukaryotes, RDE-4 dsRBDs possess weak (micromolar) affinity for short dsRNA. With increasing length of dsRNA, RDE-4 exhibits enhanced affinity due to co-operativity. The linker and dsRBD2 are indispensable for RDE-4's simultaneous interaction with dsRNA and Dcr-1. In the present study, we have determined the solution structures of RDE-4 constructs that contain both dsRBDs and the linker region. In addition to the canonical dsRBD fold, both dsRBDs of RDE-4 show modified structural features such as truncation in the β1-β2 loop that rationalize RDE-4's relatively weak dsRNA affinity. Structure and binding studies demonstrate that dsRBD2 plays a decisive role in the RDE-4-dsRNA interaction; however, in contrast with previous findings, we found ephemeral interaction of RDE-4 dsRBD1 with dsRNA. More importantly, mutations in two tandem lysine residues (Lys217 and Lys218) in dsRBD2 impair RDE-4's dsRNA-binding ability and could obliterate RNAi initiation in C. elegans. Additionally, we postulate a structural basis for the minimal requirement of linker and dsRBD2 for RDE-4's association with dsRNA and Dcr-1.

A Scalable and Privacy-Aware Location-Sensing Model for Ephemeral Social Network Service

Social network services (SNSs) are developing at an explosive speed, which makes it easy for people to be closely connected. As a result, a new SNS type, ephemeral social network (ESN), is emerging to capture the ephemeral interactions and meetings that occur in environments such as conferences and workplaces. Most ESNs require the positioning for capturing the physical proximity between people, which impacts much the scalability, privacy protection, and the cost of the system. In this paper, we propose a scalable location-sensing model based on RFID-sensing architecture for ESN in consideration of four aspects of requirements, that is, the usability, QoS, scalability, and privacy. The model includes the perspectives of the privacy, architecture, deployment, and positioning algorithms, which can meet the four key requirements. A prototyping conference-type ESN system was also developed in this paper and was tested in the ACM UbiComp 2011 conference, which verified that the model works well with good scalability, low cost, and customized privacy protection.

Weak response of saltmarsh infauna to ecosystem-wide nutrient enrichment and fish predator reduction: A four-year study

Weak response of saltmarsh infauna to ecosystem-wide nutrient enrichment and fish predator reduction: A four-year study

Ephemeral interactions

Ephemeral interactions

Protein-Protein Interactions

Protein-Protein Interactions