Category: Articles

PhD Thesis by Xinwei Wang

“Comics are a storytelling medium. There are several practices which revolve around this medium: “the industry that produces comics, the community that embraces them, the content which they represent, and the avenues in which they appear [@Cohn2005]”. For over a hundred years, comics were presented on paper-based carriers such as magazines and books. With the development of new technologies, the comics industry has the opportunity to embrace a new carrier – the digital environment in electronic devices.”

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Gaze has important social meanings in face-to-face communication. A sighted person often uses various eye gestures to convey nonverbal information that a blind conversation partner cannot access and respond. In many examples, the eyes of blind people seem unattractive, and often with deformities, which make the eye appearances less appealing to sighted people. These factors influence the smooth communication between blind and sighted people.

Our research is to simulate the gaze for blind people, aiming at improving the quality of face-to-face communication between blind and sighted people. In this dissertation, the purpose of simulating the gaze includes two aspects: to assist blind people to perceive the gaze from the sighted and to simulate the appropriate gaze for blind people as a visual reaction.

PhD thesis by Wan Jou She

Previous bereavement-related literature indicated that around one out of ten (9.8%) bereaved individuals could suffer from a more severe and protracted grief, entitled Persistent Complex Bereavement Disorder (PCBD) in the DSM-V, or Prolonged Grief Disorder (PGD) in ICD-11. To precisely differentiate the prolonged grievers from the normal grievers, a minimum six months is required, and to offer psychotherapeutic intervention to normal grievers indifferently could instead hamper their natural coping mechanism. The fact conicts with the fact that the severely maladapted grievers might need psychotherapeutic support in a more timely manner, and might even benefit from earlier intervention. This dilemma indicates that there is a need for a screening method in the first six months of bereavement.

Based on the above discussion, the objective of the thesis is to develop a screening method for prolonged grief disorder that is empirically tested and can be embedded in an internet-based
application.

PhD Thesis by Chao Wang

The road environment can be seen as a social situation: In each journey, we encounter other drivers and need to coordinate with them to share the infrastructure. A traditional physical communication method, such as car-body language, lights, horn and speed are the most frequently used means to exchange information, limiting both the range and the bandwidth of the connectivity. This situation may lead to two adverse effects: more conflict in sharing the road and social isolation while driving.

Nowadays, everywhere available connectivity, the broad penetration of social network services and the increasing utility of advanced humanmachine interaction technology, provide new possibilities for enhancing the communication between drivers on the road, enabling social information to pass through the steel shell of the cars without the physical restriction. In this research, we generated, prototyped and evaluated multiple novel social applications …

PhD Thesis by Kadian Davis

…This dissertation employs a user-centered design approach within a multidisciplinary framework, which includes aspects of human-computer interaction, social psychology, cognition, signal processing, and pervasive computing for the design, development, deployment, and validation of bidirectional activity peripheral displays to support social connectedness. Throughout this dissertation, we exploit a human-centered approach to actively involve impending ageing and caregiver users in our design, development, and validation process. Traditional ethnographic techniques such as interviews and observation, accompanied by contemporary techniques such as co-constructing stories were applied to acquire a holistic understanding of the users in context and assist prospective users to imagine user requirements and envision future usage possibilities within AAL environments…