Bring Your Own Device (BYOD)

Now-a-days many organizations try to employ the concept of ‘Bring your own device (BYOD)’. In this concept, employees are encouraged to bring their own portable devices to their work place, and do their assigned task by those devices. Employees are allowed to use the company’s private network and other resources.

This concept is really beneficial for the organizations. Now the organizations do not need to buy computing devices for their employees, which help them to save a lot of fixed cost. Also when the employees use their own devices, the organizations are no more responsible for the maintenance of that device. By this, organizations save maintenance cost. Moreover the organizations don’t have to buy costly operating system licenses anymore. Overall cost saving in these purposes is quite significant.

However, there exist some challenges associated with this concept. The first and very important one may be the security of the network. When everyone is using their own device, then maintaining the security of every device as well as the whole network will be a very challenging stuff. If the security of a device is compromised, data inside that device may need to be compromised. All other data exists in that network is now in threat as well. Next challenge will be to keep the confidential data safe. When different devices use different software, it is very hard to keep track of all the data flow, and keep the confidential data safe. An employee may copy some confidential data in his/her device and go home; but that data is now no more safe.

Despite all those challenges, in my opinion, BYOD is a good initiative taken by some organizations. With the advancement and the growth of the potable technologies, all organizations will eventually choose this concept to reduce cost, and make a flexible work environment for the employees.

Paper Blogs 06

Reference Paper

Mimicking Expressiveness Of Movements By Autistic Children In Game Play

Daniel Tetteroo, Azadeh Shirzad, Mariana Serras Pereira, Matthijs Zwinderman, Duy Le, Emilia Barakova

(Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/SocialCom-PASSAT.2012.100)

Overview of the Paper

Mimicry is a very important social phenomenon which leads to emotional convergence in human interaction. Usually mimicry is viewed as the tendency of imitate the facial, vocal, postural and movement expressions of the people with whom he or she is interacting.

Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) are thought to face difficulties when interacting with others. They have great difficulties in performing tasks that require imitate other in group settings. An experiment is designed in this paper to find out how the children with ASD behave in more natural conditions, like playing game.

In this paper, the authors designed a game setting where the children with ASD played a game against a confederate. The confederate showed different level of expressiveness in her movements. In the same setting, children who do not have ASD also played the game with the same confederate.

During the game, the motion was captured using Microsoft Kinect. After that, the expressiveness of movement for both children with ASD, and children without ASD, was measured by human observers and their modeled automated movement analysis system. Then they compare the result of these two methods.

 

Evaluation and Validity of the Paper

From the movement data, first the expressiveness of the participant player was measured by two human observers. For each five second slots, the observers rated the expressiveness. Then, from the video, their system rated the expressiveness. They use Laban Movement Analysis (LMA) for analyzing the movement. They only use the amplitude and acceleration of movements to analyze the expressiveness. For their game settings, they defined the expressiveness of movements as an area of movement per time period.

From the result obtained from human observers, there was no significant difference in expressiveness for both participant groups. But, they found some difference in result analyzed by their system.

 

Improvement Scopes

In their discussion, the authors mentioned about that there were some difference in the game settings for both groups of children. There may be a little chance for different result. Another, improvement scope might be, to consider other part of Laban Movement Analysis (LMA) to measure expressiveness by their system.

 

Further Reading

One of the interesting articles, which are cited by this paper, is “The Chameleon Effect: The Perception-Behavior Link and Social Interaction”, by Tanya L. Chartrand and John A. Bargh [2] (Digital Object Identifier: 10.1037/0022-3514.76.6.893). Chameleon effect is non-conscious mimicry.  In the cited article, the authors presented three studies to find out chameleon effect during conversations.

References

[1] D. Tetteroo, A. Shirzad, M. Serras Pereira, M. Zwinderman, D. Le, E. Barakova, “Mimicking Expressiveness Of Movements By Autistic Children In Game Play.” In: Proceedings 4th International Conference on Social Computing (SocialCom 2012), Workshop on Wide Spectrum Social Signal Processing, Amsterdam, Netherlands, 3-5 September, 2012

[2] T. Chartrand and J. Bargh, “The chameleon effect: The perception–behavior link and social interaction.” Journal of personality and social psychology, vol. 76, no. 6, p. 893, 1999.

3D Printing

3D printing technology is undoubtedly an exciting one of this time. The current additive technology is not perfect enough to manufacture everything, but it is not far in future when it will help the inventors to develop their prototype easily by 3D printer. 

The advantage of this additive technology has many folds. It will help to manufacture like daily goods to even fine electronics, which will reduce manufacturing cost, as well as human labor. Researchers can develop small prototypes with this technology. Also mass availability will help everyone to make their own product by themselves.

However, we need to think about the some negative impacts of this technology. What if someone wants to manufacture a gun? Will there be any protection mechanism embedded into the 3D printer to protect this sort of misuse. Or how the copyright laws or patent laws will be maintained? How about keeping track of manufactured products by companies? These issues need to be solved before mass marketing of 3D printer.

In my opinion, this technology will be a big lift in manufacturing industry in future. But the unsolved issues need to be addressed before make it available to the mass people. 

Paper Blogs 05

Reference Paper

Nonverbal Synchrony and Rapport: Analysis by the Cross-Lag Panel Technique

Marianne LaFrance

(Digital Object Identifier 10.2307/3033875)

Overview of the Paper

During the second half of the last century, many studies were performed by the psychology research community to investigate how a good rapport is established. This paper also investigated different aspects of developing a rapport. The hypothesis proposed by the author was that posture sharing may be influential in establishing a rapport.

Some studies were performed before, but those are less clear cut due to several factors. The author mentioned that those studies had the limitation of less iteration, very difficult explanations to replicate, not reliably measured rapport and tended to avoid inferential statistics.

In this paper, the authors propose and try to investigate the influence of posture sharing (PS) in establishing a rapport (R). To find out the degree to which PS and R are positively correlates, four scenarios are explained. First, a positive correlation between PS and R may be possible due to an unmeasured third factor. Second, PS and R may be causing each other by positive feedback. Third, PS may be influenced by R. Finally, PS may play the dominant role to establish R.

Data was collected from a college class taken during a six-week summer session. First during the initial week, the classes were videotaped; and during the last week classes were videotaped again. Posture sharing and rapport were evaluated among the students and the instructors.

 

Evaluation and Validity of the Paper

From the graded sheet by the students about the rapport generation and checked by a third coder later, the analysis of the study was performed. The author presented cross-lag analysis to show the experimental result. It showed that posture sharing and rapport were positively correlated. Although the cross-lag analysis differential result was not significant, the direction of the result supported the author’s hypothesis.

 

Improvement Scopes

In my opinion, the future work should include multi-modal data for this research. At the time of the experiment, only the video data was recorded. May be multi-modal data will help to establish the hypothesis with better confidence.  

 

Further Reading

One of the interesting articles, which are cited by this paper, is “Group rapport: Posture sharing as a non- verbal indicator”, by Marianne LaFrance and Maida Broadbent [2] (Digital Object Identifier: 10.1177/105960117600100307). In the cited article, the authors presented another study to investigate the relationship among the posture sharing and establishing a rapport in a group.

[1] M. LaFrance, “Nonverbal synchrony and rapport: Analysis by the cross-lag panel technique,” Social Psychology Quarterly, pp. 66–70, 1979.

[2] M. LaFrance and M. Broadbent, “Group rapport: Posture sharing as a nonverbal indicator,” Group & Organization Management, vol. 1, no. 3, pp. 328–333, 1976.