Conferences vs Journals

In his article Dr. Bowyer discusses about one of the issues hugely discussed in CSE field, publications in conferences-vs-journals. As discussed in the article, some mentors want their students to publish their work only on journals; on the other hand, some other mentors want their students to focus only on conferences. According to Dr. Bowyer both are two extreme of awful mentoring advice.

I agree with Dr. Boywer’s advises in general. In my opinion, it will be really helpful for a new student to publishing in a conference. Because, in conference, it is not just a presentation, a new graduate student can get the real time feedback from the audience who are mostly related to that specific research area. Moreover, it also gives a new student to talk with other researchers about their research and the state of the art technology, which definitely helpful for a new researcher in their future project. And, sometimes it also help the community as it is possible to publish some ongoing research results in conferences. However, as before publishing in a journal, the paper need to go through several review processes, most of the time, the paper becomes a well-furnished manuscript at the time of publication.   

In the last section of the article, Dr. Boywer gives advice to the mentors not buy into the “only-conferences-matter, conferences-are-better-than-journals” viewpoint. And, also advises the new mentors to look for the research questions that need to be solved and other researchers will care about. In my opinion, this is a really valuable advice for the new mentors, and also for the graduate students. Cause, at the end of the day, only the quality of the research will matter. 

Paper Blogs 07

Reference Paper

The Chameleon Effect: The Perception-Behavior Link and Social Interaction

Tanya L. Chartrand and John A. Bargh

(Digital Object Identifier: 10.1037/0022-3514.76.6.893)

Overview of the Paper

Non-conscious mimicry of postures, mannerisms, facial expressions, and other behaviors of one’s interaction partner is referred as the chameleon effect. The chameleon effect is such that one’s behavior passively and unintentionally changes to match that of others. The authors suggest that perception-behavior link is the mechanism involved. In this paper the authors perform three experiments to prove their hypotheses. This paper is cited for more than 1500 times according to Google scholar.

In the first experiment, each participant talked with two different confederates separately. The confederates acted differently in each session. Behavior of confederates was varied from smiled/not smiled or rubbed face/shook foot. After the experiment behavior of the participants were analyzed. The result of the experiments supported the authors’ hypothesis that individuals passively took on the mannerisms and facial expressions of those of around them without the intention or reason to do so.

In second experiment, the authors wanted to see whether behavior matching increases the change of liking the conversation, and create a sense of smoother interactions. The experimental results supported the hypothesis that mimicry increases liking and fosters smooth, harmonious interactions.

In third experiment the authors wanted to see whether everyone is involved in same degree of behavioral and postural mimicry, that is, show the same degree of chameleon effect. Their result proved that individuals with greater tendency to take the perspective of others are more likely to involve in behavioral mimicry.

Evaluation and Validity of the Paper

On the experimental data of the authors conducted a repeated measure analysis of variance (ANOVA) on the number of times participants engaged in the mannerisms per minute for the first experiment. On the second and the third experimental data, the authors perform statistical approach to prove their hypotheses.

 

Improvement Scopes

One extension of this paper will be to model an automated system which automatically detects the chameleon effect of human behavior, even when the behavior mimicry occurs in most minimal circumstances. 

Further Reading

One of the interesting articles, which are cited by this paper, is “Coordinated movement and rapport in teacher-student interactions”, by F. J. Bernieri [2] (Digital Object Identifier: 10.1007/BF00986930). In this paper, 19 teaching dyads of high school students were measured for their interpersonal coordination and rapport.

[1] 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.

[2] F. J. Bernieri, “Coordinated movement and rapport in teacher-student interactions.” Journal of Nonverbal Behavior, 12, 120-138.

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.