Computing and Information Systems - Research Publications

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    Navigating Online Down Under: International Students’ Digital Journeys in Australia
    Chang, S ; Gomes, C ; Martin, F ; Gomes, C ; Yeoh, B (Rowman & Littlefield, 2018)
    Research focusing on the experiences of international students tends to centre directly on their educational experiences rather than their everyday lives outside study. Moreover, much of this research has concentrated almost exclusively on the various impacts of the physical, geographic mobility of international students as they move from one country to another, with very little exploration of their digital experiences. There also exists extensive research on the social media and information seeking experiences of young people in different regions of the world. Some of this research provides a comparison between different sources of information and uses of social media. However, there has been little research on what happens when young people move between regions or countries. Borrowing Chang and Gomes’ (2017a) concept of the digital journey, where in crossing transnational borders, migrants might also cross digital borders, this chapter provides some concrete examples of the digital experiences of international students as they transition––wholly or partly––to the Australian digital environment. How do international students transition from certain online environments into others that may be completely different, even alien, to what they have previously experienced? Referring to qualitative and quantitative data collected from three separate projects conducted between 2012 and 2017, this chapter shows that in making the digital journey, international students in Australia do not so much quit their original digital comfort zones as widen their digital horizons. Understanding international students’ digital journeys is particularly significant since it has implications for future research in international student well-being and the provision of support services for students.
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    Why Young Children Don’t Play: Parents’ Accounts of Non-engagement with Digital Games
    Mavoa, J ; Nansen, B ; Gibbs, M ; Carter, M ; Green, L ; Holloway, D ; Stevenson, K ; Jaunzems, K (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2019)
    Focusing on the digital lives of children aged eight and under, and paying attention to their parents and educators, this book showcases research findings from the UK, Denmark, Turkey, Indonesia and Australia.
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    "Adapt or Die": The funeral trade show as a site of institutional anxiety
    Van Ryn, L ; Nansen, B ; Gibbs, M ; Kohn, T ; Gibbs, M ; Nansen, B ; van Ryn, L (Routledge, 2019-06-11)
    Funeral directors shot themselves in the foot over cremation, and cemeteries got splattered with the blood.
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    Social Planning for Trusted Autonomy
    Miller, T ; Pearce, AR ; Sonenberg, L ; Abbass, HA ; Scholz, J ; Reid, DJ (Springer International Publishing, 2018)
    In this chapter, we describe social planning mechanisms for constructing and representing explainable plans in human-agent interactions, addressing one aspect of what it will take to meet the requirements of a trusted autonomous system. Social planning is automated planning in which the planning agent maintains and reasons with an explicit model of the other agents, human or artificial, with which it interacts, including the humans’ goals, intentions, and beliefs, as well as their potential behaviours. The chapter includes a brief overview of the challenge of planning in human-agent teams, and an introduction to a recent body of technical work in multi-agent epistemic planning. The benefits of planning in the presence of nested belief reasoning and first-person multi-agent planning are illustrated in two scenarios, hence indicating how social planning could be used for planning human-agent interaction explicitly as part of an agent’s deliberation.
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    Guilt in DayZ
    Carter, M ; Allison, F ; Jorgensen, K ; Karlsen, F (MIT Press, 2019-01-11)
    Death in most games is simply a metaphor for failure (Bartle 2010). Killing another player in a first-person shooter (FPS) game such as Call of Duty (Infinity Ward 2003) is generally considered to be as transgressive as taking an opponent’s pawn in chess. In an early exploratory study of players’ experiences and processing of violence in digital videogames, Christoph Klimmt and his colleagues concluded that “moral management does not apply to multiplayer combat games”(2006, 325). In other words, player killing is not a violation of moral codes or a source of moral concern for players. Subsequent studies of player experiences of guilt and moral concern in violent videogames (Hartmann, Toz, and Brandon 2010; Hartmann and Vorderer 2010; Gollwitzer and Melzer 2012) have consequently focused on the moral experiences associated with single-player games and the engagement with transgressive fictional, virtual narrative content.
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    Business Process Model Abstraction
    Polyvyanyy, A ; Smirnov, S ; Weske, M ; Vom Brocke, J ; Rosemann, M (Springer-Verlag, 2010-01-01)
    In order to execute, study, or improve operating procedures companies document them as business process models. Often business process analysts capture every single exception handling or alternative task handling scenario within a model. Such a tendency results in large process specifications. The core process logic becomes hidden in numerous modeling constructs. To fulfill different tasks companies develop several model variants of the same business process at different abstraction levels. Afterwards, maintenance of such model groups involves a lot of synchronization effort and is erroneous. We propose an abstraction technique that allows generalization of process models. Business process model abstraction assumes a detailed model of a process to be available and derives coarse grained models from it. The task of abstraction is to tell significant model elements from insignificant ones and to reduce the latter. We propose to learn insignificant process elements from supplementary model information, e.g., task execution time or frequency of task occurrence. Finally, we discuss a mechanism for user control of the model abstraction level - an abstraction slider.
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    Modeling cultural dynamics
    Kashima, Y ; Kirley, M ; Stivala, A ; Robins, G ; Vallacher, RR ; Read, SJ ; Nowak, A (Routledge, 2017)
    This chapter provides a broad and selective introduction to diverse literatures on computational approaches to cultural dynamics. It explains the social psychological models of cultural dynamics, and then move to two prominent approaches to cultural dynamics— Axelrod's model of cultural dissemination and evolutionary game theoretic approaches to evolution of cooperation. These approaches focus on complementary aspects of cultural dynamics, and that each has unique strengths in dealing with some aspects, but not others. The Axelrod model has been used to explore the dynamics deriving from transmissions of cultural information and the role of drift and to some extent of importation; however, it does not address invention, or most importantly, selection. The evolutionary game theoretic approaches have a unique strength in examining the importance of the selection process in cultural evolution. The chapter discusses how the existing approaches complement each other, and also point to the gap in the existing theory— neither has addressed the process of invention.
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    The Technology Explorers: Partnering with Older Adults to Engage with Virtual Reality and Virtual Avatars
    Baker, S ; Waycott, J ; Vetere, F ; Hoang, T ; Neves, BB ; Vetere, F (Springer Singapore, 2019)
    Participatory research methods are increasingly being adopted when designing and evaluating emerging technologies for older adults. This chapter details our approach to applying participatory methods to our work with a group of older adults during series of workshops. The workshops involved working with 25 adults from both regional and metropolitan areas, who were over the age of 70. We referred to these participants as the Technology Explorers. The Technology Explorers partnered with us to explore how Virtual Reality (VR) technology could be harnessed to provide older adults with opportunities to participate in meaningful social activities. This chapter focusses on the initial engagement phase of the project that involved introducing the Technology Explorers to a range of VR systems and interaction techniques, co-designing 3D Avatars, and interacting with each other in two social VR technology probes. We describe the participatory methods that helped us to build a strong collaborative partnership with the Technology Explorers, before detailing the techniques used to engage with group members who had vastly different levels on technical knowledge. As none of the Technology Explorers had any experience with VR or virtual avatars, in a final section we describe three techniques we employed to develop this capacity in the group, with a particular focus on the deployment of two technology probes that marked the end of the workshop series.
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    Collaborative business process modeling in multi-surface environments
    Nolte, A ; Brown, R ; Anslow, C ; Wiechers, M ; Polyvyanyy, A ; Herrmann, T ; Anslow, C ; Campos, P ; Jorge, J (Springer International Publishing, 2017-01-10)
    Analyzing and redesigning business processes is a complex task which requires the collaboration of multiple actors such as process stakeholders, domain experts and others. Current collaborative modeling approaches mainly focus on modeling workshops where participants verbally contribute their perspective on a process along with ideas on how to improve it. These workshops are supported by modeling experts who facilitate the workshop and translate participants’ verbal contributions into a process model. Being limited to verbal contributions however might negatively affect the motivation of participants to actively contribute. Interactive technology such as smartphones, tablets, digital tabletops and interactive walls can provide opportunities for participants to directly interact with process models. Multi surface environments where different interactive technologies (e.g. display walls, tabletops, tablets, and mobiles) are combined also allow for orchestrating different modes of collaboration. In this chapter we describe an approach that combines different styles of collaboration using various interactive surfaces in a multi surface environment. Testing this approach in three different settings we found indications that interactive technology not only improves involvement by participants but also speeds up workshops and improves the quality of collaboration outcomes. The studies also revealed means for improving the proposed approach.
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    The Structured Phase of Concurrency
    Polyvyanyy, A ; Bussler, C ; Bubenko,, J ; Krogstie, J ; Pastor, O ; Pernici, B ; Rolland, C ; Sølvberg, A (Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 2013)
    This extended abstract summarizes the state-of-the-art solution to the structuring problem for models that describe existing real world or envisioned processes. Special attention is devoted to models that allow for the true concurrency semantics. Given a model of a process, the structuring problem deals with answering the question of whether there exists another model that describes the process and is solely composed of structured patterns, such as sequence, selection, option for simultaneous execution, and iteration. Methods and techniques for structuring developed by academia as well as products and standards proposed by industry are discussed. Expectations and recommendations on the future advancements of the structuring problem are suggested.