Category: PhD Theses

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…

PhD Thesis by Yu Zhang

Background: Since the early pioneers like Le Corbusier in collaboration with the Philips Corporation designed Poème électronique in 1958, practitioners including designers and artists have embraced interaction and interactive technologies as means for expressing their intuitive concepts. Consequently, designing the experience for interactive art products and installations has gained attraction worldwide over the last decades. Any innovative design is strongly influenced by the intent of the practitioner. Therefore, it is of utmost importance to understand how those practitioners’ intent can be made explicit through their designed artifacts.

Continue reading Drama, Story, Production, Interaction: A Design Approach towards Interactive Installations

PhD Thesis by Maira Brandao Carvalho

Digital Serious Games (SGs) are gaining increasing importance as educational and training tools. However, there is still a long way to make them widely deployed. On the one hand, balancing fun and educational elements in a SG is not trivial and requires understanding how these games can be designed to support effective and efficient learning. On the other hand, actual development can be costly and time-consuming, involving large teams of people from different backgrounds, who often do not share common vocabularies and work processes.

The objective of this research is, thus, to support the design and development of digital educational SGs, by helping reduce the costs associated with SG development, while fulfilling the game’s educational and entertainment goals…

Omar Mubin, one of our PhD candidates, printed his book “ROILA: RObot Interaction LAnguage” last week. “… The mismatch between humans’ expectations and the abilities of interactive robots often results in frustration for the user. Palm Inc. faced a similar problem with handwriting recognition for their handheld computers. They invented Graffiti, an artificial alphabet, that was easy to learn and easy for the computer to recognize. Our Robot Interaction Language (ROILA) takes a similar approach by offering a speech recognition friendly artificial language that is easy to learn for humans and easy to understand for robots with an ultimate goal of outperforming natural language in terms of speech recognition accuracy…”.

To read more about his work, download the book [PDF, 3M].