Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Inéire Report And Policy Recommendations, Arjumand Younus, Simon Caton, Muhammad Atif Qureshi, Mingyeong Jeon, Arefeh Kazemi, Sandra Ruiz Moriana

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Over the years there has been an increased amount of immigration into Ireland leading to the formation of a multicultural society. More recently however immigration has become a controversial issue within Ireland leading to growing anti-immigrant sentiment and political conflict (Costa, 2023) reported as early as 2018 in a report by Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission and Economic & Social Research Institute (McGinnity, Grotti, Russell, Fahey, et al., 2018). This project aims to provide a comprehensive analysis of the factors behind such sentiment and its consequences by means of collecting comprehensive data on it and performing a quantitative and …

Technical Report: A Framework For Confusion Mitigation In Task-Oriented Interactions, Na Li, Robert J. Ross

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Confusion is a mental state that can be triggered in task-oriented interactions and which can if left unattended lead to boredom, frustration, or disengagement from the task at hand. Since previous work has demonstrated that confusion can be detected in embodied situated interactions from visual and auditory cues, in this technique report, we propose appropriate interaction structures which should be used to mitigate confusion. We motivate and describe this dialogue mechanism through an information state-style policy with examples, and also outline the approach we are taking to integrate such a meta-conversational goal alongside core task-oriented considerations in modern data driven …

Considerations For Scaling A Social Enterprise: Key Factors And Elements, Clodagh O'Reilly, Lucia Walsh, Ziene Mottiar

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The number of social enterprises has grown exponentially in recent times. International research regarding how social enterprises scale is starting to emerge and is becoming an area of increased focus. Due to their hybridity, social enterprises experience unique scaling challenges, and research has started to examine these experiences. This theoretical paper reviews existing literature on social enterprise scaling and, based on this, proposes a conceptual model for understanding the interdependent factors and elements social enterprises must navigate when scaling. The proposed conceptual model will provide a base for further empirical research. When validated, it will also provide a practical tool …

Something Old, Something New: Two Library Building Projects Converting Old Buildings Into New Libraries, Allison Kavanagh

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This paper describes two interrelated library building projects at Technological University Dublin. The first is the ongoing construction of an Academic Hub to accommodate the library and other academic support services, incorporating a protected structure into a new building. The second is the refurbishment of part of an office block, originally built in 1970 to be a hotel, to house an interim library until completion of the Academic Hub. This project has provided valuable information for the Academic Hub project.

Hmm, You Seem Confused! Tracking Interlocutor Confusion For Situated Task-Oriented Hri, Na Li, Robert J. Ross

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Our research seeks to develop a long-lasting and high-quality en- gagement between the user and the social robot, which in turn requires a more sophisticated alignment of the user and the system than is currently commonly available. Close monitoring of inter- locutors’ states, and we argue their confusion state in particular, and adjusting dialogue policies based on this state of confusion is needed for successful joint activity. In this paper, we present an ini- tial study of a human-robot conversation scenarios using a Pepper robot to investigate the confusion states of users. A Wizard-of-Oz (WoZ) HRI experiment is illustrated in …

Discovering Child Sexual Abuse Material Creators’ Behaviors And Preferences On The Dark Web, Vuong Ngo, Rahul Gajula, Christina Thorpe, Susan Mckeever

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Background: Producing, distributing or discussing child sexual abuse materials (CSAM) is often committed through the dark web in order to remain hidden from search engines and regular users. Additionally, on the dark web, the CSAM creators employ various techniques to avoid detection and conceal their activities. The large volume of CSAM on the dark web presents a global social problem and poses a significant challenge for helplines, hotlines and law enforcement agencies.

Objective: Identifying CSAM discussions on the dark web and uncovering associated metadata insights into characteristics, behaviours and motivation of CSAM creators.

Participants and Setting: We have conducted an …

A Framework For Sexism Detection On Social Media Via Byt5 And Tabnet, Arjumand Younus, Muhammad Atif Qureshi

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Hateful and offensive content on social media platforms particularly content directed towards a specific gender is a great impediment towards equality, diversity and inclusion. Social media platforms are facing increasing pressure to work towards regulation of such content; and this has directed researchers in text mining to work towards hate speech identification algorithms. One such attempt is sexism detection for which mostly transformer-based text methods have been proposed. We propose a combination of byte-level model ByT5 with tabular modeling via TabNet that has at its core an ability to take into account platform and language aspects of the challenging task …

The Evolution Of The Internet And Social Media: A Literature Review, Charles Alves De Castro, Isobel O'Reilly Dr, Aiden Carthy

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This article reviews and analyses factors impacting the evolution of the internet, the web, and social media channels, charting historic trends and highlight recent technological developments. The review comprised a deep search using electronic journal databases. Articles were chosen according to specific criteria with a group of 34 papers and books selected for complete reading and deep analysis. The 34 elements were analysed and processed using NVIVO 12 Pro, enabling the creation of dimensions and categories, codes and nodes, identifying the most frequent words, cluster analysis of the terms, and creating a word cloud based on each word's frequency. The …

Social Media Influencers (Smis) In Context: A Literature Review, Charles Alves De Castro, Isobel O'Reilly Dr, Aiden Carthy

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This review focused on three main areas, "Social Media Influencers (SMIs) in Context, The Impact of SMIs on Adolescents, and Consumer Behaviour in a Digital Era – Generation Z in Perspective". This article aims to further the overall understanding of SMIs and outlines the impact of SMIs on adolescents‘ lives. Thus, the main objective of this literature review is to raise awareness within the marketing field about the influence of social media influencers on adolescents and how brands promote their products and content through social media influencers. The review comprised a regular search using electronic journal databases and secondary data …

Provenance: An Intermediary-Free Solution For Digital Content Verification, Bilal Yousuf, M. Atif Qureshi, Brendan Spillane, Gary Munnelly, Oisin Carroll, Matthew Runswick, Kirsty Park, Eileen Culloty, Owen Conlan, Jane Suiter

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The threat posed by misinformation and disinformation is one of the defining challenges of the 21st century. Provenance is designed to help combat this threat by warning users when the content they are looking at may be misinformation or disinformation. It is also designed to improve media literacy among its users and ultimately reduce susceptibility to the threat among vulnerable groups within society. The Provenance browser plugin checks the content that users see on the Internet and social media and provides warnings in their browser or social media feed. Unlike similar plugins, which require human experts to provide evaluations and …

Unveiling Women’S Needs And Expectations As Users Of Bike Sharing Services: The H2020 Diamond Project, Andrea Gorrini, Rawad Choubassi, Federico Messa, Wafaa Saleh, Augustus Ababio-Donkor, Maria Chiara Leva, Lorraine D'Arcy, Francesco Fabbri, David Laniado, Pablo Aragon

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Within the objectives of the H2020 DIAMOND project, the paper investigates women’s needs and expectations as users of the bike-sharing service managed by Syndicat Mixte Autolib et Velib Métropole in the territory of Paris Region-Petite Couronne (France). The paper presents a thematic literature review focused on gender inclusion in bike-sharing schemes. The proposed methodological approach is based on (i) Geographic Information Systems for the analysis of geolocated open datasets related to land, sociodemographic and mobility characteristics of the areas surrounding each docking stations. This was aimed at identifying a short list of suitable bike-sharing docking stations, which were further characterized …

Mapping The Light Fantastic At Newgrange, Frank Prendergast, Clare Tuffy, John Lalor, Claire Breen, Sinéad Gargan

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THE WORLD HERITAGE PROPERTY of Brú na Bóinne attracts thousands of visitors from Ireland and around the globe, many drawn by the remarkable winter solstice phenomenon, when the rising sun’s rays illuminate the burial chamber. During 2020 it became clear that public health measures to combat the global pandemic were going to preclude visitor access to the chamber of the Great Mound of Newgrange, including during the annual winter solstice celebrations. When the government agencies OPW and NMS discussed how to manage Newgrange and the solstice during the restrictions, Clare Tuffy, Manager of Visitor Services at Brú na Bóinne, suggested …

Size Matters: The Impact Of Training Size In Taxonomically-Enriched Word Embeddings, Alfredo Maldonado, Filip Klubicka, John D. Kelleher

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Word embeddings trained on natural corpora (e.g., newspaper collections, Wikipedia or the Web) excel in capturing thematic similarity (“topical relatedness”) on word pairs such as ‘coffee’ and ‘cup’ or ’bus’ and ‘road’. However, they are less successful on pairs showing taxonomic similarity, like ‘cup’ and ‘mug’ (near synonyms) or ‘bus’ and ‘train’ (types of public transport). Moreover, purely taxonomy-based embeddings (e.g. those trained on a random-walk of WordNet’s structure) outperform natural-corpus embeddings in taxonomic similarity but underperform them in thematic similarity. Previous work suggests that performance gains in both types of similarity can be achieved by enriching natural-corpus embeddings with …

A New Era For Reuse Social Enterprises In Ireland? The Capacities Required For Achieving Sustainability, Gerard Doyle

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The conventional linear relationship between production and consumption is no longer sustainable. A key component of the transition towards a more sustainable society is the continuation in use of products for longer and the development of a repair and reuse culture. Reuse social enterprises contribute to addressing a range of environmental, economic and social issues facing urban areas. This paper is concerned with, firstly, the motivations for citizens to establish reuse social enterprises in Ireland. Secondly, the paper examines the factors that contribute to reuse social enterprises in Ireland becoming sustainable.

The research points to the necessity of reuse social …

A New Era For Reuse Social Enterprises In Ireland? The Capacities Required For Achieving Sustainability, Gerard Doyle

Articles

The conventional linear relationship between production and consumption is no longer sustainable. A key component of the transition towards a more sustainable society is the continuation in use of products for longer and the development of a repair and reuse culture. Reuse social enterprises contribute to addressing a range of environmental, economic and social issues facing urban areas. This paper is concerned with, firstly, the motivations for citizens to establish reuse social enterprises in Ireland. Secondly, the paper examines the factors that contribute to reuse social enterprises in Ireland becoming sustainable.

The research points to the necessity of reuse social …

The Economic Boom, Bust And Transport Inequity In Suburban Dublin, Ireland, Sarah Rock, Aoife Ahern, Brian Caulfield

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This paper examines the existence and extent of transport inequity and disadvantage in new suburbs in Dublin, built during the Celtic Tiger period and as experienced during the recession. Findings are presented from a household postal survey from three case study areas built between 2001 and 2008. The case study areas are typical 'middle class' suburbs, and were constructed at a time when Ireland was experiencing unprecedented economic growth. The subsequent recession left many of these areas in significant negative equity, and householders with very limited housing mobility. Results from the survey point to considerable problems that are impacting on …

Book Reviews: Robert Hensey, First Light: The Origins Of Newgrange. Oxford: Oxbow Books, Series: Oxbow Insights In Archaeology, 2015, Frank Prendergast

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Case Studies Of Cavity And External Wall Insulation Retrofitted Under The Irish Home Energy Saving Scheme: Technical Analysis And Occupant Perspectives, Aimee Byrne, Gerard Byrne, Garrett O'Donnell, Anthony Robinson

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The residential sector represents 27% of primary energy consumption in Ireland. This paper examines the case study of the Irish government’s national grant scheme to encourage energy efficiency retrofit in private housing. That is the Home Energy Saving (HES) Scheme, later rebranded the Better Energy: Homes (BEH) Scheme. The methodology involved monitoring several homes immediately before and after retrofit alongside discussions with occupants. The examination focused on specific measures commonly introduced through the HES/BEH programme − cavity and external wall insulation. It has been found that a significant decrease in heat loss through the walls was measured in all cases. …

Perception Based Misunderstandings In Human-Computer Dialogues, Niels Schütte, John D. Kelleher, Brian Mac Namee

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In a situated dialogue, misunderstandings may arise if the participants perceive or interpret the environment in different ways. In human-computer dialogue this may be due the sensor errors. We present an experiment system and a series of experiments in which we investigate this problem.

Personas As A User-Centred Design Tool For The Built Environment., Emma Siddall, Corelia Baibarac, Aimee Byrne, Niall Byrne, Ashling Deasy, Nuala Flood, Camille Goulding, Shane O'Driscoll, Niamh Rabbitt, Angharad Sweeney, Yue Wang, Mark Dyer

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The physical structure of a city frequently defines how people interact with each other and their environment. This paper examines the use of personas as a user-centred design tool for the re-engineering of a city to promote sustainable behaviour and social inclusion of its citizens (the Eight Eyes of Dublin Project). The research was carried out through the adoption of personas and collaboration with design partners to identify barriers to sustainability, and resulted in recommendations for the future development of Dublin city, Ireland. These recommendations are then compared with the draft Dublin development plan 2011–17 to determine the effectiveness of …

Technology-Aided Participative Methods In Environmental Assessment: An International Perspective, Ainhoa Gonzalez, Alan Gilmer, Ronan Foley, John Sweeney, John Fry

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Provisions for citizen involvement in the assessment of potential environmental effects of certain plans, programmes and projects are present in current legislation. An international survey revealed that public participation is common practice in European and some other countries worldwide. However, a number of issues are observed to affect public involvement in EIA/SEA processes and expert opinion differs when evaluating the effectiveness of existing participative methods. Results suggest that technology-aided methods can improve traditional participation processes. In particular, GIS has the potential to increase community knowledge and enhance involvement by communicating information more effectively. Variable accessibility to technology and data quality …

Audio Data Verification And Authentication Using Frequency Modulation Based Watermarking, Jonathan Blackledge, Omar Farooq

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An approach to watermarking digital signals using frequency modulation - ‘Chirp Coding’ - is considered. The principles underlying this approach are based on the use of a matched filter to reconstruct a ‘chirp stream’ code that is uniquely robust. The method is generic in the sense that it can, in principle, be used for a variety of different signal (the authentication of speech and biomedical signals, for example). Further, by generating a bit stream that is signal dependent, chirp coding provides a method of self-authentication, which has a wide range of applications including copyright protection and digital rights management. However, …