Communication Technology and New Media Commons^™

User Profile Construction In The Twin Personality-Based Recommender System, Alexandra Roshchina, John Cardiff, Paolo Rosso

Conference Papers

The information overload experienced by peo- ple who use online services and read user- generated content (e.g. product reviews and ratings) to make their decisions has led to the development of the so-called recommender systems. We address the problem of the large increase in the user-generated reviews, which are added to each day and consequently make it difficult for the user to obtain a clear picture of the quality of the facility in which they are interested.

In this paper, we describe the TWIN (“Tell me What I Need”) personality-based recom- mender system, the aim of which is to select …

Report D7.1 Recommendations On Safety Initiatives, Brian O'Neill, Sharon Mclaughlin

Reports

A central objective of EU Kids Online is to strengthen the evidence base for policies regarding online safety in Europe. Its findings regarding children’s online experiences from across Europe offer an unrivalled opportunity to gain greater knowledge of European children’s and parents’ experiences and practices regarding risky and safer use of the internet and online technologies, thereby informing the promotion of a safer online environment for children. This chapter draws out in summary form the main implications for policy making and highlights significant issues arising from the findings of the survey, aligning them with existing initiatives where relevant in the …

Eu Kids Online: Risks And Safety On The Internet From The Perspective Of European Children, Brian O'Neill

Other resources

No abstract provided.

Children's Online Activities And Their Parents' Knowledge And Perception About Online Opportunities And Risks, Brian O'Neill

Other resources

No abstract provided.

Motives For And Against Participating: A Hermeneutical Study Of Media Participation In Norway And Ireland, 2005-2006, Lars Nyre, Brian O'Neill

Conference Papers

There is a tension between consumer and citizen motives for participating in media and the internet. The first is oriented to personal gain and self-fulfillment, while the second is oriented to long-term collective goals of a political nature. People are in the process of adopting these motives to the social media and their participatory requirements, and tensions run high. This chapter discusses two forms of motivation; enjoyment and engagement, and we define them normatively to inform our empirical analysis of reasoning by consenting adults in Dublin, Ireland (2006) and Bergen, Norway (2005). We asked 64 people about their participation in …

New Trends In Automatic Assessment: Ontology Matching, Maria Mitina, Patricia Magee, John Cardiff

Conference Papers

Instant individual feedback represents a result of assessment which allows for considerable improvements in both teaching and learning. In this paper we present the application of ontology matching techniques in automatic correction of students’ answers for SQL tests, which will provide teachers with instant feedback to facilitate manual correction and marking and which they can pass to the students. Students experience many problems learning SQL due to the necessity to memorise database schemas, unclear feedback from the database engine on the execution of the query, etc. The program environment utilising the described approach is designed to solve the abovementioned problems …

Promoting Children’S Interests On The Internet: Regulation And The Emerging Evidence Base Of Risk And Harm, Brian O'Neill, Sonia Livingstone

Conference Papers

Advocacy for child protection online has tended to flow against the tide of a dominant liberal discourse concerning the internet which posits that either the internet should not be regulated or that it can’t actually be regulated at all. Regulatory trends in Great Britain, in Europe and in the wider international arena have promoted models of co- or self-regulation whereby industries themselves with varying degrees of partnership or oversight by relevant state agencies practice ‘light-touch’ regulation based on codes established within industry fora with minimalist prescriptions on content and with ultimate responsibility for risk exposure shifted to the end user. …

What Is Research Telling Us?, Brian O'Neill

Other resources

No abstract provided.

Personal Sense And Idiolect: Combining Authorship Attribution And Opinion Analysis, Polina Panicheva, John Cardiff, Paolo Rosso

Conference Papers

Subjectivity analysis and authorship attribution are very popular areas of research. However, work in these two areas has been done separately. We believe that by combining information about subjectivity in texts and authorship, the performance of both tasks can be improved. In the paper a personalized approach to opinion mining is presented, in which the notions of personal sense and idiolect are introduced and used for polarity classification task. The results of applying the personalized approach to opinion mining are presented, confirming that the approach increases the performance of the opinion mining task. Automatic authorship attribution is further applied to …

Healthcare Professional Roles: The Ontology Model For E-Learning, Lorraine Carmody, Elizabeth Sherry, John Cardiff

Conference Papers

The paper aims to present the MEDeLEARN project, an ontology-driven virtual learning environment for Medical Information System training. The current training environment for healthcare professionals in the use of essential medical information systems in a large urban training hospital is based on conventional instructor-led training sessions. Problems arise due to the demanding nature of the hospital working environment, causing training to be cancelled or curtailed. This mode of training delivery is deemed to be inefficient and ineffective, with the danger of serious errors occurring as a consequence.

The project investigates whether a virtual learning environment can address the competency gap …

Findings Of The Eu Kids Online Project, Brian O'Neill

Other resources

No abstract provided.

A Political Economy Of Formatted Pleasures, Edward Brennan

Books/Book chapters

This chapter argues that, by promoting audience pleasures based in the pursuit of individual and materialistic goals, most television formats are consonant with a dominant orthodoxy which sees markets as the only way to organise society . This elective affinity between format pleasures and free market ideology, however, does not come about through deliberate design. Rather it is an unintended consequence of television production’s response to economic and practical necessity. In their form, content and production practices formats are pre-adapted to the demands of a globalised media market place. This commercial logic has given formats a peculiar signature in terms …

Sounding The Future: Digital Radio And Cd-Quality Audio, Brian O'Neill

Books/Book chapters

Central to the early effort to win acceptance for DAB in the early 1990s was an extensive process of promotion of the many claimed advantages of the new broadcasting technology. Digital radio broadcasting under the Eureka 147 DAB project offered many technical enhancements – more efficient use of the spectrum, improved transmission methods, and lower running costs – features that were attractive to industry professionals, broadcasting organisations, regulators and spectrum planners. But digital radio was also designed as a consumer proposition offering audiences a new and improved listening experience with ease of tuning, reliable reception, text and data services, interactive …

Radio Broadcasting In Europe: The Search For A Common Digital Future, Brian O'Neill, Helen Shaw

Books/Book chapters

Europe’s radio is also characterised by a long history of being defined and driven by the state, in highly centralized fashion in the case of countries such as France (Meadel 1994), or indeed in former totalitarian regimes of Eastern Europe (Paulu 1974), and along more federal or devolved lines in countries such as Germany, Switzerland and the Netherlands (Kuhn 1985). The development of state broadcasting monopolies in most European countries, established in the early years of the twentieth century following the invention of sound broadcasting, has ensured that there is an enduring shared common ideological approach to radio broadcasting, which …

Beyond Europe: Launching Digital Radio In Canada And Australia, Brian O'Neill

Books/Book chapters

Eureka 147 was, as we have argued throughout this volume, a European technology designed within the very particular context of European public service broadcasting (see also Rudin 2006; O'Neill 2009). At the same time, the consortitum behind DAB technology had the ambition that Eureka 147 would become the world standard for digital radio. DAB was indeed the first such technological system to achieve standardisation at the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI), and be recommended as a global standard for digital terrestrial sound broadcasting by the International Telecommunications Union (ITU).

Digital Radio For Ireland: Competing Options, Public Expectations, Brian O'Neill, Helen Shaw, Agata Olbrycht

Reports

The Broadcasting Bill 2008 provides for digital terrestrial sound broadcasting services. This project will contribute to the debate on digital radio with research on the sector’s preparedness for digital radio. It will survey both professionals and potential users of digital radio and assess the environment within which public expectations for new audio media services are formed. REPORT PUBLISHED IN SEPTEMBER 2009

Communication Rights, Digital Literacy And Ethical Individualism In The New Media Environment, Brian O'Neill

Conference Papers

Recent developments in European media policy have given priority to the notion that all citizens need to be digitally literate to fully participate in the emerging Information Society. Media literacy or digital literacy, it is argued, will be required to able to exercise informed choices, understand the nature of content and services and take advantage of the full range of opportunities offered by new communications technologies. Further, being media literate, citizens will be better able to protect themselves and their families from harmful or offensive material. The inclusion of media literacy within the Audiovisual Media Services Directive (Commission of the …

Youth Media Democracy: Perceptions Of New Literacies, Jan Pettersen

Reports

The conference ‘Youth Media Democracy’ was a two day event held in April of 2008. It set out to explore the effects that new media have on the younger generation with a focus on the tremendous opportunities that new media brings. The event had the ambitious aim to offer an integrated experience of a traditional academic conference, presenting recent research on topics like; new media; emerging literacies; the digital divide; new media as a platform for democracy in the lives of young people, and at the same time also engaging the participation of Youth through a series of workshops across …

Developing Digital Radio For Ireland: Emerging Approaches And Strategies, Brian O'Neill

Conference Papers

Ireland’s experience of the transition from public service broadcasting to public service media has gathered pace within the last year with new legislative arrangements for media regulation, the awarding of digital terrestrial television licences and renewed attempts to introduce digital radio broadcasting on the DAB platform. The national public broadcaster, RTE, has played a central role in these developments as it attempts to manage a range of technology platforms and to provide media services for an increasingly diverse and complex market. This paper addresses the case of digital radio in Ireland and the prospects for a successful launch of DAB …

Digital Radio In Europe: Technologies, Industries And Cultures, Brian O'Neill

Other resources

No abstract provided.

Eu Kids Online: Young People’S Internet Use In Four European Countries And Implications For Media Literacy Provision, Brian O'Neill

Other resources

Panel Title: EU Kids Online: young people’s internet use in four European countries and implications for media literacy provision This panel presents findings arising from the EC-funded ‘EU Kids Online’ thematic network on research into young people’s use of the internet and online technologies (see www.eukidsonline.net). The internet is now an integral element of young people’s everyday media consumption, presenting new risks, opportunities and responsibilities. Perspectives on children’s online safety are divided between protectionist approaches, which view children as potential victims of harmful internet content and educational perspectives, which prioritise the development of young people’s critical media literacy skills to …

Dab Eureka-147: The European Vision For Digital Radio, Brian O'Neill

Conference Papers

The digitalisation of radio broadcasting has a long history and as a project has been under active consideration for at least 25 years. A number of different technical approaches to digital radio exist, the longest established of which is the so-called Eureka-147 or DAB (Digital Audio Broadcasting) system. This paper explores the ‘technological imaginary’ of DAB and its distinctly ‘European’ vision for new media and the future of broadcasting. It examines its origins in European R&D policy of the 1980s, and its affinity with European broadcasting practice, particularly within a public service tradition. Ironically, it was DAB’s failure to capitalise …

Back To The Future: The Emergence Of Contrasting European And Us Approaches To Digital Radio, Brian O'Neill

Conference Papers

Digital radio has been in development for over 25 years and yet is no nearer a point of successful adoption. This paper explores the emergence of contrasting European and American approaches to digital radio. The most established of these, Eureka-147 or Digital Audio Broadcasting (DAB), which originated in Europe, is contrasted with the so-called IBOC or /HD Radio approach, as alternative collective conceptualizations of how technology can bridge contemporary broadcasting practice to an ̳imagined‘ digital future. Drawing on the concept of ̳symptomatic technology‘ (Williams 1974), DAB‘s origins in European R&D policy of the 1980s and its affinity with established European …

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

Articles

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 …

Multi-Algorithmic Cryptography Using Deterministic Chaos With Applications To Mobile Communications, Jonathan Blackledge

Articles

In this extended paper, we present an overview of the principal issues associated with cryptography, providing historically significant examples for illustrative purposes as part of a short tutorial for readers that are not familiar with the subject matter. This is used to introduce the role that nonlinear dynamics and chaos play in the design of encryption engines which utilize different types of Iteration Function Systems (IFS). The design of such encryption engines requires that they conform to the principles associated with diffusion and confusion for generating ciphers that are of a maximum entropy type. For this reason, the role of …

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

Articles

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, …

Media Literacy And The Public Sphere: A Contextual Study For Public Media Literacy Promotion In Ireland, Brian O'Neill, Cliona Barnes

Reports

This research documents the background to the development of media literacy as a matter of public policy, both within the European Union and internationally, and examines considerations that may be important in the emerging Irish debate on media literacy.

How Does Advertising Articulate The Tropes Of The Posthuman That Exist In Contemporary Culture?, Norah Campbell

Doctoral

The posthuman is a concept that has accrued much currency in disciplines as diverse as legal theory, artificial life science and philosophy. This thesis explores the meaning of the concept by initially examining what it means to be human, finding that art and science have so far failed to provide a long-lasting definition of humanness. Instead of a temporal “coming-after” stage of humanity, posthumanism might be more usefully seen as a concept that draws attention to the cracks that have always existed in the apparently water-tight description of the human- how the “human” has changed radically and continues to change …

Digital Technologies And The Future Of Radio: Lessons From The Canadian Experience., Brian O'Neill

Conference Papers

This paper examines the position of digital radio in Canada. It examines the Canadian experience of digital radio development from its introduction in 1995 to the present and asks whether the approach adopted and the lessons learned provide useful models for application elsewhere. Three main strands form the background to digital radio’s current stage of development: firstly, the introduction and early support for Digital Audio Broadcasting or (DAB) in the mid 1990s; secondly, the response of the radio industry to the internet and new media as complementary to traditional radio broadcasting provision; and thirdly, the more recent experience of the …

Digital Radio Cultures In Europe, Brian O'Neill

Other resources

No abstract provided.