Theme 5 Reflection

Unfortunately my migraine held me from going to today’s seminar, but after hearing with the others about the important thing from it the design process is much about prototypes. It is a circular process, when you start with theory, then you create your prototype out of this theory and then you evaluate it by using some kind of user tests. Then you go back and do it all over again. This is as I said in the previous blog post the way to work with design processes.

To create a prototype I don’t think it has to be fully working though. The important thing is that the feature you are supposed to test right now is working. You have to be able to test the correct variable in your prototype testing, and this variable can change depending on which stage in the process you are. In some stage of the design research process you of course have to have a fully working prototype but this can be in a later stage.

Before this theme I thought that maybe I’m not going to do much design research in my area of image and video processing which I am interesting in and that the only ones doing design research are the pure designers. Of course this is not true. All areas of engineering need to make a design research in some way in some stage. All areas of engineering have to make prototypes of their product to be able to find the problems you can’t find out mathematically or theoretically. You have to test everything in real life and not just on the paper. In other sorts of science, like pure social science if don’t think that design research in this form exists though. Here models are developed for human behavior, and this is also tested in real life, but not by prototypes, but by observing and then analyzing. Maybe the prototype step is a step in this big process that isn’t needed or even possible in social science but in all kinds of product creating. 

Theme 5

The article I chose is called “A single-pixel wireless contact lens display” from the Journal of Micromechanics and Microengineering and it had 2011 an IF of 2.105. This article is about digital contact lenses and the researchers in this article has designed and tested a contact lens with one pixel on a live rabbit. They are using previous theories about wireless communications and led-display and using them together to create the digital contact lens. The hard part here is to be able to make the parts small and still able to work and communicate.

They are building a prototype which they are testing on different kinds of animals, mostly dead but also on one live rabbit. This is so that they can test if the cordless power is harmful or even working and if they can make the pixel working from a distance. In this particular article they have to make a prototype I think. This technique is never tested before and just designs which haven’t been built before. In these kinds of technique you have to come to the step when a prototype is built with all the parts that the researchers or other scientists have worked on for this type of implementation.

The good thing about this article is that I notice that all the different parts of the prototype are well researched and tested one by one. They have also thought a lot in other papers about how to build the digital contact lens. You have to make other parts of the design process before you get this far. Divergence and transformation need to be explored widely first and you must have thought critically and creative about how to build the prototype. This article is straight forward on designing the exact parts for this prototype and how to fabricate the parts; it is not a creative part.

“A single-pixel wireless contact lens display” is the first time someone ever have produced any kind of working digital contact lens. Therefore the place for creative thinking is very limiting I think. The room for creative thinking in the design process starts first when there is a working product I think.

The article “Turn Your Mobile Into the Ball: Rendering Live Football Game Using Vibration” is of a slightly different kind. Here they evaluate vibrotactile techniques and video analysis and they then build and experimental mockup which they make the testing and usability tests on. This research is more of a evaluation if the technique is worth working on and then a mockup is great. The article about digital contact lenses is more of a test whether you can create this technique at all or not. This is how you need to work on totally new techniques, but vibrotactile programming can be made in mobile telephones, we know that, and therefore you can look at the reaction from focus groups already before the final technique is even near to be finished.

This type of concept prototype is therefore very useful in the programming and HCI part of media technology where we know what technology you can implement for example to a mobile phone. Then it is not necessarily or even smart to create working prototypes of something that you are not going to use later on. Then it is better to do a mockup and if the focus groups are happy with it then you can go on to the actual real tests.

Theme 4 reflection

So, qualitative methods, what is it? Our collaborate info about qualitative methods now says “ “Qualitative Research Methods: A Data Collector’s Field Guide”, a qualitative research is especially effective in obtaining culturally specific information about the values, opinions, behaviors, and social contexts of particular populations. “. But in this view about qualitative methods I believe that we have gone a step towards pure social science research in some way where it is all about human behavior. Maybe that is what media technology is about? I think that we in this part of the course about the methods should discuss even more what kind of research that is special about media technology. It is a broad area, yes, but it still is an area.

We discussed a lot in our group about how to evaluate the data you get from a qualitative research. You have to be careful and look at your own views a lot when analyzing this data because the results can easily be affected by you as a researcher. I have read about a view called constructionism and this is about that there is no objective reality, especially not in the social world. This is about that people construct their reality based on their beliefs and expectations. This is a thought as hard as the discussion about knowledge in the beginning of the course. I still think it is very important to have these thoughts in the back of your head when talking about qualitative research. How can you be neutral when the research is about human behavior? We also discussed phenomenologism and this view is about that a person’s perception is what creates the persons reality. And people don’t perceive things in the same way. Therefore people’s reality is different and this is what is studied.

Qualitative research is though important and interesting but my point is that it should be made with caution and a open mind. Otherwise is can easily go wrong.

Theme 4

My article this week is “Qualitative evaluation of automatic assignment of keywords to images” by Chih-Fong Tsai , Ken McGarry and  John Tait is once again a image & video inspired article, but not as technical as the ones I usually choose. It comes from the journal “INFORMATION PROCESSING & MANAGEMENT” which just has an impact factor of 1,119 which is the lowest IF I have had so far. This article is about how humans assign keywords to images in a different way than computers. This includes a qualitative method where five people assign keywords to images and then this is compared to what the computers have annotated to this image. This is a part of the research field IR, information retrieval which is becoming a bigger and bigger research-field today.

I think this is an important research because it shows that in this case the computers may today have a problem with being better that the computers. To make a qualitative research on this is good because it can show more and deeper information than if it would have been a quantitative research. It is the process that is important and it is a flexible research. The problem with this research and qualitative research in the whole may be that it is a very small sample of 5 people. They may show some important things, but it is still few people. It may be subjective as well. It is hard to say whether there are other things left out in this research since they use some models that is limiting. The evaluations model which they base their qualitative method on is called Type I and Type II evaluation models and this is models for evaluations and data collections from human judgments. I think this is great models for evaluating human judgments where it works as guidelines for how to analyze behavior. The models are open and this can be a benefit where it is used in a way which fits right in a research but I also think there are big risks with these kinds of frameworks with smaller space for innovation.

The article  “Comics, Robots, Fashion and Programming: outlining the concept of actDresses” by Fernaeus, Y. & Jacobsson, M. (2009) is a interesting article in a pretty special subject I think. I like the approach of learning things from two totally different areas like sign systems from comics and from how people are clothing their robots, like Roomba and Pleo. To link these parts to physical programming looks for me as a nice way to invent new ways to solve the old problems. This is a beautiful way to be innovative. In this example when they use clothing to control different kinds of robot they have found a innovative way to solve a known problem. I am interested in this kind of findings and how you can come up with them. I think this is the beauty of qualitative methods where you can explore things in a deeper way. Quantitative methods are still more of repetitive and only confirming way to work where qualitative methods are the innovative way.

My question is if these finding and this progress they did in actDresses could have been done through a quantitative method or if this type of innovative new finding are exclusive for qualitative methods?

Reflection Theme 3

This week has been interesting. Quantitative methods are interesting and as a student you have to be able to master it. I think the hard and interesting thing about it is to find the correct sample size for your cause.  In the article about Mixed Research they use one source for all their information about sample size, namely Onwuegbuzie, A. J., & Leech, N. L. From these authors they have seven different books and articles about sample sizes and other info about how to research with qualitative, quantitative as well as mixed research methods. This is very good to know when it’s time for me to look at my methods in my master thesis this spring.

For quantitative research it is very important to know how you should make your polls, and even more important to be able to know how to use this data. Already after trying SPSS in the lab this week I’m sold. It’s the perfect way to present your data in an easy as well as complex way. To run frequencies in a easy and effective way is perfect. I think it is pretty hard to do this in excel but the cross-tabulate function in SPSS is easy. In the lab me and Jacob compared the two questions “Did you listen to radio yesterday(and for how long)” and “Did you read any special journal yesterday(and how many?)”. It isn’t perhaps the two most obvious questions to compare, but the point is that in just a minute we compared the answers of these two questions and got a nice diagram over the whole thing. I felt like Hans Rosling for a few seconds and I am sure that I’m going to use this tool in my master thesis.

Data mining and presentation is of course one thing, but the important thing is what conclusions you draw from it and where you go next. I think that I have learnt that after the nice presentation of my data I almost have a responsibility to make something out of it at make sure that the correct conclusions is made.

Theme 3

Mixed research and online learning. What’s the connection? When I read the article by Lowenthal, P. R. & Leech, N I don’t feel like they have connected the two subjects enough. It is interesting reading about what mixed research is and the good and the bad things about it, but I don’t feel like they say why it is needed especially in online learning. The only thing they say is that today it is a mono-method, and they want mixed research. It is though really interesting to read this article, because I think it shows pretty good how the world of research works. This is a way for them to enter their say into the debate about how to make the research about online learning better and trying to perform a paradigm-shift in the way research should be made. It is also a way for them do talk about the paradigm wars and propose a way to make peace in that war.

Mixed research is a very interesting way of research and personally I think it is a very good way. I think if it is used right it will be a good way to broaden your research and a good way to make sure that you cover your area of research even better.  There are though some obvious problems. Quantitative and qualitative research is like two different genres, and to combine them you’ll have to be able to use both. It is like the sport Nordic Combined when the athletes compete in both ski jumping and cross-country skiing in the same competition. It is not enough if you are the best in one of the sports, you have to be able to do well in both.

One interesting problem with mixed research is how you describe your methods use. Lowenthal, P. R. & Leech, N talks about this problem and how it may be hard to duplicate a mixed research work. But if you can use this method, it is good. But you get the hard part of both the quantitative method and the qualitative, so you must be careful when you choose.

“Emotions, then, are a double-edged sword that may help or hinder learning” is a great quote from the other article by Cleveland-Innes, M. & Campbell P that shows the essence of what this, according to me, quantitative research on online learning looks at. Would this research be better if it had used mixed research methods then? I actually don’t think so, because this article was successful showing that emotions is present in online learning and that it can be positive or negative. That short statement is the answer to a good quantitative question. A mixed research would have been bigger and more complex. Maybe it would have given more answers to question about how to use this knowledge that emotions exists, but now they propose this on future work.

What I have learned here is that mixed research can be used, but one should be very careful when using it, since there is a possibility that the research will be incomplete instead of better. It is easy to lose vital parts instead of finding new extra possibilities. And for us students, it can be interesting to use the mix, but we need to be good at both qualitative and quantitative research first, and then we can start to use sciences answer to Nordic combination. 

Theme 2 - Reflection

What is theory then? This week hasn't made it any clearer to me. The more I have thought about the more problems I have explored. It is something very complex and we discussed in our group if a theory is something that is true for you, at this very moment. That way we of course got to the problem about what is true and what is not, but apart from that it is a interesting way to look at theory, if you can back it up it can be true for you. We also discussed what’s needed to create a theory. Can you create your own personal theory that applies for example whether you will be hungry at some moment or not. And how is there any special context that is needed for a theory? Or can you create a general theory. As you can see I think the subject this week just created more questions and I got somehow even more puzzled.

But even thought I can’t put words on what a theory is, I still think I know what it is. And how is that? It is because of all the theories we have looked at. Theories about game-theory and signal theory and so on. And that is the most important. To see what these theories does for their subject. They are some kind of thinking-help. A general way to think about the subject. It is not a model, and not data, but some kind of guidelines for thinking.

The point with all of this is that a theory is the best way to explain a way of thinking and according to Wikipedia the word comes from the ancient Greeks and the technical meaning of it was a “contemplative or speculative understandings of natural things” which also shows that it is a way of thinking and understanding things and the word was used by the ancient philosophers.

Theme 2

What is theory? Gregor says that this question is not treated very much in the history. After reading the article by Sutton and Staw I can’t agree with that. Kaplan and Merton has for example said that theory is “answers to queries of why”. A little bit unclear and big answer, but still you can use that definition as a start. It’s about why things happens more or less, according to these guys. These thing can be anything from thoughts to events. Sutton and Staw says that “Strong theory, in our view,

delves into underlying processes so as to understand the systematic reasons for a particular occurrence or nonoccurrence.”.

So, if theory is about reasons for why things happen, what is theory not? Sutton and Staw makes it easy for us and puts all their points up, one after the other. They say that theory is not: References (they say that it’s used as a smoke screen to hide that you doesn’t have theory), Data, List of variables, Diagrams, Hypotheses. So, what are these things then? I think it more of tools to create your theory, to answer the why.

My paper this week is “Feature detection and letter identification” from the journal Vision Research with an IF of 2.414. This articles main goal is to look at how people recognize objects and in this case how they identify letters. The paper tries to look at how computation works when people are doing visual identification of familiar objects. One of the theory they base this paper on is signal detect ability for identifying one-of-many known signals in white noise by Van Trees, 1968. The theory type here is EP I think, since it is a mathematical theory which says what happens, why and especially what number you will get in which situations.

The benefit with this type of theory is that it is easy to duplicate their work since the theory often is good described in not only their work but also other people previous work.

Limitations is just that, that you can be limited by the theory and it’s guidelines of this theory. If you have guidelines on every step of the theory you must be critical to this theory and also to if it’s the right theory for you.

They have some other theories describes in this article, where on is Wertheimers (1923) theory which says that “a good object is more readily perceived as a whole”. This is more of the type Analysis with just a very short description. This is not limited as much as the above theory, but it doesn’t give you much to work on either.

Reflection Theme 1

It has been an interesting theme this week with much new information. The philosophical angle has been very interesting and there has been a lot of new question that will puzzle me in the near future. I have already started to read parts of the Theaetetus and I will definitely read more philosophy in the future. It is interesting to get interesting things to think about.

I have been thinking about knowledge and what it really is before, but not in this formal way. The best thing I have learned is the thought of everything that will have impact on the knowledge. The fact that for example the way you form a question can change the whole answer will be of much interest in my upcoming thesis.

To find papers and journals haven’t been any problem for me yet. I think it depends mostly because of my interest in the narrow subject of image processing since it is easy to search for that subject. It may also be since I am rather used to use the databases from KTH library and also the library at the Stockholm University.

Impact factor Is though new to me. It is good to be able to check how good the journal is and if you can believe what it publishes. But there are though some questions marks. Stefan mentioned that some journals ask the writers who gets published in the journal to quote other papers in that journal. That way they get a higher IF. The other is if the impact factor really shows the things that makes a paper good or if there are other criteria’s that should have been included. But it’s a good guideline. 

Theme 1: Research publications/Theory of science

I chose the journal The IEEE Transactions on Broadcasting which 2011 had an IF of 1.703. this is a journal that includes publications about the whole broadcast technology field, which includes many aspects of broadcasting, including distribution which interests me very much.

The article I chose is “No-Reference Image Quality Analysis for Compressed Video Sequences” by Arnd Eden and it comes from the journal above. The article looks at compression artifacts in images and they show that there’s a correlation between the artifacts and the spatial activity in the image. The article presents an approach on how to measure image quality based on how human perceives the image. The usual way of measuring image quality is objective and done by algorithms, so the problem here with their subjective measurement is that they need to base the whole new idea upon people’s thoughts on what good image quality is.

1.       Sense –data is introduced after a discussion on whether a table is a table and whether there is any knowledge that are certain to all people. A table is, of course a table if you look at it, but if you zoom in and looks closer, is it still a table? This is also the same if you touch a table, you can touch harder and get a different sense of touch. Russell raises two questions, “Is there a real table at all” and “If so, what sort of object can it be?”. Sense-data is therefore the things we feel by perception, the things that we register immediately, like the color or the shape. BUT, the problem with sense-data is the question if it really exists independently from us, or if it’s just a social creation or creations by people’s minds and ideas. But still all philosophers say that the first question is true, the table exists, even though the sense-data depends on our minds. The sense-data is the one thing we can be certain of.

2.       A proposition is when we know certain things and specifics about for example a man, but we are not acquainted to this thing personally and we don’t know exactly what it is. Statement of fact is more of a “knowledge by description” when we state something that are known to be true about this thing.  

3.       Definite description involves the difference between ambiguous descriptions, which is a non definite description of the form “a man”. The example Russell talks about is when you say “the man with the iron mask” instead. Then you know which man he talks about, it’s a definite description, even though you don’t know him personally.

4.       The knowledge which we base on the intuitive knowledge is call derivative knowledge, and this knowledge we can test. This is no problem. The problem comes with intuitive knowledge, where we can’t test what is true and what’s not. This intuitive knowledge needs to be self-evident and this knowledge is trustworthy in a direct proportion to its self-evidence.

He says that the problem of “modern thought” is that it’s based on that you show that your contradictions is false and not that you prove it from what you theoretically think must be true and why this is so.

Russell says therefore that the main difference between science and philosophy is criticism.  The philosophy looks at knowledge in another way and finds outs the inconsistencies which sometimes the science is built upon and this way the philosophers minimizes the risk of error.  

New blog

This is my new blog for the course Theory and Method for Media Technology. Welcome.