scholarly journals Taming the Golem - an Experiment in Participatory and Constructive Technology Assessment

2005 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 52-74
Author(s):  
Eva Heiskanen
Keyword(s):  
Key Words ◽  
Technology Assessment ◽  
Real World ◽  
Technology Development ◽  
Grocery Shopping ◽  
Constructive Approach ◽  
Market Evolution ◽  
Type Experiment ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Constructive Technology Assessment

This article examines the possibilities and limitations of constructive technology assessment in the light of a CTA-type experiment conducted in Finland on sustainable alternatives for online grocery shopping. The starting point of the analysis is the impasse created by the lack of dialogue between technology proponents and technology opponents. Constructive technology assessment is investigated here as a forum for constructive exchange and co-operation between seemingly antagonistic perspectives on technology. Thus, although the experiment did not provide visible practical outcomes in technology development or market evolution, it was successful in creating an atmosphere of dialogue and creativity that helped technology proponents and opponents to learn from each other. The article concludes that adopting a ‘constructive’ approach in the sense of making stakeholders work together on envisioning better alternatives appears to be useful in creating new discursive spaces, even when it does not lead to real-world outcomes. *Key words*: technology, assessment, participation

scholarly journals Constructive Technology Assessment: Systematic Review and Future Study Needs

2021 ◽  
Vol 30 (55) ◽  
pp. e12459
Author(s):  
Óscar Iván Rodríguez-Cardoso ◽  
Vladimir Alfonso Ballesteros-Ballesteros ◽  
Manuel Francisco Romero-Ospina
Keyword(s):  
Future Study ◽  
Technology Assessment ◽  
Technology Development ◽  
New Technology ◽  
Social Needs ◽  
Negative Effects ◽  
Technical Problems ◽  
European Model ◽  
Technological Assessment ◽  
Constructive Technology Assessment

Engineering, understood as the gathering of scientific and technological knowledge for innovation, creation, advancement and optimization of techniques, as well as a set of useful tools to meet social needs and solve technical problems of both individuals and the community, makes its main actors, engineers, key players in sustainable development and in the creation of alternatives that minimize the negative effects of technology on society. It is in this sense that technology assessment approaches should take importance among those who manage technology development and implementation policies. Generally, the undesirable effects of the intrusion of a new technology are acted upon when they already occur, and technology assessment is intended to anticipate the risk. This paper presents a bibliographic review of technology assessment, its approaches and future study needs. Based on an articulating axis that positions technological change and innovation as an imperative need for social development, an exhaustive review of related articles in specialized databases was carried out. The most important results of this work reveal that the field of technological assessment has been strongly inclined towards the health or sanitary sector; however, research is being developed in central engineering topics such as the development of nanotechnology, robotics, and the handling of big data, where the European model stands out as a reference for technological assessment processes due to its inclusive and democratic nature.

scholarly journals Real-world evidence: perspectives on challenges, value, and alignment of regulatory and national health technology assessment data collection requirements

2021 ◽  
Vol 37 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hannah Sievers ◽  
Angelika Joos ◽  
Mickaël Hiligsmann
Keyword(s):  
Health Technology Assessment ◽  
Technology Assessment ◽  
Real World ◽  
Health Technology ◽  
Practical Experience ◽  
Added Value ◽  
Real World Data ◽  
Conflicting Demands ◽  
Real World Evidence ◽  
Semistructured Interviews

Abstract Objective This study aims to assess stakeholder perceptions on the challenges and value of real-world evidence (RWE) post approval, the differences in regulatory and health technology assessment (HTA) real-world data (RWD) collection requirements under the German regulation for more safety in drug supply (GSAV), and future alignment opportunities to create a complementary framework for postapproval RWE requirements. Methods Eleven semistructured interviews were conducted purposively with pharmaceutical industry experts, regulatory authorities, health technology assessment bodies (HTAbs), and academia. The interview questions focused on the role of RWE post approval, the added value and challenges of RWE, the most important requirements for RWD collection, experience with registries as a source of RWD, perceptions on the GSAV law, RWE requirements in other countries, and the differences between regulatory and HTA requirements and alignment opportunities. The interviews were recorded, transcribed, and translated for coding in Nvivo to summarize the findings. Results All experts agree that RWE could close evidence gaps by showing the actual value of medicines in patients under real-world conditions. However, experts acknowledged certain challenges such as: (i) heterogeneous perspectives and differences in outcome measures for RWE generation and (ii) missing practical experience with RWD collected through mandatory registries within the German benefit assessment due to an unclear implementation of the GSAV. Conclusions This study revealed that all stakeholder groups recognize the added value of RWE but experience conflicting demands for RWD collection. Harmonizing requirements can be achieved through common postlicensing evidence generation (PLEG) plans and joint scientific advice to address uncertainties regarding evidence needs and to optimize drug development.

scholarly journals Reinforcement Learning Approaches in Social Robotics

Sensors ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (4) ◽  
pp. 1292
Author(s):  
Neziha Akalin ◽  
Amy Loutfi
Keyword(s):  
Reinforcement Learning ◽  
Real World ◽  
Social Robotics ◽  
Research Field ◽  
Social Robots ◽  
Learning Approaches ◽  
Reward Function ◽  
Optimal Behavior ◽  
Learning Challenges ◽  
Starting Point

This article surveys reinforcement learning approaches in social robotics. Reinforcement learning is a framework for decision-making problems in which an agent interacts through trial-and-error with its environment to discover an optimal behavior. Since interaction is a key component in both reinforcement learning and social robotics, it can be a well-suited approach for real-world interactions with physically embodied social robots. The scope of the paper is focused particularly on studies that include social physical robots and real-world human-robot interactions with users. We present a thorough analysis of reinforcement learning approaches in social robotics. In addition to a survey, we categorize existent reinforcement learning approaches based on the used method and the design of the reward mechanisms. Moreover, since communication capability is a prominent feature of social robots, we discuss and group the papers based on the communication medium used for reward formulation. Considering the importance of designing the reward function, we also provide a categorization of the papers based on the nature of the reward. This categorization includes three major themes: interactive reinforcement learning, intrinsically motivated methods, and task performance-driven methods. The benefits and challenges of reinforcement learning in social robotics, evaluation methods of the papers regarding whether or not they use subjective and algorithmic measures, a discussion in the view of real-world reinforcement learning challenges and proposed solutions, the points that remain to be explored, including the approaches that have thus far received less attention is also given in the paper. Thus, this paper aims to become a starting point for researchers interested in using and applying reinforcement learning methods in this particular research field.

scholarly journals Revisiting the CompCars Dataset for Hierarchical Car Classification: New Annotations, Experiments, and Results

Sensors ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 596
Author(s):  
Marco Buzzelli ◽  
Luca Segantin
Keyword(s):  
Real World ◽  
High Performance ◽  
Ad Hoc ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Levels Of Detail ◽  
Excellent Starting Point ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Hierarchical Nature ◽  
Multiple Levels ◽  
Entire Dataset

We address the task of classifying car images at multiple levels of detail, ranging from the top-level car type, down to the specific car make, model, and year. We analyze existing datasets for car classification, and identify the CompCars as an excellent starting point for our task. We show that convolutional neural networks achieve an accuracy above 90% on the finest-level classification task. This high performance, however, is scarcely representative of real-world situations, as it is evaluated on a biased training/test split. In this work, we revisit the CompCars dataset by first defining a new training/test split, which better represents real-world scenarios by setting a more realistic baseline at 61% accuracy on the new test set. We also propagate the existing (but limited) type-level annotation to the entire dataset, and we finally provide a car-tight bounding box for each image, automatically defined through an ad hoc car detector. To evaluate this revisited dataset, we design and implement three different approaches to car classification, two of which exploit the hierarchical nature of car annotations. Our experiments show that higher-level classification in terms of car type positively impacts classification at a finer grain, now reaching 70% accuracy. The achieved performance constitutes a baseline benchmark for future research, and our enriched set of annotations is made available for public download.

scholarly journals Migratory movements in the press of Spanish-speaking countries (2017)

2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 216-224
Author(s):  
Luis Guerra Salas ◽  
María Elena Gómez Sánchez
Keyword(s):  
Key Words ◽  
Multidisciplinary Approach ◽  
Cultural Anthropology ◽  
Spanish Speaking ◽  
Mining Technique ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Press ◽  
Spanish Press ◽  
Migratory Movements ◽  
Specific Search

AbstractThe aim of this article is to analyze journalistic texts on migratory movements appeared on the main newspapers of Spanish-speaking countries along 2017. The focus is put on the subjects that the newspapers highlight, the regions selected and the linguistics elections being made. The research has a multidisciplinary approach that uses the concept of representation, as being used in linguistics pragmatics and cultural anthropology. We use the database Factiva® as the starting point to collect the journalistic pieces that we use for our analysis. The search has been refined using linguistic, contextual, geographic and chronological criteria. Two sub-corpora have been built with the texts obtained through the search. One focuses strictly on Spanish press and the second one is related to the Hispanic area (seven newspapers have been chosen to build this corpus, and each one of them represents one of the seven ample dialectal areas of Spanish language). The qualitative analysis is based on the key words of each of these sub-corpora; such key words are stablished from a text-mining technique that offers the most relevant words and sentences of the first 100 texts obtained through every specific search.

R WE ready for reimbursement? A round up of developments in RWE relating to health technology assessment: part 2

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alex Simpson ◽  
Sreeram V Ramagopalan
Keyword(s):  
Health Technology Assessment ◽  
Technology Assessment ◽  
Real World ◽  
Health Technology ◽  
Health Inequity ◽  
Real World Data ◽  
World Data

In this round up, we cover how COVID-19 has been beneficial for improved access to real-world data, as well as how real-world data can be used to address health inequity, an area of increasing interest for health technology assessment.

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