School Professionals’ awareness of Adverse Childhood Experiences Scale (SPACES): Initial steps towards the development of new scale

This short paper describes the initial scale development of an instrument designed to measure school professionals' awareness of adverse childhood experiences (ACEs), their impact and practices that can support children who have been affected by ACEs.

Beyond the Portal

<p>This research project began by asking the question, ‘How does mixed reality aid the creation of an inexhaustible three-dimensional world that supports the evolution of inhabitable narratives within sacred spaces? Imdat As states, ‘The user in the digital age is not only a spectator but also an active participant of a parallel world.’ Within this environment, ‘we experience and manipulate virtual space (Imdat AS, 2006, p.60)’. As such, this notion of ‘experiencing and manipulating virtual space’ can provide a valuable set of tools to aid the evolution of inhabitable narratives within sacred spaces. To answer this question, the research proposes a proof of concept for a mixed reality multifaith environment. In its current conception, the multifaith space is limited to room scale spaces, treated as purely functional entities to the point where the experience within the space becomes monotonous. Religious architecture, whether it may be a church, mosque or temple, has been successfully translated into the collective memory of larger society, but within multifaith spaces, our focus has been on neutralization and in the process voided the space of any rich phenomenological experience. In order to activate the space, the research aims to digitally overlay ‘cultural information’ on top of a multifaith space in order to alter its use, essentially transforming it to the spiritual needs of the user. Hereby, a Muslim immersive experience was developed by investigating and interpreting both the tangible and intangible rituals of prayer. By incorporating an ‘altered’ immersive experience, the project aids the evolution in design and concept of a multifaith space that moves beyond the notion of an “empty white room (Crompton, 2013, p.487)”. By creating an MR environment for users of the Muslim faith the project contributes design concepts and methods for others, furthering research in this field.</p>

Beyond the Portal

<p>This research project began by asking the question, ‘How does mixed reality aid the creation of an inexhaustible three-dimensional world that supports the evolution of inhabitable narratives within sacred spaces? Imdat As states, ‘The user in the digital age is not only a spectator but also an active participant of a parallel world.’ Within this environment, ‘we experience and manipulate virtual space (Imdat AS, 2006, p.60)’. As such, this notion of ‘experiencing and manipulating virtual space’ can provide a valuable set of tools to aid the evolution of inhabitable narratives within sacred spaces. To answer this question, the research proposes a proof of concept for a mixed reality multifaith environment. In its current conception, the multifaith space is limited to room scale spaces, treated as purely functional entities to the point where the experience within the space becomes monotonous. Religious architecture, whether it may be a church, mosque or temple, has been successfully translated into the collective memory of larger society, but within multifaith spaces, our focus has been on neutralization and in the process voided the space of any rich phenomenological experience. In order to activate the space, the research aims to digitally overlay ‘cultural information’ on top of a multifaith space in order to alter its use, essentially transforming it to the spiritual needs of the user. Hereby, a Muslim immersive experience was developed by investigating and interpreting both the tangible and intangible rituals of prayer. By incorporating an ‘altered’ immersive experience, the project aids the evolution in design and concept of a multifaith space that moves beyond the notion of an “empty white room (Crompton, 2013, p.487)”. By creating an MR environment for users of the Muslim faith the project contributes design concepts and methods for others, furthering research in this field.</p>

Investigating Human Scale Spatial Experience

Spatial experience, or how humans experience a given space, has been a pivotal topic especially in urban-scale environments. On the human scale, HCI researchers have mostly investigated personal meanings or aesthetic and embodied experiences. In this paper, we investigate the human scale as an ensemble of individual spatial features. Through large-scale online questionnaires we first collected a rich set of spatial features that people generally use to characterize their surroundings. Second, we conducted a set of field interviews to develop a more nuanced understanding of the feature identified as most important: perceived safety. Our combined quantitative and qualitative analysis contributes to spatial understanding as a form of context information and presents a timely investigation into the perceived safety of human scale spaces. By connecting our results to the broader scientific literature, we contribute to the field of HCI spatial understanding.

On-chip light diffraction imaging of nano structures in the guanine platelet

Light projection over short distances can minimize the size of photonic devices, e.g., head-mounted displays and lens-free microscopes. Small lenses or light condensers without typical lenses are essential for light control in micron-scale spaces. In this work, micro-platelets floating in water are used for light projection near the image sensor. These platelets, which are made from guanine, have nanohole gratings and demonstrate light diffraction toward specific directions. By setting a thin water layer on the image sensor's cover glass, each platelet in water forms column- or bar-code-shaped images on the screen. The projected image shapes and colors are inferred to contain information about nano-structures present in the guanine platelet. The proposed down-sized imaging technique can realize extremely compact and portable imagers for nanoscale object detection.

A Lightweight Fusion Distillation Network for Image Deblurring and Deraining

Recently, deep learning-based image deblurring and deraining have been well developed. However, most of these methods fail to distill the useful features. What is more, exploiting the detailed image features in a deep learning framework always requires a mass of parameters, which inevitably makes the network suffer from a high computational burden. We propose a lightweight fusion distillation network (LFDN) for image deblurring and deraining to solve the above problems. The proposed LFDN is designed as an encoder–decoder architecture. In the encoding stage, the image feature is reduced to various small-scale spaces for multi-scale information extraction and fusion without much information loss. Then, a feature distillation normalization block is designed at the beginning of the decoding stage, which enables the network to distill and screen valuable channel information of feature maps continuously. Besides, an information fusion strategy between distillation modules and feature channels is also carried out by the attention mechanism. By fusing different information in the proposed approach, our network can achieve state-of-the-art image deblurring and deraining results with a smaller number of parameters and outperform the existing methods in model complexity.

Towards an enriched framework of service evaluation for pedestrian and bicyclist infrastructure: acknowledging the power of users’ perceptions

More and more cities worldwide are striving for sustainability and livability. Measuring the service or performance of local-scale spaces for pedestrians and bicyclists to better understand how to provide “walkable” and “bikeable” environments is key in this endeavor to enhance active transportation. These pedestrian and bicycle service or performance indicators, such as Level of Traffic Stress or Level of Service, relate measurable characteristics with a perceived proxy of the performance or service, such as comfort, satisfaction, or quality of service (QoS). The purpose of this study is to propose and validate a framework that integrates user-oriented inputs to the existing traditional supply-oriented variables to explain the QoS in segment roadways in urban environments for active modes. The conceptual framework underlying this study considers the contribution of individual perceptions, in addition to the traditionally considered operational and geometry variables, to explain the perceived QoS of pedestrian and bicyclist infrastructure. The framework is tested via two separate and independent surveys for pedestrians and bicyclists. Evidence determined the relative importance of these supply-oriented and user-oriented factors to explain the QoS. The superior explanatory power of the perception variables and in terms of the variables that explain the individuals’ perceived QoS justify the framework for both pedestrians and bicyclists.

The world within reach: an image database of reach-relevant environments

Near-scale spaces are a key component of our visual experience: whether for work or for leisure, we spend much of our days immersed in, and acting upon, the world within reach. Here, we present the Reachspace Database (RSDB), a novel stimulus set containing over 10,000 images depicting first person, reachable-scale, motor-relevant views (hereafter “reachspaces”), which reflect the visual input that an agent would experience while performing a task with her hands. These images are divided into over 350 categories, based on a taxonomy we developed, which captures information relating to the identity of each reachspace, including the broader setting and room it is found in, the locus of interaction (e.g., kitchen counter, desk), and the specific action it affords. Summary analyses of the taxonomy labels in the database suggest a tight connection between activities and the interaction spaces that support them: while a small number of rooms and interaction loci afford many diverse actions (e.g. workshops, tables), most reachspaces were relatively specialized, typically affording only one main activity (e.g. gas station pump, airplane cockpit, kitchen cutting board). Overall, this Reachspace Database represents a large sampling of reachable environments, and provides a new resource to support behavioral and neural research into the visual representation of reachable environments.

Infrared and visible image fusion via octave Gaussian pyramid framework

Image fusion integrates information from multiple images (of the same scene) to generate a (more informative) composite image suitable for human and computer vision perception. The method based on multiscale decomposition is one of the commonly fusion methods. In this study, a new fusion framework based on the octave Gaussian pyramid principle is proposed. In comparison with conventional multiscale decomposition, the proposed octave Gaussian pyramid framework retrieves more information by decomposing an image into two scale spaces (octave and interval spaces). Different from traditional multiscale decomposition with one set of detail and base layers, the proposed method decomposes an image into multiple sets of detail and base layers, and it efficiently retains high- and low-frequency information from the original image. The qualitative and quantitative comparison with five existing methods (on publicly available image databases) demonstrate that the proposed method has better visual effects and scores the highest in objective evaluation.