Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Human augmentation'

Thesis: S.M. in Architecture Studies - Design and Computation, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Architecture, 2017.
Thesis: S.M., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2017.
Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. "June 2017."
Includes bibliographical references (pages [67]-70).
If we are to understand human-level intelligence, we need to understand how memories are encoded, stored and retrieved. In this thesis, I take a step towards that understanding by focusing on a high-level interpretation of the relationship between episodic memory formation and spatial navigation. On the basis of the biologically inspired process, I focus on the implementation of NeverMind, an augmented reality (AR) interface designed to help people memorize effectively. Early experiments conducted with a prototype of NeverMind suggest that the long-term memory recall accuracy of sequences of items is nearly tripled compared to paper-based memorization tasks. For this thesis, I suggest that we can trigger episodic memory for tasks that we normally associate with semantic memory, by using interfaces to passively stimulate the hippocampus, the entorhinal cortex, and the neocortex. Inspired by the methods currently used by memory champions, NeverMind facilitates memory encoding by engaging in hippocampal activation and promoting task-specific neural firing. NeverMind pairs spatial navigation with visual cues to make memorization tasks effective and enjoyable. The contributions of this thesis are twofold: first, I developed NeverMind, a tool to facilitate memorization through a single exposure by biasing our minds into using episodic memory. When studying, we tend to use semantic memory and encoding through repetition; however, by using augmented reality interfaces we can manipulate how our brain encodes information and memorize long term content with a single exposure, making a memory champion technique accessible to anyone. Second, I provide an open-source platform for researchers to conduct high-level experiments on episodic memory and spatial navigation. In this thesis I suggest that digital user interfaces can be used as a tool to gather insights on how human memory works.
by Oscar Rosello.
S.M. in Architecture Studies - Design and Computation
S.M.

Thesis (M.A.)--Boston University
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The practice of augmenting hunan beings using technological or pharmaceutical means is rapidly expanding and there are many who fear the practice may be a threat to our very humanity. In this work I trace the primary source of that concem to the moral ideal of authenticity and examine how authenticity is used in the contemporary literature on human augmentation. Each conception, or framework of authenticity in the literature is expounded on and evaluated, and each is found somewhat lacking. Finally, I propose an altemative view of authenticity based on Wittgenstein's concept of family resemblance and use it to evaluate whether particular augmentation procedures are authentic, inauthentic, or entirely neutral.
2031-01-01

The objective with the thesis is to research how to match a company's human resources with job assignments received from clients. A common problem is the difficulty for computers to distinguish what semantic context a word is in. This means that for words with multiple interpretations it is hard to determine which meaning is the correct meaning in a given context. The proposed solution is to use ontologies to implement a query augmentation that will improve defining the context through users adding suggestions of relevant words. The intuition is that by incrementally adding words, the context narrows, making it easier to search for any consultant matching a specific assignment. The query augmentation will then manifest in a web application created in NodeJS and AngularJS. The experiments will then measure, based on \emph{precision}, \emph{recall} and \emph{f-measure}, the performance of the query augmentation. The thesis will also look into how to store document-based résumés, .docx file-format, and properly enable querying over the database of résumés. The Apache based frameworks Solr and Lucene, with its inverted indexing and support for HTTP requests, are used in this thesis to solve this problem. Looking at the results, the query augmentation was indicated of having somewhat too strict restrictions for which the reason is that it only permits \emph{AND} conditions. With that said, the query augmentation was able to narrow down the search context. Future work would include adding additional query conditions and expand the visualization of the query augmentation.

Thesis: S.M., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Mechanical Engineering, 2017.
Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.
Includes bibliographical references (pages 91-95).
Manufacturing tasks are highly demanding of work, and there is an especially high prevalence of injury associated with overhead tasks which are taxing to the shoulder and upper body. To assist workers completing these tasks, and to increase overall productivity, safety and effectiveness, we introduce a novel design of Supernumerary Robotic Limb (SRL). This is a robotic arm worn on the shoulder of the technician/- worker which extends the human capability with implicit force control algorithms that allow for intuitive control and interface of the extra robot arm. Affectionately dubbed Aucto, the robotic arm can lift an object and hold it while the wearer is securing the object using a tool with both hands. The worker does not have to take a laborious posture for a long time, reducing fatigue and injuries. Furthermore, a single worker can execute the task, which would otherwise require two workers. Two technical challenges and novel solutions are presented. One is to make the wearable robot simple and lightweight with use of a new type of granular jamming gripper that can grasp diverse objects from an arbitrary direction. This eliminates the need for orienting the gripper against the object with three-axis wrist joints, reducing the number of degrees of freedom (DOF) from 6 to 3. The other is an effective control algorithm that allows the wearer to move freely while the robot on the shoulder is holding an object. Unlike a robot sitting on a floor, the SRL worn by a human is disturbed by the movement of the wearer. An admittance-based control algorithm allows the robot to hold the object stably and securely despite the human movement and changes in posture. A 3 DOF prototype robot with a new granular jamming gripper and an ergonomic body mounting gear is developed and tested. It is demonstrated that the robot can hold a large object securely in the overhead area despite the movement of the wearer while performing an assembly work.
by Lawrence 'Zack' Bright.
S.M.

Thesis: S.M., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Mechanical Engineering, 2017.
Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.
Includes bibliographical references (pages 91-95).
Manufacturing tasks are highly demanding of work, and there is an especially high prevalence of injury associated with overhead tasks which are taxing to the shoulder and upper body. To assist workers completing these tasks, and to increase overall productivity, safety and effectiveness, we introduce a novel design of Supernumerary Robotic Limb (SRL). This is a robotic arm worn on the shoulder of the technician/- worker which extends the human capability with implicit force control algorithms that allow for intuitive control and interface of the extra robot arm. Affectionately dubbed Aucto, the robotic arm can lift an object and hold it while the wearer is securing the object using a tool with both hands. The worker does not have to take a laborious posture for a long time, reducing fatigue and injuries. Furthermore, a single worker can execute the task, which would otherwise require two workers. Two technical challenges and novel solutions are presented. One is to make the wearable robot simple and lightweight with use of a new type of granular jamming gripper that can grasp diverse objects from an arbitrary direction. This eliminates the need for orienting the gripper against the object with three-axis wrist joints, reducing the number of degrees of freedom (DOF) from 6 to 3. The other is an effective control algorithm that allows the wearer to move freely while the robot on the shoulder is holding an object. Unlike a robot sitting on a floor, the SRL worn by a human is disturbed by the movement of the wearer. An admittance-based control algorithm allows the robot to hold the object stably and securely despite the human movement and changes in posture. A 3 DOF prototype robot with a new granular jamming gripper and an ergonomic body mounting gear is developed and tested. It is demonstrated that the robot can hold a large object securely in the overhead area despite the movement of the wearer while performing an assembly work.
by Lawrence 'Zack' Bright.
S.M.

Thesis: S.M., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, September, 2020
Cataloged from the official PDF version of thesis.
Includes bibliographical references.
We explore the vision of closed-loop bio-digital interfaces for human augmentation, where the bio-digital system allows for both sensing and writing biological information to the body. Current-generation wearable devices sense an individual's physiological data such as heart rate, respiration, electrodermal activity, and EEG, but lack in sensing their biological counterparts, which drive the majority of individual's physiological signals. On the other hand, biosensors for detecting biochemical markers are currently limited to one-time use, are non-continuous and don't provide flexibility in choosing which biomarker they sense. We believe that the future for wearable biosensors lies in going beyond specific sensing capabilities and becoming a wearable "lab" on body, where a small device can offer a fully integrated and re-configurable system that mimics several processes usually performed in the laboratory for clinical diagnostics and analysis of human health. To illustrate our vision of having a lab on body, we prototyped "Wearable Lab" a bio-digital platform for sensing biochemical and digital data from saliva. Our platform contains digital sensors such as an IMU for activity recognition, as well as an automated system for continuous sampling of biomarkers from saliva by leveraging existing paper-based biochemical sensors. The platform could aid with longitudinal studies of biomarkers and early diagnosis of diseases. We present example data collected from the device, show a preliminary evaluation, and discuss the limitation of our platform.
by Pat Pataranutaporn.
S.M.
S.M. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences

Thesis (M.A.)--Georgia State University, 2008.
Title from file title page. Elizabeth Sheff, committee chair; Dawn Baunach, Denise Donnelly, committee members. Electronic text (97 p.) : digital, PDF file. Description based on contents viewed June 24, 2008. Includes bibliographical references (p. 80-85).

In this dissertation, I present Dramatis, a computational human behavior model of suspense based on Gerrig and Bernardo's de nition of suspense. In this model, readers traverse a search space on behalf of the protagonist, searching for an escape from some oncoming negative outcome. As the quality or quantity of escapes available to the protagonist decreases, the level of suspense felt by the audience increases. The major components of Dramatis are a model of reader salience, used to determine what elements of the story are foregrounded in the reader's mind, and an algorithm for determining the escape plan that a reader would perceive to be the most likely to succeed for the protagonist. I evaluate my model by comparing its ratings of suspense to the self-reported suspense ratings of human readers. Additionally, I demonstrate that the components of the suspense model are sufficient to produce these human-comparable ratings.

In recent years, deep learning, a critical technology in computer vision, has achieved remarkable milestones in many fields, such as image classification and object detection. In particular, it has also been introduced to address the problem of violence detection, which is a big challenge considering the complexity to establish an exact definition for the phenomenon of violence. Thanks to the ever increasing development of new technologies for surveillance, we have nowadays access to an enormous database of videos that can be analyzed to find any abnormal behavior. However, by dealing with such huge amount of data it is unrealistic to manually examine all of them. Deep learning techniques, instead, can automatically study, learn and perform classification operations. In the context of violence detection, with the extraction of visual harmful patterns, it is possible to design various descriptors to represent features that can identify them. In this research we tackle the task of generating new augmented datasets in order to try to simplify the identification step performed by a violence detection technique in the field of Deep Learning. The novelty of this work is to introduce the usage of DensePose model to enrich the images in a dataset by highlighting (i.e. by identifying and segmenting) all the human beings present in them. With this approach we gained knowledge of how this algorithm performs on videos with a violent context and how the violent detection network benefit from this procedure. Performances have been evaluated from the point of view of segmentation accuracy and efficiency of the violence detection network, as well from the computational point of view. Results shows how the context of the scene is the major indicator that brings the DensePose model to correct segment human beings and how the context of violence does not seem to be the most suitable field for the application of this model since the common overlap of bodies (distinctive aspect of violence) acts as disadvantage for the segmentation. For this reason, the violence detection network does not exploit its full potential. Finally, we understood how such augmented datasets can boost up the training speed by reducing the time needed for the weights-update phase, making this procedure a helpful adds-on for implementations in different contexts where the identification of human beings still plays the major role.

Beta cell replacement is the only therapy currently able to restore insulin independence in C-peptide negative Type 1 diabetes. This can be achieved through either vascularised whole pancreas transplantation or isolated islet transplantation. Whole pancreas transplantation can deliver long-term normalisation of blood glucose but nevertheless is associated with significant peri-operative morbidity and mortality. Islet transplantation is a much less invasive procedure which can provide complete resolution of disabling hypoglycaemia with potential insulin independence. However, at the outset of this research, this procedure was restricted to UK centres with islet isolation facilities. Two main hurdles prevent wide application of this treatment modality. First, a limit to the number of isolation facilities that can be established. These are sophisticated and very expensive laboratories and require extensive staff training and commitment. Second, there is significantly limited supply of suitable donor pancreases meeting less than 1% of the potential clinical need. The goal of this PhD project was to address, from the UK perspective, the limitations in transplantation sites and scarcity of suitable islets for clinical transplantation maintaining a clinically relevant focus through the study of primary human islets. The overall aims were: 1. To demonstrate safe and effective islet transport despite relatively long journey time in the UK without need for complete revalidation / repreparation for transplant at satellite site. 2. To evaluate potential for enhancing mass and function in intact human islets including the potential of in vitro incubation with pregnancy-related hormones 3. To evaluate potential for in vitro expansion of human pancreatic cells with determination of whether a functional beta-cell phenotype can be maintained over passage and whether putative pancreatic stem cells can be identified in culture. 4. To determine potential for redifferentiation of expanded human pancreatic cells towards a functional beta-cell phenotype by in vitro pseudo-islet formation. III A safe, practical and clinically viable islet transportation system was successfully established to suit the UK setting. This system enabled efficient utilisation of central islet isolation facilities for production of clinical grade high quality islets for transportation to several islet transplantation centres. Cooling a relatively small volume of high density islets in transport bags enabled transported islets to be transplanted at the satellite centres without any further manipulation and repreparation. This work underpinned government funding of a national islet transplantation program and led to the first successful UK islet transplantation of transported islets. Validated standard operating procedures (SOPs) created in this project were adopted nationally by all islet receiving centres. Augmentation of islet mass and function in intact primary human islets was attempted following treatment with pregnancy related hormones and a panel of other growth factors. In contrast to previously published reports on rodent islets or adherent human islets, these studies confirmed that growth factor treatment can only maintain as opposed to increasing islet mass or function in intact human islets. Nevertheless, prolactin induced a significant increase in insulin expression and potentiated insulin secretion in response to elevated glucose concentrations. Proliferative cultures from pancreatic islets were established and characterised achieving high proliferative capacity with potential to produce transplantable mass sufficient for several recipients from a single donor. Despite maintenance of differentiated phenotypic markers in early passages there was an accelerated loss of β-cell function. Nevertheless expression of pluripotency-associated markers was identified for first time suggesting stem cells residing in adult pancreas. Potential for enhanced β-cell function in islet proliferative culture with minimal manipulation was demonstrated through pseudo-islet formation. This was associated with down-regulation of pluripotency-associated markers and enhanced β-cell function in vitro IV and limited, but confirmed activity, in vivo. However, currently this remains limited and insufficient for clinical impact. In conclusion, validation of an effective and safe islet transport system was achieved underpinning unique National Health Service funding of a UK national clinical programme of islet transplantation and enabling the first successful UK transplantation of transported islets. Definitive studies to demonstrate functional enhancement in human islets in response to pregnancy related hormones and/or other factors would require toxic pre-conditioning. Significant islet mass expansion was attained in vitro with potential functional enhancement with pseudo-islet formation. However, further differentiation studies and validation of a practical large scale culture system remain an important requirement for any potential future clinical application.

Aux confluences historiques et conceptuelles de la modernité, de la technologie, et del’« humain », les textes de notre corpus négocient et interrogent de façon critique lespossibilités matérielles et symboliques de la prothèse, ses aspects phénoménologiques etspéculatifs : du côté subjectiviste et conceptualiste avec une philosophie de laconscience, avec Merleau-Ponty ; et de l’autre avec les épistémologues du corps ethistoriens de la connaissance Canguilhem et Foucault. Le trope prometteur de laprothèse impacte sur les formations discursives et non-discursives concernant lareconstruction des corps, là où la technologie devient le corrélat de l’identité. Latechnologie s’humanise au contact de l’homme, et, en révélant une hybridité supérieure,elle phagocyte l’humain du même coup.Ce travail d’anthropologie bioculturelle (Andrieu, 1993; Andrieu, 2006; Andrieu,2007a), au croisement d’une sociologie des sciences (Latour, 1989), ou encore d’uneanthropologie des sciences (Hakken, 2001), se propose en tant qu’exemple de lacontribution potentielle que l’anthropologie biologique et culturelle peut rendre à lamédecine reconstructrice et que la médecine reconstructrice peut rendre à la plastique del’homme ; l’anthropologie biologique nous concerne dans la transformation biologiquedu corps humain, par l’outil de la technologie, tant dans son histoire de la reconstructionmécanique et plastique, que dans son projet d’augmentation bionique. Nous établironsune continuité archéologique, d’une terminologie foucaldienne, entre les deux pratiques.Nous questionnons les postulats au sujet des relations nature/culture, biologie/contextesocial, et nous présentons une approche définitionnelle de la technologie, pierreangulaire de notre travail théorique. Le trope de la technologie, en tant qu’outil adaptatifde la culture au service de la nature, opère un glissement sémantique en se plaçant auservice d’une biologie à améliorer. Une des clés de notre recherche sur l’augmentationdes fonctions et de l’esthétique du corps humain réside dans la redéfinition même de cesrelations ; et dans l’impact de l’interpénétration entre réalité et imaginaire dans laconstruction de l’objet scientifique, dans la transformation du corps humain.Afin de cerner les enjeux du discours au sujet de l’« autoévolution » des corps, lesthéories évolutionnistes sont abordées, bien que ne représentant pas notre spécialité.Dans le cadre de l’autoévolution, et de l’augmentation bionique de l’homme, la7somation culturelle du corps s’exerce par l’usage des biotechnologies, en ruptureépistémologique de la pensée darwinienne, bien que l’acte d’hybridation évolutionnistesoit toujours inscrit dans un dessein de maximisation bionique/génétique du corpshumain. Nous explorons les courants de la pensée cybernétique dans leurs actions detransformation biologique du corps humain, de la performativité des mutilations. Ainsitechnologie et techniques apparaissent-elles indissociables de la science, et de sonconstructionnisme social
Situated at the historical and conceptual crossroads of modernity, technology and the“human”, this thesis will negotiate and critique the material and symbolic possibilities ofthe prosthesis, together with its phenomenological and speculative aspects. This workwill be undertaken on the one hand from a subjectivist point of view, using Merleau-Ponty and his conceptualist philosophy of consciousness; and on the another from aviewpoint based on epistemologists of the body and historians of knowledge such asCanguilhem, and Foucault. The promising trope of the prosthesis has an impact ondiscursive and non-discursive structures related to the reconstruction of the body, wheretechnology becomes the correlate of identity.This work in Biological Anthropology (Andrieu, 1993, 2006, 2007), interwining withSociology of Sciences (Latour, 1989) and Anthropology of Sciences (Hakken, 2001), isproposed as an example of the potential contribution which biological and culturalanthropology can make to reconstructive medicine and which reconstructive medecinecan make to human corporeality ; Biological Anthropology allows us to study theprocess of the human body’s biological modification, via technology and theincorporation of biomaterial into the body, through the medical history of mechanicaland plastic reconstruction, and through the cybernetic project of bionic augmentation.An archeological continuity, to use Foucault’s terminology, will be established betweenboth practices.We will question the postulates at stake in the relationships between nature and culture,biology and social context, and will present as a cornerstone of our theoretical work awide range of definitional approaches. The trope of technology as an evolutionaryadaptative tool of culture in the service of nature allows a semantic slide whereby itbecomes a tool to improve one’s biology. One of the keys of our research into thetransformation of the human body in medical practices is the very redefinition of thoserelationships; another is the impact of the interpenetration of reality and imaginary in theconstruction of the scientific object and the transformation of the human body.8In order to locate what is at stake in the discourse on “auto-evolution”, evolutionarytheories are tackled, albeit from a non-specialist outlook. In the context of autoevolutionand bionic augmentation of the human, the cultural somatic modification ofthe body

Dans cette thèse, nous introduisons le concept de Réalité Augmentée Haptique (RAH) en définissant une taxonomie à deux axes. Le premier dénommé Haptique Augmentée (HA) représente l'ensemble des applications qui modifient/augmentent une donnée haptique existante. Le second axe, appelé Augmentation Haptique (AH), considère les applications qui utilisent la modalité haptique pour fournir une information supplémentaire à l'utilisateur. Par la suite, nous illustrons ces concepts sous forme d'une application de télé-diagnostic, permettant l'exploration d'un objet mixte, composé de parties réelles et virtuelles, ou la comparaison entre un objet réel et un virtuel ; d'un nouvel algorithme pour l'enseignement d'un chemin par guidage haptique, tout en évitant les problèmes de passivité et de dépendance de l'apprenti ; et de l'emploi de ces deux notions dans une application de peinture virtuelle sur un quelconque objet réel (avec croisement d'augmentations visio-haptique), le tout enrichi d'un processus visuel de Réalité Diminuée.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Civil and Environmental Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, 2008.
Committee Chair: Germanovich, Leonid; Committee Co-Chair: Skrinjar, Oskar; Committee Member: Mayne, Paul; Committee Member: Puzrin, Alexander; Committee Member: Rix, Glenn.

Aux confluences historiques et conceptuelles de la modernité, de la technologie, et de l’« humain », les textes de notre corpus négocient et interrogent de façon critique les possibilités matérielles et symboliques de la prothèse, ses aspects phénoménologiques et spéculatifs : du côté subjectiviste et conceptualiste avec une philosophie de la conscience, avec Merleau-Ponty ; et de l’autre avec les épistémologues du corps et historiens de la connaissance Canguilhem et Foucault. Le trope prometteur de la prothèse impacte sur les formations discursives et non-discursives concernant la reconstruction des corps, là où la technologie devient le corrélat de l’identité. La technologie s’humanise au contact de l’homme, et, en révélant une hybridité supérieure, elle phagocyte l’humain du même coup. Ce travail de sociologie des sciences (Latour, 1989), ou encore d’anthropologie des sciences (Hakken, 2001) ou d’anthropologie bioculturelle (Andrieu, 1993; Andrieu, 2006; Andrieu, 2007a) se propose en tant qu’exemple de la contribution potentielle que l’anthropologie biologique et culturelle peut rendre à la médecine reconstructrice et que la médecine reconstructrice peut rendre à la plastique de l’homme ; l’anthropologie biologique nous concerne dans la transformation biologique du corps humain, par l’outil de la technologie, tant dans son histoire de la reconstruction mécanique et plastique, que dans son projet d’augmentation bionique. Nous établirons une continuité archéologique, d’une terminologie foucaldienne, entre les deux pratiques. Nous questionnons les postulats au sujet des relations nature/culture, biologie/contexte social, et nous présentons une approche définitionnelle de la technologie, pierre angulaire de notre travail théorique. Le trope de la technologie, en tant qu’outil adaptatif de la culture au service de la nature, opère un glissement sémantique en se plaçant au service d’une biologie à améliorer. Une des clés de notre recherche sur l’augmentation des fonctions et de l’esthétique du corps humain réside dans la redéfinition même de ces relations ; et dans l’impact de l’interpénétration entre réalité et imaginaire dans la construction de l’objet scientifique, dans la transformation du corps humain. Afin de cerner les enjeux du discours au sujet de l’« autoévolution » des corps, les théories évolutionnistes sont abordées, bien que ne représentant pas notre spécialité. Dans le cadre de l’autoévolution, et de l’augmentation bionique de l’homme, la somation culturelle du corps s’exerce par l’usage des biotechnologies, en rupture épistémologique de la pensée darwinienne, bien que l’acte d’hybridation évolutionnaire soit toujours inscrit dans un dessein de maximisation bionique/génétique du corps humain. Nous explorons les courants de la pensée cybernétique dans leurs actions de transformation biologique du corps humain, de la performativité des mutilations. Ainsi technologie et techniques apparaissent-elles indissociables de la science, et de son constructionnisme social.

La technologie d’édition CRISPR peut être définie comme un outil biologique qui par son efficacité, son extrême précision et la facilité de sa modélisation, permet aujourd’hui de modifier le génome des organismes vivants en général et celui de l’homme en particulier. Sa découverte en 2012 par les chercheuses française et américaine, E. Charpentier et J. Doudna, récompensées par le Prix Nobel de chimie 2020, permet des applications thérapeutiques, au niveau germinal, pour des maladies à transmission autosomique dominante. Jusqu’ici, aucune technologie antérieure d’édition génomique, ni aucun diagnostic anténatal (DPI, DPN), n’avait été capable de prévenir ces maladies. En novembre 2018, le chercheur chinois Hé Jiankui annonce avoir utilisé la technologie CRISPR pour éditer des embryons humains viables. Selon Jiankui cette tentative consiste à modifier génétiquement des embryons humains en FIV afin de prévenir « définitivement » l’infection au VIH des futurs bébés. Cette modification génétique est ainsi transmissible à leur descendance. A partir de là, il s’est ouvert un tournant décisif de l’édition du génome humain héritable. Celui-ci s’apparente, dans notre contexte marqué par la convergence des NBIC, à une perspective transhumaniste. Car à la vérité, CRISPR n’aurait pas fait que prévenir l’infection au VIH chez ces bébés, il aurait surtout amélioré un caractère génétique conférant à ces derniers une immunité à vie contre le VIH-SIDA, avec pour principal corollaire, que de telles modifications sont héritables. Cette application non thérapeutique controversée, nous a conduit à nous demander successivement s’il est souhaitable de se servir de la technologie d’édition du génome CRISPR-Cas9, pour corriger au niveau germinal ou embryonnaire, une anomalie génétique afin de préserver le futur enfant de certains handicaps qui pourraient mettre en péril sa santé ou alourdir sa vie ?Jusqu’où de telles modifications pourraient être jugées comme bénéfiques ou à risque pour l’enfant et qui en aurait l’ultime légitimité d’en juger ?Peut-on alors affirmer, qu’en regard de l’extrême étroitesse qui existe entre la finalité thérapeutique d’une modification génomique germinale ou embryonnaire et l’amélioration/l’augmentation génétique, le risque d’altération de la nature humaine et de fait, la sortie hors de l’espèce humaine devient inéluctable ?
Doctorat en Philosophie
info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

User Centred Design is accepted as being essential to good software design, only by involving the users throughout the development process can the developers understand what the end users really want (Sharp et al., 2007). One area which has in the past had little experience of User Centred Design is Assistive Technology, and in particular Augmentative and Alternative Communication software (Waller et al., 2005a). Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) offer the possibility of being able to access communication for people with Severe Speech and Physical Impairments.This thesis describes a software development study which investigated methods currently used in software development and how they could be adapted for use with this population. The way difficulties cited in the literature when working with this population were tackled are also discussed. The study involved four adults with Severe Speech and Physical Impairments in the User Centred Development of a piece of assistive software.The study found that with careful planning it was possible to conduct User Centred Design with participants with Severe Speech and Physical Impairments, the lessons from this study were translated into recommendations and provided to a second developer who wished to work with adults with Severe Speech and Physical Impairments. The second study found similar levels of contribution to the features of the software were found in the pilot study. This work has demonstrated the potential for adults with Severe Speech and Physical Impairments to be actively involved (i.e. contribute a high proportion of the features) in the development of Augmentative and Alternative Communication software. A number of areas for further investigation have been identified including the differences found in usability of devices developed using User Centred Design compared to traditional methods, and also how adults with Severe Speech and Physical Impairments can be more actively included in a range of research fields.

This thesis describes a series of studies examining the role of technologies in supporting adults with intellectual disabilities to have their voices heard and express their competencies and interests in a day centre for people with intellectual disabilities. It offers insights on how communication unfolds through complex relations between adults with intellectual disabilities and their carers. This thesis also describes several working prototypes and shows new pathways for design of Alternative and Augmentative Communication devices. Overall, the research articulates a number of methodological contributions on how to operationalize co-design activities in a group care setting for people with intellectual disabilities.

La Cour Européenne des droits de l’homme, depuis les années 1990, connait une extension de ses compétences ratione personae et ratione loci sans précèdent. Faire face à ce phénomène exceptionnel requiert des instruments nouveaux. L’objet de cette étude réside dans l’examen des techniques adaptées par la Cour afin de maintenir le niveau de protection des droits de l’homme garantis par la Convention. Par ailleurs les organes et les Etats membres du Conseil de l’Europe participèrent grandement à l’effort de conservation du niveau d’excellence de protection des droits de l’homme en Europe. Ce sont ces aspects précis qui sont passés en revue et apprécié sous l’angle de leurs apports et parfois, inconvénients. Sujet d’étude apporté dans un espace-temps précis, il demanderait dans un avenir d’être complété et apprécié sous cet angle
The European Court of Human Rights, since the 1990s, recognizes an unprecedented extension of its competence ratione personae and ratione loci. In order to face this exceptional phenomenon new instruments are required. The purpose of this study is the examination of new techniques adapted by the Court to maintain the level of protection of human rights guaranteed by the Convention. Other organs and Member States of the Council of Europe participated actively to the efforts in order to conserve the excellent level for the protection of human rights in Europe. These are specific areas having been reviewed and valued in terms of their contribution and sometimes their disadvantages. Prepared in a particular space-time, this study would ask in the future to be completed and assessed from this angle

This study presents research findings to informthe design and development of innovativemobile services aiming to enable collocated people to interact with each other in public urban places. The main goal of this research is to provide applications and deliver guidelines to positively influence the user experience of different public urban places during everyday urban life. This study describes the design and evaluation of mobile content and services enabling mobile mediated interactions in an anonymous way. The research described in this thesis is threefold. First, this study investigates how Information and Communication Technology (ICT) can be utilised in particular urban public places to influence the experience of urban dwellers during everyday life. The research into urban residents and public places guides the design of three different technologies that form case studies to investigate and discover possibilities to digitally augment the public urban space and make the invisible data of our interactions in the urban environment visible. • Capital Music enables urban dwellers to listen to their music on their mobile devices as usual but also visualises the artworks of songs currently being played and listened to by other users in ones’ vicinity. • PlaceTagz uses QR codes printed on stickers that link to a digital message board enabling collocated users to interact with each other over time resulting in a place-based digital memory. • Sapporo World Window, Brisbane Hot Spots, and YourScreen are interactive content applications allowing people to share data with their mobile phones on public urban screens. The applications employ mobile phones to mediate interactions in form of location and video sharing. Second, this study sets out to explore the quality and nature of the experiences created through the developed and deployed case study applications. The development of a user experience framework for evaluating mobile mediated interactions in urban public places is described and applied within each case. Third, drawing on research from urban sociology, psychology, urban design, and the findings from this study, this thesis discusses how such interactions can have an impact on the urban experience.

碩士
國立臺北科技大學
自動化科技研究所
106
Due to the advances in technology and hardware development, deep learning has become a popular research topic in recent years. In comparison with traditional machine learning algorithms, deep learning based approaches have better performance in many tasks. However, the application of deep learning requires ample data and a well-designed neural network architecture. When the training data is not enough or limited, we do not normally obtain good results using deep learning approaches. This thesis proposed an approach based on the fusion of deep learning and data augmentation to improve the activity recognition accuracy. We proposed five methods for data augmentation, including noise injection, permutation, rotation, and two different generative models to reach a high-performance model with limited training data. The experimental results showed that the proposed data augmentation approach could reach an accuracy of 98.32% on a UCI dataset, and boost the accuracy up to 1.5% when compared with data without augmentation.

Chopin’s Etudes are difficult musical compositions for advanced piano students. Helmut Brauss, a professional pianist and educator, has created a number of videos to teach students motion patterns that will help them perfect the Etudes. The subtleties of motion shown in the videos are not apparently obvious to students, and in our research, we have developed four markerless based approaches to visually augment the videos: Predictive Optical Flow, Historical Optical Flow, Predictive Hand Tracking and Historical Hand Tracking. A survey of students learning the Etudes was conducted, and it was determined that the participants found the Historical techniques to be the most useful. No difference could be found between the usefulness of the Optical Flow and Hand Tracking augmentations.
Graduate

abstract: Human running requires extensive training and conditioning for an individual to maintain high speeds (greater than 10mph) for an extended duration of time. Studies have shown that running at peak speeds generates a high metabolic cost due to the use of large muscle groups in the legs associated with the human gait cycle. Applying supplemental external and internal forces to the human body during the gait cycle has been shown to decrease the metabolic cost for walking, allowing individuals to carry additional weight and walk further distances. Significant research has been conducted to reduce the metabolic cost of walking, however, there are few if any documented studies that focus specifically on reducing the metabolic cost associated with high speed running. Three mechanical systems were designed to work in concert with the human user to decrease metabolic cost and increase the range and speeds at which a human can run. The methods of design require a focus on mathematical modeling, simulations, and metabolic cost. Mathematical modeling and simulations are used to aid in the design process of robotic systems and metabolic testing is regarded as the final analysis process to determine the true effectiveness of robotic prototypes. Metabolic data, (VO2) is the volumetric consumption of oxygen, per minute, per unit mass (ml/min/kg). Metabolic testing consists of analyzing the oxygen consumption of a test subject while performing a task naturally and then comparing that data with analyzed oxygen consumption of the same task while using an assistive device. Three devices were designed and tested to augment high speed running. The first device, AirLegs V1, is a mostly aluminum exoskeleton with two pneumatic linear actuators connecting from the lower back directly to the user's thighs, allowing the device to induce a torque on the leg by pushing and pulling on the user's thigh during running. The device also makes use of two smaller pneumatic linear actuators which drive cables connecting to small lever arms at the back of the heel, inducing a torque at the ankles. Device two, AirLegs V2, is also pneumatically powered but is considered to be a soft suit version of the first device. It uses cables to interface the forces created by actuators located vertically on the user's back. These cables then connect to the back of the user's knees resulting in greater flexibility and range of motion of the legs. Device three, a Jet Pack, produces an external force against the user's torso to propel a user forward and upward making it easier to run. Third party testing, pilot demonstrations and timed trials have demonstrated that all three of the devices effectively reduce the metabolic cost of running below that of natural running with no device.
Dissertation/Thesis
Masters Thesis Engineering 2014

碩士
國立臺灣大學
電信工程學研究所
107
Age play a critical role in our lives. It can help us solve many things in people’s life. It has wide range of application, such as unmanned store, monitoring,marketing, autonomous vehicle and so on. In marketing, it can analyze the age level of the purchased goods and help the store to increase the sales amount. The challenge of age estimation is that people have little change in face during middle age, so employing only deep learning methods is not enough. Therefore, we proposed an age identification system that combines many methods to improve the accuracy of the age. These methods combine deep learning and traditional techniques. In order to address the problem that face changes little in middle age, we classify the age and then make accurate estimates from each age range. Our proposed system is divided into three stages. The first step is pre-processing, including feature map、face detection and cropping. The second step is to classify ages into seven classes through deep learning and support vector machine (SVM) techniques. The third step is to train seven Deep Neural Networks (DNN) models, then predict the explicit age. The input for each model contains the probability of each age group and also increases the probability of each range by ten years. This probability is estimated by the previous step Deep Neural Networks (DNN). Increasing the features of the input can effectively reduce errors.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Florida State University, 2005.
Advisor: John Keller, Florida State University, College of Education, Dept. of Educational Psychology and Learning Systems. Title and description from dissertation home page (viewed Jan. 27, 2006). Document formatted into pages; contains xi, 173 pages. Includes bibliographical references.

碩士
國立陽明大學
生物藥學研究所
97
Arsenic trioxde (ATO) has been approved as an effective drug against acute promyelocytic leukemia (APL). The therapeutic application of ATO toward other cancers, including solid tumors, is potentially promising, but still limited. Numerous studies have shown that ATO treatment induces intracellular oxidative stress and DNA damage, and subsequently triggers cell death in a variety of cancer cell types. This study aims to understand whether the therapeutic activity of ATO could be ameliorated by attenuating the DNA repair activity. Xeroderma pigmentosum group C (XPC) protein, a member participating in nucleotide excision repair pathway, is required for recognizing DNA adducts, and associated with oxidative DNA repair. In addition, emerging studies have shown that XPC is involved in response to oxidative stress. In this study, we demonstrated that XPC silencing sensitizes human glioblastoma U87 cells to ATO mediated through increased frequencies of senescence and autophagy as compared to siRNA control cells. The present results also showed that XPC silencing enhances ATO-induced DNA damage in U87 cells, but not interfere with the repair of ATO-induced DNA damage. Alternatively, XPC silencing augmented ATO-induced oxidative stress, the hyperoxidation level of peroxiredoxin, as well as the activities of ROS responsible transcription factors activities, such as activator protein 1 (AP-1), nuclear factor-kB (NFkB), serum response element (SRE). These results implicate that XPC silencing modulates cellular redox environment, which may result in increased susceptibility to ATO.