Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Sensory descriptions'

Visualization of Sensory Perception Descriptors is a topic in the field of Information Visualization. It is concentrated on the research and development of methods for analyses of data related with human modalities description. One possibility for investigating sensory perception descriptors is analyzing a great number of wine tasting notes. This thesis is concerned with the visualization of wine tasting notes in order to aid linguistic analyses. It strives to find proper visualizations that will give a better insight into the language used in wine tasting notes. Two main processes are described in the following report. First it sets out the process of researching of different methods of information visualization that led to the final approach for representing the data. A number of concepts for text analyses are discussed and the most useful of them are developed further. Several approaches for text visualization and statistical information are combined to build a system for tasting notes analyses. The second part of the report describes the process of developing a prototype that implements the represented approaches and gives an opportunity for real testing and conclusions.

Syfte: Produktbeskrivningar kan kommunicera de fördelaktiga egenskaper som en vara medför, vilket kan få produkten att skilja sig från mängden. Under de senaste decennierna har det skapats ett ökat intresse för både sensoriska och miljömärkta produktbeskrivningar och för företag blir det allt viktigare att lyckas identifiera vilka faktorer som påverkar betalningsviljan hos konsumenter. Syftet med denna studie är därför att undersöka hur sensoriska och miljömärkta produktbeskrivningar påverkar konsumentens betalningsvilja. Metod: Metoden har en deduktiv ansats och vår empiriska insamling har skett utifrån en kvantitativ metod i form av en enkätundersökning. Populationen avser individer mellan 15–75 år som antingen dricker kaffe regelbundet eller som någon gång har inhandlat bryggkaffe i en livsmedelsbutik. Resultaten har bearbetats i SPSS där dem har analyserats utifrån deskriptiv statistik, korrelationsanalys och regressionsanalys.  Resultat och slutsats: Studiens resultat påvisar att sensoriska produktbeskrivningar på kaffe har en positiv effekt på konsumentens betalningsvilja. Sensoriska smakattribut är de viktigaste att kommunicera i en produktbeskrivning för att tilltala konsumenten. Däremot påvisar studiens resultat att produktbeskrivningar som är miljömärkta i form av ekologisk och Fairtrade-märkning, har en starkare påverkan på konsumentens betalningsvilja för kaffe än vid sensoriska produktbeskrivningar.  Examensarbetets bidrag: Vårt bidrag till ämnet företagsekonomi och marknadsföring är att produktbeskrivningar för kaffe främst bör framföra kvalitetsstämplar om sådana finns för att påverka konsumentens betalningsvilja. Vid icke ekologiska eller Fairtrade-märkta produkter, bör de sensoriska attributen förmedlas för att ha en positiv inverkan på konsumentens betalningsvilja. Förslag till fortsatt forskning: Efter denna studie kan vi konstatera att betalningsviljan skiljer sig åt beroende på vilken produktbeskrivning som framställs. Det skulle därför vara av intresse att även se till olika varumärken för kaffe vid framställandet av olika typer av produktbeskrivningar för att se om betalningsviljan förändras. För framtida forskning vore det även av intresse att se till hur sensoriska produktbeskrivningar i samband med miljömärkningar hade påverkat konsumentens betalningsvilja.
Aim: Product descriptions can communicate the beneficial properties that comes with a product, which can make the product stand out, among others. In recent decades, there has been an increased interest in both sensory and environmentally friendly product descriptions and for companies, it is becoming increasingly important to succeed in identifying the factors that affect consumers’ willingness to pay. The purpose of this study is therefore to investigate how sensory and environmentally friendly product descriptions affect consumers’ willingness to pay.  Method: The method has a deductive approach, and our empirical data has been based on a quantitative method in the form of a survey. The population refers to individuals between the ages of 15 and 75 who either drink coffee regularly or have ever bought brewed coffee in a grocery store. The results have been processed in SPSS where they have been analyzed based on descriptive statistics, correlation analysis and regression analysis.  Result & Conclusion: The results of the study show that sensory product descriptions of coffee have a positive effect on the consumer’s willingness to pay. Sensory taste attributes are the most important to communicate in a product description to appeal to the consumer. On the other hand, the results of the study show that product descriptions that are ecological and Fairtrade-labeled have a stronger impact on the consumer’s willingness to pay for coffee than with sensory product descriptions.  Contribution of the thesis: Our contribution to the subject of business administration and marketing is that product descriptions for coffee should primarily communicate ecological and Fairtrade-labels if such exist, to influence the consumer’s willingness to pay. In the case of non-ecological or Fairtrade-labeled products, the sensory attributes should be communicated to have a positive impact on the consumer’s willingness to pay. Suggestions for future research: After this study, we can state that the willingness to pay differs depending on which product description is presented. It would therefore be of interest to also look at different brands for coffee when producing different types of product descriptions to see if the willingness to pay changes. For future research, it would also be of interest to see how sensory product descriptions in combination with environmentally friendly product description had affected the willingness to pay.

Unusual responses to sensory stimuli have been reported in nearly all children with autism spectrum conditions (ASC). A few studies on adults indicate that the sensory and perceptual problems persist into adulthood. Sensory symptoms have not been included in the diagnostic criteria for ASC but in the new diagnostic manual (DSM-5, 2013) hyper- or hyporeactivity or unusual sensory interests were included in the diagnostic criteria for ASC. Sensory phenomena are mostly investigated in studies involving children and the scales used to measure sensory reactivity have been constructed on the basis of the scientific literature and parents’ reports. The experiences of adults with ASC are not well understood and have not been systematically used to develop measures. The overall aim of the thesis was to capture the first-hand experiences of and perspectives on sensory reactivity and translate them into a self-rating scale. To fulfil this overarching aim the personal sensory experiences of adults with ASC were investigated and the variations and range of atypical sensory phenomena explored and described in two qualitative studies (study I and II). The analyses of the firstperson descriptions enabled the development of items for a scale. These were reduced in steps and the final scale which was named the Sensory Reactivity in Autism Spectrum scale (SR-AS) comprised 32 items in four subscales: high awareness/ hyperreactivity, low awareness/hyporeactivity, strong sensory interests and sensory/motor. The SR-AS was validated using content and factor analyses. Its discriminative validity was then investigated as well as its reliability in the form of internal consistency (study III). In the final step the scale was used to identify clusters of atypical sensory functioning in adults with ASC by hierarchical cluster analysis (study IV). Three different sensory clusters were found. The main contribution of this thesis is its presentation of individual experience and perspectives and the creation of an clinical tool to measure atypical sensory reactivity frequently experienced by people with ASC. The ways in which the SR-AS can be used comprise assessment of individual sensory patterns for self-knowledge and awareness, to enable the development of coping strategies and to provide information on environmental adjustments required. In diagnostic processes where other criteria for ASC are fulfilled the SR-AS can be used for assessing sensory symptoms according to the DSM-5.

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2006.
Includes bibliographical references (p. 105-109) and index.
Embedded-sensor platforms are advancing toward such sophistication that they can differentiate between subtle actions. For example, when placed in a wristwatch, such platforms can tell whether a person is shaking hands or turning a doorknob. Sensors placed on objects in the environment now report many parameters, including object location, movement, sound, and temperature. A persistent problem, however, is the description of these sense data in meaningful human-language. This is an important problem that appears across domains ranging from organizational security surveillance to individual activity journaling. Previous models of activity recognition pigeon-hole descriptions into small, formal categories specified in advance; for example, location is often categorized as "at home" or "at the office." These models have not been able to adapt to the wider range of complex, dynamic, and idiosyncratic human activities. We hypothesize that the commonsense, semantically related, knowledge bases can be used to bootstrap learning algorithms for classifying and recognizing human activities from sensors.
(cont.) Our system, LifeNet, is a first-person commonsense inference model, which consists of a graph with nodes drawn from a large repository of commonsense assertions expressed in human-language phrases. LifeNet is used to construct a mapping between streams of sensor data and partially ordered sequences of events, co-located in time and space. Further, by gathering sensor data in vivo, we are able to validate and extend the commonsense knowledge from which LifeNet is derived. LifeNet is evaluated in the context of its performance on a sensor-network platform distributed in an office environment. We hypothesize that mapping sensor data into LifeNet will act as a "semantic mirror" to meaningfully interpret sensory data into cohesive patterns in order to understand and predict human action.
by Bo Morgan.
S.M.

The automatic extraction of knowledge from the world by a robotic system as human beings interpret their environment through their senses is still an unsolved task in Artificial Intelligence. A robotic agent is in contact with the world through its sensors and other electronic components which obtain and process mainly numerical information. Sonar, infrared and laser sensors obtain distance information. Webcams obtain digital images that are represented internally as matrices of red, blue and green (RGB) colour coordinate values. All this numerical values obtained from the environment need a later interpretation in order to provide the knowledge required by the robotic agent in order to carry out a task.

Similarly, light wavelengths with specific amplitude are captured by cone cells of human eyes obtaining also stimulus without meaning. However, the information that human beings can describe and remember from what they see is expressed using words, that is qualitatively.

The exact process carried out after our eyes perceive light wavelengths and our brain interpret them is quite unknown. However, a real fact in human cognition is that people go beyond the purely perceptual experience to classify things as members of categories and attach linguistic labels to them.

As the information provided by all the electronic components incorporated in a robotic agent is numerical, the approaches that first appeared in the literature giving an interpretation of this information followed a mathematical trend. In this thesis, this problem is addressed from the other side, its main aim is to process these numerical data in order to obtain qualitative information as human beings can do.

The research work done in this thesis tries to narrow the gap between the acquisition of low level information by robot sensors and the need of obtaining high level or qualitative information for enhancing human-machine communication and for applying logical reasoning processes based on concepts. Moreover, qualitative concepts can be added a meaning by relating them to others. They can be used for reasoning applying qualitative models that have been developed in the last twenty years for describing and interpreting metrical and mathematical concepts such as orientation, distance, velocity, acceleration, and so on. And they can be also understood by human-users both written and read aloud.

The first contributions presented are the definition of a method for obtaining fuzzy distance patterns (which include qualitative distances such as ‘near’, far’, ‘very far’ and so on) from the data obtained by any kind of distance sensors incorporated in a mobile robot and the definition of a factor to measure the dissimilarity between those fuzzy patterns. Both have been applied to the integration of the distances obtained by the sonar and laser distance sensors incorporated in a Pioneer 2 dx mobile robot and, as a result, special obstacles have been detected as ‘glass window’, ‘mirror’, and so on. Moreover, the fuzzy distance patterns provided have been also defuzzified in order to obtain a smooth robot speed and used to classify orientation reference systems into ‘open’ (it defines an open space to be explored) or ‘closed’.

The second contribution presented is the definition of a model for qualitative image description (QID) by applying the new defined models for qualitative shape and colour description and the topology model by Egenhofer and Al-Taha [1992] and the orientation models by Hernández [1991] and Freksa [1992]. This model can qualitatively describe any kind of digital image and is independent of the image segmentation method used. The QID model have been tested in two scenarios in robotics: (i) the description of digital images captured by the camera of a Pioneer 2 dx mobile robot and (ii) the description of digital images of tile mosaics taken by an industrial camera located on a platform used by a robot arm to assemble tile mosaics.

In order to provide a formal and explicit meaning to the qualitative description of the images generated, a Description Logic (DL) based ontology has been designed and presented as the third contribution. Our approach can automatically process any random image and obtain a set of DL-axioms that describe it visually and spatially. And objects included in the images are classified according to the ontology schema using a DL reasoner. Tests have been carried out using digital images captured by a webcam incorporated in a Pioneer 2 dx mobile robot. The images taken correspond to the corridors of a building at University Jaume I and objects with them have been classified into ‘walls’, ‘floor’, ‘office doors’ and ‘fire extinguishers’ under different illumination conditions and from different observer viewpoints.

The final contribution is the definition of a similarity measure between qualitative descriptions of shape, colour, topology and orientation. And the integration of those measures into the definition of a general similarity measure between two qualitative descriptions of images. These similarity measures have been applied to: (i) extract objects with similar shapes from the MPEG7 CE Shape-1 library; (ii) assemble tile mosaics by qualitative shape and colour similarity matching; (iii) compare images of tile compositions; and (iv) compare images of natural landmarks in a mobile robot world for their recognition.

The contributions made in this thesis are only a small step forward in the direction of enhancing robot knowledge acquisition from the world. And it is also written with the aim of inspiring others in their research, so that bigger contributions can be achieved in the future which can improve the life quality of our society.

International Telemetering Conference Proceedings / October 20-23, 2003 / Riviera Hotel and Convention Center, Las Vegas, Nevada
A particular engineering aspect of distributed sensor networks that has not received adequate attention is the system level hardware architecture of the individual nodes of the network. A novel hardware architecture based on an idea of task specific modular computing is proposed to provide for both the high flexibility and low power consumption required for distributed sensing solutions. The power consumption of the architecture is mathematically analyzed against a traditional approach, and guidelines are developed for application scenarios that would benefit from using this new design.

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Indivíduos deficientes visuais, apesar de possuírem grande capacidade de adaptação por meio de outros sentidos, ainda apresentam algumas limitações, como, por exemplo, a locomoção segura. A navegação humana é um comportamento muito complexo, que depende principalmente da visão. Portanto, para uma pessoa com deficiência visual, a locomoção se torna uma tarefa muito difícil, especialmente em algumas situações, como em ambientes desconhecidos ou próximo ao tráfego urbano. Aplicativos de navegação, baseados em mapas, proporcionam uma ajuda significativa em questões de orientação, mobilidade e apoio à localização, bem como a estimativa das direções e distâncias. Porém, estes usuários ainda encontram grandes dificuldades no acesso à informação espacial, já que a interação com este tipo de aplicação é realizada, principalmente, por meio da visão. Assim, na presente pesquisa, foi realizado um estudo com deficientes visuais, visando desenvolver uma solução acessível colaborativa de mobilidade para entender as principais necessidades, em termos de locomoção, desses usuários. A solução proposta inclui uma aplicação móvel com mapas acessíveis e com efeitos sonoros, capaz de ajudar na mobilidade deste tipo de usuário, levando em consideração possíveis obstáculos em seus trajetos e descrevendo o ambiente, em termos de Pontos de Interesse (POI), ao seu redor e em torno de uma direção específica indicada pelo usuário. Para alcançar este objetivo, foi utilizada a técnica de Informação Geográfica Voluntária (Volunteered Geographic Information - VGI), que tem se mostrado eficaz e de baixo custo para obtenção de informação geográfica. Foi conduzida uma avaliação experimental para avaliar a qualidade dos dados obtidos de forma colaborativa, bem como experimentos envolvendo participantes voluntários, a fim de avaliar se a solução proposta é satisfatória para mitigar os problemas relacionados à navegação da população deficiente visual. Por fim, os resultados obtidos nos experimentos se mostraram encorajadores, demonstrando que a solução proposta pode ser satisfatória para usuários deficientes visuais.
Although visually impaired individuals have great ability to adapt to a variety of situations through other senses, they still face some limitations, such as safe locomotion. Human navigation is a complex behavior, which depends mainly on vision. Therefore, for a visually impaired person, locomotion is a difficult task, especially in some situations, such as in unfamiliar surroundings or close to urban traffic. Map-based navigation applications provide significant help with guidance, mobility and location support, as well as with estimation of directions and distances. However, this kind of users still find great difficulties in accessing spatial information, since the interaction with this type of application is performed, mainly, through the vision. Thus, a study was carried out with the visually impaired to understand their main mobility needs, aiming at developing an accessible and collaborative mobility solution. The proposed solution includes a mobile application with accessible maps and sound effects, able to help the mobility of this type of users, taking into account possible obstacles in their paths and describing the environment in terms of Points of Interest (POI) around them and around a specific direction indicated by the user. In order to reach this goal, the Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) technique was used, since it has been shown to be efficient and low cost in obtaining geographic information. An experimental evaluation was conducted to evaluate the quality of the data obtained collaboratively, as well as experiments involving volunteer participants, in order to evaluate whether the proposed solution is satisfactory to mitigate the problems related to navigation of the visually impaired population. Finally, the results obtained in the experiments were encouraging, demonstrating that the proposed solution may be satisfactory for visually impaired users.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Electrical and Computer Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, 2006.
Altunbasak, Yucel, Committee Chair ; Mersereau, Russell M., Committee Member ; Fekri, Faramarz, Committee Member ; Smith, Glenn, Committee Member ; Huo, Xiaoming, Committee Member. Includes bibliographical references.

J.M.G. Le Clézio a été plébiscité par le jury du Nobel en sa qualité d’écrivain de « l’extase sensuelle ». Les sens seraient-ils le filtre sémantique de « cet explorateur d’une humanité au-delà et en-dessous de la civilisation régnante » ?D’un point de vue diégétique, sémiotique et stylistique, la prose leclézienne illustre de diverses manières (entre mots, typographie, photographies ou techniques cinématographiques) un univers physique, où les perceptions sensorielles forment un prisme de significations sur l’époque contemporaine. Comme un sismographe à l’affût des pulsations du monde, l’écrivain enregistre, tous sens ouverts, les mouvements, les formes, et les idées des XXe et XXIe siècles. Telle est l’hypothèse centrale de cette étude. Le concept polysémique de « sens » est ainsi appréhendé depuis le monde perceptuel de l’auteur jusqu’aux strates les plus profondes du texte. La démarche repose sur l’étude de la description, en tant que clé de déchiffrement – ou de « dé-scription » selon le concept foucaldien –, à partir d’une analyse linguistico-textuelle puisant dans le champ élargi des sensory studies (phénoménologie de la sensation, philosophie du corps, sociologie de la perception, etc.). La finalité ultime est d’éclairer sous un nouvel angle la quête ontologique d’un homme de lettres pour lequel la littérature ne peut plus feindre d’être détachée du corps des hommes. J.M.G. Le Clézio was hailed by the Nobel jury as the author of “sensual ecstasy.” Would the senses be the semantic filter of this “explorer of a humanity beyond and below the reigning civilization?” From a diegetic, semiotic and stylistic viewpoint, the Leclezian prose depicts in many ways (through words, typography, photos or cinematic techniques) a physical universe, where sensory perceptions form a prism of meanings of the contemporary era. As a seismograph records the world’s pulse, the writer registers, with his senses fully attuned, the movements, shapes and ideas of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. This is the central hypothesis of the research. The polysemous concept of “senses” is thus apprehended from the writer’s world beneath to the deepest strata of his texts. The approach relies on the study of description, as the key to deciphering – or to “de-scribing” according to Foucault’s concept –, from a linguistic-textual analysis drawing on the broader field of sensory studies (phenomenology of sensation, philosophy of the body, sociology of perception, etc.). The ultimate purpose is to enlighten from a new angle the ontological quest of a man of letters, according whom literature can no longer pretend to be detached from the body of human beings.
Doctorat en Langues et lettres
info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

J.M.G. Le Clézio a été plébiscité par le jury du Nobel en sa qualité d'écrivain de « l'extase sensuelle ». Les sens seraient-ils le filtre sémantique de « cet explorateur d'une humanité au-delà et en-dessous de la civilisation régnante » ? D'un point de vue diégétique, sémiotique et stylistique, la prose leclézienne illustre de diverses manières (entre mots, typographie, photographies ou techniques cinématographiques) un univers physique, où les perceptions sensorielles forment un prisme de significations sur l'époque contemporaine. Comme un sismographe à l'affût des pulsations du monde, l'écrivain enregistre, tous sens ouverts, les mouvements, les formes, et les idées des XXe et XXIe siècles. Telle est l'hypothèse centrale de cette étude. Le concept polysémique de « sens » est ainsi appréhendé depuis le monde perceptuel de l'auteur jusqu'aux strates les plus profondes du texte. La démarche repose sur l'étude de la description, en tant que clé de déchiffrement – ou de « dé-scription » selon le concept foucaldien –, à partir d'une analyse linguistico-textuelle puisant dans le champ élargi des sensory studies (phénoménologie de la sensation, philosophie du corps, sociologie de la perception, etc.). La finalité ultime est d'éclairer sous un nouvel angle la quête ontologique d'un homme de lettres pour lequel la littérature ne peut plus feindre d'être détachée du corps des hommes
J.M.G. Le Clézio was hailed by the Nobel jury as the author of “sensual ecstasy.” Would the senses be the semantic filter of this “explorer of a humanity beyond and below the reigning civilization?” From a diegetic, semiotic and stylistic viewpoint, the Leclezian prose depicts in many ways (through words, typography, photos or cinematic techniques) a physical universe, where sensory perceptions form a prism of meanings of the contemporary era. As a seismograph records the world's pulse, the writer registers, with his senses fully attuned, the movements, shapes and ideas of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. This is the central hypothesis of the research. The polysemous concept of “senses” is thus apprehended from the writer's world beneath to the deepest strata of his texts. The approach relies on the study of description, as the key to deciphering – or to “de-scribing” according to Foucault's concept –, from a linguistic-textual analysis drawing on the broader field of sensory studies (phenomenology of sensation, philosophy of the body, sociology of perception, etc.). The ultimate purpose is to enlighten from a new angle the ontological quest of a man of letters, according whom literature can no longer pretend to be detached from the body of human beings

Les progrès de la technologie des capteurs, des communications sans fil et de l'Internet des Objets ont favorisé le développement des réseaux de capteurs multimédias. Ces derniers sont composés de capteurs interconnectés capables de fournir de façon omniprésente un suivi fin d’un espace connecté. Grâce à leurs propriétés, les réseaux de capteurs multimédias ont suscité un intérêt croissant ces dernières années des secteurs académiques et industriels et ont été adoptés dans de nombreux domaines d'application (tels que la maison intelligente, le bureau intelligent, ou la ville intelligente). L'un des avantages de l'adoption des réseaux de capteurs multimédias est le fait que les données collectées (vidéos, audios, images, etc.) à partir de capteurs connexes contiennent des informations sémantiques riches (en comparaison avec des capteurs uniquement scalaires) qui permettent de détecter des événements complexes et de mieux gérer les exigences du domaine d'application. Toutefois, la modélisation et la détection des événements dans les reséaux de capteurs multimédias restent une tâche difficile à réaliser, car la traduction de toutes les données multimédias collectées en événements n'est pas simple.Dans cette thèse, un framework complet pour le traitement des événements complexes dans les réseaux de capteurs multimédias est proposé pour éviter les algorithmes codés en dur et pour permettre une meilleure adaptation aux évolution des besoins d’un domaine d'application. Le Framework est appelé CEMiD et composé de :• MSSN-Onto: une ontologie nouvellement proposée pour la modélisation des réseaux de capteurs,• CEMiD-Language: un langage original pour la modélisation des réseaux de capteurs multimédias et des événements à détecter, et• GST-CEMiD: un moteur de traitement d'événement complexe basé sur un pipeline sémantique.Le framework CEMiD aide les utilisateurs à modéliser leur propre infrastructure de réseau de capteurs et les événements à détecter via le langage CEMiD. Le moteur de détection du framework prend en entrée le modèle fourni par les utilisateurs pour initier un pipeline de détection d'événements afin d'extraire des données multimédias correspondantes, de traduire des informations sémantiques et de les traduire automatiquement en événements. Notre framework est validé par des prototypes et des simulations. Les résultats montrent que notre framework peut détecter correctement les événements multimédias complexes dans un scénario de charge de travail élevée (avec une latence de détection moyenne inférieure à une seconde)
The dramatic advancement of low-cost hardware technology, wireless communications, and digital electronics have fostered the development of multifunctional (wireless) Multimedia Sensor Networks (MSNs). Those latter are composed of interconnected devices able to ubiquitously sense multimedia content (video, image, audio, etc.) from the environment. Thanks to their interesting features, MSNs have gained increasing attention in recent years from both academic and industrial sectors and have been adopted in wide range of application domains (such as smart home, smart office, smart city, to mention a few). One of the advantages of adopting MSNs is the fact that data gathered from related sensors contains rich semantic information (in comparison with using solely scalar sensors) which allows to detect complex events and copes better with application domain requirements. However, modeling and detecting events in MSNs remain a difficult task to carry out because translating all gathered multimedia data into events is not straightforward and challenging.In this thesis, a full-fledged framework for processing complex events in MSNs is proposed to avoid hard-coded algorithms. The framework is called Complex Event Modeling and Detection (CEMiD) framework. Core components of the framework are:• MSSN-Onto: a newly proposed ontology for modeling MSNs,• CEMiD-Language: an original language for modeling multimedia sensor networks and events to be detected, and• GST-CEMiD: a semantic pipelining-based complex event processing engine.CEMiD framework helps users model their own sensor network infrastructure and events to be detected through CEMiD language. The detection engine of the framework takes all the model provided by users to initiate an event detection pipeline for extracting multimedia data feature, translating semantic information, and interpret into events automatically. Our framework is validated by means of prototyping and simulations. The results show that our framework can properly detect complex multimedia events in a high work-load scenario (with average detection latency for less than one second)

碩士
國立中興大學
昆蟲學系
84
Scanning electron microscopy has been used to examine the antennal sensoryplaque organs of 104 species in 81 genera of Delphacidae, and 50 species in29 genera of Cixiidae. In addition, the antennal second projection of 36 species in 22 genera of Cixiidae has also been studied. In Delphacidae 4 typesof the sensory plaque organs are recognized and their evolutionary trend isproposed as Type 1 → Type 2 → Type 3 → Type 4. In Cixiidae 2 groups each including 3 types are observed and the proposed evolutionary trend for Group 1is Type 1 → Type 2 → Type 3. The evolutionary relationships among the 3 typesof Group 2 and between these 2 groups are unclear. Two groups and 7 types ofthe antennal second projection of Cixiidae have been recognized; the Type 0represents the absence of this character. The proposed evolutionary trend ofGroup 1 is Type 1 → Type 2 → Type 3. Yet, the relationships among the 3 typesof Group 2, between the 2 groups, as well as between Type 0 and the 2 groupsare unknown.

This study describes three case studies with three children diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome, the focus of the dissertation being the sensory processing issues that these children experience, the limited intervention regarding this subject, and the possible emotional connotations that may accompany these difficulties. In the study, three children partook in six Gestalt Play Therapy sessions, where sensory stimulants were utilised as a medium of expression. The data was analysed, with the emphasis on the children's responses to the sensory work and the emotions that could be linked to this experience. A detailed description of the sessions is provided. It was found that these children were able to make use of the Gestalt Play Therapy setting, along with the sensory work, as a means of emotional expression.
Social Work
M. Diac. (Play Therapy)

In South Africa, English-language versions of neuropathic pain screening tools typically are used to screen for and diagnose neuropathic pain in the clinical and research setting. It is assumed that most individuals understand the Englishlanguage symptom descriptors in these tools (e.g. burning, pins-and-needles, aching, tingling or itching) despite English being the first-language of less than 10% of South Africans. The objectives of this study was firstly to determine what isiZulu terms are used to describe the symptoms of neuropathic pain by individuals whose home-language is isiZulu, and secondly, to determine the level of understanding of typical English neuropathic pain descriptors by these isiZulu speakers. Fifty-four participants with symptomatic HIV-associated sensory neuropathy (HIV-SN) were recruited to participate in the study. Participants were firstly asked to describe, in isiZulu, the pain and/or abnormal sensations in their feet and lower legs. Thereafter, a list of common English neuropathic pain descriptors was read to participants and they were asked to identify which words and phrases described their sensory symptoms. If they identified a particular term as describing their symptoms, participants were asked to provide an isiZulu equivalent for that English term. Participants typically used the isiZulu words “ziyashisa” (hot-48%), “amajaqamba/amacramps” (cramping-35%), “ziyaluma/kuyaluma” (itching-22%), “ndikindiki” (numb-22%) or phrases indicating numbness in their feet and lower legs to spontaneously describe their symptoms. When prompted with English neuropathic pain descriptors, “cramping” (89%) was the most selected term followed by the terms “hot” (87%), “burning” (65%), “tight” (61%) and “itching” (59%). The English terms that were the least understood by participants included “throbbing” (96% of participants did not understand the term), “radiating” (83% did not understand the term), “tingling” (78% did not understand the term), “pricking” (72% did not understand the term), “aching” (70% did not understand the term) and “numb” (63% did not understand the term). Overall, when isiZulu speakers with HIV-SN describe their neuropathic symptoms spontaneously, the descriptors used are similar to commonly-used English neuropathic pain descriptors (when prompted with the terms). However, the understanding of English terms can be poor, indicating the need for the development of neuropathic screening and assessment tools in languages more accessible for the patients who are being assessed. The results obtained contribute to a better understanding of the description of neuropathic pain in isiZulu speakers, which will aid in the diagnosis and management of neuropathy in individuals prone to neuropathy.