With this paper we describe the ongoing research we are developing in the Internet of Things (IoT) domain. The description of IoT as an ecosystem of objects and services highlights the central role of the end user in extracting, merging, analyzing, visualizing, and sharing data. We also provide a discussion of data under different perspectives to underline how promising the IoT field is in term...

Usability engineering represents a general framework for thinking about the design of usable systems. Nevertheless, the usability of a product is strongly determined by the social and cultural contexts of prospective users. In this paper we draw upon Organisational Semiotics and Participatory Design to promote the usability of systems designed for the context of work in organisations. Our appro...

The threshold concepts approach to student learning and curriculum design now informs an empirical research base comprising over 170 disciplinary and professional contexts. It draws extensively on the notion of troublesomeness in a ‘liminal’ space of learning. The latter is a transformative state in the process of learning in which there is a reformulation of the learner’s meaning frame and an ...

Much crime investigation today is carried out by automatic scrutiny of large transaction databases, with considerable value placed on the use of profiles to seek out unusual and potentially suspicious behaviour. However, the power of automated profiling can result in negative outcomes such as over-reporting and increased expenditure on manual compliance checking. This paper examines some of the...

Frederik Stjernfelt Center for Semiotics Aarhus University Aarhus, Denmark [email protected] Abstract Theses on the semiotic study of life as presented here provide a collectively formulated set of statements on what biology needs to be focused on in order to describe life as a process based on semiosis, or signaction. An aim of the biosemiotic approach is to explain how life evolves through al...

Innovation, when it is discussed in the social sciences is often given definitions consistent with economics or technology oriented approaches. This paper offers a culturally substantiated approach. It looks at how innovations in new media forms can be understood from a semiotic analytical perspective. A new media form, for instance, a multimedia videogame, is considered as an infinitely hetero...

In this paper, we discuss the process of analysis and design of a user interface to support dialogue and negotiation between players of participatory simulations. The underlying context is an interdisciplinary project, named SimParc [8], about participatory management of protected areas for biodiversity conservation and social inclusion. This project is inspired by the ComMod MAS/RPG approach [...

Archaeologists wishing to interpret the meanings of artifacts, both symbolic and functional, have increasingly drawn from Saussureinspired linguistic models as a way to ‘read’ the archaeological record. Such models, however, may not be appropriate for a number of reasons, and should be discarded in favor of a discourse-centered approach, which investigates meaning through practice, currently ga...

This paper is part of a research project called "A Computational Model of Distance Learning based on the Socio-Interactionist Approach". This project is related to situated learning, i.e., in the conception of cognition as a social practice based on the use of language, symbols and signs. The objective is the construction of a Distance Learning environment, implemented as a multi-agent system c...

It is suggested that the use of the semiotic ladder, together with a supportive trust agent can be used together to better explicate “soft” trust issues in the context of Grid services. The contribution offered here is intended to fill a gap in current understanding and modelling of such issues and to support Grid service designers to better conceptualise, hence manage trust issues. The semioti...