We use the framework of social shaping of technology and society, and ethnographic observation to study human-robot interaction (HRI) between various social actors in a nursing home (e.g. nurses, older adults, family members) and the socially assistive robot PARO. For the purpose of our study, PARO was placed a public space in the nursing home where participants could interact with it freely. W...

In the Information Society, end-users keep increasing very fast in number, as well as in their demand with respect to the activities they would like to perform with computer environments, without being obliged to become computer specialists. There is a strong request of providing end-users with powerful and flexible environments, tailorable to the culture, skills and needs of very diverse end-u...

This paper suggests an analogy between education and genetic interventions as means of shaping the identity of children and future adults. It proposes to look at issues discussed in the philosophy of education as a possible source of insight for ethical guidelines regarding future genetic interventions. The paper focuses on situations of conflict between parents and state regarding the authorit...

The infant female is unique. Her particular qualities include specific genetic, hormonal, and physiological ingredients that help sculpt her development. Parental influences and the wider society and culture have a profound shaping effect on her particular biological components. Whereas male infants have their own inimitable developmental line, this paper’s focus is on the female. Our recent hi...

The following discussion paper provides an overview of ways that insights from the interdisciplinary field of STS (Science and Technology Studies or Science Technology and Society) might assist eco-innovators in the IT sector. Drawing very broadly from the social shaping of technology literatures we have identified 4 interlocking themes we believe that eco-innovators should keep in mind to help...

In the Information Society, end-users keep increasing very fast in number, as well as in their demand with respect to the activities they would like to perform with computer environments, without being obliged to become computer specialists. There is a great request to provide end-users with powerful and flexible environments, tailorable to the culture, skills and needs of a very diverse end-us...

In the modeling of exible structures, there is generally uncertainty in both the frequencies and damping constants , and it is thus important that the control methods for such systems be robust to these uncertainties. Input shapers have been shown to yield good performance while being insensitive to modeling errors. Most previous input shaping studies, however, have addressed only frequency mod...

The emerging importance of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), has led to increasing interest in recent years about how to improve their performance. Therefore, to improve SMEs’ performance, we define proactivity as an essential factor that enables a company to anticipate change, to have the desire to make a change, and to create that change in our research framework. We also suppose tha...

This paper presents an approach for designing multi-input shapers using an s-plane pole placement technique. Slightly more information about the system model is taken into account than has been traditionally done with input shaping designs. The input shaping sequences for all system inputs are solved for simultaneously , and the resulting designs lead to shorter impulse sequences than solving f...