The present historical moment may seem a particularly inopportune time to review Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam's latest exploration of civic decline in America. After all, the outpouring of volunteerism, solidarity, patriotism, and self-sacrifice displayed by Americans in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks appears to fly in the face of Putnam's central argument: that \"social capital\" -defined as \"social networks and the norms of reciprocity and trustworthiness that arise from them\" (p. 19)'has declined to dangerously low levels in America over the last three decades. However, Putnam is not fazed in the least by the recent effusion of solidarity. Quite the contrary, he sees in it the potential to \"reverse what has been a 30to 40-year steady decline in most measures of connectedness or community.\"' As an example of how the current \"war on terrorism\" could generate a durable civic renewal, Putnam points to the burst in civic practices that occurred during and after World War II, which he says \"permanently marked\" the generation that lived through it and had a \"terrific effect on American public life over the last half-century.\" 3 If Americans can follow this example and channel their current civic

Bowling alone: The collapse and revival of American community

The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society

Originally published in Contemporary Psychology: APA Review of Books, 1994, Vol 39(2), 225. Reviews the book, The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion by John Zaller (1992). The author's commendable effort to specify a model of mass opinion formation offers readers an introduction to the prevailing vi

The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion.

https://www.ee.columbia.edu/%7Eajaimes/Pubs/ajaimes_iccv05.pdf

Multimodal human-computer interaction: A survey

Architecture for implementing a perceptual user interface. The architecture comprises alternative modalities for controlling computer application programs and manipulating on-screen objects through hand gestures or a combination of hand gestures and verbal commands. The perceptual user interface system includes a tracking component that detects object characteristics of at least one of a plurality of objects within a scene, and tracks the respective object. Detection of object characteristics is based at least in part upon image comparison of a plurality of images relative to a course mapping of the images. A seeding component iteratively seeds the tracking component with object hypotheses based upon the presence of the object characteristics and the image comparison. A filtering component selectively removes the tracked object from the object hypotheses and/or at least one object hypothesis from the set of object hypotheses based upon predetermined removal criteria.

Architecture for controlling a computer using hand gestures

Geovisualization is both a process for leveraging the data resources to meet scientific and societal needs and a research field that develops visual methods and tools to support a wide array of geospatial data applications. While researchers have made substantial advances in geovisualization over the past decade, many challenges remain. To support real-world knowledge construction and decision making, some of the most important challenges involve distributed geovisualization - that is, enabling geovisualization across software components, devices, people, and places.

/pdf/geovisualization-for-knowledge-construction-and-decision-19w5185nsw.pdf

Geovisualization for knowledge construction and decision support

Emergency response requires strategic assessment of risks, decisions, and communications that are time critical while requiring teams of individuals to have fast access to large volumes of complex information and technologies that enable tightly coordinated work. The access to this information by crisis management teams in emergency operations centers can be facilitated through various human-computer interfaces. Unfortunately, these interfaces are hard to use, require extensive training, and often impede rather than support teamwork. Dialogue-enabled devices, based on natural, multimodal interfaces, have the potential of making a variety of information technology tools accessible during crisis management. This paper establishes the importance of multimodal interfaces in various aspects of crisis management and explores many issues in realizing successful speech-gesture driven, dialogue-enabled interfaces for crisis management. This paper is organized in five parts. The first part discusses the needs of crisis management that can be potentially met by the development of appropriate interfaces. The second part discusses the issues related to the design and development of multimodal interfaces in the context of crisis management. The third part discusses the state of the art in both the theories and practices involving these human-computer interfaces. In particular, it describes the evolution and implementation details of two representative systems, Crisis Management (XISM) and Dialog Assisted Visual Environment for Geoinformation (DAVE/spl I.bar/G). The fourth part speculates on the short-term and long-term research directions that will help addressing the outstanding challenges in interfaces that support dialogue and collaboration. Finally, the fifth part concludes the paper.

Speech-gesture driven multimodal interfaces for crisis management

Current computing systems do not support human work effectively. They restrict human–computer interaction to one mode at a time and are designed with an assumption that use will be by individuals (rather than groups), directing (rather than interacting with) the system. To support the ways in which humans work and interact, a new paradigm for computing is required that is multimodal, rather than unimodal, collaborative, rather than personal, and dialogue‐enabled, rather than unidirectional. To address this challenge, we have developed an approach for designing natural, multimodal, multiuser dialogue‐enabled interfaces to geographic information systems that make use of large‐screen displays and integrated speech–gesture interaction. After outlining our goals and providing a brief overview of relevant literature, we introduce the Dialogue‐Assisted Visual Environment for Geoinformation (DAVE_G). DAVE_G is being developed using a human‐centred systems approach that contextualizes development and assessment in...

Enabling collaborative geoinformation access and decision‐making through a natural, multimodal interface

For a graph G0 = (V, E0) and an integer K, how many edges are needed for augmenting G0 to a K-edge-connected graph? Results in the literature have answered this in several special cases such as when G0 is a tree, or when K = 2. In this paper, we settle the problem in the general case where G0 can be any multigraph and K can be any positive integer. We obtained both good characterization and good algorithm for the problem. Applications of our algorithm are suggested in designing a reliable network aiming at the most effective use of exising network.

The minimum augmentation of any graph to a K-edge-connected graph

Geographic information exists in multiple forms, such as cartographical maps, images, and texts. Effective retrieval systems for geographic information are currently studied by both geospatial information scientists and library/information scientists. The two groups take quite different approaches, which have rarely been explicitly compared and connected. This paper discusses the advantages and limitations of current geographic information retrieval (GIR) and textual information retrieval (IR) systems in dealing with multimedia geographic information, and proposes a new retrieval model, called GeoVSM (Geographic + Vector Space Model), which integrates coordinate-based geographic indexing with the keyword-based vector space model in representing information space. Document ranking by relevance is supported by document-query similarity measures, taking into account the degree of relevance in both the spatial domain and the thematic domain. To support visual querying and browsing, the GeoVSM model recognizes the fundamental differences in the dimensionality and configuration of geographic space and thematic space, and demands multi-view visual interfaces based on a "world" metaphor and a "desktop" metaphor. As an example of such interfaces, GeoVIBE is presented, which supports a coordinated GeoView and a VibeView for smooth integration of two browsing strategies using geographic clues as well as thematic clues provided by users.

Guoray Cai

Papers

Geovisualization for knowledge construction and decision support

Speech-gesture driven multimodal interfaces for crisis management

Enabling collaborative geoinformation access and decision‐making through a natural, multimodal interface

The minimum augmentation of any graph to a K-edge-connected graph

GeoVSM: An Integrated Retrieval Model for Geographic Information