In the US, the abuse of individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities (I/DD) is at epidemic proportions; however, the reporting of such abuse has been severely lacking. It has been found that individuals with I/DD are more aware of when and how to report abuse if they have received abuse prevention training. Consequently, in this paper we present the design of a mobile-computing app called Recognize to teach individuals with I/DD about abuse. Our research team is diverse, with both individuals with I/DD and neurotypical individuals. We leveraged this diversity by utilizing a co-design process with our team members who live with I/DD. Our team developed three initial prototypes of the app and performed a qualitative, within-group user study with six separate individuals with I/DD who are themselves experienced teachers to other individuals with I/DD. We found that, overall, the app would be viable for use by individuals with I/DD. We end the paper with a brief discussion of the implications of our findings toward building a full prototype of the app.

In the US, abuse of individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities (I/DD) is at epidemic proportions. Further, abuse incidents of individuals with I/DD are woefully under-reported. We surveyed practitioners who help individuals with I/DD post-abuse to get a broader context on the problem. We found that abuse of individuals with I/DD was often reported by someone other than the survivor, as survivors faced impediments in reporting. Consequently, we argue for developing a mobile-computing-based reporting tool for empowering individuals with I/DD to self-report abuse. Next, we conducted focus groups of individuals with I/DD to evaluate the tool’s viability, with respect to their ability to recognize/report abuse and use mobile-computing devices. We found individuals with I/DD could recognize/report abuse well when they received appropriate training. We also found individuals with I/DD could independently use their devices, though they shared access to them with family. Based on these findings, we call for several lines of accessibility research in designing an abuse self-reporting tool for individuals with I/DD.

We designed and implemented an online module that explains accessibility to non-major high school students. The module demonstrates one of the important Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, known as Reflow, using hands-on experience. Reflow is a particularly essential feature for the accessibility of webpages for people with cognitive impairments. The module consists of an interactive lecture and engaging quizzes. We held an online one-hour workshop where the activity was presented to 52 high school students. We collected objective and subjective data about students' knowledge and learning experience using 3 questionnaires. Our findings indicate that the module is effective in raising students' awareness of disabilities, leveraging their knowledge on accessibility, and maintaining high interest in pursuing a computing degree.

It can be an arduous and time consuming task to manually curate video data for tracking the movement of an object. This is particularly challenging when tracking animals whose behaviour is sporadic and unpredictable, but it can provide pertinent information when monitoring health, conditions and treatments. Here, we evaluate the use of machine learning retroactively applied to automatically track specific steers in hours of video with minimal manual interaction. This is approached using the Faster R-CNN Object Detection algorithm with VGG-16 acting as a feature extractor. Performance on a number of video segments is presented and discussed, and the issues encountered are outlined. This highlights a number of guidelines that should be taken under consideration when generating video data to improve object detection performance, and helps define the applicability of the approach to pre-existing data.

Climate change and food security are significant global challenges facing society. The dairy industry is inextricably linked to these challenges as it is concerned with the economies of food production, while acknowledging that it is a major contributor to greenhouse gas production. Action by microbial communities in the rumen is responsible for efficient breakdown of plant matter for food conversion, but a by-product of this action is substantial methane production. Insight into food conversion and methane production in rumen microbiota is possible through metagenomics analysis, which is the analysis of microbial communities and their interactions with the environment. However, metagenomic analysis is hampered by the sheer volume and complexity of data that needs to be processed. This paper presents a bioinformatics pipeline and visualisation platform that facilitates deep analysis of microbial communities, under various conditions in cattle rumen, with the aim of leading to significant impact on probiotic supplement usage, methane production and feed conversion efficiency. This pipeline was developed as part of the EU H2020 MetaPlat project and will pave the way for a more optimal usage of metagenomic datasets, thus reducing the number of animals necessary to be engaged in such studies. This will ensure better and more economic animal welfare, better use of resources and lessen the impact of the dairy industry on climate change.

Abstract Telepresence involves the use of virtual reality technology to facilitate apparent physical participation in distant events, including potentially performing tasks, while creating a sense of being in that location. Traditionally, such systems are asymmetric in nature where only one side (participant) is “teleported” to the remote location. In this manuscript, the authors explore the possibility of symmetric three‐dimensional telepresence where both sides (participants) are “teleported” simultaneously to each other's location; the overarching concept of symmetric telepresence in virtual environments is extended to telepresence robots in physical environments. Two identical physical humanoid robots located in UK and the USA serve as surrogates while performing a transcontinental shared collaborative task. The actions of these surrogate robots are driven by capturing the intent of the participants controlling them in either location. Participants could communicate verbally but could not see the other person or the remote location while performing the task. The effectiveness of gesturing along with other observations during this preliminary experiment is presented. Results reveal that the symmetric robotic telepresence allowed participants to use and understand gestures in cases where they would otherwise have to describe their actions verbally. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

This paper describes personalization metadata standards that can be used to enable individuals to access and use resources based on a user's particular requirements. The paper describes two approaches which are being developed in the library and Web worlds and highlights some of the potential challenges which will need to be addressed in order to maximise interoperability. The paper concludes by arguing the need for greater dialogue across these two communities.

In this paper, we propose the use of records management principles to identify and manage Web site resources with enduring value as records. Current Web archiving activities, collaborative or organisational, whilst extremely valuable in their own right, often do not and cannot incorporate requirements for proper records management. Material collected under such initiatives therefore may not be reliable or authentic from a legal or archival perspective, with insufficient metadata collected about the object during its active life, and valuable materials destroyed whilst ephemeral items are maintained. Education, training, and collaboration between stakeholders are integral to avoiding these risks and successfully preserving valuable Web-based materials.