Digital Identity

We view scenes in the real world by moving our eyes three to four times each second and integrating information across subsequent fixations (foveation points). By taking advantage of this fact, in this paper we propose an original approach to partitioning of a video into shots based on a foveated representation of the video. More precisely, the shot-change detection method is related to the computation, at each time instant, of a consistency measure of the fixation sequences generated by an ideal observer looking at the video. The proposed scheme aims at detecting both abrupt and gradual transitions between shots using a single technique, rather than a set of dedicated methods. Results on videos of various content types are reported and validate the proposed approach Index Terms-Attentive vision, dissolves, hard cuts, shot detection, video segmentation.

Over the past 10 years there has been a great evolution of technology and the way the teaching and learning process is developed, as well as how research and publication are carried out. The Web 2.0, a term coined by O'Reilly in 2004, has introduced a new concept to the use of the Internet, in particular as it relates to the educational framework. The web 2.0 tools allow the creation of emerging ubiquitous environments that enable the development and management of a real Personal Learning Environment (PLE). This chapter is a proposal for the “Handbook of Applied Research on E-Learning in Engineering and Architecture Education” and represents a literature review on the topic of Personal Learning Environments (PLE). It explores the definition around the concept of PLE, its history, the advantages for its use in a lifelong learning process and its importance in the scope of the present research.

This study explores the relationship between socioeconomic status (SES) and the computer-use profile of 1241 school students in Flanders, the northern region of Belgium. More specifically, the article examines whether varying patterns of computer access, attitudes, competencies and uses can be seen as constituting differences in cultural capital. Additionally, gender was included in the survey as an important background characteristic in digital divide research. Path analysis was used to model the complex relationships between the influencing factors upon the ICT-related variables. What emerged from the analyses was that SES affects the computer-use profile only moderately. No relationship between SES and computer ownership was found. Moreover, the acquisition of ICT competencies can no longer be attributed to computer ownership. Apart from a small effect on ICT use (a higher SES tends to be associated with more ICT use), SES does not seem to affect the computer-use profile of young people in Flanders.

Although researchers have discussed the existence of a virtual self, or embodiment of human characteristics within an avatar, little known about how the virtual self influences a player’s behavior within a virtual environment. To better understand this relationship, World of Warcraft game players were asked to complete personality-rating scales for both themselves and their avatars. In addition, in-world behavior was recorded and then analyzed using a behavioral assessment checklist. Results suggested a relationship between personality and behavior within the domain of agreeableness. Based on these findings, the researchers discuss implications for the construct known as the virtual self, as well as the inclusion of psychological systems design into the overall game design process.► We examine the relationship between personality and behavior in a virtual environment (VE). ► The emergence of a virtual self as a psychological component of VE software appears to exist. ► Results indicate a relationship along the domain of agreeableness.

While ‘classical’ human identity has kept philosophers busy since millennia, ‘Digital Identity’ seems primarily machine related. Telephone numbers, E-Mail inboxes, or Internet Protocol (IP)-addresses are irrelevant to define us as human beings at first glance. However, with the omnipresence of digital space the digital aspects of identity gain importance. In this submission, we aim to put recent developments in context and provide a categorization to frame the landscape as developments proceed rapidly. First, we present selected philosophical perspectives on identity. Secondly, we explore how the legal landscape is approaching identity from a traditional dogmatic perspective both in national and international law. After blending the insights from those sections together in a third step, we will go on to describe and discuss current developments that are driven by the emergence of new tools such as ‘Distributed Ledger Technology’ and ‘Zero Knowledge Proof’. One of our main findings is that the management of digital identity is transforming from a purpose driven necessity towards a self-standing activity that becomes a resource for many digital applications. In other words, whereas traditionally identity is addressed in a predominantly sectoral fashion whenever necessary, new technologies transform digital identity management into a basic infrastructural service, sometimes even a commodity. This coincides with a trend to take the ‘control’ over identity away from governmental institutions and corporate actors to ‘self-sovereign individuals’, who have now the opportunity to manage their digital self autonomously. To make our conceptual statements more relevant, we present several already existing use cases in the public and private sector. Subsequently, we discuss potential risks that should be mitigated in order to create a desirable relationship between the individual, public institutions, and the private sector in a world where self-sovereign identity management has become the norm. We will illustrate these issues along the discussion around privacy, as well as the development of backup mechanisms for digital identities. Despite the undeniable potential for the management of identity, we suggest that particularly at this point in time there is a clear need to make detailed (non-technological) governance decisions impacting the general design and implementation of self-sovereign identity systems. FULL VERSION AVAILABLE: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3454513

Several factors contribute to an individual’s experiences in computer-based environments. Previous research shows one such factor, the degree to which users feel connected to a virtual environment, influ- ences the actions of individuals within the environment (Banos et al., 2008; Welch, 1999). Additional factors, such as people’s personality and the personality of their avatar, influence behaviors in virtual environments (McCreery, Krach, Schrader, & Boone, 2012). The current study focused on the role of presence as it affects behavior within the virtual environment. Presence has been defined as the psychological state where virtual experiences feel authentic. However, the degree to which presence acts as a mediating variable in virtual environments is not well understood. The current study employed a combination of survey instruments and direct observation to explore the relationships among personality of self and avatar, presence, and behaviors within a virtual environment. Findings indicated that participant scores in the domain of agreeableness were a significant predictor of agreeable behavior in the virtual environment. However, with the exception of negative effects (e.g., dizziness), presence does not appear to influence behavior. Overall implications for these findings are discussed.

The #WalkMyWorld project was an open, social media experiment developed to provide preservice and in-service teachers and K–12 students with an opportunity to focus on developing media literacies and civic engagement in online spaces. The study employed a basic interpretative qualitative study approach (Merriam, 2002) to examine how online social environments can be used as a vehicle to engage educators in the creation and sharing of online content, as it relates to multimodal meaning making, social scholarship, and identity construction. For this study, identity construction was identified as visually representing an aspect of an individual’s life using any preferred medium, and sharing it through Twitter using the #WalkMyWorld hashtag. Results suggest three different categories in which participants viewed the activity of identity construction: (a) embraced similar identities, (b) established separate identities, or (c) resisted creating an online identity. As educators engage students with reading and writing digital content within social and connected learning environments, it is important to consider the creation and curation of an individual’s digital identity in social scholarship practices.

Findings from five qualitative case studies of adolescents' uses of web-based resources and digital literacy skills to construct online identities call into question some common perceptions of youth wasting valuable time on the internet. A team of researchers,
working within a New Literacy Studies perspective, enlisted the help of five high school students who agreed to keep daily logs of the web sites they visited over a period of eight months. The logs provided a focus for weekly, semi-structured individual interviews that were recorded, transcribed, and used to inform the next week's interviews. A six-step multilayered analysis of the data shows that students use a range of web-based resources and digital literacy skills to construct their online identities. While such practices are connected to students' offline worlds, a debate exists concerning their relevancy for preparing youth to be contributing members of society.

Social gaze provides a window into the interests and intentions of others and allows us to actively point out our own. It enables us to engage in triadic interactions involving human actors and physical objects and to build an indispensable basis for coordinated action and collaborative efforts. The object-related aspect of gaze in combination with the fact that any motor act of looking encompasses both input and output of the minds involved makes this non-verbal cue system particularly interesting for research in embodied social cognition. Social gaze comprises several core components, such as gaze-following or gaze aversion. Gaze-following can result in situations of either “joint attention” or “shared attention.” The former describes situations in which the gaze-follower is aware of sharing a joint visual focus with the gazer. The latter refers to a situation in which gazer and gaze-follower focus on the same object and both are aware of their reciprocal awareness of this joint focus. Here, a novel interactive eye-tracking paradigm suited for studying triadic interactions was used to explore two aspects of social gaze. Experiments 1a and 1b assessed how the latency of another person’s gaze reactions (i.e., gaze-following or gaze version) affected participants’ sense of agency, which was measured by their experience of relatedness of these reactions. Results demonstrate that both timing and congruency of a gaze reaction as well as the other’s action options influence the sense of agency. Experiment 2 explored differences in gaze dynamics when participants were asked to establish either joint or shared attention. Findings indicate that establishing shared attention takes longer and requires a larger number of gaze shifts as compared to joint attention, which more closely seems to resemble simple visual detection. Taken together, novel insights into the sense of agency and the awareness of others in gaze-based interaction are provided.

Societies at large still grapple to categorize digital space as a phenomenon. At the same time, scientists and developers are searching for innovative methods to better understand how the fundamental shifts caused by digital change will affect the future of humanity over the coming decades. Interdisciplinary governance research at the intersection of technological and environmental foresight is urgently needed to minimize the risks of technological change and explore how digitalization may support, hinder or reshape sustainability transformations. In this article, we focus on the case of 'blockchain' or distributed-ledger technology (DLT) to investigate how recent digital technologies may support the implementation of sustainable development initiatives. Our investigation is centered on areas of public administration and governance which will most likely see an adoption of DLT over the next two decades, such as digital identity, social service provision, and innovative climate finance. To allow for a meaningful comparison of various use cases, we propose four guiding questions that can help researchers, decision-makers and practitioners to determine whether DLT might be an appropriate choice for the sustainability-related task at hand. Moreover, we illustrate how the initial design and subsequent implementation of DLTs may support more centralized or networked modes of governance.

This report explores the possible solutions for image annotation and retrieval by implicitly monitoring user attention via eye-tracking. Features are extracted from the gaze trajectory of users examining sets of images to provide implicit information on the target template that guides visual attention. Our Gaze Inference System (GIS) is a fuzzy logic based framework that analyses the gaze-movement features to assign a user interest level (UIL) from 0 to 1 to every image that appeared on the screen. Because some properties of the gaze features are unique for every user, our user adaptive framework builds a new processing system for every new user to achieve higher accuracy. The generated UILs can be used for image annotation purposes however the output of our system is not limited as it can be used also for retrieval or other scenarios. The developed framework produces promising and reliable UILs where approximately 53% of target images in the users' minds can be identified by the machine with an error of less than 20% and the top 10% of them with no error. We show in this paper that the existing information in gaze patterns can be employed to improve the machine's judgement of image content by assessment of human interest and attention to the objects inside virtual environments. This article has been accepted for publication in a future issue of this journal, but has not been fully edited. Content may change prior to final publication. 4 the use of fuzzy logic increased the ability to interpret [23] the developed system. In addition it reduced the training period extensively. It also decreased the computational cost and cut down the required time for a user calibration phase in order to provide training datasets for the system (less than 2 minutes). On the other hand using the pattern recognition neural network resulted in a slightly improved performance of the framework but costs it more training time and it is more computationally expensive.