About the project
Objective
Asreen Rostami joined RISE Cybersecurity as an ERCIM postdoctoral fellow. Her research was focused on “humanising” Internet of Things (IoT) security to provide an understanding of the technical, design, social and political issues that arise when considering IoT systems from a human-centred perspective. Her current research under the Digital Futures postdoctoral fellowship program is centred around bringing marginalised perspectives into cyber security, starting with looking at the deviant use of smart home devices.
She aims to develop gender-inclusive cyber security, a human-centred approach to security that encompasses feminist principles such as diversity, autonomy, respect, and consent and applies them in a digital context.
About the Digital Futures Postdoc Fellow
Asreen Rostami holds a PhD in the area of HCI from Stockholm University. Her doctoral research was focused on the incorporation of interactive technologies in designing and experiencing interactive and mixed-reality performances, during which she developed a design concept (frictions) used to create an immersive and engaging VR experience and co-designed and staged a mixed-reality performance (Frictional Realities, 2019) in collaboration with a group of Swedish artists.
Main supervisor
Barry Brown, Professor, Department of computer and systems sciences, Stockholm University.
Co-supervisor
Shahid Raza, Associate Professor, RISE Cybersecurity, RISE Research Institutes of Sweden.
About the project
Objective
The research aims to fill the gap in women’s health by designing and studying the use of digital health technologies for intimate care and the tacit interpersonal relationships associated with intimate care. At the personal level, the research aims to improve awareness of intimate care by co-designing and developing innovative interactions with the technology using innovative design methods such as Soma Design. At the interpersonal level, the research aims to study the shared and domestic use of intimate health technologies between partners, such as fertility tracking, and how better care structures can be developed outside the home, such as in the workplace. The research aims to understand the trust factors in using algorithmic services for intimate health at the system level.
Background
Despite making important progress in women’s health, severe gaps prevail in how women’s health is understood and represented. Social and cultural taboos associated with the female body have long affected education, treatment, and access to healthcare. Digital approaches to women’s health similarly have been limited in their focus such that they fail to respond to the broad, bodily, and taboo challenges that women’s health brings.
About the Digital Futures Postdoc Fellow
Deepika Yadav is a postdoctoral research fellow in Stockholm Technology & Interaction Research (STIR) group. Her research lies at the intersection of Human-Computer Interaction and global development with specific interests in working for underrepresented groups in resource-constrained settings, women’s health, and well-being. Her latest research studies sociological contexts of interpersonal relationships of care in the workplace setting for lactating mothers.
Main supervisor
Airi Lampinen, Associate Professor, Department of Computer and Systems Sciences (DSV), Stockholm University.
Co-supervisor
Madeline Balaam, Associate Professor, Division of Media Technology and Interaction Designs, KTH.
Watch the recorded presentation at Digitalize in Stockholm 2022 event.
About the project
Objective
This research takes the experiential notion of being a foreigner as the starting point to represent how crises unfold in distant territories digitally. This ethnographic research utilises earthquakes as case studies to show how everyday experiences are shaped by how our bodies are connected to geographic singularities. By alluding to our human capacity for adaptability, this research aims to (a) generate novel interactive experiences to communicate the changing nature of the Anthropocene Era. Furthermore, (b) to generate design methods considering the global citizen’s perspective.
Background
Amidst the Anthropocene Era and the COVID pandemic, the resolution of traditionally ill-defined problems in design requires the recognition of non-dominant paradigms and cultural perspectives. Moreover, living in a world of shared uncertainties due to a series of political, environmental and social changes demands cultivating adaptability to face unexpected future scenarios.
From a methodological perspective, this research engages in first-person Soma Design research, which places the locus on the body and experience. This somatic epistemology is becoming increasingly influential in developing digital and interactive technologies in the last decade.
About the Digital Futures Postdoc Fellow
Claudia Núñez-Pacheco is an interaction design researcher and artist. She holds a PhD and a master’s degree from the Sydney School of Design at the University of Sydney in interaction design and electronic arts. Her research investigates how bodily ways of knowing can be used as crafting materials to design aesthetic experiences. In her research journey, Claudia has engaged in a multidisciplinary exploration that merges material thinking, wearable technology, human-computer interaction (HCI) and design methods with tools from experiential psychology. Claudia has been awarded twice by the National Commission for Scientific and Technological Research Scholarship (Chile), in addition to disseminating her research through various international HCI and design academic fora.
Main supervisor
Kia Höök, Professor, Division of Media Technology and Interaction design, KTH.
Co-supervisor
Thiemo Voigt, Professor, RISE Computer Science.
About the project
Objective
Online proctoring systems (OPS) in higher education settings are evolving fast. Their use is encouraged by the need to preserve the academic integrity of online assessment, particularly during the COVID-19 and post-pandemic. The acceptance of and trust in these tools are hindered by several ethical challenges, where students’ privacy is at the top. This postdoc research project aims to identify the main privacy issues around the use of OPS in higher education and how they can be addressed. This project will offer higher education institutions the privacy protection framework to be considered in educational and design practices to address the identified challenges.
About the Digital Futures Postdoc Fellow
Chantal Mutimukwe is a postdoc researcher at the Department of Computer Systems and Sciences (DSV), Stockholm University. Before joining Stockholm University, she worked at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology. Chantal got her PhD in informatics from Örebro University in 2019.
Her PhD research concerned the protection of information privacy in an e-government context. The main research goal was to provide an understanding of how the practices of information collection and dissemination by government organizations can match with the protection of citizens’ privacy. Her primary research interest is data privacy and security protection in an online service context.
Main supervisor
Teresa Cerratto-Pargman, Professor, Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), Stockholm University.
Co-supervisor
Olga Viberg, Associate Professor, Division of Media Technology and Interaction Design, KTH.
Watch the recorded presentation at the Digitalize in Stockholm 2023 event.
About the project
Objective
This research project aims to design and develop an AI prototype that strengthens the collaborative work in the sighted guiding partnership. In sighted guiding, the guide bends and offers its arm to the person being guided. Their physical connection allows companions to accomplish navigation collaboratively.
This project will advance perspectives that stress how access and independence are achieved through interdependence, opening up new opportunities to design AI-AT that supports cooperation between people through/with AI, better responds to people’s capacities, and therefore empowers people with VI in social life. Results will be technically innovative because of the increasing adaptability of AI-based AT to contextual, situational and personal factors and the capabilities of people with VI. This differs from previous approaches focused on object recognition and discrete tasks where the end-to-end scenario is easily defined.
Background
Over 30 million people live with Visual Impairments (VI) in Europe. Often this medical condition interferes with the individual’s abilities to perform activities of everyday life since in a world with a predominance of visual content, information access can be hard, tiring and frustrating. Nowadays, people with VI still suffer from exclusion, such as marginalisation and powerlessness, in an increasingly digitalised society. People with VI are early adopters of Assistive Technology (AT), and AI-based AT (e.g., smartphone applications) plays an increasing part in their daily lives. In Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) research, increased attention has been given to independent navigation. Here, AI technologies aim to solve a functional task, where the user follows turn-by-turn instructions to successfully reach a destination and receive physical spatial information, such as the identification and proximity of obstacles and landmarks. A promising alternative approach builds on the interdependence framework that sees AT as a way to extend the relations between one another, focusing on how actors are made more or less able, relationally, through other actors and through AT.
About the Digital Futures Postdoc Fellow
Beatrice Vincenzi, University of London, is a postdoc in the Interaction Design research group at KTH Royal Institute of Technology. She is interested in inclusivity and designing AI assistive technology for/with people with disabilities. She is passionate about exploring design methods which make space for accessibility, interdependence, and AI.
Main supervisor
Marianela Ciolfi Felice, KTH.
Co-supervisor
Sanna Kuoppamäki, KTH.
About the project
About the Digital Futures Postdoc Fellow
Mareike Glöss main research interest is understanding digital transformations and their diffusion into everyday life. She looks at how novel computing technologies are appropriated and how this impacts everyday life. An important part of her work is translating results to inform the design and development of new technologies. Mareike is especially interested in public spaces and how people move through them. She has studied auto-mobility aspects – on the road with Swedish commuters or as a passenger in Californian cabs and Uber rides.
But there is a big chance that auto-mobility will only be a small part of future mobility (at most). Thus, more recently, she started to think about new approaches to mobility away from single modes of transportation. According to Mareike Glöss, we must start thinking much more about personal journeys and intermodal forms of transport. Closely related to this is her interest in Smart Cities. Those are still treated very much like a future vision, but cities are already very smart. Just in a much more chaotic form than we had imagined. And this chaos is something she would like to untangle.
Main supervisor
Rob Comber, Associate Professor, Division of Media Technology and Interaction Designs, KTH.
Co-supervisor
Jonathan Metzger, Professor at the School of Architecture and the Built Environment, Urban Planning and Environment, KTH.
About the project
Objective
This project has two parts – the feminist design part is about reflecting on how feminist ideas can influence social robot design, firstly ensuring that robots do not propagate harmful norms, e.g. about women, but then actually going beyond that to see if we can actively challenge such norms with the design decisions we make. The part on working with children is about exploring how children can be invited to co-design robots designed for their use, and particularly whether we can use human-in-the-loop automation approaches to have them ‘teach’ robots how to support them best.
Background
Involvement in robotics research and development is typically limited to a privileged few who generally lack diversity with regards to, e.g. gender, cultural background, etc., yet are expected to develop systems that work for all. These projects are both fundamentally concerned with trying to bring different perspectives into robotics, motivated by a desire to avoid some of the harms we already see in technology development (biased systems, inappropriate use of gender cues) but also build better systems from the beginning – who better craft robot behaviours than those who are ultimately supposed to benefit from that robot’s deployment?
About the Digital Futures Postdoc Fellow
Katie Winkle, after originally studying to be a mechanical engineer, undertook a PhD in social robotics at the Bristol Robotics Laboratory in the UK. She also undertook work on responsible robotics with partners from the University of Oxford. She defended her thesis ‘Expert-Informed Design and Automation of Persuasive, Socially Assistive Robots’ in Summer 2020. Now, Katie is a Digital Futures Postdoctoral Research Fellow at KTH, based in the Social Robotics group at the Division of Robotics, Perception and Learning. Her research is hugely interdisciplinary, drawing on psychology and the social sciences and the latest in robotics and AI to engineer effective, meaningful, impactful human-robot interactions.
Main supervisor
Iolanda Leite, Associate professor, Department of Robotics, Perception and Learning, KTH.
Co-supervisor
Donald McMillan, Associate professor, Department of Computer and Systems Sciences, Stockholm University.