As a large share of the people who write about User-Centred Design seems to consist of gurus, visionaries and other enthusiasts, the story that is preached might be a bit too optimistic. Furthermore, with only some consensus on a high, abstract level, there is a lack of agreement on what UCD exactly is, which makes the concept rather ambiguous. Simultaneously, the amount of problems faced when ...

We view match as an operator that takes two graph-like structures (e.g., classifications, XML schemas) and produces a mapping between the nodes of these graphs that correspond semantically to each other. Semantic matching is based on two ideas: (i) we discover mappings by computing semantic relations (e.g., equivalence, more general); (ii) we determine semantic relations by analyzing the meanin...

Interpretation of artificial intelligence on the base of the philosophical fictionalism allowed discussing the educational technologies in the context of conditions for strengthening of discursive power of pupils’ thought. The artificial intelligence received broad interpretation as an embodiment of a literary image, which did not have unambiguous link with the area of logical formalisms and ma...

In this thesis we prove the existence of m-armed spiral wave solutions for the complex Ginzburg-Landau equation in the circular and spherical geometries. Instead of applying the shooting method in the literature, we establish a functional approach and generalize the known results of existence for rigidly-rotating spiral waves. Moreover, we prove the existence of two new patterns: frozen spirals...

We investigate people’s attitudes towards the possible use of mobile negotiation support systems (NSS) in different social contexts and the consequences for their design. For that purpose we developed an online survey based on existing models of technology acceptance. In the questionnaire we showed five filmed scenarios of NSS use contexts. The data collected from 120 respondents, showed (a) th...

Sufficiency criteria are established to ensure the asymptotic stability and boundedness of solutions to third-order nonlinear delay differential equations of the form ... x (t) + e(x(t), ẋ(t), ẍ(t))ẍ(t) + g(x(t− r), ẋ(t− r)) + ψ(x(t− r)) = p(t, x(t), x(t − r), x(t), x(t− r), x(t)). By using Lyapunov’s functional approach, we obtain two new results on the subject, which include and improve some ...

Various researchers and policy analysts have made empirical studies of innovation systems in order to understand their current structure and trace their dynamics. However, policy makers often experience difficulties in extracting practical guidelines from studies of this kind. In this paper, we operationalize our previous work on a functional approach to analyzing innovation system dynamics int...

How does valuing something for its own sake differ from an entity the of other things? Although numerous answers come to mind, many them rule out substantive views about what is valuable sake. I therefore seek provide a more neutral way distinguish two attitudes. Drawing existing accounts valuing, argue that can be distinguished in terms conative-volitional feature. Focusing first on “non-final...

This paper addresses the issue of developing weatherimpacted routes for the Final Approach Spacing Tool (FAST). FAST relies on adaptation data that includes nominal terminal area routes and degrees of freedom to generate optimum landing sequences and runway assignments. However, during adverse weather some adapted routes may become unavailable due to the presence of hazardous weather. If FAST c...

We often describe lives (or parts of lives) as meaningful or as not meaningful. It is also common to characterize them as more or less meaningful. Some lives, we tend to think, are more meaningful than others. But how then can one compare lives with respect to how much meaning they contain? Can one? This paper argues that (i) only a notion of rough equality can be used when comparing different ...