No abstract

Digital technologies have impacted almost every aspect of our society, including how people participate in activities that matter to them. Indeed, digital participation allows people to be involved in different societal activities at an unprecedented scale through the use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT). Still, enabling participation at scale requires making it seamless for people to: interact with a variety of software platforms, get information from connected physical objects and software services, and communicate and collaborate with their peers. Toward this objective, this paper introduces and formalizes the concept of Social Participation Network, which captures the diverse participation relationships-between people, digital services and connected things-supporting participatory processes. The paper further presents the early design of an associated online service to support the creation and management of Social Participation Networks. The design advocates the instantiation of Social Participation Networks within distinct participation contexts-spanning, e.g., private institutions, neighbor communities, and governmental institutions-so that the participants' information and contributions to participation remain isolated and private within the given context.

This article introduces an advanced human-robot interaction (HRI) interface that allows teaching new assembly tasks to collaborative robotic systems. Using advanced perception and simulation technologies, the interface provides the proper tools for a non-expert user to teach a robot a new assembly task in a short amount of time. An RGBD camera is used to allow the user to demonstrate the task and the system extracts the needed information for the assembly to be simulated and performed by the robot, while the user guides the process. The HRI interface is integrated with the ROS framework and is built as a web application allowing operation through portable devices, such as a tablet PC. The interface is evaluated with user experience rating from test subjects that are requested to teach a folding assembly task to the robot.