ABSTRACT
This study investigated the behaviors of attendees of small social life cycle events during the COVID-19 pandemic, incorporating the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB) into the study framework. Adopting individuals' risk perception aspects based on the affect and availability heuristics as antecedents of variables of TPB, this study found that affect and availability heuristics influenced individuals' attitudes and perceived behavioral control when attending small social life cycle events during the pandemic. Findings of the study also revealed that individuals' attitudes, perceived behavioral control, and social norm influenced their behavioral intentions and, in turn, their behaviors. The group comparison analysis found the severity of the pandemic in the regions moderated attendees' behaviors partially. Theoretical and managerial implications were addressed, followed by limitations and future study suggestions. © Copyright 2023 Cognizant, LLC.
ABSTRACT
Wastewater surveillance is a promising technology for real-time tracking and even early detection of COVID-19 infections in a community. Although correlation analysis between wastewater surveillance data and the daily clinical COVID-19 case numbers has been frequently conducted, the importance of stationarity of the time series data has not been well addressed. In this study, we demonstrated that strong yet spurious correlation could arise from non-stationary time series data in wastewater surveillance. Data prewhitening to remove trends by the first differences of values between two consecutive times helped to reveal distinct cross-correlation patterns between daily clinical case numbers and daily wastewater SARS-CoV-2 RNA abundance during a lockdown period in 2020 in Honolulu, Hawaii. Normalization of wastewater SARS-CoV-2 RNA concentration by the endogenous fecal viral markers in the same samples significantly improved the cross-correlation, and the best correlation was detected at a two-day lag of the daily clinical case numbers. The detection of a significant correlation between the daily wastewater SARS-CoV-2 RNA abundance and the clinical case numbers also suggests that disease burden fluctuation in the community should not be excluded as a contributor to the often observed weekly cyclic patterns of clinical cases. © 2023 The Royal Society of Chemistry.
ABSTRACT
The use of social robots has recently been investigated in various areas, including STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) education and artistic performances. To inform children of the seriousness of climate change and awareness that they can make change, we created the Robot Musical Theater performance. In this project, natural elements (wind, earth, fire, and water) were anthropomorphized and represented by humanoid robots (Pepper, Milo, and Nao). The robots were designed to motivate audience to participate in the action to prevent climate change. Because of COVID, only fourteen visitors as a single group were allowed to participate in real-time and posted to YouTube, where at the time of submission, 141 people have viewed the performance. The participants provided positive comments on the performance and showed their willingness to participate in the movement to prevent climate change, and expressed their further interest in STEM learning. This performance is expected to contribute to enhancing informal STEM and robotics learning, as well as advancing robotic arts. © 2022 IEEE.
ABSTRACT
A worldwide pandemic has brought many challenges in numerous areas of everyone's life. The AutomotiveUI 2020 has also been moved to a virtual conference. Although the situation seems to be improving in some parts of the world, the impacts that the pandemic has brought to the research and academia may last long even after the pandemic is over. In the AutomotiveUI community, there is more than one aspect that should be taken into consideration. Ironically, the situation brought about both risks and opportunities including research methods, collaboration, interaction manners, and diversity and inclusion. With this background, the goal of this workshop is to discuss the impact of the COVID19 pandemic on the AutomotiveUI community from the perspective of the diversity and inclusion and to discuss the direction of collaborative activities of our community with researchers from various groups. We will organize three virtual workshop sessions accomodating different time zones. © 2020 Owner/Author.