Conducting a secret ballot elections for virtual meetings.

Communication plays a crucial role in business, education, and generally in everyday people's interactions. Face-to-face communication has been banned by the COVID-19 pandemic restrictions and had to be replaced with its electronic remote form. Popular digital applications allowed us to switch to online life quite easily. That conversion wasn't problematic for most (especially young) people. Working online and meeting people virtually became a standard, and people have mostly adapted to the new reality. Moving conventional communication to the Internet wasn't much challenging, because it was only a matter of existing ICT solutions popularization. They have already existed and were functional, but haven't been used much often. COVID-19 pandemic changed it permanently because there was no other way as rapid adoption to this unusual situation. Although most of the actions could have been realized online, some were more problematic to conduct electronically. One of them was secret balloting for virtual meetings. As open voting was not much complicated to arrange using remote communication, conduction the secret type of elections was not so obvious. In open voting electors' data can be revealed and the results may be easily verified when it's finished. Secret voting demands to remain voters' data and their choices confidential. That leads to the question of how to verify the users' identity and voting rights and keep them anonymous at the same time? This paper provides an overview of a person's remote identification and verification methods, also explores the possibilities of using them for secret voting authentication. Results show that conducting a secret ballot with remote voter authentication is possible. The method was widely described and also applied in a authors' digital system. A fully functional ICT solution has been tested in real elections across several organizations in Poland, in which present authorities were elected electronically during the COVID-19 lockdown period.

Doing and talking: People with intellectual disabilities' handling of challenges of remote communication

This article is about the challenge of communication via smartphones and tablets by people with intellectual disabilities (ID). We will give special attention to persons that struggle with verbal communication. One of our co-researchers, the fourth author, has a severe ID. She cannot read, write or use voice assisted technology in any functional manner. As a result of many years of collaboration, and the need for solutions in connection with the challenges with COVID-19, she and her family have developed ways of remote communication that can be mastered both by the person with an ID and the majority (those without similar disabilities). We call it doing and talking. Successful remote communication not only depends on technology and how to use it, but also on communication strategies that both work for the person with an ID and the majority. It is often the case that people with ID are expected to learn the skills necessary to adapt to the majority. We will show that success is just as much a question of the majority learning new skills and strategies that can make real inclusion and collaboration possible. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved)

Audio Streams Synchronization for Music Performances

For many years, the mechanisms of transmitting audio streams have been gaining popularity. The SARS-COV-2 pandemic completely remodeled people's habits by completely preventing participation in concerts. The technical possibilities of the musicians' remote cooperation have not been fully used yet.The popularity of remote communication is unquestionable. However, so far this type of communication has been based on a one-to-many model. In the case of music events, or music production in general, a many-to-one or generally many-to-many model must be implemented. For this to be possible, it is necessary to solve the problem of synchornization of streams originating sequentially from many creators. In addition to the aspect of audio stream synchronization discussed in this article, one of the assumptions was also the ease of adapting the proposed solution as part of a web application. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

New Normal Remote Communication for Collaboration

Remote communication is not new for the architecture, engineering and construction (AEC) industry and academia. Organisations started using what was common, called "conference rooms” with sophisticated technological equipment prepared for "conference calls” when face-to-face meetings were not possible, and the industries culture and work practices were rooted in face-to-face meetings. This was current practice until the beginning of 2020, with the emergence of the global COVID-19 pandemic. The pandemic forced people to have safe distances between them, to be isolated for long periods of time, and several restrictions to travel not being possible to meet face-to-face. This situation rapidly created a new need to find ways to communicate as alternatives to traditional face-to-face meetings, for "conference call rooms” anywhere and accessible at any time by everyone. The extended duration of the pandemic made organisations adapt to that new normal and remarkable new opportunities arose in a new way. This article explores recent situations in academia and industry that can highlight potential guidance towards the new normal in remote communication for learning–teaching and the AEC industry sectors. In conclusion, appropriate use of these electronic processes provides opportunities to significantly improve remote communication in future. It is expected that the number of opportunities to develop international relationships and partnerships can be boosted to another level of accessibility. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.

Perceived Impacts of Covid-19 in Conference Tourism: A Partial Least Squares (pls) Analysis

The purpose of this article is to explore the perceived impacts of COVID-19 in participating in academic events, relating the attractiveness of destinations and tourist opportunities as pull factors. Remote communication technologies have also been put into perspective to understand how they can influence future participation in events. A partial least squares (PLS) was used to test both research model and hypotheses. This study supports that COVID-19 has profoundly affected participation in events and has an impact on the attractiveness of the destination and tourist opportunities. During the pandemic context, remote communication technologies have replaced physical presence at events and are expected to continue to be present in future events. However, it is anticipated that technology will not permanently replace physical presence at events, due to the social character it represents. Also, destination attractiveness and tourist opportunities will be important in the decision to participate in physical events. This article addresses the current topic of COVID-19 and the impact on the future of physical events and gives some indicators that may contribute to a better planning of destinations in the recovery of this sector, namely by enhancing the tourist attractiveness of destinations as pull factor.

Study of the characteristics of ear animations used to convey information and emotion in remote communication without web camera.

The use of remote communication has grown globally due to the COVID-19 outbreak. In some remote communication, meeting participants use audio only with their web cameras turned off, resulting in a lack of exchange of nonverbal information. In this study, we defined an "ear animation" as an avatar composed of a simple face-like body with no facial features and ear-like parts coming out from this body which can be animated. The purpose of this study was to design the ear animation and evaluate user impressions of it as nonverbal information. While setting conveying information and conveying emotion as dependent variables, the independent variables we set in this study were three different conditions: when ear animations were presented with no sound, when ear animations were presented simultaneously with simple voice, when only voice was played, and three different kinds of content: "agreement", "skepticism", and "disagreement" conveyed from ear animations. Using Two-way ANOVA (repeated) with these variables, we conducted comparative analysis. The results showed that ear animations presented simultaneously with voice had the potential to be a new way of conveying nonverbal information by combining relevant ear animation movement forms.

Sociotechnical imaginaries of remote personal touch before and during COVID-19: An analysis of UK newspapers

This article considers newspapers' role in shaping the sociotechnical imaginaries of touch, and emerging technologies that digitally mediate touch. It examines the discourses of touch and personal relationships at a distance that circulated in major British broadsheet newspapers during the 2020 outbreak of coronavirus disease-19, alongside dominant narratives of touch and remote communication in the previous 5 years. In doing so, the article demonstrates how existing discourses of touch and remote communication intensified during the pandemic, while imaginations of remote touch narrowed. The sociotechnical imaginaries of digital touch matter because they illuminate the kinds of social relations touch technologies are perceived to forge, maintain or deny.

Automated Exam Proctoring using Support Vector Machine and Histogram of Oriented Gradients

Online learning has grown exponentially since the Covid-19 outbreak. Educational organizations are forced to stop their regular curriculum. Using remote communication software, students are able to pursue their educational curriculums. This paper proposes a multimedia exam proctoring system based on face recognition and object capturing systems. System hardware includes a webcam only. Dlib is used for facial detection and face landmark detection. The OpenCV Caffe model is then utilised to appropriately locate and sketch the face. YOLOv3 is used to detect objects. Onfocus event is used for tab detection. By combining all these, an exam proctoring system is developed which can classify if the student is found cheating and is then informed to the examiner. © 2022 IEEE.

Perceived Listening Difficulties of Adult Cochlear-Implant Users Under Measures Introduced to Combat the Spread of COVID-19.

Following the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, public-health measures introduced to stem the spread of the disease caused profound changes to patterns of daily-life communication. This paper presents the results of an online survey conducted to document adult cochlear-implant (CI) users' perceived listening difficulties under four communication scenarios commonly experienced during the pandemic, specifically when talking: with someone wearing a facemask, under social/physical distancing guidelines, via telephone, and via video call. Results from ninety-four respondents indicated that people considered their in-person listening experiences in some common everyday scenarios to have been significantly worsened by the introduction of mask-wearing and physical distancing. Participants reported experiencing an array of listening difficulties, including reduced speech intelligibility and increased listening effort, which resulted in many people actively avoiding certain communication scenarios at least some of the time. Participants also found listening effortful during remote communication, which became rapidly more prevalent following the outbreak of the pandemic. Potential solutions identified by participants to ease the burden of everyday listening with a CI may have applicability beyond the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. Specifically, the results emphasized the importance of visual cues, including lipreading and live speech-to-text transcriptions, to improve in-person and remote communication for people with a CI.

Hovering and Contact Representation of Laser Contour-Based Hand with Swinging Tablet PC for Distant Communication

As covid-19 spread worldwide, the growing trend to reduce people's mobility and the establishment of new lifestyles such as remote work, contactless communication systems have been required. Using a projected hand makes it possible to realize remote communication with a sense of presence without loading a user's physical body. However, conventional projected hand systems have a problem that the relative brightness of the hand image in a bright living room is low. Therefore, we propose a configuration that combines a video call system and a contour-based projected hand by a laser scanning projector. In addition, we incorporate a haptic feedback system with a tablet PC to improve the sense of contact with remote objects. To enhance the sense of contact in remote areas, we focus on providing the transition between hovering and contact states of the contour-based projected hand and users' hands. According to the experiment, we confirmed that there is a possibility to express hovering and contact even with simple swinging flat-panel feedback and visual effects of the contour-based projected hand. © 2022 Owner/Author.

Tailored Software Design for Remote Communication Skill Development in Software Engineering Curriculums

Communication skill is one of the most crucial skills that Software Engineering (SE) industry demands. According to literature, it is evident that oral communication, feedback, and presentation skills are the most crucial among all. SE curriculums need to be structured to prepare its undergraduates to meet these demands. Due to Covid-19 pandemic, most universities opted for online education. Therefore, communication skill development inevitably needed to be conducted remotely. Current mechanisms used in these remote sessions do not cater to unique needs of SE industry. This paper proposes a design of a plugin to be used with Zoom to analyze and improve student's communication skills real time. The proposed design is inclusive of two phases. In phase one, variables which determine communication skills are identified. In relation to these variables, student communication data will be collected for a period of a semester. The data collection will occur via Zoom sessions, for a selected project-based learning (PBL) module. In phase two, a machine learning model will be created using the gathered data in phase 1, and the plugin will be implemented. The plugin will categorize the students' communication skills into 3 categories such as 'weak', 'average' and 'good'. The proposed plugin generates a comprehensive report on student's communication skills which could be downloaded at the end of each session. The expected accuracy rate of the plugin is 80%. © 2021 IEEE.

Remote communication in Scrum teams - a COVID-19 preventive measure or work time optimisation?

The article presents the impact of remote work, resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic, on the functioning of Scrum teams. Attempts have been made to analyse the positive and negative aspects of remote work. The article also looks at the impact of remote work on the level of communication and efficiency of Scrum teams. For this purpose, the author conducted research on a sample of 40 organisations that declared to use Scrum methodology, using 187 questionnaires as the research material. The study was carried out at the turn of April and May 2021 and was carried out using the CAWI technique. The obtained results were analysed using the Principal Component Analysis and Cluster Analysis methods, and enable defining a picture of an organisation's readiness to work remotely. In addition, they also allowed for an assessment of how the infrastructure used for remote work communication translates into the organisation of Sprint meetings. This paper presents conclusions aimed at counteracting the observed irregularities detected during the tests. At the end, the author proposes solutions that could improve communication within Scrum teams, with remote work in mind.

Can I Get Back Later or Turn It Off? Day-Level Effect of Remote Communication Autonomy on Sustainable Proactivity

Overwhelming remote communication episodes have become critical daily work demands for employees. On the basis of affective event theory, this study explores the effect of daily remote communication autonomy on positive affect and proactive work behaviors. We conducted a multilevel path analysis using a general survey, followed by experience sampling methodology, with a sample of 80 employees in China who completed surveys thrice daily over a two-week period. The results showed that daily remote communication autonomy increased positive affective reactions, which, in turn, enhanced proactive work behaviors on the same workday. Furthermore, positive day-level relationships leading to employee proactivity were only significant when the employees’ person-level general techno-workload was not high. The findings provide a new perspective for managing employees working under continuous techno-workload and demands for remote interactions.

On the clinical psychologist's role in the time of COVID-19, with particular reference to experience gained in pediatric oncology.

OBJECTIVE: The COVID-19 pandemic seems to be developing into a planetary-scale mental health experiment, undermining the foundations of our being human, obliging us to keep physically apart from one another, and inducing us to see other people as a potential threat. METHODS: In the world of pediatric oncology, we have found ourselves up against new challenges. In this article, we discuss the difficulties found in conducting psychological support sessions while complying with physical distancing rules, as well as wearing protective face masks, and even gloves; or while using modern remote communication telecommunications. RESULTS: The classic reasons behind requests for psychological support have been compounded by other, novel problems, such as: fewer relational resources for families at home, less chance to socialize, hospital stays with only one parent, the suspension of all teaching and group activities on the ward, economic difficulties caused by the pandemic, the rising levels of family conflictuality and generalized anxiety. CONCLUSIONS: It is essential to find new solutions that can be promptly implemented, reconfiguring the way we humanize our hospital wards.