ABSTRACT
The COVID-19 pandemic has forced most interactions to move to online space, starting from online lectures, conferences in hybrid mode, and work-from-home office works. Hence, it is essential for live video streaming to be reliable and provide a good quality of experience (QoE) to users. However, in large sections of the world, the cellular network is not reliable enough to be used for online participation in such events. To quantify this problem, we first measure the QoE in terms of lag, video resolution, and dropped calls on a popular video conferencing platform Google Meet over three different cellular ISPs in New Delhi, India. We observe significantly worse quality of experience metrics compared to a study recently performed in the US. To mitigate this problem, we propose NATIVE (Network Aggregation-based Tiled lIve Video strEaming), a system of aggregating the cellular network connectivity using a secondary or helper device in the vicinity trusted by the user. The implementation of NATIVE uses tiled encoding of video, where the video frames are divided into rectangular units known as tiles. All the tiles are divided into two subsets which are scheduled independently via the available network interfaces depending on its importance. The receiver device receives video segments from the two network paths and stitches back the tiles in them to play. We show the demo of NATIVE using two laptops and a cloud server where the server acts as a streamer. © 2023 IEEE.
ABSTRACT
This paper explores how users of Cubadebate, the digital media with more visibility of the Cuban web, commented on the news about Covid-19 published in March 2020. The comments topic was used as an analytical category to classify user-generated content according to criteria from passive consumption to active production and fictitious or apparent production and real production. We selected a representative sample of 365 comments from 6,984 linked to 24 news published on the subject, in a context of 11 million visits during the period. The results reveal that users participate in cyberspace motivated by getting involved in actions that influence on the public sphere and thus build autonomous citizen participation spaces in the virtual environment;through the comments, they externalize their perception of the crisis situation, monitor the health management, institutional and governmental agents, and place issues in the collective debate that transcend the content of the news they comment on. However, passive consumption and symbolic production -which reproduces contents of previous messages- predominates over real production or production of original content.
ABSTRACT
The hackathons related systematic literature review findings, from the past 15 years, show that academics mostly focus on giving overview, describing and explaining the events. It also seems to be quite popular to present an overview of event arrangements. The research, which appears to be missing, is the new style of hackathons, which were a requirement for online hackathons and remote events because of the social distancing, e.g., what covid-19 did demand from global society. By core design, hackathons have always been social gatherings and innovation events. Especially in these exceptional times with social distancing requirements, hackathon organizers turned towards online models. As this is not the original way these events have been organized, it was hard to get the best practices to how to proceed as there are few to none general guidelines and models for online/remote hackathons. By studying the current academic literature, our systematic literature review concludes that contemporary academic literature does not give too much guidance either. This review concludes that more practical, on-site, and educational problem-based development research studies about online and remote hackathon events are needed. Especially research on means and tools to utilize to organize them and handle exceptions and be successful in new normal. © 2021 IEEE.
ABSTRACT
The COVID-19 (coronavirus disease 2019) pandemic has forced universities to find new ways to conduct learning and teaching, as traditional face-to-face teaching has been prevented or restricted to an absolute minimum in many instances. Therefore, we redesigned and taught second-year veterinary student microbiology laboratory exercises (labs) with a hybrid learning approach. For this, a novel 'remote partner' model was implemented in which students present on-site in the laboratory worked synchronously pairwise with their remote partner present online. A student feedback survey revealed that in this remote partner model, both on-site and online participation in the labs were experienced as being useful in improving their laboratory skills. The students' overall performance in hands-on microbiological laboratory skills and safe working practices was similar in the hybrid learning approach (the 2021 class) and in the traditional on-site participation approach (the 2018-20 classes). This study suggests that the remote partner model is an effective way to acquire microbiological laboratory skills. This learning approach can be used in the non-pandemic future and/or also be applied to other fields.