Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) have a role to play in human development. However, in order to be effective, they have to be adopted and used by their potential users. While there is an extensive literature on user modelling, there has been very little effort to model emergent users -those who are less educated, economically disadvantaged, geographically dispersed, and culturally heterogeneous. These users have not been adequately addressed by the progress in ICT until recently. In order to design successful ICT artefacts for the emergent users, one needs to know how the users adopt them and progress in their usage. Based on contextual interviews, we propose a two-dimensional model of technology adoption. One dimension characterises the types of users on the basis of the factors affecting their predisposition towards technology adoption, such as culture, capabilities and attitudes. Along the other dimension, we map the progress of each user type in skilful usage of a given ICT artefact over time. We also identify the triggers and barriers encountered during this progress.
The problem of offline to online script conversion is a challenging and an ill-posed problem. The interest in offline to online conversion exists because there are a plethora of robust algorithms in online script literature which can not be used on offline scripts. In this paper, we propose a method, based on heuristics, to extract online script information from offline bitmap image. We show the performance of the proposed method on a real sample signature offline image, whose online information is known.
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