With the ever-growing popularity of online media such as blogs and social networking sites, the Internet is a valuable source of information for product and service reviews. Attempting to classify a subset of these documents using polarity metrics can be a daunting task. After a survey of previous research on sentiment polarity, we propose a novel approach based on Support Vector Machines. We compare our method to previously proposed lexical-based and machine learning (ML) approaches by applying it to a publicly available set of movie reviews. Our algorithm will be integrated within a blog visualization tool.

The livestreaming industry in China is gaining greater traction than its European and North American counterparts and has a profound impact on the stakeholders' online and offline lives. An emerging genre of livestreaming that has become increasingly popular in China is outdoor livestreaming. With outdoor livestreams, streamers broadcast outdoor activities, travel, or socialize with passersby in outdoor settings, often for 6 or more hours, and viewers watch such streams for hours each day. However, given that professionally produced content about travel and outdoor activities are not very popular, it is currently unknown what makes this category of livestreams so engaging and how these techniques can be applied to other content or genres. Thus, we conducted a mixed methods study consisting of a survey (N=287) and interviews (N = 20) to understand how viewers watch and engage with outdoor livestreams in China. The data revealed that outdoor livestreams encompass many categories of content, environments and passersby behaviors create challenges and uncertainty for viewers and streamers, and viewers watch livestreams for surprising lengths of time (e.g., sometimes more than 5 continuous hours). We also gained insights into how live commenting and virtual gifting encourage engagement. Lastly, we detail how the behaviors of dedicated fans and casual viewers differ and provide implications for the design of livestreaming services that support outdoor activities.

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Millions of people in Canada have impairments that result in a loss of function and directly affect their ability to carry out activities of daily living. Many individuals with disabilities enter into rehabilitation programs to improve their motor functioning and quality of life. Currently, many of the activities and exercises that are performed are monotonous, uninteresting, and do not inspire patients to perform to the best of their abilities. The usage of traditional exercises can also make it difficult for therapists to objectively measure and track patient progress. The integration of highly interactive and immersive technologies into rehabilitation programs has the potential to benefit both patients and therapists. We have developed a multi-touch tabletop system, the AIR Touch, which combines existing multi-touch technologies with a suite of new rehabilitation-centric applications. The AIR Touch was developed under the guidance of practicing occupational therapists.

Growing interest in personal fabrication has resulted in many ways to ideate, design, and prototype, in addition to studies of who a maker is and the challenges they face. Less attention, however, has focused on the role of the environment in fabrication processes. By understanding how interactions with tools, fixtures, materials, and spaces shape workflows, we can better determine how to design the next generation of workshops, design tools, and fabrication equipment to support personal fabrication activities. To build this understanding, site visits and interviews at local makerspaces, fabrication studios, and workshops were conducted. These visits uncovered the rich practices and roadblocks generated by workshops today. The observations identified the importance of spatial layouts, territoriality and occupant agency, distributed knowledge, and organizational flux, among others, to design and fabrication processes. These observations were further synthesized into one possible direction for such spaces: hybrid workshops (i.e., environments that can leverage computation and responsive architecture to enhance a maker's ability to design and fabricate). This work identifies how such spaces could harness the rich practices and eliminate the challenges found with workshops today and discusses the technical innovations and philosophical questions that hybrid workshops will pose to the future of personal fabrication.