Textiles of today are materials with applications in almost all our activities. We wear clothes all the time and we are surrounded with textiles in almost all our environments. The integration of multifunctional values in such a common material has become a special area of interest in recent years. Smart Textile represents the next generation of textiles anticipated for use in several fashion, furnishing and technical textile applications. The term smart is used to refer to materials that sense and respond in a pre-defined manner to environmental stimuli. The degree of smartness varies and it is possible to enhance the intelligence further by combining these materials with a controlling unit, for example a microprocessor. As an interdisciplinary area Smart Textile includes design spaces from several areas; the textile design space, the information technology design space and the design space of material science. This thesis addresses how Smart Textiles affect the textile design space; how the introduction of smart materials and information technology affects the creation of future textile products. The aim is to explore the convergence between textiles, smart materials and information technology and to contribute to providing a basis for future research in this area. The research method is based on a series of interlinked experiments designed through the research questions and the research objects. The experiments are separated into two different sections: interactive textile structures and health monitoring. The result is a series of basic methods for how interactive textile structures are created and a general system for health monitoring. Furthermore the result consists of a new design space, advanced textile design. In advanced textile design the focus is set on the relation between the different natures of a textile object: its physical structure and its structure in the context of design and use.

As a result of development toward ‘smart’ materials, materials now enable an expanding range of aesthetic expressions and user experiences. These materials are fundamentally temporal in their capacity to assume multiple, discrete states of expression that can be repeatedly and minutely controlled. These materials come to be, or become, only over time and in context—they are becoming materials. Thus, in the development and application of such materials, we must engage more extensively with the experience of materials in practices of design and of use. This paper introduces and discusses the concept of becoming materials—as well as the implications for practice—through a series of examples from our own practice-led research within art, design and architecture. Coming to terms with the implications for material practices of design and of use, we suggest, requires the development of new concepts and methods for doing and studying the design of becoming materials.

This work deals with Smart Textiles in interaction with the body. We design textiles and outfits as tools that can influence fashion and textile design. Central to our work is that artistic envisioning can point to new possibilities and values, in which we want to stress the importance of combining traditional materials and methods with contemporary and future functions in order to obtain sustainable ideas. The film documents a performance, where dancers create a link between the body, the textile material and the room surrounding the body. The textile material and the garment are to inspire movement that, in turn, creates development; when a person wears the garment and moves in a certain way or touches other persons, the visual expression of the room changes through an electronic signal. In this case, the colour of the pattern of the textile draping changes to the static pattern that is printed on the person’s outfit. The point of the show was to show possibilities of non-static and dynamic design through scenic expression.

Computation and new materials are entering the world of textiles, challenging our view on the textile material. As new techniques and electrically conductive fibres enable the design of textile circuits and computationally active textiles [2], the areas of smart textile design and interaction design start to merge. Wearable computing [cf.1], the notion of moving computational tools directly onto the body, might have been the first approach to bring computation technology closer to the area of clothing.. In an approach to investigate new enhanced forms of expressional interaction through textiles, the relationship between tactile and visual aesthetical properties are explored in the present paper. Textile Dimensions, an interactive set of textiles, shows how clothes and textiles become interfaces themselves, able to sense and react on external stimuli in expressive ways.

If publicly funded libraries (PFL) such as national libraries were to adopt a more open source approach when making digitized cultural heritage (CH) material available, users would be granted not only open access to delivery files at a surface level (in e.g. PDF, JPG, or XHTML) but ”deep access” to archival file material and technical documentation as well (such as TIFF, full XML/TEI, scripts, style sheets and machine instructions). PFL:s would thereby strengthen the force behind the values of equal access, of supporting education and research, and of distributing not only digitized material but competence and methods as well. They might also come one step closer to sharing information-rich material with other digitizing institutions by constructing valid banks of commonly and mutually accessible digitized CH material. As of yet however, this is far from the case. Many PFL:s are rather adopting a policy to restrict public access to light-weight delivery versions while charging users for access to the archival, deep level (or hiding it away altogether). This paper examines some of the arguments for such a restrictive policy and discusses feasible ways of bypassing some of the open source obstacles.

The Swedish School of Library and Information Science has been offering dedicated courses in cultural heritage digitization since 2004. This paper describes the implementation of new assignments, projects and events in the courses that were developed since 2008. These new events include a critical image editing workshop, a text encoding enhancement of “dirty” OCR texts, experimental and critical evaluation of OCR software performance, and the design of a realistic digitization plan. The course innovations strengthen the course’s pedagogical legacy of sustainability and Dewey’s pragmatism, particularly of having the students perform hands-on work in digitization, experimenting with technology and drawing critical conclusions from the analysis of the results. To avoid some of the risks of naïve pragmatism however, the pedagogy and course design draws ideas from Lave’s and Wenger’s notions of situated learning by having the students engage in both local material with a situated relevance and testing their ideas in in particular existing communities of practice and/or expertise.

Machine learning algorithms utilizing gradient descent to identify concepts or more general learnables hint at a so-far ignored possibility, namely that local and global minima represent any vocabulary as a landscape against which evaluation of the results can take place. A simple example to illustrate this idea would be a potential surface underlying gravitation. However, to construct a gravitation-based representation of, e.g., word meaning, only the distance between localized items is a given in the vector space, whereas the equivalents of mass or charge are unknown in semantics. Clearly, the working hypothesis that physical fields could be a useful metaphor to study word and sentence meaning is an option but our current representations are incomplete in this respect.For a starter, consider that an RBF kernel has the capacity to generate a potential surface and hence create the impression of gravity, providing one with distance-based decay of interaction strength, plus a scalar scaling factor for the interaction, but of course no term masses. We are working on an experiment design to change that. Therefore, with certain mechanisms in neural networks that could host such quasi-physical fields, a novel approach to the modeling of mind content seems plausible, subject to scrutiny.Work in progress in another direction of the same idea indicates that by using certain algorithms, already emerged vs. still emerging content is clearly distinguishable, in line with Aristotle’s Metaphysics. The implications are that a model completed by “term mass” or “term charge” would enable the computation of the specific work equivalent of sentences or documents, and that via replacing semantics by other modalities, vector fields of more general symbolic content could exist as well. Also, the perceived hypersurface generated by the dynamics of language use may be a step toward more advanced models, for example addressing the Hamiltonian of expanding semantic systems, or the relationship between reaction paths in quantum chemistry vs. sentence construction by gradient descent.

In accessibility tests for digital preservation, over time we experience drifts of localized and labelled content in statistical models of evolving semantics represented as a vector field. This articulates the need to detect, measure, interpret and model outcomes of knowledge dynamics. To this end we employ a high-performance machine learning algorithm for the training of extremely large emergent self-organizing maps for exploratory data analysis. The working hypothesis we present here is that the dynamics of semantic drifts can be modeled on a relaxed version of Newtonian mechanics called social mechanics. By using term distances as a measure of semantic relatedness vs. their PageRank values indicating social importance and applied as variable ‘term mass’, gravitation as a metaphor to express changes in the semantic content of a vector field lends a new perspective for experimentation. From ‘term gravitation’ over time, one can compute its generating potential whose fluctuations manifest modifications in pairwise term similarity vs. social importance, thereby updating Osgood’s semantic differential. The dataset examined is the public catalog metadata of Tate Galleries, London.

Touching Loops is a collection of three knitted textiles with structure-changing interactive properties. The textiles are able to sense and react to touch by shrinking, breaking or becoming stiff. The textiles are thought of as interactive architectural material. When they are touched, a specific area in the textile becomes hot. A microcontroller that is connected to the textile is programmed to sense and react to touch. The materials in the samples react to heat in different ways by shrinking, becoming stiff or by breaking into pieces. The developing process consisted in programming the patterns for industrial machines in such a way that the conductive silver yarns are of important matter for the material aesthetics besides their function to generate heat. The three knitted pieces react in different ways when current passes trough the conductive yarns. The first piece combines a silver coated copper yarn and Pemotex yarn in a ridge pattern. In the second sample a Jaquard pattern combines shrinking polyester monofilament, a Grilon yarn and a silver coated copper yarn. This piece reacts to heat by breaking and shrinking. The third piece is constructed with partial knitting and ridge patterns and the yarns used are Pemotex, a Grilon yarn and the silver coated copper yarn. When the conductive yarn gets hot, the ridges shrink and harden. The aim of the project is to explore possibilities for expressive interactive tactile knitted materials and structures. The textiles are seen as a possible material to use in the context of architecture.

A computer mouse is a generic interaction tool designed for navigating graphical elements on a two dimensional plane. It is developed in a context of technology and formed to serve the ergonomics of the desktop work situation. A textile mouse, on the other hand, engages a different context. The textile alone evokes the traditions of clothes and home décor that will inevitably influence how it is perceived and consequently used.

Noninvasive measurement of blood pressure by optical methods receives considerable interest, but the complexity of the measurement and the difficulty of adjusting parameters restrict applications. We develop a method for estimating the systolic and diastolic blood pressure using a single-point optical recording of a photoplethysmographic (PPG) signal. The estimation is data-driven, we use automated machine learning algorithms instead of mathematical models. Combining supervised learning with a discrete wavelet transform, the method is insensitive to minor irregularities in the PPG waveform, hence both pulse oximeters and smartphone cameras can record the signal. We evaluate the accuracy of the estimation on 78 samples from 65 subjects (40 male, 25 female, age 29±7) with no history of cardiovascular disease. The estimate for systolic blood pressure has a mean error 4.9±4.9 mm Hg, and 4.3±3.7 mm Hg for diastolic blood pressure when using the oximeter-obtained PPG. The same values are 5.1±4.3 mm Hg and 4.6±4.3 mm Hg when using the phone-obtained PPG, comparing with A&D UA-767PBT result as gold standard. The simplicity of the method encourages ambulatory measurement, and given the ease of sharing the measured data, we expect a shift to data-oriented approaches deriving insight from ubiquitous mobile devices that will yield more accurate machine learning models in monitoring blood pressure.

The project is a cooperation between University College of Borås (UB), local Unemployment Agency and European Social Fund. The purpose of the project is to offer practice to unemployed academics at UB, let them develop themselves and find a new job. After 5 months 11of 30 participants have got a job. The project uses a Learning Management System (LMS) to promote group interaction and socialization. An analysis of the use of online asynchronous discussion (OAD) within the LMS has been made and presented in this paper. The purpose of this analysis is to study the group interaction and socialization.

The purpose of this study was to examine the attitudes among lecturers and find out if there was a resistance that could be an obstacle to an increased use of LMS (Learning management systems) in the higher education. At the University College of Boras 22 lecturers were interviewed, the sample consisted of lecturers that had the opportunity to use WebCT during the last 9 months. The answers show that most of the lecturers, including those who only used minor parts of the LMS, believed that they could benefit from using a LMS in the future. The study did not support the hypothesis that fear of the complexity of the system or unwanted effects on the education is a main reason for lecturers not to use LMS, when lecturers decide individually to use tools in the systems, the major concern is the initial amount of work compared with the expected benefits. Due to the benefits of a fully implemented LMS and the result of this study it is recommended that institutions in higher education take actions to establish LMS as a standard tool, and the handling a part of the professional competence of the lecturers.

Compared to other industries, fashion apparel retail faces many challenges in predicting future demand for its products with a high degree of precision. Fashion products’ short life cycle, insufficient historical information, highly uncertain market demand, and periodic seasonal trends necessitate the use of models that can contribute to the efficient forecasting of products’ sales and demand. Many researchers have tried to address this problem using conventional forecasting models that predict future demands using historical sales information. While these models predict product demand with fair to moderate accuracy based on previously sold stock, they cannot fully be used for predicting future demands due to the transient behaviour of the fashion industry. This paper proposes an intelligent forecasting system that combines image feature attributes of clothes along with its sales data to predict future demands. The data used for this empirical study is from a European fashion retailer, and it mainly contains sales information on apparel items and their images. The proposed forecast model is built using machine learning and deep learning techniques, which extract essential features of the product images. The model predicts weekly sales of new fashion apparel by finding its best match in the clusters of products that we created using machine learning clustering based on products’ sales profiles and image similarity. The results demonstrated that the performance of our proposed forecast model on the tested or test items is promising, and this model could be effectively used to solve forecasting problems.

The long-term monitoring of biophysiological signals requires new types of sensor systems that are wearable and at the same time convenient for the users. This paper describes the design of a novel garment-based sensing system for the long-term monitoring of breathing rhythm. The system concept was realized in a prototype garment, integrated with coated piezoresistive sensors. The prototype garment was tested by five subjects, and compared with a standard piezoelectric respiratory belt. Each signal was quantitatively and qualitatively evaluated in the time and frequency domain to make sure that no medical and diagnostic information was lost. The results showed a good agreement between the garment-based sensors and the standard reference, where errors occurred only when the breathing rate was extremely high. The garment-based sensor system could also distinguish the predominance breathing compartment (chest versus abdominal breathing). The system could detect a 10 s pause in breathing, which could be of importance in studies of sleep apnea. A garment-based sensing system maintains the accuracy of the signal quality without reducing the comfort for the user. It makes possible long-term ambulatory monitoring and has home-based healthcare applications.

Problem - Android är det ledande operativsystemet på marknaden, samtidigt har tidigare forskning påvisat att skadlig kod och mobila attacker främst har riktats mot Androidenheter. Attacker utförs genom att applikationer som innehar skadlig kod, får den åtkomst på enheten som de begär genom att applikationsbehörigheter godkänns av användaren före installation av en applikation. Ett stort problem är att användarna i dagsläget väljer att ignorera behörigheterna före installation samt inte förstår dess betydelse.

Frågeställning och syfte - Studien syftar till att undersöka tre frågeställningar. Den första forskningsfrågan behandlar hypoteser kring hur pass medvetna Androidanvändarna är om riskerna som finns hos tio applikationsbehörigheter vilket ofta förekommer bland skadliga applikationer. Vidare var målet med studien att undersöka om det finns ett samband mellan användarnas medvetenhet och nedladdningsbeteende. Den sista frågeställningen undersöker om användarna läser igenom applikationsbehörigheter före installation av en applikation och vilka bakgrundsorsaker det finns ifall de inte gör det.

Metod - Kvantitativa metoder har använts i form av att det empiriska materialet inhämtats med hjälp av en enkätundersökning. I studien deltog 116 respondenter och resultatet togs fram med hjälp av stapeldiagram, korstabeller, Chi2-tester och frekvenstabeller.

Resultat och slutsats - Målet har uppfyllts till hög grad, dock hade det varit gynnsamt att ha ett större urval för att möjligen kunna säkerställa samt stärka signifikansen i Chi2-testerna. Resultatet visade att en hög grad av användarna inte är medvetna om riskerna hos de undersökta behörigheterna. Vidare visade fynden att det finns ett visst samband mellan användarnas medvetenhet och nedladdningsbeteende då sex av tio hypoteser bekräftats. Resultatet visade även att 62 procent av användarna aldrig alternativt sällan läser igenom behörigheterna före installation, samt att orsaken till detta är att de inte förstår behörigheternas beskrivning alternativt inte lägger märke till behörigheterna. Slutligen påpekade respondenterna att de inte förstår behörigheternas beskrivning på grund av att de är för korta samt innehåller för många tekniska termer.

Originalitet - Studiens resultat nyttjar främst Androidanvändarna för att öka deras kunskap vilket skyddar dem mot de risker som finns. Resultatet ger dock även nytta för vidare utveckling av applikationsbehörigheterna för att mer effektivt fungera som en varningsmetod vid nedladdning. Det som är nytt och värdefullt i studien är att vi baserat på problemen som påvisats hos tidigare forskning, valt att ytterligare fördjupa oss inom ämnet. Studien har undersökt om det finns ett samband mellan användarnas medvetenhet och nedladdningsbeteende, samt vilka bakgrundsorsaker det finns som medfört att användarna inte läser igenom samt inte förstår sig på applikationsbehörigheterna. Originalitet finns även i studien då vi avgränsat oss till att specifikt undersöka medvetenheten kring tio behörigheter som ofta förekommer bland skadliga applikationer, men som även uppkommer hos vanliga applikationer på Google Play.

Light textiles Is a research work which focuses on the development of light textiles based on the integration of optical fibres into textile structures. The aim is to create textile light designs which offer big light surfaces that have an even all over and strong light effect. Finally they could be used as big movable light screens in a space either private or public.

A significant body of work on biomedical text mining is aimed at uncovering meaningful associations between biological entities, including genes. This has the potential to offer new insights for research, uncovering hidden links between genes involved in critical pathways and processes. Recently, high-throughput studies have started to unravel the genetic landscape of chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL), the most common adult leukemia. CLL displays remarkable clinical heterogeneity, likely reflecting its underlying biological heterogeneity which, despite all progress, still remains insufficiently characterized and understood. This paper deploys an ontology-based semantic similarity combined with self-organizing maps for studying the temporal evolution of cohesion among CLL-related genes and the extracted information. Three consecutive time periods are considered and groups of genes are derived therein. Our preliminary results indicated that our proposed gene groupings are meaningful and that the temporal dimension indeed impacted the gene cohesion, leaving a lot of room for further promising investigations.

Textile and clothing (T&C) products contribute to a substantial proportion of the non-food product recalls in the European Union (EU) due to various levels of associated risks. Out of the listed 34 categories for product recalls in the EU’s Rapid Exchange of Information System (RAPEX), the category ’clothing, textiles, and fashion items’ was among the top 3 categories with the most recall cases during 2013–2019. Previous studies have attempted to highlight the issue of product recalls and their impacts from the perspective of a single company or selected companies, whereas limited attention is paid to understand the problem from a sector-specific perspective. However, considering the nature of product risks and the consistency in a higher number of recall cases, it is important to analyze the issue of product recalls in the T&C sector from a sector-specific perspective. In this context, the paper focuses on investigating the past recalls in the T&C sector reported RAPEX during 2005–2021 to understand the major trends in recall occurrence and associated hazards. Correspondence Analysis (CA) and Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) were applied to analyze the qualitative and quantitative recall data. The results reveal that there is a geographical pattern for the product risk that leads to the recalls. The countries in eastern part of Europe tend to have proportionately high recalls in strangulation and choking-related issues, whereas chemical-related recalls are proportionately high in countries located in western part of Europe. Further, text-mining results indicate that design-related recall issues are more prevalent in children’s clothing.

We are developing a dynamic textile wall hanging as an interface to the atmosphere of a room. Atmospheres are elusive. An atmosphere is the result of an ongoing negotiation between the activities in the room and the expression of the material objects, the lighting, the temperature, and the boundaries of the room [4, 8]. The wall hanging will play an active part in that ongoing negotiation. The activities in the room will influence how the textile wall hanging changes structure, form, color, as well as the pace with which it happens, and the activities in the room may in turn be influenced by the expression of the wall hanging.

Imagine that the table is set and dinner is ready. It’s time to sit down and share the moment. That is what we do also in terms of sharing a one time pattern change in the tablecloth, and in terms of sharing each others’ mobile phone activity. Incoming phone calls and messages are not notified by the phones themselves, but through a burned out pattern in the tablecloth, in between our plates. The Burning Tablecloth serves as a design example of the design technique for irreversible patterns, expressing colour and structure-changes in a knitted textile. The Burning Tablecloth changes colour and structure according to mobile phone signals (calls and text messages) with burned out patterns and acts as a medium for raising questions about interactive tactile and visual expressions in textiles. The project is a design example of research into three fields, knitted circuits, textile patterns and peoples’ relation to computational technology. The tablecloth is knitted with cotton yarns and a heating wire in a Stoll flatbed knitting machine. The pattern that appears when using the tablecloth is built up as squares with the potential of becoming chess-patterned over the whole tablecloth surface. The table-cloth is connected to a microcontroller and various electronic components. The heating wire knitted in the table-cloth is the active material; when heated it is able to change the colour and structure of the table-cloth. The burning tablecloth reacts to mobile phone signals by getting warm so that colour and eventually structure changes is appearing in the tablecloth. The experiment demonstrates a design example where visual and tactile interactive properties are expressed in a tablecloth by mobile phone signals. Combined in a material structure, textile circuits are controlled by external stimuli adding an aesthetical value to the textile expression. With a foundation of experienced knowledge from latter experiments, the tablecloth shows an example developed by the design technique for irreversible patterns. The Burning Tablecloth also demonstrates how information can be expressed in an esthetical way through textiles, acting as an interactive colour and structure changing ambient textile display.

Building on conceptual metaphor theory, this article investigates and argues the importance of the utility metaphor in discussions shaping information technologies. The results reveal that the utility metaphor has been evoked in different shapes and forms continually since the late fifties relating, for example, to concepts such as Time-sharing, Computer networks, The computer grid, Utility computing, and – the contemporary metaphor – Cloud computing.

In this paper, we explore the possibility of applying high-dimensionalvector representations of concept-relation-concept triplets, which have been successfullyapplied to model a small set of relationship types in the biomedicaldomain, to the task of modeling folk tales. In doing so, our ultimate aim is todevelop representations of narratives through which their underlying structurecan be compared. The current paper describes our progress toward this aim, withemphasis on addressing the technical challenges involved in moving from therelatively constrained set of relations that have been extracted from biomedicaltext to the much larger set of unnormalized relations that have been extractedfrom the open domain. A toy example using graded vectors demonstrates that ourapproach will be feasible once more material will be added to the test collection.

If our contemporary society needs innovative solutions we argue that we need to learn from our youth. This paper presents the most prevailing issues that arose during the collaborative digital art project designed to connect our youth with big, mainstream cultural institution, and to augment the outreach of the project. By using the research through design approach and surveys with participants, we analyse the implications introduced by inter-institutional and interdisciplinary collaboration. We claim that such collaborations are rich, but expensive and risky. Still, they are powerful mechanisms for learning new concepts, developing creative and critical thinking, and above all social capital acquisition.

The urge for evolving the Web into a globally shared dataspace has turned the Linked Open Data (LOD) cloud into a massive platform containing 100 billion machine-readable statements. Several factors hamper a historical study of the evolution of the LOD cloud, and hence forecasting its future: its ever-growing scale, which makes a global analysis difficult; its Web-distributed nature, which challenges the analysis of its data; and the scarcity of regular and time-stamped archival dumps. Recently, a scalable implementation of self-organizing maps (SOM) has been developed to visualize the local topology of high-dimensional data. We use this methodology to address scalability issues, and the Dynamic Linked Data Observatory, a regular biweekly, centralized sample of the LOD cloud, as a time-stamped collection. We visualize the drift of Linked Datasets between 2012 and 2016, finding that datasets with high availability, high vocabulary reuse, and modeling with commonly used terms in the LOD cloud are better traceable across time.

Adding the semantic content of texts to the study of citations opens for new means of research in the field. Words can be used in specific or more general terms. Their meaning changes through use. Correspondingly, the meaning of a cited reference is defined by its use. Furthermore, the meaning of the reference changes as it is used in different contexts. Using ‘word embeddings’ we create a conceptual space of references using a window of text around the references. The model is trained on a set of 2 million full-text articles derived from EuroPMC. We measure the length of the journey of the cited references in this space to determine how much their semantic meaning changes over time. Furthermore, we study the topical heterogeneity of the citation contexts inferred to the references by the citing documents.

• RQ1. Can we identify the degree of topical heterogeneity of a subset of investigated cited references?
• RQ2. Can we identify the semantic drift in cited references over time?
• RQ3. Can we infer the presence of a cited reference in a given text using our trained model? Correspondingly: can we reconstruct the context of a reference in a text?

In this explorative work we investigate to what degree the semantic meaning of a cited reference can be recognized. In the end, we explore the possibility to generate a dynamic classification of research based on its use, rather than on their content. This would make it possible to identify similar works irrespectively of manifest citation links (bibliographic coupling or co-citation) or identical content of words (co-word analysis).

Knitted products have a flexibility that offers many attractive possibilities. Combined with technical fibres, this gives interesting and innovative possibilities. Many technical fibres and yarns has however properties such as high stiffness and brittleness which are difficult to process in the practice of weft knitting. This paper is about the experimental product development of a light radiating textile lamp in which optical fibres are used as the only illumination source. The lampshade is produced on an electronic flat knitting machine with special equipment suitable for the feeding of yarn with high stiffness. The work was divided in two parts: exploring the possibilities to knit the desired shape on one hand and experimenting about knitting with optical fibres as a weft insertion on the other hand. The method is an inductive approach; a literature survey, information from suppliers of knitting production equipment and experimental work on a flat knitting machine at The Swedish School of Textiles, Borås, Sweden. Results show that the diamond shaped structure can be knitted in one piece with transparent monofilament yarns. Furthermore it also shows that difficulties occur when knitting with stiff and brittle optical fibres therefore the paper ends with a discussion with suggestions of how to overcome these challenges.

In this ongoing practise-based design research project, a new technique for designing textile patterns is developed and explored; a non chemical burn-out (ausbrenner) technique. As a first part of the project, experiments with conductive and traditional textile materials in knitted structures were designed. The knitted samples were made in cotton, wool, viscose, polyester and Kevlar (Kevlar 2008), and have all been combined with Kanthal heating wires (Kanthal 2008). When a voltage is applied to the textile, the heating wire leaves burned out patterns in the textile material. The result is a new technique, where we can design irreversible textile patterns. We also suggest new design variables of relevance when designing dynamic textile patterns. The overall aim is to explore different materials, material combinations and techniques for developing textile circuits and designing dynamic textile patterns. The knitted textile patterns change over time when a voltage is turned on or off in the textile circuits.

This paper presents an experimental research in the areas of knitting technology and optical fibres. The aim is to explore the possibilities to knit stiff monofilament optical fibres in flat knitting machines. The yarns used were transparent monofilament of polyester and optical fibres of PMMA (Polymethyl Metacrylate). Result shows that a hexagon shaped flat knitted prototype can be produced but also difficulties to knit monofilament yarn with optical fibres. The optical fibres was put into the structure in straight angles as weft insertion, to avoid bending and breakage of the monofilaments. Another problem was the take down device on the knitting machine but a solution of this is presented in the paper.

This paper describes a concept of collaboration between industry, university and research institutes in the area of Smart Textiles in Sweden. The concept idea of a laboratory and Prototype Factory at The Swedish School of Textiles for development of Smart Textiles in knitting is presented. The result presented shows a concept where Smart Textiles can be developed and knitted in a prototype factory and a development laboratory. Companies, researchers and others with product ideas in the area of Smart Textiles can here get a first prototype and help to continue to make a ready made product for the market.

This article draws from ethnographic data produced inside mathematics teacher education in Sweden. It explores and makes visible the ongoing process of education during workshops in information and communication technology (ICT) laboratory contexts in which student teachers were working with spreadsheet applications on the computer. The main finding is that, contrary to the intentions to renew and revitalise education, ICT in use seemed to operate as a relay in the reproduction of traditional ways of teaching and learning. However, the investigation is not one of the failures of education to make use of ICT but one that tries to distance itself from the traditional enthusiastic rhetoric, with the ambition to contribute to a more realistic discussion. Bernstein's concept of pedagogical discourse has been used. One education setting has been studied in detail.

For 30 years there has been ongoing argument that developments of information and communication technology (ICT) will inevitably change education systems and practices. This innovation of education by using ICT-tools is often described as more or less self-evident with a naïve faith in the promises of new technology to enable teachers to make improvement in the content, the methods and the organisation of teaching and learning, with far-reaching influence on students’ skills and knowledge (Westera 2005; Nivala 2009). One example is ICT literacy defined as an important component in a set of generic skills that all citizens in the neo-liberal market society must possess (Kozma and Voogt 2003; Krumsvik 2009; Robertson 2003; De Castell, Bryson, and Jenson 2002). However, educational practices seem to have failed to live up to these utopian expectations and the process of integration of ICT has often been described as slow. Reasons for this lethargy has by many researchers been identified in various aspects of educational practice ranging from technical factors such as lack of technology and software in schools and the limited personal expertise of teachers in the use of ICT, to other factors, such as for example teachers’ beliefs, and knowledge about how to integrate ICT in teaching (Robertson 2003; UNESCO Launches ICT Standards Effort 2008; De Castell, Bryson, and Jenson 2002; Goktas, Yildirim, and Yildirim 2009; Govender and Govender 2009). The aim with this paper is to discuss how ethnographic methods can be used to make visible what educational technologies might offer for teaching and learning of mathematics. The paper offers critical considerations of the official discourse (described above), stemming from economic interests, exhorting the field of education to adopt and integrate information and communication technology (ICT), in teaching and learning. It calls for an alternative, reflexive and critical approach where questions about technology uses in education are emphasised. But the question is, what educationally, does ICT really offer for education? In the present study a group of student teachers were followed during 20 weeks of a mathematics course as part of a three and a half to four yearlong education. The course was followed in its entirely but the material discussed here represents participants observation together with conversional interviews with students from lab work where student teachers work with computers . One way of understanding the attractiveness of ICT for educational policy makers, is the way new technology is formulated in official discourse, by the society and its selected agents, where digital technology in many way defines society, and the position education has as a driving force of economic competiveness (Ball 2006). The argument for ICT use in education formulated in this discourse is rooted in economistic theorizing rather than in an educational theory (De Castell, Bryson, and Jenson 2002). The present study try to redress this imbalances. It uses Basil Bernstein conceptual framework about the construction of pedagogic discourse as a grammar underlying fields of production, recontextualisation and pedagogical practice. These theoretical concepts could be used to understand the process where dominant groups in society ideologically create unrealistic expectations about the effects of ICT use on teaching and learning. It does this through its concern with the intrinsic feature of pedagogic discourse, with the distinctive form and structure of what actually goes on the process of education (Bernstein 2000).

Customer churn is one of the most challenging problems for digital retailers. With significantly higher costs for acquiring new customers than retaining existing ones, knowledge about which customers are likely to churn becomes essential. This paper reports a case study where a data-driven approach to churn prediction is used for predicting churners and gaining insights about the problem domain. The real-world data set used contains approximately 200 000 customers, describing each customer using more than 50 features. In the pre-processing, exploration, modeling and analysis, attributes related to recency, frequency, and monetary concepts are identified and utilized. In addition, correlations and feature importance are used to discover and understand churn indicators. One important finding is that the churn rate highly depends on the number of previous purchases. In the segment consisting of customers with only one previous purchase, more than 75% will churn, i.e., not make another purchase in the coming year. For customers with at least four previous purchases, the corresponding churn rate is around 25%. Further analysis shows that churning customers in general, and as expected, make smaller purchases and visit the online store less often. In the experimentation, three modeling techniques are evaluated, and the results show that, in particular, Gradient Boosting models can predict churners with relatively high accuracy while obtaining a good balance between precision and recall.

As design problems are inherently indeterminate or wicked, we have to rely on various strategies when practicing design. In this paper, we propose a material strategy that emphasizes the expressional potential of computers. We argue how computers, in principle, can be understood as a material for design and how they can be part of a formgiving practice. We embark on the beginning of establishing a practical understanding of the computer as a material by articulating a number of material properties of computers. Two of these properties, computed causality and connectability, are given shape through material samples of a computational composite. The composite is in the form of a copper tile of which the computer controls the thermodynamic behavior. The material strategy proposed here which produced dramatic results is still in its infancy, but by adopting a material understanding of computers and beginning to embody the space of opportunities it unfolds, we take the first steps towards a new way of designing computational objects and architectures.

Embedding computers into our environment is perhaps not only a job for computer scientist and engineers. We propose to understand the computer as a material for design as means to invite artists, architect, and designers to participate in envisioning how and where the computational power can be used. We will invite the conference attendees to (once again) think about how to bridge the so-called gap between computational and material properties but this time using a material rather than the traditional information centric perspective. The invitation is extended through hands-on experiences with our two samples of computational composites.

Management of change is essential to ensure the long-term reusabilityof digital assets. Change can be brought about in many ways, includingthrough technological, user community and policy factors. Motivated by casestudies in space science and time-based media, we consider the impact ofchange on complex digital objects comprising multiple interdependent entities,such as files, software and documentation. Our approach is based on modellingof digital ecosystems, in which abstract representations are used to assess risksto sustainability and support tasks such as appraisal. The paper is based onwork of the EU FP7 PERICLES project on digital preservation, and presentssome general concepts as well as a description of selected research areas underinvestigation by the project.