360 Video: A prototyping process for developing virtual reality interventions

Abstract

Virtual reality (VR) has emerged as a promising technological intervention for anxiety disorders. However, there are no existing standards and best practices to evaluate the effectiveness of environments to achieve their intervention goals. The purpose of this study was to develop a VR intervention for student veterans with social anxiety disorder and test feasibility utilizing a three-stage development model. The development of a therapeutic VR environment may benefit from an interdisciplinary collaboration of researchers from various fields of study. Utilizing three stages of prototyping with two virtual reality platforms, fully immersive video (n?=?6) and three-dimensional (3-D) immersive virtual reality (n?=?8), the research team designed an intervention for student veterans with social anxiety disorder, testing bio-reactivity of participants. Results of prototyping include user feedback validating increased stress levels and increased bio-reactivity specifically in galvanic skin response and heart rate elevation. Implications include the use of 360° video for prototyping 3-D virtual reality interventions.     

Strategic Influences of Technological Innovation in Greece

This exploratory paper analyses the ‘importance’ and ‘awareness’ of a set of established ‘strategic’ influences of technological innovation in the context of a European newly‐industrialized country. The author interviewed 105 Greek manufacturing firms (mainly SMEs) and measured their perceived innovation rate as well as 17 ‘strategic’ factors regarding top‐management practices and characteristics. Using correlation and regression analysis the initial group of factors was reduced to a subset of five ‘major importance’ influences of innovation, namely: incorporation of technology plans in the business strategy, managerial attitude towards risk, perceived intensity of competition and rate of change of customer needs, and finally status of the CEO (owner‐CEOs were associated with higher innovation rate than appointed CEOs). The ‘statistical’ results are exploratory and have to be treated with caution, as they are highly dependent on the accuracy of the respondents' perception of their company's innovation rate and top‐management practices and characteristics. The ‘statistical’ results were then compared with the managers' perception on the important factors determining innovation (also measured during the interviews). Overall the perceptual analysis confirmed the significance of the statistically important variables, with the exception of a disagreement in the direction of association between the status of the CEO and the rate of innovation. In general, top‐management characteristics proved more important ‘strategic’ influences of innovation for the Greek SMEs than corporate practices. The study also indicated that the important influences of innovation were generally scarce in the Greek institutional context. The highly innovative companies were the ones to overcome country‐specific innovation barriers such as the low supply of technology, the low level of competition and the risk‐averse national culture.     

On certain optimal gas storage policies

A gas distribution company must satisfy at every instant of time an exogenous demand. In order to meet the peak demand in the most economic way, it can resort to storage and peak shaving techniques. For the case of a local distribution company linked to a national gas grid through a connection of bounded transmission capacity, we derive a schedule of drawing gas from the national grid that minimizes the storage capacity required under the assumption of deterministic demand. The storage minimizing schedule is derived through both elementary and optimal control methods. An extension is possible for the case of stochastic demand.     

On the max-weight edge coloring problem

We study the following generalization of the classical edge coloring problem: Given a weighted graph, find a partition of its edges into matchings (colors), each one of weight equal to the maximum weight of its edges, so that the total weight of the partition is minimized. We explore the frontier between polynomial and NP-hard variants of the problem, with respect to the class of the underlying graph, as well as the approximability of NP-hard variants. In particular, we present polynomial algorithms for bounded degree trees and star of chains, as well as an approximation algorithm for bipartite graphs of maximum degree at most twelve which beats the best known approximation ratios.     

Experiences of student veterans with social anxiety and avoidance: A qualitative study

Eight-to-ten percent of returning combat veterans report symptoms of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), of which 7–13% also report symptoms of Social Anxiety Disorder. Both disorders are characterized by maladaptive patterns of social functioning, which can have significant effects on the lives of returning combat veterans and increase suicidal risk. The objective of the present study was to identify elements of the lived experience of college student veterans experiencing social anxiety and avoidance. Twelve student veterans with post-9/11 active duty service were interviewed about their lived experiences with social anxiety/avoidance within the framework of phenomenological theory. Data was analyzed using multilevel coding and theme analysis. Analysis of interview themes (n = 12) clarified university campus environments that induce social anxiety/avoidance and the impact on personal and professional relationships, learning, and navigation of physical space. Implications of this study include addressing student veterans’ needs through clinical intervention and further representative research on prevalence rates of these risk factors in various university and community college settings.     

Efficient algorithms for the max k -vertex cover problem

Given a graph  \(G(V,E)\) of order  \(n\) and a constant \(k \leqslant n\) , the max  \(k\) -vertex cover problem consists of determining  \(k\) vertices that cover the maximum number of edges in  \(G\) . In its (standard) parameterized version, max  \(k\) -vertex cover can be stated as follows: “given  \(G,\) \(k\) and parameter  \(\ell ,\) does  \(G\) contain  \(k\) vertices that cover at least  \(\ell \) edges?”. We first devise moderately exponential exact algorithms for max  \(k\) -vertex cover, with time-complexity exponential in  \(n\) but with polynomial space-complexity by developing a branch and reduce method based upon the measure-and-conquer technique. We then prove that, there exists an exact algorithm for max  \(k\) -vertex cover with complexity bounded above by the maximum among  \(c^k\) and  \(\gamma ^{\tau },\) for some \(\gamma < 2,\) where  \(\tau \) is the cardinality of a minimum vertex cover of  \(G\) (note that \({\textsc {max}}\,\) k \({\textsc {\!-vertex cover}}{} \notin \mathbf{FPT}\) with respect to parameter  \(k\) unless \(\mathbf{FPT} = \mathbf{W[1]}\) ), using polynomial space. We finally study approximation of max  \(k\) -vertex cover by moderately exponential algorithms. The general goal of the issue of moderately exponential approximation is to catch-up on polynomial inapproximability, by providing algorithms achieving, with worst-case running times importantly smaller than those needed for exact computation, approximation ratios unachievable in polynomial time.