To understand issues about information accessibility within communities, research studies have examined human, social, and technical factors by taking a sociotechnical view. While this view provides a profound understanding of how people seek, use, and access information, this approach tends to overlook the impact of the larger structures of information landscapes that constantly shape peoples access to information.
This was a part of research projects conducted under the Basic Research Laboratory Grant from Ministry of Education, Science, and Technology in South Korea. This project is two folds: (1) simulating an application of swarm robot systems; (2) designing a software framework for the swarm robot systems to reduce the complexity of developing applications while minimizing the amount of transmitted data by adopting MapReduce paradigm. The video above is a simulation of a swarm robot system application that searches for red pillars (foraging).
This project was conducted in 2008 for my bachelor's thesis in the Department of Electrical Engineering at Seoul National University (it was more like a capstone project rather than a thesis, since the focus of the project was mainly at implementing algorithms rather than analyzing the performance of algorithms using concrete measures, e.g., recall and precision). I implemented an image retrieval system prototype that takes an image as input, and outputs most similar images from the image database.
This research project had been conducted for my master's thesis (Master of Information Management degree). I conceptualized cultual background with Hall's high- and low-context culture (1976) and tried to see whether people's perceptions of urban places vary between physical addresses and symbolic representations of spaces (landmarks), when their cultural backgrounds were different. A survey questionnaire was used to measure cultural background, and a web-based online game was used to measure people's perceptions of places.