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This purpose of this paper is to develop a change detection technique for activity recognition model. The approach aims to detect changes in the initial accuracy of the model after training and when the model is deployed for recognizing new unseen activities without access to the ground truth. The changes between the two sessions may occur because of differences in sensor placement, orientation and user characteristics such as age and gender. However, many of the existing approaches for model adaptation in activity recognition are blind methods because they continuously adapt the recognition model without explicit detection of changes in the model performance.

The approach determines the variation between reference activity data belonging to different classes and newly classified unseen data. If there is coherency between the data, it means the model is correctly classifying the instances; otherwise, a significant variation indicates wrong instances are being classified to different classes. Thus, the approach is formulated as a two-level architectural framework comprising of the off-line phase and the online phase. The off-line phase extracts of Shewart Chart change parameters from the training data set. The online phase performs classification of new samples and the detection of the changes in each class of activity present in the data set by using the change parameters computed earlier.

The approach is evaluated using a real activity-recognition data set. The results show that there are consistent detections that correlate with the error rate of the model.

The developed approach does not use ground truth to detect classifier performance degradation. Rather, it uses a data discrimination method and a base classifier to detect the changes by using the parameters computed from the reference data of each class to discriminate outliers in the new data being classified to the same class. The approach is the first, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, that addresses the problem of detecting within-user and cross-user variations that lead to concept drift in activity recognition. The approach is also the first to use statistical process control method for change detection in activity recognition, with a robust integrated framework that seamlessly detects variations in the underlying model performance.

The purpose of this paper is to explore charitable giving and receiving as a site of social class interaction in Croatia today, particularly in relation to the country’s socialist past and capitalist present.

Ethnographic fieldwork was conducted in three charity organisations in Croatia. The reported material is based on participant observation, interviews and informal conversations with organisation members, activists, employees and end users.

The authors find that charity activists and recipients of aid occupy distinct but overlapping moral economies in relation to questions of poverty, charity and the role of the state.

The authors develop a unique perspective on charitable giving and receiving in a context in which memories of socialism shape understandings of the role of the state today vis-à-vis poverty relief.

The Equal Pay Act 1970 (which came into operation on 29 December 1975) provides for an “equality clause” to be written into all contracts of employment. S.1(2) (a) of the 1970 Act (which has been amended by the Sex Discrimination Act 1975) provides:

Although product design is a fundamental element in the transition towards the circular economy, the knowledge of practices, methods and tools oriented to circular product design has not been widely developed. This study aims to contribute to the circular economy research area by investigating and analyzing the main design approaches to circular products and their relationship to new product development.

The authors conducted a systematic review and qualitative analysis of 120 articles. In these studies, the authors analyzed aspects such as design strategies used, the barriers to the adoption of circular product design and the relationships between the phases of new product development processes with circular product design studies.

The findings revealed that the circular product design approach has added new design strategies to those already recommended by ecodesign, such as multiple use cycles, emotional durability and biomimicry. Furthermore, the results showed that most circular product design articles focus on the planning and concept development phases of the new product development process.

In this article, the authors systematized the findings of an emergent research area: the development of new products for the circular economy. Its main contributions lie in the identification of design strategies, the classification of Design for X approaches, analysis of such approaches during the new product development process and discussion of their main barriers. Finally, this study presents contributions for managers and designers who are starting the transition to a circular strategy.

This article aims to compare smart meters' acceptance studies worldwide to consolidate trends and highlight factors that are not a consensus.

This work performs a statistical meta-analysis, using the Hunter–Schmidt method and the UTAUT2 model, of the factors of acceptance of smart meters in the world literature. A meta-regression was also conducted to verify the moderation exercised by gender, level of education and timeline context of the articles.

The main results point to hedonic motivation, performance expectancy and effort expectancy as the leading influencers for smart meter's acceptance. Meta-regression indicates that the influence is more significant among the male gender and that over the years, the social influence must gain weight in the smart meter's acceptance.

Specific strategies are suggested to improve projects for the implementation of smart meters based on the obtained results.

The contribution given by this work is relevant, considering it is the first meta-analysis focused on smart meters' acceptance published in the literature