Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
“ MAKING THE MOVE FROM TEACHING TO LEARNING ” STRUCTURED KNOWLEDGE FOR TAILORED INTERACTIVE COMPUTER ASSISTED LEARNING – A GENERIC FRAMEWORK

In this paper, we describe a novel approach to the generation of reusable computer-based assets to support the production and customisation of learning materials for user and environment constrained learning scenarios. The approach is based on work carried out by the authors in knowledge base research, user modelling, training systems for industry, and learning environment development. Work is now under way on a project to develop both the technological solution and the pedagogic strategy necessary to produce an adaptive learning system based on this approach. The test vehicles for this project will be distance learning materials developed at Heriot-Watt University for Computer Science modules. Control information will be gathered from traditional classroom based teaching, and three different learning scenarios will be investigated. The outcomes of this investigation will be used to validate the approach, and provide information for the further development of the tool(s) and strategy thus developed.
Long-Lasting Spinal Oxytocin Analgesia Is Ensured by the Stimulation of Allopregnanolone Synthesis Which Potentiates GABAA Receptor-Mediated Synaptic Inhibition

Hypothalamospinal control of spinal pain processing by oxytocin (OT) has received a lot of attention in recent years because of its potency to reduce pain symptoms in inflammatory and neuropathic conditions. However, cellular and molecular mechanisms underlying OT spinal antinociception are still poorly understood. In this study, we used biochemical, electrophysiological, and behavioral approaches to demonstrate that OT levels are elevated in the spinal cord of rats exhibiting pain symptoms, 24 h after the induction of inflammation with an intraplantar injection of λ-carrageenan. Using a selective OT receptor antagonist, we demonstrate that this elevated OT content is responsible for a tonic analgesia exerted on both mechanical and thermal modalities. This phenomenon appeared to be mediated by an OT receptor-mediated stimulation of neurosteroidogenesis, which leads to an increase in GABAA receptor-mediated synaptic inhibition in lamina II spinal cord neurons. We also provide evidence that this novel mechanism of OT-mediated spinal antinociception may be controlled by extracellular signal-related protein kinases, ERK1/2, after OT receptor activation. The oxytocinergic inhibitory control of spinal pain processing is emerging as an interesting target for future therapies since it recruits several molecular mechanisms, which are likely to exert a long-lasting analgesia through nongenomic and possibly genomic effects.
Reproducibility of Retinal Nerve Fiber Layer Thickness Measurements Using Spectral Domain Optical Coherence Tomography

PurposeTo evaluate the reproducibility of the peripapillary retinal nerve fiber layer (RNFL) thickness measurements obtained by Spectralis spectral domain optical coherence tomography (OCT) (Heidelberg Engineering, Heidelberg, Germany) in normal and glaucoma participants. MethodsParticipants were recruited from a university-based clinic. Peripapillary RNFL thickness measurements were repeated 3 times during the same visit using the follow-up function. One eye of each participant was randomly selected for statistical analysis. Reproducibility was evaluated using within-subject standard deviation (Sw), coefficient of variation (CV), and intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC). Spearman rank correlation coefficient analyses were used to assess the correlation of the standard deviation of the 3 measurements for each participant with the RNFL thickness value. ResultsForty-five normal participants and 33 glaucoma patients were included in the study. The CVs ranged from 1.45% [overall global (G)] to 2.59% [temporal quadrant (T)] in normal eyes and from 1.74% (G) to 3.22% (T) in the glaucomatous eyes. ICCs ranged from 0.977 (T) to 0.990 (G and inferior-nasal sector) in normal eyes and from 0.983 (T) to 0.997 (inferior quadrant) in glaucomatous eyes. Sw were from 1.34 &mgr;m (G) to 2.39 &mgr;m (superior-temporal and inferior-temporal sectors) in normal eyes and from 1.14 &mgr;m (G) to 2.25 &mgr;m (superior-nasal sector) in the glaucomatous eyes. There were no significant correlations between RNFL thickness values and the measurement variability for each participant. ConclusionsSpectralis OCT shows excellent reproducibility for measuring the peripapillary RNFL thickness values in both healthy and glaucoma participants.
A Field Evaluation of the User Experience of a Mobile Recommender of Leisure Activities

There have been many context-aware, personalized mobile recommender systems for leisure activities, but the user experience of such devices has received scant attention compared to feature descriptions. This paper reviews findings from existing evaluations and provides detailed results from a field evaluation of Magitti, a similar system offering recommendations of leisure activities for locals and tourists. It focuses on issues that are likely to crop up for designers of such systems, such as user control and management of recommendations, sharing the experience with others, map design, the role of content, user interface design issues, and other aspects of the user experience. Author
Policies on and practices of cultural inclusivity in learning management systems: perspectives of Indigenous holistic pedagogies

ABSTRACT Online learning has become a conventional term and practice in Australian higher education, yet cultural inclusivity for Indigenous (Indigenous for the purposes of this paper refers to Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples) students is insufficiently reflected in learning management system (LMS) policies and design. This study aims to explore culturally inclusive learning entrenched in Australian university policies on and practices of LMS by applying Indigenous holistic pedagogical values in LMS design. Based on a literature review, we articulate four dimensions: communication, collaboration, community and interculturality for culturally inclusive learning in an online learning environment. By using the dimensions, we critically review policies (n = 10) and LMS sites (n = 50). In this review, we argue that there are contrasts of individually heterogeneous and collectively homogeneous approaches, self-focused and community-driven pedagogy, and task-oriented and relational learning. Significantly, the review results indicate that Indigenous holistic pedagogies have a metaphysical strength to be the ontological foundation for cultural inclusivity.
Extracting Objects and Events from MPEG Videos for Highlight-based Indexing and Retrieval

Automatic recognition of highlights from videos is a fundamental and challenging problem for content-based indexing and retrieval applications. In this paper, we propose techniques to solve this problem using knowledge supported extraction of semantics, and compressed-domain processing is employed for efficiency. Firstly, knowledgebased rules are utilized for shot detection on extracted DCimages, and statistical skin detection is applied for human object detection. Secondly, through filtering outliers in motion vectors, improved detection of camera motions like zooming, panning and tilting are achieved. Video highlight high-level semantics are then automatically extracted via low-level analysis in the detection of human objects and camera motion events, and finally these highlights are taken for shot-level annotation, indexing and retrieval. Results using a large test video data set have demonstrated the accuracy and robustness of the proposed techniques.
Second-Order-Statistics-Based Blind Source Separation for Non-Stationary Sources with Stationary Noise

The aim of "blind source separation" is to recover mutually independent unknown source signals from observations obtained through an unknown linear mixture system. Simultaneous diagonalization of correlation matrices (second-order statistics) of observations is one of resolutions, when the unknown source signals are non-stationary. When observation noise exists, this method needs to correct the correlation matrices based on an estimation of the variance of the noise. However, the estimation of the variance of the noise requires additional information such as redundant observations. In this paper, we propose a new method of estimating the variance of the noise without additional information by utilizing a necessary and sufficient condition that simultaneous diagonalization of the correlation matrices is always achieved. We also verify the efficacy of the proposed method by numerical examples
Developing Cultural Competence to Enact a Culturally Inclusive, Learner-Centered Practice to Promote Learning and Justice in Diverse U.S. Urban Schools

Children in diverse urban schools are struggling socially and academically due to a range of unmet social, emotional and academic needs (Greene, 2014). In a small qualitative research study, participants' interpretations of a vignette showed some evidence of using child development but were silent about possible racial, cultural and linguistic dimensions of the interaction. This suggests the need for teacher preparation programs to consistently, explicitly and rigorously attend to the interaction of identity and learning for children in US urban schools to supportteacher candidates' abilityto develop culturally inclusive, learner-centered, identity-safe classroom practices (Steele & Cohn-Vargas, 2013).
Serious Games in Formal Medical Education: An Experimental Study

Medical knowledge has increased exponentially in the last decades. Healthcare professionals face a life- time challenge in medical education right from the beginning of medical school. They experience serious difficulties to keep updated. Traditional adult education, largely used in medical training, shows little effectiveness. Problem-based-learning has been proposed as a student-centred pedagogy to overcome failure of traditional medical instruction. A more recent trend is related to the use of serious games. Although, there are still few examples of serious games for medical education, the increased interest shown in the latest years shows that this is an important area and with a lot of potential to explore. In this paper we present the serious game Critical Transport, targeted at medical students with the aim to teach and train the recommendations for the transport of critically ill patients. This game was designed and validated with physicians of an academic hospital and tested during a formal class.
PDHA1 gene knockout in prostate cancer cells results in metabolic reprogramming towards greater glutamine dependence

Alternative pathways of metabolism endowed cancer cells with metabolic stress. Inhibiting the related compensatory pathways might achieve synergistic anticancer results. This study demonstrated that pyruvate dehydrogenase E1α gene knockout (PDHA1 KO) resulted in alterations in tumor cell metabolism by rendering the cells with increased expression of glutaminase1 (GLS1) and glutamate dehydrogenase1 (GLUD1), leading to an increase in glutamine-dependent cell survival. Deprivation of glutamine induced cell growth inhibition, increased reactive oxygen species and decreased ATP production. Pharmacological blockade of the glutaminolysis pathway resulted in massive tumor cells apoptosis and dysfunction of ROS scavenge in the LNCaP PDHA1 KO cells. Further examination of the key glutaminolysis enzymes in human prostate cancer samples also revealed that higher levels of GLS1 and GLUD1 expression were significantly associated with aggressive clinicopathological features and poor clinical outcome. These insights supply evidence that glutaminolysis plays a compensatory role for cell survival upon alternative energy metabolism and targeting the glutamine anaplerosis of energy metabolism via GLS1 and GLUD1 in cancer cells may offer a potential novel therapeutic strategy.
Adaptive Multiregression in Reproducing Kernel Hilbert Spaces: The Multiaccess MIMO Channel Case

This paper introduces a wide framework for online, i.e., time-adaptive, supervised multiregression tasks. The problem is formulated in a general infinite-dimensional reproducing kernel Hilbert space (RKHS). In this context, a fairly large number of nonlinear multiregression models fall as special cases, including the linear case. Any convex, continuous, and not necessarily differentiable function can be used as a loss function in order to quantify the disagreement between the output of the system and the desired response. The only requirement is the subgradient of the adopted loss function to be available in an analytic form. To this end, we demonstrate a way to calculate the subgradients of robust loss functions, suitable for the multiregression task. As it is by now well documented, when dealing with online schemes in RKHS, the memory keeps increasing with each iteration step. To attack this problem, a simple sparsification strategy is utilized, which leads to an algorithmic scheme of linear complexity with respect to the number of unknown parameters. A convergence analysis of the technique, based on arguments of convex analysis, is also provided. To demonstrate the capacity of the proposed method, the multiregressor is applied to the multiaccess multiple-input multiple-output channel equalization task for a setting with poor resources and nonavailable channel information. Numerical results verify the potential of the method, when its performance is compared with those of the state-of-the-art linear techniques, which, in contrast, use space-time coding, more antenna elements, as well as full channel information.
An Empirical Scenario for the Evaluation of Requirements Elicitation Tasks

While requirements elicitation has been established as a crucial phase of the systems development process, empirical research on the topic of requirements elicitation is sparse. In this paper we present a requirements elicitation scenario that can be used by researchers to evaluate different methods of eliciting a set of requirements. This scenario consists of an elicitation tasks, a system features set, and a coding method. The task revolves around the generation of a set of features for an online student textbook exchange. Such a system is likely to be familiar to students. We present a set of criteria to assess the quality of a requirements elicitation scenario and provide support from our experience using the scenario.
Enterprise Architecture and Information Systems: In Japanese Banking Industry

Japan is currently facing some environment changes, like global competition, deregulations, highly developed information technology (IT), etc., so Japanese firms need to increase their productivity more than ever before and use flexible information systems to survive. Historically, the biggest challenge facing firms is "adaptation" to any environment. The flexibility of information systems to create business values has long been discussed as a critical problem among IT communities. One potential solution is to adopt a web service using service-oriented architecture (SOA). When SOA is adopted, an enterprise architecture (EA) viewpoint is crucial. We clarify the problems when firms implement SOA and discuss solutions from an EA viewpoint while also discussing the relation between EA and information systems on the basis of our factor analysis of the Japanese banking industry.
TUD-1 : Design and Evaluation of Peer-to-Peer Overlays ( Gnutella ) Contact person :

Peer-to-peer (P2P) paradigm has gained significant popularity of both research and non research community nowadays. Big potential of having such a self-organizing, scalable, robust and low-cost network have been recognized and its functional spectrum is expanding from popular file sharing systems to applications such as Skype or Groove. A lot of research effort has been invested in developing peer-to-peer overlay networks with different advantages and disadvantages. According to the classification based on the relationship between the stored content and peer ID, there are two big classes of overlays: structured and unstructured. We are interested to evaluate Gnutella, the most used unstructured network, to compare it with structured overlays in different aspects like scalability, retrievability of the results, etc.
Optimal Design RRC Pulse Shape Polyphase FIR Decimation Filter for Multi-Standard Wireless Transceivers

Pulse Shaping Filters or Root Raised Cosine (RRC) low pass filters emerges as one of the hottest topic in field of Wireless Communication technology. Low pass filters are used for decimation and for interpolation. When decimating, low pass filters are used to reduce the bandwidth of a signal prior to reducing the sampling rate. This is done to minimize aliasing due to the reduction in the sampling rate. When interpolating, low pass filters are used to remove spectral images from the low-rate signal. In this paper, Area Efficient and Cost Effective Techniques for design of Pulse Shaping Filters have been presented to improve the computational and implementation complexity. Pulse Shaping Filters have been designed and implemented by using Square Raise Cosine Filter and Optimized Multistage polyphase FIR interpolation filter, and polyphase FIR decimation filter. The results shown that the computational cost of a polyphase Decimation filter is less with comparing the computational cost of a conventional FIR filter, which can be used both at the receiver and the transmitter.
Development and Validation of an Academic Stress Scale

The purpose of this study was to develop and validate an academic stress scale. Subjects were 554 middle school students, which included 283 in the first grade and 271 in the third grade. The third graders were utilized as an exploratory group and the first ones were utilized as a cross-validation group. The scale development was based on the conceptual structure of academic stress. Academic stress was conceptualized into two dimension of area and source. The area dimension includes grade, class-taking, and studying. The source dimension includes parent, teacher, and self. Initially, 45 items of SAS(Scale of Academic Stress) were developed and the pre-test was performed. Through the examinations of response pattern, internal consistency, uni-dimensionality, and content validity, 6 items were modified. The reliability of SAS was very good. The academic stress scale was validated through the evidence based on the criteria of test anxiety and achievement. Through the comparison of a research model and two competing models, one of competing models, 3-area hierarchy model, was selected as a final model of construct structure of SAS. This model was cross-validated with the first graders. Implications of this study were discussed in detail.
A Tangible Interface to Realize Touch Operations on the Face of a Physical Object

In this paper, we describe a tangible interface that can realize touch operations on a physical object. We printed physical objects that have conductive striped patterns using a multi-material 3D printer. The ExtensionSticker technique allows the user to operate capacitive touch-panel devices by tapping, scrolling, and swiping the physical object. By shaping the structure of conductive wiring inside a physical object, a variety of interfaces can be realized. We examined the conditions for using our proposed method on touch-panel devices.
Semantic Entity-Component State Management Techniques to Enhance Software Quality for Multimodal VR-Systems

Modularity, modifiability, reusability, and API usability are important software qualities that determine the maintainability of software architectures. Virtual, Augmented, and Mixed Reality (VR, AR, MR) systems, modern computer games, as well as interactive human-robot systems often include various dedicated input-, output-, and processing subsystems. These subsystems collectively maintain a real-time simulation of a coherent application state. The resulting interdependencies between individual state representations, mutual state access, overall synchronization, and flow of control implies a conceptual close coupling whereas software quality asks for a decoupling to develop maintainable solutions. This article presents five semantics-based software techniques that address this contradiction: Semantic grounding, code from semantics, grounded actions, semantic queries, and decoupling by semantics. These techniques are applied to extend the well-established entity-component-system (ECS) pattern to overcome some of this pattern's deficits with respect to the implied state access. A walk-through of central implementation aspects of a multimodal (speech and gesture) VR-interface is used to highlight the techniques' benefits. This use-case is chosen as a prototypical example of complex architectures with multiple interacting subsystems found in many VR, AR and MR architectures. Finally, implementation hints are given, lessons learned regarding maintainability pointed-out, and performance implications discussed.
Tm1: A Mutator/Foldback Transposable Element Family in Root-Knot Nematodes

Three closely related parthenogenetic species of root-knot nematodes, collectively termed the Meloidogyne incognita-group, are economically significant pathogens of diverse crop species. Remarkably, these asexual root-knot nematodes are capable of acquiring heritable changes in virulence even though they lack sexual reproduction and meiotic recombination. Characterization of a near isogenic pair of M. javanica strains differing in response to tomato with the nematode resistance gene Mi-1 showed that the virulent strain carried a deletion spanning a gene called Cg-1. Herein, we present evidence that the Cg-1 gene lies within a member of a novel transposable element family (Tm1; Transposon in Meloidogyne-1). This element family is defined by composite terminal inverted repeats of variable lengths similar to those of Foldback (FB) transposable elements and by 9 bp target site duplications. In M. incognita, Tm1 elements can be classified into three general groups: 1) histone-hairpin motif elements; 2) MITE-like elements; 3) elements encoding a putative transposase. The predicted transposase shows highest similarity to gene products encoded by aphids and mosquitoes and resembles those of the Phantom subclass of the Mutator transposon superfamily. Interestingly, the meiotic, sexually-reproducing root-knot nematode species M. hapla has Tm1 elements with similar inverted repeat termini, but lacks elements with histone hairpin motifs and contains no elements encoding an intact transposase. These Tm1 elements may have impacts on root-knot nematode genomes and contribute to genetic diversity of the asexual species.