Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Developing Geoscience Student-Learning Centered Courses

Courses designed around student-learning pose a unique set of challenges. Instructors must consider how students learn content and construct meaningful knowledge out of it. Course planning needs to address the linkage between learning objectives and skill development, and include appropriate assessment strategies. These issues go beyond designing effective components such as collaborative learning and writing-to-learn exercises, although these and other strategies may be essential components of a student-learning course. Course planning must address how to integrate these strategies to achieve the progressive development of students' skills and abilities in a manner that facilities learning course content. Assessment tools need to be calibrated to monitor student development and identify students' ultimate level of understanding. In addition, students need opportunities to honestly communicate their perspective on their progress and the course progression. This feedback allows instructors to remain responsive to learning issues, thereby giving value to student concerns.
Comparing tangible and multi-touch interfaces for a spatial problem solving task

This thesis presents the results of an exploratory study of a tangible and a multi-touch interface. The study investigates the effect of interface style on users’ performance, problem solving strategies and preference for a spatial problem solving task. Participants solved a jigsaw puzzle using each interface on a digital tabletop. The effect of interface style was explored through efficiency measures; a comparative analysis of hands-on actions based on a video coding schema for complementary actions; participants’ responses to questionnaires; and observational notes. Main findings are that tangible interaction better enabled complementary actions and was more efficient. Its 3D tactile interaction facilitated more effective search, bi-manual handling and visual comparison of puzzle pieces. For spatial problem solving activities where an effective and efficient strategy is not important, a multi-touch approach is sufficient. The thesis uniquely contributes to understanding the hands-on computational design space through its theoretical framing and empirical findings.
Privacy and Curiosity in Mobile Interactions with Public Displays.

Personal multimedia devices like mobile phones create new needs for larger displays distributed at specific points in the environment to look up information about the current place, playing games or exchanging multimedia data. The technical prerequisites are covered; however, using public displays always exposing information. In this paper we look at these issues from the privacy as well as from the curiosity perspective with several studies showing and confirming users’ reservations against public interactions. Interactive advertisements can exploit this best using specific types of interaction techniques.
Apprentissage du Français de la Douane dans le Cadre d’un Dispositif Hybride

Sommaire Les enseignants des langues étrangères utilisaient très longtemps des méthodes traditionnelles comme celle de grammaire-traduction. Le travail des professeurs et des andragogues est plus complexe aujourd’hui qu’auparavant. Les trois dernières décennies ont vu de nombreux changements : évolution technologique, pluridisciplinarité des sciences, globalisation. L’enseignement actuel des langues étrangères s’appuie sur des sciences aussi diverses que la linguistique, la psychologie, l’informatique, les sciences de communication en se basant sur le Cadre européen commun de référence pour les langues3 dont le but est l’identification et la définition des facettes théoriques de l’apprentissage d’une langue. Cet article analyse l’enseignement du français aux douaniers lituaniens en mettant l’accent sur des approches et des techniques actives, en particulier sur l’approche hybride. Il analyse les programmes proposés par le Centre de la formation des douaniers de Vilnius en se concentrant sur une étude plus détaillée du programme de l’apprentissage hybride en français pour lequel le français de spécialité est une priorité. Cette approche appliquée à l’enseignement des langues étrangères, se révèle séduisante pour les adultes car elle facilite l’intégration à la vie professionnelle. Elle participe également à la réalisation de la politique de multilinguisme grâce à la coopération entre les enseignants des langues étrangères et les apprenants. Plus que d’autres, elle favorise également les synergies interdisciplinaires grâce à l’utilisation des nouvelles technologies et des documents authentiques dans des domaines très variés : de la vérification douanière des véhicules aux questions d’éthique des douanes. Cet article présente enfin 5 composantes de l’acquisition lexicale qui accompagnent la formation professionnelle des douaniers en français : linguistique, discursive, référentielle, socioculturelle et stratégique.
Handling Dislocated and Discontinuous Constituents in Chinese Semantic Role Labeling

This paper discusses two outstanding issues, dislocated and discontinuous arguments, in the construction of the Penn Chinese PropBank, a corpus that has already been treebanked. It describes the verbspecific approach in our semantic role annotation in which arguments and adjuncts are treated differently in the sense that arguments are assigned labels that are interpretable only within the scope of the verb while adjuncts receive labels that reflect a more global classification. The paper discusses the rationale behind this approach in comparison with other semantic role labeling projects.
Distance Learning and New Technologies

istance education is the hot topic these days as millions of dollars are being invested in new technologies, such as the Internet, with the expectation that education at all levelswill be revolutionized. N e w papers now have feature sections about the Internet and technology-related self-help books are proliferating. Technology is frequently hailed as the “magic pill” that will somehow provide solutions to the organizational and policy issues that are endemic to adult education. Adult and continuing education programs are rushing to become players in the new world of global technology, searching for new applications while fearful of “being left behind. ” Discussions Seem to center around the impact of technology on distance education provision, but perhaps these discussions are reflective of the past rather than predictive of the future. Distance education technologies have been primarily used, historically, to extend access to classroom instruction to rural or isolated sites. For the most part, adult distance education programs have done that with high levels of success long before the Internet or computer networks were cost effective. Efforts such as Project Leap in Mississippi and the GED on TV are excellent examples of successful and effective distance education programs. These and most other distance education programs embrace a traditional classroom approach (i.e., they attempt to emulate a traditional classroom using one-way video with two-way audio), relying heavily on printed materials and on the host institution for both the delivery of services and the management of instruction. Broadcast times are set and learners must be available at those times or miss instruction. Research has shown that distance e d u a tion in an “extend-the-classroom approach” is one of the more effective ways to provide access to diverse learners who are place bound, bound by distances, or bound by economic efficiencies or policies (Johnstone, 1991). Indeed, learners in distance education programs progress as well as learners in a face-to-face classroom environment Qones, Valdez, Nowakowski, & Rasmussen, 1994). Overall, it is evident that distance education programs have exceeded their potential in enabling adults in rural and isolated communities to gain access to instruction. However, is providing access to “a traditional classroom” reason enough to expand investments in such new technologies as desktop video conferencing and the Internet? Is the goal simply to make a better mouse-trap (i.e., a faster machine to deliver traditional classroom-based instruction)? We can improve our existing distance education programs cheaply by simply upgrading existing broadcast and cable systems. Instead, the emergence of new technologies enables us to shift our focus from the delivery of classroom-based instruction to the delivery of new materials and the facilitation of new ways of learning. In this environ ment, issues of instructional content, information mum, leaning theory, and quality are paramount. The question is not, “How can we transport the class-
Multi-RCCL User’s Guide

This manual is a tutorial-style document which describes the robot programming system MultiRCCL, Release 4.0. The primary sites for this system are McRCIM (McGill University) and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). Copyright c 1988, 1991 by John E. Lloyd and Vincent Hayward. Permission to use, copy, modify, and distribute this document, and the RCCL/RCI software, is granted for non-commercial and research purposes only, and providing that (1) no fee is charged except the minimum necessary to cover copying and shipping expenses, and (2) all copyright notices are preserved and the authors are fully acknowledged. All other rights are reserved. The commercial sale of RCCL/RCI, its supporting documentation, or a system which contains RCCL/RCI as a component, is prohibited unless permission is obtained from the authors. Since RCCL/RCI is licensed free of charge, it is provided ”as is”, without any warranty, including any implied warranty of merchantability or fitness for a particular use. The authors assume no responsibility for, and shall not be liable for, any special, indirect, or consequential damages, or any damages whatsoever, arising out of or in connection with the use of the software. RCCL/RCI Release 4.2, December 12,1995
A General System for Semantic Analysis of English and its Use in Drawing Maps from Directions

We describe a semantic processor we a r e constructing which is i n t e n d e d to be of general applicability. It is designed around semantic operations which work on a s t r u c t u r e d data base of world knowledge to draw the appropriate i n f e r e n c e s and to identify the same entities i n d i f f e r e n t parts of t h e t e x t . The semantic operations capitalize on the high degree of redundancy e x h i b i t e d by all texts. Described are the operations for interpreting higher predicates,
Using Weak Mutation Coverage with GCT

The Generic Coverage Tool (GCT) User's Manual describes the most common uses of GCT. This manual explains how to use GCT to measure weak mutation coverage, a "researchy" coverage measure. Preface GCT is free software; you are encouraged to redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 1, or (at your option) any later version. GCT is sometimes bundled with Expansion Kits, also distributed in source form but licensed separately. If you redistribute GCT, please take care to redistribute only GCT. GCT and its Expansion Kits are distributed in the hope that they will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. For more details, refer to the GNU General Public License (the file COPYING in the distribution) or to the separate license you received with an Expansion Kit. You can join the GCT mailing list by sending mail to gct-request@cs.uiuc. edu.
RDBMS to NoSQL: Reviewing Some Next-Generation Non-Relational Database's

s In the world of cloud computing, one essential ingredient is a database that can accommodate a very large number of users on an ondemand basis. Distributed storage mechanisms are becoming the de-facto method of data storage for the new generation of web applications used by companies like Google, Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, Salesforce.com, Linkedin.com and Yahoo! etc., which are processing large amount of data at a petabyte scale. The main limitations with RDBMS are it is hard to scale with Data warehousing, Grid, Web 2.0 and Cloud applications, non-linear query execution time, unstable query plans and static schema. Even though RDBMS have provided database users with the best mix of simplicity, robustness, flexibility, performance, scalability and compatibility still next generation NoSQL ( not only SQL ) databases mostly being non-relational, distributed, open-source and horizontally scalable. The main characteristics of these databases are schema-free, no join, non-relational, easy replication support, simple API and eventually consistent. The aim of this paper is to provide a better understand of the nonrelational database design, architecture and comparison between them and also identify important research directions in this increasingly
Evolving Efficient Theme Park Tours

In this paper, we describe the use of an evolutionary algorithm (EA) for the problem of visiting rides in a theme park. Generating a tour of the rides in a theme park is an instance of the time dependent traveling salesman problem (TDTSP) in which the cost of visiting any two rides depends not only on the distance between the rides, but also the time to wait in line and ride each ride. We describe the implementation of the evolutionary algorithm, including EA's ability to satisfy the constraint of scheduling lunch in the theme park. We present several test problems and compare both the running times and costs of tours generated by the EA to those of a previously described dynamic programming heuristic.
Memory optimizations on the sequential hardware-in-the-loop simulator

Simulating hardware designs with the assistance of a Field-programmable Gate Array (FPGA) can greatly increase the simulation speed. Especially since new hardware designs often encompass a complete System-on-Chip (SoC). Due to the limited resources of a single FPGA these designs may be too large to instantiate them into an FPGA. Wolkotte et al, presented a simulation approach that can simulate those designs [1]. The approach uses time multiplexing to simulate only a small part of the hardware designs in a single clock cycle. This technique works well with hardware designs that contain a lot of nearly identical components, e.g. a Multi Processor System-on-Chip (MPSoC). Such a MPSoC may consist of a 2d-mesh Network-on-chip (NoC). Each router in the NoC could be connected to a small processing element, i.g. the Montium tile processor [2]. One of the transformations that is performed for time multiplexing the simulation is state extraction. The current approach by Rutgers [3, 4] is only able to extract flip-flops from the hardware designs. This thesis introduces some new algorithms that extract large memories. These algorithms make it possible to also simulate the network with the processing element attached. This was not possible in the approach of Rutgers due to the bandwidth limitations within an FPGA.
INVESTIGATING STUDENT ROLES IN ONLINE STUDENT-CENTERED LEARNING

In this study we used the technique of Social Network Analysis (SNA) to investigate the roles students take on in an online student-centered learning environment, and more specifically in an online Computer Aided Language Learning (CALL) course. SNA is the mapping and measuring of relationships and flows between people, groups, organizations, computers or other information/knowledge processing entities (Krebs, 2004). We studied the interactions and communications of the students in the discussion boards of the language course and carried out Equivalence Analysis. Equivalence of the network members shows when two actors have similar patterns of relations. In other words, students with similar communication behaviors are grouped together. Being able to define, theorize about, and analyze data in terms of equivalence is important because we want to be able to make generalizations about social behaviour and social structure (Hanneman, 2001). Two nodes are said to be structurally equivalent if they have identical ties with themselves, each other and all other vertices. The aim of equivalence is to classify actors with similar roles into role groups by embedding the actors in a certain role space, identifying clusters of students and then carrying out subsequent cluster analysis to identify their roles. After the role types were identified we used a number of other methods in order to get more details and characteristics of the role groups. These methods included the Topic Relation Analysis (TRA) which is a content analysis tool used to group the students messages into conversation categories, the Attitudes Towards Thinking and Learning Survey (ATTLS) which is used to measure the quality of discourse within the course and the extent which a person is a 'connected knower' (CK) or a 'separate knower' (SK), and the Collectivist On-Line Learning Survey (COLLES) which measures students’ perceptions and preferences and was designed to help teachers assess, from a social constructivist perspective, the quality of their online learning environment (Taylor and Maor, 2000). Our findings show that four main roles types (R1-R4) where identified and one of the students in particular (R1) had communication patterns that resembled those of a teacher in classroom settings. The student in R2 would provide his own lectures notes and was connected with a large number of his peer students who depended on him for this material, he was part of a high number of cliques and his contributions in the discussion boards were mainly on course related material. The R3 students interacted with a small number of their peers but at a higher frequency, thus working more in small teams. In addition, the majority of their usage of the discussion boards was about the course material and helping out their peers. Finally, the students in R4 made connections with a large number of their peers, their discussions were mainly on social topics and not course related, they prefer to learn on their own and were mainly using the discussion boards to make friends and socialize with their peers.
Tracking trials of echolocating finless porpoise by two stationary passive acoustic monitoring systems

This study showed the preliminary results of two-dimensional localization of echolocating finless porpoises by two stereo acoustic data loggers, A-tags. We conducted passive acoustic observation from an anchored fishing boat using two separated A-tags. Five echolocating porpoises were tracked during a 1.5-hour monitoring. The estimated swimming speeds of the porpoises matched the previous study, which were measured using bio-logging technique. At least one track of porpoises, however, was considered to contain false localization because the swimming speed was faster than the maximum speed of porpoises. Stationary acoustic monitoring has a limited observation range compared to a moving platform. But it has advantages to be able to easily measure the swimming speed and observe under water movement of underwater porpoises. In the future work, it is necessary to observe wild behavior of this species and evaluate the accuracy of the localization method by using larger sample size.
A Unified Approach to Personalization Based on Probabilistic Latent Semantic Models of Web Usage and Content

Web usage mining techniques, such as clustering of user sessions, are often used to identify Web user access patterns. However, to understand the factors that lead to common navigational patterns, it is necessary to develop techniques that can automatically characterize users’ navigational tasks and intentions. Such a characterization must be based both on the common usage patterns, as well as on common semantic information associated with the visited Web resources. The integration of semantic content and usage patterns allows the system to make inferences based on the underlying reasons for which a user may or may not be interested in particular items. In this paper, we propose a unified framework based on Probabilistic Latent Semantic Analysis to create models of Web users, taking into account both the navigational usage data and the Web site content information. Our joint probabilistic model is based on a set of discovered latent factors that “explain” the underlying relationships among pageviews in terms of their common usage and their semantic relationships. Based on the discovered user models, we propose algorithms for characterizing Web user segments and to provide dynamic and personalized recommendations based on these segments. Our experiments, performed on real usage data, show that this approach can more accurately capture users’ access patterns and generate more effective recommendations, when compared to more traditional methods based on clustering.
INTEGRATING SEMANTIC RESOURCES TO SUPPORT SME KNOWLEDGE COMMUNITIES

Abstract The development of ontologies to unify and to put into context the different concepts and terms of the sometimes rather traditional and locally coloured construction industry domains is a necessary step to avoid misinterpretations and inefficient communication. The KNOW-CONSTRUCT project, as an approach to this task, decided to re-use, as far as possible, existing ontologies, classification systems and other semantic resources in order to develop a system for the integration, management and reuse of the area specific knowledge via a common knowledge base in order to consolidate and provide access to integrated knowledge, making community emergent knowledge a significant added value.
Document Retrieval in Big Data

Nearest Neighbor Search for similar document retrieval suffers from an efficiency problem when scaled to a large dataset. In this paper, we introduce an unsupervised approach based on Locality Sensitive Hashing to alleviate its search complexity problem. The advantage of our proposed approach is that it does not need to scan all the documents for retrieving top-K Nearest Neighbors, instead, a number of hash table lookup operations are conducted to retrieve the top-K candidates. Experiments on two massive news and tweets datasets demonstrate that our approach is able to achieve over an order of speedup compared with the traditional Information Retrieval method and maintain reasonable precision. Keywords–Document Retrieval; Locality Sensitive Hashing; Big Data.
Experimental observations of temperature effects in the near-field regime of the Casimir–Polder interaction

We investigate the temperature dependence of the Casimir–Polder interaction on the electrostatic limit. This unusual phenomenon relies on the coupling between a virtual atomic transition and a thermal excitation of surface polariton modes. We first focus on the scenario in which a Cs(8P3/2) atom is next to a CaF2 or BaF2 surface. Our theoretical predictions show a strong temperature dependence of the van der Waals coefficient at experimentally accessible conditions. A series of spectroscopic measurements performed in a specially designed Cs vapor cell containing a CaF2 tube is presented. Our results illustrate the sensitivity of atom–surface interaction experiments to the quality and chemical stability of the surface material and emphasize the need for using more durable materials, such as sapphire. Finally, we discuss selective reflection experiments with Cs(7D3/2) in an all-sapphire cell that clearly demonstrate a temperature-dependent van der Waals coefficient.
Techniques informatiques efficaces pour la simulation de milieux granulaires par des méthodes d'éléments distincts

These Ecole polytechnique federale de Lausanne EPFL, n° 1545 (1996)Institut de mathematiquesChaire de recherche operationnelle SO Reference doi:10.5075/epfl-thesis-1545Print copy in library catalog Record created on 2005-03-16, modified on 2016-08-08