Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
WEB SYSTEM FOR EDUCATIONAL ACHIEVEMENTS EVALUATION AND RATING FORMATION OF HIGHER EDUCATION STUDENTS

The article is devoted to the peculiarities of the web-based system development assessing the academic achievements of higher education students. It automatically generates examination cards with tests and tasks for exams and other tests. The presented information system is aimed at providing greater objectivity, transparency and diversity of methods for assessing the students’ knowledge in a blended learning environment. The basic requirements and modules that should make up the system were identified. The main roles of users and their functionality in the system and the features of differentiating access rights were identified. The technical characteristics of the system, functional features of the software product are described. The web technologies for a knowledge assessment application development are considered. The UML-diagram showing a sequence of users’ actions is presented, the database structure is developed. In the process of knowledge assessment system development in the modern digital environment, methods of examination cards generation using web technologies were chosen; the architecture and description of e-system modules were defined, programming technologies were chosen to implement the system, in particular the server programming language PHP, JavaScript, its libraries and the MySQL database included in the PhpMyAdmin software were used. The local OpenServer web server is used. The formation of the student success rating in the environment of the proposed web system for further consideration of points in the calculation of scholarships in higher education is considered. The presented web system for assessing the academic achievements of higher education students optimizes the work and saves time of the teacher in making of tests or exams, activates the repetition and consolidation of the studied educational material by students.
(NON) BLENDED LEARNING IN HIGHER EDUCATION: VIEWS OF THE PARTICIPANTS OF THE EDUCATIONAL PROCESS ON (NON) BLENDED

The article focuses the problem of using different learning models in modern conditions: blended learning as an integration of traditional (classroom/face-to-face) and distance learning, as well as traditional and distance learning in the absence of blended. The aim of the study is to identify and compare the views of participants in the educational process in the classical university on the choice of learning models organization in higher education depending on the ratio of traditional (classroom/face-to-face) and distance learning. The author included in the anonymous online survey 1373 respondents in 2020, including 1071 students, 140 PhD students, 172 university teachers; and 443 students in 2021; used IBM SPSS Statistics 23 for statistical analyses. The analysis of the survey results shows that Bachelor and Master students of the same year express similar views on choosing a model of organization for full-time and part-time higher education. A comparison of most other groups of respondents (students - teachers, students - PhD students, PhD students - teachers) shows a statistically significant difference (p≤0,05) in such views. The author describes some excesses of the critical value of the statistical criterion chi-square in the case of comparing some groups of students on the basis of the studied characteristics, which indicates a different view of their organization of full-time or part-time higher education. The analysis shows that in most cases there are no statistically significant differences in the comparison of individual samples on the same basis (gender, specialty, form of education). Traditional face-to-face learning for full-time and part-time education is mostly chosen in descending order of interest - students, teachers, PhD students. Blended learning, compared to distance and traditional, has an advantage in most respondents in all studied characteristics (educational/scientific level, gender, specialty, form of education). The author summarized the data of all groups (students, PhD students, university teachers) and formed options for non-mixing within the following intervals (in %): traditional face-to-face learning 12,9-29,3 (full-time form); 1,4-9,0 (part-time form); distance learning 0,6-7,9 (full-time form), 4,3-18,5 (part-time form); blended learning 62,8-85,0 (full-time form), 72,5-90,1 (part-time form). Some variants of blended were as follows (in%): mainly traditional education 25,3-44,8 (full-time form), 5,0-9,3 (part-time form); half 26,9-44,3 (full-time), 37,1-48,8 (part-time form); mostly distance learning 4,7-10,6 (full-time form), 24,4-46,4 (part-time form). Similar trends were found in all groups of respondents, namely: the choice decreases for traditional face-to-face, and increases for blended and distance learning in the transition from the model of learning organization for full-time to part-time higher education.
Correction to: Accurate Graphic Symbol Detection in Ancient Document Digital Reproductions

Chapter “Accurate Graphic Symbol Detection in Ancient Document Digital Reproductions” was previously published non-open access. It has now been changed to open access under a CC BY 4.0 license and the copyright holder updated to ‘The Author(s)’.
THEORETICAL AND METHODOLOGICAL FUNDAMENTALIZATION OF SCIENCE EDUCATION IN THE CONDITIONS OF INTEGRATION OF PHYSICS AND PROFESSIONALLY ORIENTED DISCIPLINES ON THE BASIS OF STEM-EDUCATION

The emphasis of science education is to increase students science literacy through investigative measures that include planning, measuring, observing, analyzing data, developing and evaluating procedures, and studying evidence based on the introduction of modern learning technologies (STEM-technologies). The article considers the concept of science as a pioneer of «science education», substantiates the theoretical and methodological fundamentalization of science education on the basis of STEM-education of a technical institution of higher education. It is determined that the main function of the system of science education is to provide society with scienceally literate citizens. The information and resources (usually financial) reinforce this system. In the article we have formed a model of science on the development of STEM-educational trends of innovative development of education in Ukraine. We have formed the features of science education on the basis of STEM-technologies that will contribute to the introduction of modern methods of teaching physics and professionally oriented disciplines. The integration processes in education in recent years have become increasingly important, as they are aimed at implementing new educational ideals – the formation of a holistic system of knowledge and skills of the individual, the development of their creative abilities and potential. The idea of integrated teaching of physics and professionally oriented disciplines is relevant, because its successful methodological implementation involves achieving the goal of quality science education, ie competitive education, able to ensure each person to achieve a life goal, creative self-affirmation in various social spheres. Learning science will allow students to lead a full and responsible life, encouraging them to learn independently, solve new situations, think critically, think creatively, make informed decisions and solve problems. Students should also develop an understanding of the relationship between science, technology, society and the environment (STSE), and strengthen the ability to integrate and apply knowledge and skills in physics and vocational disciplines in technical freelance education. They must be able to address changes and challenges in a constantly evolving society and contribute to the science and technological world.
Hardas Singh Sandhu (1932–2022)

With extreme grief, we are penning down the obituary of a teacher of teachers. Prof. Hardas Singh Sandhu was known to be a very simple and gem of a person, with all the finest qualities of head and heart. We knew him for many decades. The light went off, forever, at 7.00 a.m. on January 17, 2022, leaving behind his wife, two daughters, and two sons.
EXPLORING THE USE OF BLACKBOARD LEARN AS A TOOL TO FACILITATE E-LEARNING IN SOUTH AFRICAN HIGHER EDUCATION

Ponte Academic JournalJun 2022, Volume 78, Issue 6 EXPLORING THE USE OF BLACKBOARD LEARN AS A TOOL TO FACILITATE E-LEARNING IN SOUTH AFRICAN HIGHER EDUCATIONAuthor(s): Jeremiah MadzimureJ. Ponte - Jun 2022 - Volume 78 - Issue 6 doi: 10.21506/j.ponte.2022.6.2 Abstract:The COVID-19 pandemic has shifted education towards online through the adoption of technological learning platforms such as Blackboard Learn amongst others. Grounded on the technology acceptance model, the purpose of this study was to explore the use of Blackboard Learn as a tool to facilitate e-learning in terms of usefulness and ease of use. While many universities are still deciding on what e-learning platform to adopt, decisions must be based on organizational context including factors such as cost, effectiveness, and efficiency. Such information must be based on sound research findings. To gather primary data, three online activities in the form of video presentations were created and uploaded on the Blackboard platform and the total experience reported on. Findings support the literature that in general, Blackboard Learn is easy to use and useful given its many tools at the disposal of an instructor to facilitate online learning. Despite a few executional challenges encountered, which could not be attributed to problems with the platform itself. Future research is thus recommended to further explore such challenges. Insights gained from this research presents both managerial and policy implications as it may assist in the selection and adoption of Blackboard Learn as a tool to facilitate e-learning based on empirical research. Download full text:Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution Username Password
PHYLOGENETIC REPLAY LEARNING IN DEEP NEURAL NETWORKS

Though substantial advancements have been made in training deep neural networks, one problem remains, the vanishing gradient. The very strength of deep neural networks, their depth, is also unfortunately their problem, due to the difficulty of thoroughly training the deeper layers due to the vanishing gradient. This paper proposes "Phylogenetic Replay Learning", a learning methodology that substantially alleviates the vanishing gradient problem. Unlike the residual learning methods, it does not restrict the structure of the model. Instead, it leverages elements from Neuroevolution, transfer learning, and layer by layer training. We demonstrate that this new approach is able to produce a better performing model, and by calculating Shannon Entropy of weights, we show that the deeper layers are trained much more thoroughly and contain statistically significantly more information than when a model is trained in a traditional brute force manner...
Solar energy potential calculation methods

Several European municipalities developed an information map called solar cadaster that provide qualitative information for the citizens about the possible locations and amount of the small scale household solar PV system installations. The objective of these cadasters is the promotion and fostering of the distribution of the PV systems. Most of the cadasters are based on remote sensing roof measurements and irradiation information but provide only indicative data. Our solution is based on ten implementation type categories such as individual small houses, housing estates, solar carports, public institutions, etc. We looked for which segment of the solutions can raise the penetration with greater efficiency. We found that in Budapest there are eight large 10 storeys block-type housing estates with 100 thousand flats. Here 20-40 kWp can be installed for each staircase that is about 300-600 MWp for 1500 staircase. The total additive PV potential in Budapest is 1500 MW.
An Approach for Devising Stenography Application Using Cross Modal Attention

This paper focuses on providing a solution to the direct conversion of speech to shorthand. Since shorthand is not understood by many but is used for writing quick transcripts, a product is developed that converts the speech to its appropriate Gregg shorthand. A website that will be used as a front end, will use a speech-to-text API to record the speech in real-time. The converted text will then be fed into a text-to-image retrieval model that derives its corresponding Gregg shorthand for the text. The text will then be displayed to the user in real-time. By achieving this, the model reduces the need to depend upon stenographers for transcribing scripts. The resulting model achieves a good result.
CAREER GUIDANCE WORK WITH HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS IN ENGINEERING EDUCATION

Engineering degrees are gradually losing prestige as modern schoolchildren underestimate the prospects of engineering education. High-quality and effective career guidance is one of the possible ways to solve this problem, yet a recommended set of effective methods to guide schoolchildren is still undefined. The article substantiates the relevance of career guidance methods in engineering education to attract high school students to technical specialties. The purpose of this study is to analyze the practices of career guidance work using the interactive quest method and to study the advantages and disadvantages of the interactive method considering its further improvement and application. To achieve the goal, analytical methods and systematic analysis of the SUSU Polytechnic Institute’s experience were used. The authors identified an innovative method for conducting career guidance events. The presented analysis can be useful for the admission campaign organizers involved in preparing and implementing career guidance activities for engineering education.
A context‐aware mobile augmented reality pet interaction model to enhance user experience

Abstract Virtual pet applications have been widely developed and applied in various fields. Mobile augmented reality (MAR) provides a new medium for virtual pets, allowing users to have a more immersive interactive experience through MAR pets. However, the issue of the user experience in MAR pets remains uninvestigated and relatively unexploited. Therefore, this article proposes a context‐aware MAR pet interaction model (CAPet model) to enhance the user experience in MAR pet systems, which allows the MAR pet makes feedback adaptively corresponding to the dynamic context. In addition, this article presents a user experience pyramid to measure the user experience for MAR pet. According to the proposed CAPet model, a MAR pet‐dog application is designed and implemented, based on which user test are conducted. The results of user test indicate the effectiveness of the proposed method on enhancing user experience, which provides a basis for the design of MAR pet applications in the future.
Similarity Measurement and Classification of English Characters Based on Language Features

English is now widely used in the world as an international language. As a symbol of the development of human civilization, English characters provide an important medium and tool for mankind. In the current information age, the vocabulary of English words is more quantitative, and it is almost everywhere. Under the background of the multiquantification of English words and the quantification of the relationship between words, the similarity measurement analysis and calculation of English words and the classification of vocabulary measurement calculation are carried out by integrating the characteristics of language. The experimental results are as follows: (1) the development situation of English words is analyzed, the research direction of the experiment is determined, the concept of English character features is proposed, and the similarity calculation method is selected according to different features, in order to simplify the complex and difficult-to-understand word meaning relationship between English words; (2) the text features are extracted through the similarity feature selection of language and text. The extraction of features indirectly affects the effectiveness of classification. The similarity word embedding vector is used to map English words into the vector for analysis and comparison, calculate the distance between the similarity numerical variables between English words and their similarity coefficient, measure the distance between them, and evaluate the similarity between them, including the angle cosine method and correlation coefficient method which are the two main methods for calculating the similarity coefficient.
User-guided grasp planning for digital hand

In order to assemble a part (of, e.g., an engine), a human hand must obtain complete control of its motion through application of forces and toques at multiple contact points. Today, it is often time-consuming to synthesize a good hand grasp of a part using digital human modeling (DHM) tools because these tools require detailed manual inputs from a user, such as manually placing a digital hand around a feasible grasp location and then closing the fingers around the part. In a previous paper, we presented two different methods (i.e., Pointwise Shortest Distance and Environment Clearance) to color part surfaces by taking environmental distance constraints into account so that a user such as an assembly simulation expert can easily identify feasible grasp locations. Due to the robustness of the implementation, even triangle meshes with common geometric flaws such as cracks and gaps can be handled. In this paper, we leverage this feasibility analysis and present a user-guided grasp planning approach that significantly speeds up the grasp modeling process. First, the user selects a predefined grip type and then sets an approach direction for the hand. To synthesize many grasps, we randomly sample the hand’s rotation around the approach direction. Next, the hand is moved towards the part until the hand’s grasp center point reaches the geometry of the part or a collision between the hand and the part is detected. If a collision is detected, we move the hand backwards until there is no collision between the hand and the part anymore. Finally, we close the hand’s fingers around the part to synthesize a grasp. In this way, we can quickly synthesize a multitude of grasps and let the user choose among the ones with the best grasp qualities, where each grasp quality is computed using the corresponding 6D grasp wrench hull. We believe that this user-guided grasp planning approach can significantly enhance DHM tools such as Intelligently Moving Manikins (IMMA) when it comes to user usability.
Book Reading Habits of College Level English Language Teachers

Reading only textbooks or coursebooks is not enough for English language teachers. In addition to textbooks, they should read several books for their academic advancement. Keeping this in mind, this descriptive survey design under quantitative research tried to find out the book reading habits of the college level English Language (EL) teachers. The participants of the study consisted of 20 English language teachers who have been teaching English in different Tribhuvan University (TU) affiliated colleges located in Banke district. The participants were selected employing simple random sampling technique. The data was collected using a questionnaire which included altogether fifteen questions. The first ten questions were closed ended and the last five questions were open ended. The collected data was analyzed based on the descriptive statistics technique of data analysis. The results of the study showed that the average number of books the college teachers read in a year is approximately four. Similarly, the majority of college teachers have no habits of reading even a single book in a month. Another finding of this study is that college teachers prefer extensive reading over intensive one. Moreover, the college teachers believed that the library is the main source for college teachers to read.
Garou: An Efficient and Secure Off-Blockchain Multi-Party Payment Hub

To mitigate the scalability problem of decentralized cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum, the payment channel, which allows two parties to perform secure coin transfers without involving the blockchain, has been proposed. The payment channel increases the transaction throughput of two parties to a level that is only limited by their network bandwidth. Recent proposals focus on extending the two-party payment channel to the N-party payment hub. Unfortunately, none of them can achieve efficiency, flexibility in the absence of a trusted third-party. In this paper, we propose Garou, a secure N-party payment hub that allows multiple parties to perform secure off-chain coin transfers. Except in the case of disputes, participants within the payment hub can make concurrent and direct coin transfers with each other without the involvement of the blockchain or any third-party intermediaries. This allows Garou to achieve both high-performance and flexibility. Garou also guarantees that an honest party always maintains its balance security against strong adversarial capabilities. To demonstrate the feasibility of the Garou protocol, we develop a proof of concept prototype for the Ethereum network. Our evaluation results show that the maximum transaction throughput of Garou is 20 times higher than that of state-of-art payment hubs.
Nuevas estrategias de comunicación en tiempos de COVID-19 para la enseñanza / aprendizaje de la lengua francesa

The pandemic has brought about a radical change in the educational situation at all levels, to which both teachers and students have had to adapt abruptly. The emotional burden of this situation has been added to all the material and communicative difficulties that have resulted from the states of alarm occurred in all countries worldwide. Thus, the affective factors that are normally involved in the teaching / learning process, which the CEFRL considers under “existential competence”, have been particularly evident in this difficult period in which fear, uncertainty and isolation have been present in all the activities. In this context, the change from face-to-face teaching to blended learning has had a negative influence on the motivation not only of the students but also of the teaching staff. In this article we present the experience in teaching of French as a foreign language of a year in which classroom communication between teacher and student was suddenly and unexpectedly disrupted.