ppxscal/embedding_network huggingface dataset:
Effectiveness of computer-assisted instruction compared to traditional instruction in a basic computer proficiency course at the collegiate level
Authors: David Paper
Venue:  (2006)

This study was prompted by the increasing implementation of computer-assisted instructional (CAI) programs in college computer proficiency courses without sufficient evidence that these programs are effective. The purpose of this study was to examine the effectiveness of a CAI program on student achievement as measured by performance tests in a college computer proficiency course. This study was conducted in eight college computer proficiency sections in Utah. A questionnaire was administered to obtain demographic data and previous software experience. A quasi-experiment using a nonequivalent control-group design was implemented to compare word processing and spreadsheet applications achievement, and a static-group comparison design was implemented to compare database applications achievement between the control and treatment groups. Students in the treatment group completed a follow-up questionnaire to obtain their perceptions on the effectiveness of the CAI lessons.Analysis of covariance (ANCOVA) and analysis of variance (ANOVA) were conducted to compare student achievement in word processing, spreadsheet applications, and database applications. Independent-samples t tests were conducted to compare differences between males and females and between traditional and nontraditional student achievement within the treatment group. One-sample t tests were conducted to evaluate student perceptions about the CAI training in relation to software learning and test preparation.Statistically significant differences on student achievement existed between the groups; however, previous software experience was similar. For students in the CAI group, no statistically significant differences existed in student achievement between males and females or between traditional and nontraditional students. Student perceptions in relation to CAI helping students learn software tasks and in preparing students for the performance tests were statistically significant.Based on the findings, it appears that CAI is more effective than TI on student achievement in computer proficiency courses. However, CAI does not have a different effect on males and females or traditional and nontraditional students. Finally, students believe that CAI training helped them learn software tasks and prepare for the performance tests.Computer proficiency instructors are recommended to supplement TI with CAI. Furthermore, recommendations are made for further CAI research in computer proficiency courses.
Helping students develop higher-level thinking: use of the Perry model
Authors: M. J. Pavelich
Venue: Proceedings of the 26th Annual Frontiers in Education - Volume 01 (1996)

This paper reports data on how well an experiential curriculum helps students mature intellectually. It also reports on-going experiments with teaching methods designed to accelerate students' intellectual development. The data collection, curriculum design and experimental teaching approaches are based on William Perry's model of intellectual development which describes the stages people progress through in their understanding of knowledge, the use of evidence and their ability to understand open-ended problem solving. Our data show that one quarter of CSM students do mature to an acceptable level by graduation, but fully one third are still at a troublingly low level as seniors. The current efforts of some of our faculty center on refining our teaching approaches to help more students make significant progress in their thinking. The approach is basically one of putting students into the middle of an open-ended situation and then mentoring them through their misconceptions. We use our role as authority to coax them beyond the "single right answer" mentality. Our experience in trying to implement this teaching approach is discussed.
Reflections and observations: education and technology
Authors: A. van Dam
Venue: Proceedings of the 26th Annual Frontiers in Education - Volume 01 (1996)

van Dam began teaching computer graphics just as the field was beginning, in the early 1960s. His first class was not of graduate students or post-docs, but was a group of forward thinking high school teachers and their best students. It was this experience that inspired van Dam to pursue a career in academia. For the past 30 years he has taught at Brown University where he co-founded the department of computer science and for 10 years served as its first chairman. The past five years have seen exceptionally strong demand for integration of computers into K-12 curricula driven both by the media hype surrounding computer technology and networks and the increasing pressure on educational institutions to improve scope and quality of education in a publicly demonstrable fashion. These forces have combined to produce a time of great potential for education but also one of great danger. Educators and administrators must consider how can this technology be used to promote rigorous and useful learning rather merely adding glitz to traditional types of assignments. Educators and administrators must also be aware that although computers can bring education to a more diverse and expanding audience, the same technology can serve to divide societies into groups of haves and have nots. van Dam analyzes several means of approaching these and other issues, drawing on current research findings and using real life examples from his experience as a researcher educator, and Director of the Graphics and Visualization Center.
A low cost hybrid diffusion technique for object segmentation
Authors: E. Izquierdo
Venue: Proceedings of the Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, 2000. on IEEE International Conference - Volume 04 (2000)

In this paper a low-complexity nonlinear filtering technique to smooth textures preserving object contours is presented. The approach is based on a hybrid combination of both isotropic and anisotropic recursive filtering. Using only intensity information the segment borders obtained by applying nonlinear filtering do not necessarily coincide with physical object contours, especially in the case of textured objects. To segment images into regions with physical meaning additional information extracted from disparity or motion is used to weight the filter coefficients. The presented technique has been successfully tested in the context of object segmentation of natural scenes and object-based disparity estimation for stereoscopic applications.
On the asymptotic period of powers of a fuzzy matrix
Authors: Chin-Tzong Pang
Venue: Computers Mathematics with Applications (2007)

In our prior study, we have examined in depth the notion of an asymptotic period of the power sequence of an nxn fuzzy matrix with max-Archimedean-t-norms, and established a characterization for the power sequence of an nxn fuzzy matrix with an asymptotic period using analytical-decomposition methods. In this paper, by using graph-theoretical tools, we further give an alternative proof for this characterization. With the notion of an asymptotic period using graph-theoretical tools, we additionally show a new characterization for the limit behaviour, and then derive some results for the power sequence of an nxn fuzzy matrix with an asymptotic period.
Consent Mechanisms for Electronic Health Record Systems: A Simple Yet Unresolved Issue
Authors: Khin T. Win, John A. Fulcher
Venue: Journal of Medical Systems (2007)

Electronic health record (EHR) systems are now in widespread use in healthcare institutions worldwide. EHRs include sensitive health information and if they are integrated among healthcare providers, data can be accessible from many different sources. This leads to increased concern regarding invasion of privacy and confidentiality. Incorporating consent mechanisms into EHRs has the potential to enhance confidentiality. However there are both positive and negative effects from employing such mechanisms--they need to balance privacy, safety, consumer and public interest.
The HDM: a segmental hidden dynamic model of coarticulation
Authors: H. B. Richards
Venue: Proceedings of the Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, 1999. on 1999 IEEE International Conference - Volume 01 (1999)

This paper introduces a new approach to acoustic-phonetic modelling, the hidden dynamic model (HDM), which explicitly accounts for the coarticulation and transitions between neighbouring phones. Inspired by the fact that speech is really produced by an underlying dynamic system, the HDM consists of a single vector target per phone in a hidden dynamic space in which speech trajectories are produced by a simple dynamic system. The hidden space is mapped to the surface acoustic representation via a non-linear mapping in the form of a multilayer perceptron (MLP). Algorithms are presented for training of all the parameters (target vectors and MLP weights) from segmented and labelled acoustic observations alone, with no special initialisation. The model captures the dynamic structure of speech, and appears to aid a speech recognition task based on the SwitchBoard corpus.
Environments for creativity: a lab for making things
Authors: Ellen Yi-Luen Do, Mark D. Gross
Venue: Proceedings of the 6th ACM SIGCHI conference on Creativity cognition (2007)

We have, with our students, engaged in cross-disciplinary research in design. We describe parameters and principles that we have found helpful in organizing and conducting this kind of work. A variety of projects that have been developed in our group illustrate these parameters and principles. Our group focuses on making and we have come to see creativity as grounded in the ability to make things.
A Java-based environment for teaching programming language concepts
Authors: M. Hauswirth
Venue: Proceedings of the 28th Annual Frontiers in Education - Volume 01 (1998)

The authors describe the SDE visual environment for the study of the semantics of programming languages. SDE supports the abstract machine called SIMPLESEM which is used to define the operational semantics of programming languages in a widely-used textbook on programming languages. By basing the environment on the World-wide Web infrastructure, the environment is immediately available to students and instructors around the globe. SDE enhances the student's learning by simulating and visualizing abstract concepts of semantics. Such visualization environments are invaluable in the study of abstract subjects. SDE is currently being used in several university courses in different countries. The authors describe the environment's architecture and capabilities and review some of their experiences in developing the environment.
A Software Process for Modeling Complex Systems with UML-RT
Authors: Yifeng Sun, David Levy
Venue: Proceedings of the First Joint IEEE/IFIP Symposium on Theoretical Aspects of Software Engineering (2007)

UML-RT has been widely used in modeling complex embedded/real-time systems. Designers of such complex systems, however, also need a sound, systematic, and practical software process that can guide the whole development phase. In this paper, we describe a mapping between COMET and UML-RT that effectively maps COMET objects and models into UML-RT prototypes and software structures. Furthermore, based on the mapping relationship, we present a new software process that derives from COMET to address the issues of designing complex systems specifically for UML-RT. Finally, a practical example that applies this process using the UML-RT compliant CASE tool, Rational Rose Real Time, is fully discussed in order to demonstrate the applicability of the mapping and the software process.
Supporting security monitor-aware development
Authors: Dries Vanoverberghe, Frank Piessens
Venue: Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Software Engineering Workshops (2007)

With the emergence of support for third-party applications on mobile devices such as cell phones and PDA's, support for setting application security policies is also built into these devices. While this can significantly increase security for end-users, it also significantly complicates the task of building useful and reliable applications for these devices. Different devices will set different policies, and violations of the policy will lead to security exceptions or even immediate abortion of the application potentially leaving it in an inconsistent state. This paper addresses this issue in the context of application security policies specified by means of security automata, and enforced by means of run-time monitoring. We propose a language element, the check block, that developers can use to make their applications more security monitor-aware. At run-time, a check block will query the security policy enforced by the monitor to make sure that the body of the block will not lead to policy-violations. At compile time, a static check ensures that the generated runtime check is adequate. We present a formalization of the static and dynamic semantics of the check block, and we outline how it can be implemented on top of C# or Java.
A Probability Distribution Of Functional Random Variable With A Functional Data Analysis Application
Authors: Etienne Cuvelier, Monique Noirhomme-Fraiture
Venue: Proceedings of the Sixth IEEE International Conference on Data Mining - Workshops (2006)

Probability distributions are central tools for probabilistic modeling in data mining, and they lack in functional data analysis (FDA). In this paper we propose a probability distribution law for functional data. We build it using jointly the Quasi-arithmetic means and the generators of Archimedean copulas. We also define a density adapted to the infinite dimension of the space of functional data. For this we use the Gateaux differential. We illustrate the utility of this tool in FDA, applying it in a mixture decomposition classification.
Averaging operators for exponential splittings
Authors: Marko Huhtanen
Venue: Numerische Mathematik (2007)

Averaging operations are considered in connection with exponential splitting methods. Toeplitz plus Hankel related matrices are resplit by applying appropriate averaging operators leading to a hierarchy of structured matrices. With the resulting parts, the option of using exponential splitting methods becomes available. A related, seemingly important group of unitary unipotents is looked at. Based on a formula due to Lenard, a very fast iterative method to find the nearest Toeplitz plus Hankel matrix in the Frobenius norm is devised.
Extending Dynamic Constraint Detection with Polymorphic Analysis
Authors: Nadya Kuzmina, Ruben Gamboa
Venue: Proceedings of the 5th International Workshop on Dynamic Analysis (2007)

The general technique for dynamically detecting likely invariants, as implemented by Daikon, lacks specific objectoriented support for polymorphism. Daikon examines only the declared type of a variable which prohibits it from examination of the runtime variables in the presence of polymorphism. The approach presented in this paper extends the technique to consider the runtime type of a polymorphic variable, which may have different declared and runtime types. The runtime behavior of a polymorphic variable is captured by polymorphic constraints which have the form of an implication with the name of the runtime class in the antecedent. We demonstrate the improved accuracy of the dynamically detected specification on the Money example from the JUnit testing framework tutorial. Polymorphic constraints are shown to reveal the specification of the runtime behavior of the example.
A semi-blind maximum likelihood approach for resolving linear convolutive mixtures
Authors: J. Xavier
Venue: Proceedings of the Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, 2000. on IEEE International Conference - Volume 05 (2000)

We introduce a new technique to separate a linear convolutive mixture of discrete-time sources, emitting uncorrelated data samples. The proposed approach works in the reduced dimension space of the (channel) whitened data samples, where the data matrix is highly structured: it is the product of an orthogonal and generalized Toeplitz matrices embedded in additive Gaussian noise. By itself, this factorization does not unambiguously determine the sources (even in the absence of noise), but uniqueness is restored if short fragments (inadequate for training) of the emitted messages are known beforehand. We present a locally convergent iterative algorithm which implements the joint maximum likelihood (ML) estimator of both the orthogonal mixing matrix and the user signals, subject to the known side information. We also discuss a simple (sub-optimal) adaptation of the proposed algorithm to the class of finite-alphabet (FA) sources. Computer simulations show that the proposed technique outperforms an alternative subspace approach, specially in low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) scenarios.
Rough-Fuzzy Granulation, Rough Entropy and Image Segmentation
Authors: Sankar K. Pal
Venue: Proceedings of the First Asia International Conference on Modelling & Simulation (2007)

This talk has two parts explaining the significance of Rough sets in granular computing in terms of rough set rules and in uncertainty handling in terms of lower and upper approximations. The first part describes how the concept of rough-fuzzy granulation can be used for the problem of case generation, with varying reduced number of features, in a case based reasoning framework, and their application to multi-spectral image segmentation.
Performance analysis of multicarrier modulation systems using cosine modulated filter banks
Authors: S. Govardhanagiri
Venue: Proceedings of the Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, 1999. on 1999 IEEE International Conference - Volume 03 (1999)

We compare the performance of biorthogonal cosine modulated transmultiplexer filter banks with today's multicarrier modulation systems whose transceivers are based on DFT. In contrast to early works on transmultiplexer filter banks that concentrated on the derivation of perfect reconstruction constraints of the filter bank or prototype design, this study takes into consideration a typical twisted pair copper line transmission channel into consideration and examines the influence of different system parameters as filter length, number of channels, and the overall system delay on the distortion at the receiver. Biorthogonal filter banks have the advantage that filter length and overall system delay can be chosen independently. Restricting the equalizer at the receiver to a single scalar tap per subchannel, we show that cosine-modulated filter banks outperform DFT based multicarrier systems without a guard interval and obtain a similar performance to DFT based systems with a guard interval and time domain equalization but at a lower computational cost and a higher throughput data rate.
A Simple active attack against TCP
Authors: Laurent Joncheray
Venue: Proceedings of the 5th conference on USENIX UNIX Security Symposium - Volume 5 (1995)

This paper describes an active attack against the Transport Control Protocol (TCP) which allows a cracker to redirect the TCP stream through his machine thereby permitting him to bypass the protection offered by such a system as a one-time password [SKEY] or ticketing authentication [Kerberos]. The TCP connection is vulnerable to anyone with a TCP packet sniffer and generator located on the path followed by the connection. Some schemes to detect this attack are presented as well as some methods of prevention and some interesting details of the TCP protocol behaviors.
The Influence of Job Characteristics on Job Outcomes of Pharmacists in Hospital, Clinic, and Community Pharmacies
Authors: Blossom Yen-Ju Lin, Ying-Chen Yeh, Wen-Hung Lin
Venue: Journal of Medical Systems (2007)

This study examines the relationship between job characteristics and job outcomes of pharmacists in hospital, clinic, and community pharmacies in Taiwan. The structured questionnaires covered the items of job characteristics, job outcomes, and demographics of pharmacists, and were distributed between Feb 2004 and April 2004. Two hundred and ninety-eight pharmacists responded. Data were analyzed descriptively, and univariate analyses, factor analysis, and multiple regression analyses were used. It found the more enriched the job, the greater the job satisfaction and less intention to leave. And community pharmacists reported greater job enrichment and job satisfaction and less intention to leave than did hospital and clinic pharmacists. It suggests pharmacy managers could recognize the needs of pharmacists to redesign and enrich their work arrangements.
Three research challenges at the intersection of machine learning, statistical induction, and systems
Authors: Moises Goldszmidt, Ira Cohen, Armando Fox, Steve Zhang
Venue: Proceedings of the 10th conference on Hot Topics in Operating Systems - Volume 10 (2005)

Recent research activity [2, 12, 27, 10, 1] has shown encouraging results for performance debugging and failure diagnosis and detection in systems by using approaches based on automatically inducing models and deriving correlations from observed data. We believe that maximizing the potential of this line of research will require surmounting some fundamental challenges arising not from the modeling techniques themselves, but specifically from the application of those techniques to real-world systems. We specifically formulate three challenges. First, as new data is collected from a system, previously-induced models must be continuously assessed and validated, with the ultimate aim of achieving online adaption to system changes. Second, human operators must be able to effectively interact with the models, including interpreting model findings to generate explanations, enabling human feedback to improve the models, and identifying false positives and missed detections. Third, it should be possible to formally manipulate "signatures" of system state as represented by these models, allowing us to query the system's past to identify recurring problems and manually annotate them with additional information. We contend that the specifics of this problem domain not only raise these challenges, but also provide the knowledge base from which to derive well-engineered solutions to them. We suggest some possible strategies for addressing each challenge and show how they arise in the context of a real example.
Detection of fetal ECG with IIR adaptive filtering and genetic algorithms
Authors: A. Kam
Venue: Proceedings of the Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, 1999. on 1999 IEEE International Conference - Volume 04 (1999)

The continuous monitoring of the fetal heart condition during pregnancy and labor is of great clinical importance. The cardiac electrical activity of the fetus (FECG) may be recorded by means of surface abdominal electrodes. The signal is severely contaminated by the maternal cardiac signal (MECG). FECG enhancement is usually performed by FIR adaptive filtering. A new IIR FECG enhancement system is suggested and evaluated. In order to avoid convergence into local extrema, the system employs a genetic algorithm (GA). Two architectures are considered. The first is a combination of an adaptive filter and GA where the GA is recruited whenever the adaptive filter is suspected of reaching a local extremum. The second is an independent GA search. The hybrid IIR-GA was shown to be superior to the conventional FIR adaptive filtering.