ppxscal/embedding_network huggingface dataset:
An Exploratory Study on Teachers' Perceptions of Game-based Situated Learning
Authors: Morris S. Y. Jong, Junjie Shang, Fong-Lok Lee, Jimmy H. M. Lee, Huk-Yuen Law
Venue: Proceeding of the 2006 conference on Learning by Effective Utilization of Technologies: Facilitating Intercultural Understanding (2006)

Game-based Situated Learning (GBSL) is a web-based learning paradigm which is a combination of computer game and educational content, in which the learning context is charily designed to put a learner into a game-play environment that is similar or analogous to where the knowledge of the content can be applied in real life. Empirical evidence has shown that teachers' perceptions are always significant in influencing the success of an educational innovation because they are the ultimate designers of learning and teaching activities in educational processes. The present study aimed to qualitatively analyze the perceptions of the teachers who had participated as facilitators in two comparative research studies on GBSL. Results showed that although the teachers were uncertain on whether GBSL can enable their students to have better learning outcomes, they were very positive towards the educational paradigm of this approach in terms of arousing students' learning interest and motive. Coincidentally, they suggested a very similar 2-stage “blended” strategy for enhancing the existing GBSL approach. The 1st stage is to let students amusingly learn with a GBSL game in a learner-centred fashion, while the 2nd stage is for a teacher to correct, strengthen and further extend the knowledge that the students have learnt in the game; in fact, this is a process called “debriefing” which allows students to transform their game-play experience into learning experience. All these findings provided vital insights and a basis for further investigating the application and development of GBSL for learning and teaching.
An Eclipse Plug-in for SVG Animations in an Educational System for Programming
Authors: Naoki Yanagisawa, Kenichi Takai, Koji Kagawa, Hiroyuki Tarumi
Venue: Proceeding of the 2005 conference on Towards Sustainable and Scalable Educational Innovations Informed by the Learning Sciences: Sharing Good Practices of Research, Experimentation and Innovation (2005)

There are many educational Web-based systems for programming. Web-based systems have several advantages in assisting learners by collecting various forms of information on the server side. However, the client-side components of Web-based systems are difficult to design and implement and therefore tend to be poor compared to the server side programs. This paper describes a Web-based system that helps learners write programs that create animations. It uses SVG as the graphics format and employs a plug-in for Eclipse as the client-side component. The plug-in can cooperate with the server-side system for downloading libraries and template programs, and for submitting animations to the bulletin board system for SVG animations.
Introducing Maya 2008
Authors: Dariush Derakhshani
Venue:  (2007)

The new edition of this perennial bestseller is the ideal initiation to 3D and Maya. Starting with the basics, it builds from the ground up, combining straightforward text with practical examples that make it fun and easy to learn Maya's core tools while introducing the latest Maya 2008 features. Follow clear-cut, step-by-step lessons while you learn by doing using a wealth of hands-on files provided on the CD. You'll also find compelling examples in the full-color insert.
Ontological Queries Supporting Decision Process in KaSeA System
Authors: Krzysztof Goczyła, Aleksander Waloszek, Wojciech Waloszek, Teresa Zawadzka, Michał Zawadzki
Venue: Proceeding of the 2007 conference on Information Modelling and Knowledge Bases XVIII (2007)

With development of knowledge bases (KB) there appeared expert systems that use KBs to support them in decision making process. Decision Support Systems, that are the subject of the paper, communicate with knowledge bases by populating them with known facts and receiving newly inferred knowledge. However there exist situations when a DSS receives ambiguous response from knowledge base and needs to know what additional information is missing and is required to give a precise response. The paper focuses on a communication between a DSS and a knowledge base especially in the scope of getting the missing information. The special type of inference performed over a Description Logics ontology to solve the problem, the corresponding query and implementation issues are described.
Erratum &ldquo;Different spaces for e-development: What can we learn from the capability approach&quest;&rdquo; from Information Technology for Development, 15(2) (2009), 66&ndash;82.
Authors: Staff
Venue: Information Technology for Development (2009)

Guest Editor Chris Westrup was the accepting editor for this paper. The ACM Portal is published by the Association for Computing Machinery. Copyright © 2010 ACM, Inc. Terms of Usage Privacy Policy Code of Ethics Contact Us Useful downloads: Adobe Acrobat QuickTime Windows Media Player Real Player
Mission-phasing techniques for constrained agents in stochastic environments
Authors: Edmund H. Durfee
Venue:  (2008)

Resource constraints restrict the set of actions that an agent can take, such that the agent might not be able to perform all its desired tasks. Computational time limitations restrict the number of states that an agent can model and reason over, such that the agent might not be able to formulate a policy that can respond to all possible eventualities. This work argues that, in either situation, one effective way of improving the agent's performance is to adopt a phasing strategy. Resource-constrained agents can choose to reconfigure resources and switch action sets for handling upcoming events better when moving from phase to phase; time-limited agents can choose to focus computation on high-value phases and to exploit additional computation time during the execution of earlier phases to improve solutions for future phases. This dissertation consists of two parts, corresponding to the aforementioned resource constraints and computational time limitations. The first part of the dissertation focuses on the development of automated resource-driven mission-phasing techniques for agents operating in resource-constrained environments. We designed a suite of algorithms which not only can find solutions to optimize the use of predefined phase-switching points, but can also automatically determine where to establish such points, accounting for the cost of creating them, in complex stochastic environments. By formulating the coupled problems of mission decomposition, resource configuration, and policy formulation into a single compact mathematical formulation, the presented algorithms can effectively exploit problem structure and often considerably reduce computational cost for finding exact solutions. The second part of this dissertation is the design of computation-driven mission-phasing techniques for time-critical systems. We developed a new deliberation scheduling approach, which can simultaneously solve the coupled problems of deciding both when to deliberate given its cost, and which phase decision procedures to execute during deliberation intervals. Meanwhile, we designed a heuristic search method to effectively utilize the allocated time within each phase. As illustrated in analytical and experimental results, the computation-driven mission-phasing techniques, which extend problem decomposition techniques with the across-phase deliberation scheduling and inner-phase heuristic search methods mentioned above, can help an agent judiciously emphasize high-value portions of a large problem, while paying less attention to others, to generate a better policy within its time limit.
Broadened answer extraction of QA system capability using expanded notion of logical-linguistic approach
Authors: A. K. Rabiah, T. M. T. Sembok, B. Z. Halimah
Venue: Proceedings of the international conference on Computational and information science 2009 (2009)

The idea of this paper is to discuss the capability of question answering (QA) system by simulating understanding with respect to read a short passage and answering questions pertaining to it. Currently, passage understanding task received increased attention within the NLP community as a means to develop and evaluate robust question answering methods. This paper is concerned with the problem of extracting an answer in the context of sophisticated knowledge representation for reasoning and inferential processing. This work focused on Wh types of question to a restricted passage. A Pragmatic Skolemized Clauses (PragSC) was designed to represent the semantic formalism for the computational linguistic. In order to broaden the answer extraction capability, an expanded notion of literal answer was used with the given question expressible in PragSC. This paper introduced ground term as an expanded notion of literal answer which implement together with the universal and existential quantified within the theorem-proving paradigm. This work found that the expanded notion of literal answer in PragSC broadened the answer extraction capability of QA system.
Studying spamming botnets using Botlab
Authors: John P. John, Alexander Moshchuk, Steven D. Gribble, Arvind Krishnamurthy
Venue: Proceedings of the 6th USENIX symposium on Networked systems design and implementation (2009)

In this paper we present Botlab, a platform that continually monitors and analyzes the behavior of spam-oriented botnets. Botlab gathers multiple real-time streams of information about botnets taken from distinct perspectives. By combining and analyzing these streams, Botlab can produce accurate, timely, and comprehensive data about spam botnet behavior. Our prototype system integrates information about spam arriving at the University of Washington, outgoing spam generated by captive botnet nodes, and information gleaned from DNS about URLs found within these spam messages. We describe the design and implementation of Botlab, including the challenges we had to overcome, such as preventing captive nodes from causing harm or thwarting virtual machine detection. Next, we present the results of a detailed measurement study of the behavior of the most active spam botnets. We find that six botnets are responsible for 79% of spam messages arriving at the UW campus. Finally, we present defensive tools that take advantage of the Botlab platform to improve spam filtering and protect users from harmful web sites advertised within botnet-generated spam.
Data retention characteristics of MANOS-type flash memory device with different metal gates at various levels of charge injection
Authors: Man Chang, Tae-Wook Kim, Joonmyoung Lee, Minseok Jo, Seonghyun Kim, Seungjae Jung, Hyejung Choi, Takhee Lee, Hyunsang Hwang
Venue: Microelectronic Engineering (2009)

We investigated the impact of charge injection and metal gates (Al and Pt) on the data retention characteristics of metal-alumina-nitride-oxide-silicon (MANOS) devices for NAND flash memory application. Through the theoretical and experimental results, the highly injected charge (@DV"T"H) could cause the band bending of Al"2O"3, which reduced the tunneling distance across Al"2O"3. Thus, the dominant charge loss path is not only toward SiO"2 but also toward Al"2O"3 direction. Compared to low-metal work function (@?"M), ONA stack with high-@?"M showed better data retention characteristics, even if @DV"T"H is high. This could be explained by Fermi level alignment for different @?"M, which results in the reduction of electric field across the Al"2O"3 compensated by the @D@?"M (@?"P"t-@?"A"l).
Effective use of search strategies
Authors: Zeynel Abidin Misirli, Ferit Karakoyun, Abdullah Kuzu
Venue: Proceedings of the international conference on Computational and information science 2009 (2009)

Learning process is to access information. Traditional research methods which are used for searching library resources changed with the rapid development of information and communication technologies, accessing to knowledge became easier. Internet is a huge mass of information and it is growing bigger day by day. These continuous growths not only make it attractive but also make it more complex and more difficult to reach the information. The researches show that the users which have search skills can easily reach results which are appropriate and directly related with the subject; they can reach the information easily instead of being lost in mass of information. The purpose of the study is to help users to find information they are looking for easily.
Agent-Based Simulation Analysis for Equilibrium Selection and Coordination Failure in Coordination Games Characterized by the Minimum Strategy
Authors: Ichiro Nishizaki, Tomohiro Hayashida, Hideki Katagiri, Noriyuki Hara
Venue: Proceedings of the Third KES International Symposium on Agent and Multi-Agent Systems: Technologies and Applications (2009)

In this paper, to analyze equilibrium selection and coordination failure in coordination games, we develop an agent-based simulation system in which artificial adaptive agents have a mechanism of decision making and learning based on neural networks and genetic algorithms. Using the simulation system, we examine the strategy choices of agents and formation of equilibria in the steady state, and compare the experimental result given by VanHuyck et al. (1990) with our simulation result.
Simultaneous Alignment and Folding of Protein Sequences
Authors: Jérôme Waldispühl, Charles W. O'Donnell, Sebastian Will, Srinivas Devadas, Rolf Backofen, Bonnie Berger
Venue: Proceedings of the 13th Annual International Conference on Research in Computational Molecular Biology (2009)

Accurate comparative analysis tools for low-homology proteins remains a difficult challenge in computational biology, especially sequence alignment and consensus folding problems. We presentpartiFold-Align, the first algorithm for simultaneous alignment and consensus folding of unaligned protein sequences; the algorithm's complexity is polynomial in time and space. Algorithmically,partiFold-Align exploits sparsity in the set of super-secondary structure pairings and alignment candidates to achieve an effectively cubic running time for simultaneous pairwise alignment and folding. We demonstrate the efficacy of these techniques on transmembrane β-barrel proteins, an important yet difficult class of proteins with few known three-dimensional structures. Testing against structurally derived sequence alignments,partiFold-Align significantly outperforms state-of-the-art pairwise sequence alignment tools in the most difficult low sequence homology case and improves secondary structure prediction where current approaches fail. Importantly, partiFold-Align requires no prior training. These general techniques are widely applicable to many more protein families. partiFold-Align is available at http://partiFold.csail.mit.edu.
Photoshop CS4 Photographer's Handbook
Authors: Stephen Laskevitch
Venue:  (2009)

Adobe Photoshop is central to almost all photography workflows today. The introduction of CS4 is another milestone in the development of this imaging behemoth. Photographers often feel overwhelmed when starting with Photoshop; the sheer number of tools and options make it difficult for the novice. There is no shortage of instructional books, either, yet very few direct the user to the most significant aspects of the program in a way that reflects a real workflow. Steve has leveraged his experience as a teacher and practitioner to create a step-by-step guide that provides a clear and effective workflow for editing photographs in Photoshop CS4 and its companions Bridge, Camera Raw, and Lightroom 2. Focusing on the critical elements of the workflow rather than covering every arcane feature, the Handbook is designed to get you working quickly in these applications. It provides the essential terms, concepts, and information along with step-by-step methods for Photoshop techniques of all levels. Use the Photoshop CS4 Photographer's Handbook to: Educate yourself or others in the tools and processes used to "develop" photographs in Photoshop CS4 Learn a practical and robust workflow for editing images: organizing, clean-up, global and targeted adjustments, and creative effects Learn specific techniques through step-by-step instructions and the principles to develop your own unique practices
Rough Set Theory: A True Landmark in Data Analysis, 1st edition
Authors: Ajith Abraham, Ajith Abraham, Rafael Falcn, Rafael Bello
Venue:  (2009)

Along the years, rough set theory has earned a well-deserved reputation as a sound methodology for dealing with imperfect knowledge in a simple though mathematically sound way. This edited volume aims at continue stressing the benefits of applying rough sets in many real-life situations while still keeping an eye on topological aspects of the theory as well as strengthening its linkage with other soft computing paradigms. The volume comprises 11 chapters and is organized into three parts. Part 1 deals with theoretical contributions while Parts 2 and 3 focus on several real world data mining applications. Chapters authored by pioneers were selected on the basis of fundamental ideas/concepts rather than the thoroughness of techniques deployed. Academics, scientists as well as engineers working in the rough set, computational intelligence, soft computing and data mining research area will find the comprehensive coverage of this book invaluable.
A New Approach for Biometric Template Storage and Remote Authentication
Authors: Neyire Deniz Sarier
Venue: Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Advances in Biometrics (2009)

In this paper, we propose a new remote biometric based authentication scheme, which is designed for distributed systems with a central database for the storage of the biometric data. For our scheme, we consider the recently introduced security notions of Identity and Transaction privacy and present a different storage mechanism for biometrics resulting in a reduced database storage cost. Besides, the components of the system do not need to store any biometric template in cleartext or in encrypted form, which affects the social acceptance of the system positively. Finally, we compare our results with existing schemes satisfying the current security notions and achieve improved computational complexity.
Identification of computational hot spots in protein interfaces
Authors: Nurcan Tuncbag, Attila Gursoy, Ozlem Keskin
Venue: Bioinformatics (2009)

Motivation:Hot spots are residues comprising only a small fraction of interfaces yet accounting for the majority of the binding energy. These residues are critical in understanding the principles of protein interactions. Experimental studies like alanine scanning mutagenesis require significant effort; therefore, there is a need for computational methods to predict hot spots in protein interfaces. Results:We present a new intuitive efficient method to determine computational hot spots based on conservation (C), solvent accessibility [accessible surface area (ASA)] and statistical pairwise residue potentials (PP) of the interface residues. Combination of these features is examined in a comprehensive way to study their effect in hot spot detection. The predicted hot spots are observed to match with the experimental hot spots with an accuracy of 70% and a precision of 64% in Alanine Scanning Energetics Database (ASEdb), and accuracy of 70% and a precision of 73% in Binding Interface Database (BID). Several machine learning methods are also applied to predict hot spots. Performance of our empirical approach exceeds learning-based methods and other existing hot spot prediction methods. Residue occlusion from solvent in the complexes and pairwise potentials are found to be the main discriminative features in hot spot prediction. Conclusion:Our empirical method is a simple approach in hot spot prediction yet with its high accuracy and computational effectiveness. We believe that this method provides insights for the researchers working on characterization of protein binding sites and design of specific therapeutic agents for protein interactions. Availability:The list of training and test sets are available as Supplementary Data at http://prism.ccbb.ku.edu.tr/hotpoint/supplement.doc Contact:agursoy@ku.edu.tr; okeskin@ku.edu.tr Supplementary information:Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.
A Statistical Framework for Image Category Search from a Mental Picture
Authors: Marin Ferecatu, Donald Geman
Venue: IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (2009)

Traditional image retrieval techniques usually require a first image to start a query. However, for large unstructured databases, it is not clear how to choose this query (the "page zero" problem). We propose a new statistical framework based on relevance feedback to locate an instance of a semantic category in an unstructured image database with no semantic annotation. A search session is initiated from a random sample of images. At each retrieval round the user is asked to select one image from among a set of displayed images - the one that is closest in his opinion to the target class. The matching is then "mental". Performance is measured by the number of iterations necessary to display an image which satisfies the user, at which point standard techniques can be employed to display other instances. Our core contribution is a Bayesian formulation which scales to large databases. The two key components are a response model which accounts for the user's subjective perception of similarity and a display algorithm which seeks to maximize the flow of information. Experiments with real users and two databases of 20,000 and 60,000 images demonstrate the efficiency of the search process.
Automatically annotating textual resources with human intentions
Authors: Markus Strohmaier, Mark Kroell, Christian Koerner
Venue: Proceedings of the 20th ACM conference on Hypertext and hypermedia (2009)

Annotations represent an increasingly popular means for organizing, categorizing and finding resources on the "social" web. Yet, only a small portion of the total resources available on the web are annotated. In this paper, we describe a prototype - iTAG - for automatically annotating textual resources with human intent, a novel dimension of tagging. We investigate the extent to which the automatic analysis of human intentions in textual resources is feasible. To address this question, we present selected evidence from a study aiming to automatically annotate intent in a simplified setting, that is transcripts of speeches given by US presidential candidates in 2008.