Search results for: task analysis

Authors: Zhicheng Han

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This study examines the correlation between knowledge of formulaic language, working memory (WM), and phonological short-term memory (PSTM) in Chinese L2 learners of English. This study investigates if WM and PSTM correlate differently to the acquisition of formulaic language, which may be relevant for the discourse around the conceptualization of formulas. Connectionist approaches have lead scholars to argue that formulas are form-meaning connections stored whole, making PSTM significant in the acquisitional process as it pertains to the storage and retrieval of chunk information. Generativist scholars, on the other hand, argued for active participation of interlanguage grammar in the acquisition and use of formulaic language, where formulas are represented in the mind but retain the internal structure built around a lexical core. This would make WM, especially the processing component of WM an important cognitive factor since it plays a role in processing and holding information for further analysis and manipulation. The current study asked L1 Chinese learners of English enrolled in graduate programs in China to complete a preference raking task where they rank their preference for formulas, grammatical non-formulaic expressions, and ungrammatical phrases with and without the lexical core in academic contexts. Participants were asked to rank the options in order of the likeliness of them encountering these phrases in the test sentences within academic contexts. Participants’ syntactic proficiency is controlled with a cloze test and grammar test. Regression analysis found a significant relationship between the processing component of WM and preference of formulaic expressions in the preference ranking task while no significant correlation is found for PSTM or syntactic proficiency. The correlational analysis found that WM, PSTM, and the two proficiency test scores have significant covariates. However, WM and PSTM have different predictor values for participants’ preference for formulaic language. Both storage and processing components of WM are significantly correlated with the preference for formulaic expressions while PSTM is not. These findings are in favor of the role of interlanguage grammar and syntactic knowledge in the acquisition of formulaic expressions. The differing effects of WM and PSTM suggest that selective attention to and processing of the input beyond simple retention play a key role in successfully acquiring formulaic language. Similar correlational patterns were found for preferring the ungrammatical phrase with the lexical core of the formula over the ones without the lexical core, attesting to learners’ awareness of the lexical core around which formulas are constructed. These findings support the view that formulaic phrases retain internal syntactic structures that are recognized and processed by the learners.

Keywords: formulaic language, working memory, phonological short-term memory, academic language

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Authors: Lisa Rudolfsson

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Socio-cognitive factors, such as social support and attribution of blame, influence the victim’s psychological adjustment after the abuse. Furthermore, the response from the person that the victim first confides to effect adjustment following the abuse. In Sweden, although police are investigating most of the reported cases of rape, very few rape-cases leads to trial and sentence. For many women who have been raped, contact with the police officer when reporting the crime will, therefore, be the most notable experience of how representatives for the Swedish society regard and handle what has happened. Hence, it seems urgent to gather information about these initial meetings. This study is part of a three-year research project, titled 'Female rape victims: Quality of initial police and medical care contact', funded by the Swedish Crime Victim and Support Authority. The focus of this study was on police officers in Sweden: their thoughts and experiences of meeting with raped women. Forthcoming are interviews with raped women about their experiences of meeting with police. Sixteen police officers participated in three focus groups and one interview. The participants consisted of five men and eleven women. Focus groups and interview were audio recorded and transcribed verbatim. The material was analyzed using thematic analysis. Participants described how violence against women was not a priority in Swedish society or within the Police Authority. They talked about rape cases as a Sisyphean work-task that put high demands on them, while they also lacked training and support. They expressed a wish to offer the woman some kind of restoration, and they talked about their work as potentially making a difference for the woman – even if she did not get juridical justice. However, participants also described that they did not feel validated in their hard work. They talked about working rape cases as causing them a great deal of frustration - directed towards the Police Authority, the juridical system, colleagues, and sometimes towards the woman. Participants also described how meeting with raped women was a work that affected them in a personal manner. Listening to stories about sexual violence made the participants sad, and they described it as a struggle to understand. They described wondering how the woman’s life turned out and how they sometimes questioned if they had done enough. Some of the conclusions concern the lack of prerequisites needed for police officers to be able to offer a good-enough treatment of raped women, as well as the lack of tools needed for police officers to care for themselves. In lack of training, validation, and support, the knowledge of how to offer a good- enough treatment of raped women becomes a task learned by doing. Attempts to offer, if not legal justice, then at least some kind of restoration becomes a personal task, dependent on individual police officers. It seems urgent that we address the risk of police officers’ frustration building up to be detrimental for both the crime victim and the officer her/himself.

Keywords: focus groups, police, raped women, restoration

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Authors: Sven Tackenberg, Sönke Duckwitz, Andreas Petz, Christopher M. Schlick

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This paper introduces an extension to the well-established Resource-Constrained Project Scheduling Problem (RCPSP) to apply it to complex maintenance problems. The problem is to assign technicians to a team which has to process several tasks with multi-level skill requirements during a work shift. Here, several alternative activities for a task allow both, the temporal shift of activities or the reallocation of technicians and tools. As a result, switches from one valid work process variant to another can be considered and may be selected by the developed evolutionary algorithm based on the present skill level of technicians or the available tools. An additional complication of the observed scheduling problem is that the locations of the construction sites are only temporarily accessible during a day. Due to intensive rail traffic, the available time slots for maintenance and repair works are extremely short and are often distributed throughout the day. To identify efficient working periods, a first concept of a Bayesian network is introduced and is integrated into the extended RCPSP with pre-emptive and non-pre-emptive tasks. Thereby, the Bayesian network is used to calculate the probability of a maintenance task to be processed during a specific period of the shift. Focusing on the domain of maintenance of the railway infrastructure in metropolitan areas as the most unproductive implementation process at construction site, the paper illustrates how the extended RCPSP can be applied for maintenance planning support. A multi-criteria evolutionary algorithm with a problem representation is introduced which is capable of revising technician-task allocations, whereas the duration of the task may be stochastic. The approach uses a novel activity list representation to ensure easily describable and modifiable elements which can be converted into detailed shift schedules. Thereby, the main objective is to develop a shift plan which maximizes the utilization of each technician due to a minimization of the waiting times caused by rail traffic. The results of the already implemented core algorithm illustrate a fast convergence towards an optimal team composition for a shift, an efficient sequence of tasks and a high probability of the subsequent implementation due to the stochastic durations of the tasks. In the paper, the algorithm for the extended RCPSP is analyzed in experimental evaluation using real-world example problems with various size, resource complexity, tightness and so forth.

Keywords: maintenance management, scheduling, resource constrained project scheduling problem, genetic algorithms

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Authors: Zhidong Zhang

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This study established a mixed method model in assessing statistics learning with Bayesian network models. There are three variants in exploratory sequential designs. There are three linked steps in one of the designs: qualitative data collection and analysis, quantitative measure, instrument, intervention, and quantitative data collection analysis. The study used a scoring model of analysis of variance (ANOVA) as a content domain. The research study is to examine students’ learning in both semantic and performance aspects at fine grain level. The ANOVA score model, y = α+ βx1 + γx1+ ε, as a cognitive task to collect data during the student learning process. When the learning processes were decomposed into multiple steps in both semantic and performance aspects, a hierarchical Bayesian network was established. This is a theory-driven process. The hierarchical structure was gained based on qualitative cognitive analysis. The data from students’ ANOVA score model learning was used to give evidence to the hierarchical Bayesian network model from the evidential variables. Finally, the assessment results of students’ ANOVA score model learning were reported. Briefly, this was a mixed method research design applied to statistics learning assessment. The mixed methods designs expanded more possibilities for researchers to establish advanced quantitative models initially with a theory-driven qualitative mode.

Keywords: exploratory sequential design, ANOVA score model, Bayesian network model, mixed methods research design, cognitive analysis

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Authors: Anne Lehner, Mostafa Salari Rad, Jeremy Ginges

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Many of life’s privileges (and burdens) are thrust on us at birth. Someone born white or male in the United States is also born with a set of advantages over someone born non-white or female. One aspect of privileges conferred by birth is that they are so entrenched in social institutions and social norms that until they are robustly challenged, they can be seen as a moral good. While American society increasingly confronts privileges based on gender and race, other types of privileges, like one's nationality, see less attention. The nationality one is born into can have enormous effects on one’s personal life, work opportunities, and health outcomes. Yet, we predicted that although most Americans would regard it as absurd to think that white people have a right to protect their privileges and 'way of life', they would regard it as obvious that Americans have a right to protect the American way of life and associated privileges. In a preregistered study we presented 300 Americans randomly with one out of three 'privilege scales' in order to assess their agreement with certain statements. The domains for the privilege scales were nationality, race, and gender. Next, all participants completed the switched-at-birth task assessing ones tendency to essentialize nationality. We found that Americans are more approving of privilege based on nationality than of privilege based on gender and race. In addition, we found an interaction of condition with ideology, showing that conservatives are in general more approving of the privilege of any kind than liberals are, and they especially approve of privilege based on nationality. For the switched-at-birth task, we found that both, liberals as well as conservatives are equally willing to grant the child 100% American nationality. Whether or not one chose 100% is unrelated to the expressed approval of privilege based on nationality. One might hesitate to fully grant the child 100% American nationality in the task, yet disapprove of privilege based on nationality. This shows that as much as we see beholders of privilege being oblivious to their statuses within other social categories, like gender or race, we seem to detect the same blindness for the privilege based on nationality. Liberals showing relatively fewer support for privilege based on nationality compared to conservatives still refused to acknowledge the child as having become 100% American and thereby denying the privileges it potentially bestows upon them.

Keywords: thought experiment, anti-immigrant attitudes, privilege of nationality, immigration, moral circles, psychology

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Authors: Terry Teo, Sun Woh Lye, Yufei Li, Zainuddin Zakaria

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Wearable devices such as Electroencephalography (EEG) hold immense potential in the monitoring and assessment of a person’s task engagement. This is especially so in remote or online sites. Research into its use in measuring an individual's cognitive state while performing task activities is therefore expected to increase. Despite the growing number of EEG research into brain functioning activities of a person, key challenges remain in adopting EEG for real-time operations. These include limited portability, long preparation time, high number of channel dimensionality, intrusiveness, as well as level of accuracy in acquiring neurological data. This paper proposes an approach using a 4-6 EEG channels to determine the cognitive states of a subject when undertaking a set of passive and active monitoring tasks of a subject. Air traffic controller (ATC) dynamic-tasks are used as a proxy. The work found that when using the channel reduction and identifier algorithm, good trend adherence of 89.1% can be obtained between a commercially available BCI 14 channel Emotiv EPOC+ EEG headset and that of a carefully selected set of reduced 4-6 channels. The approach can also identify different levels of engagement activities ranging from general monitoring ad hoc and repeated active monitoring activities involving information search, extraction, and memory activities.

Keywords: assessment, neurophysiology, monitoring, EEG

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Authors: Germán Gálvez-García, Marta Lavin, Javiera Peña, Javier Albayay, Claudio Bascour, Jesus Fernandez-Gomez, Alicia Pérez-Gálvez

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We studied the effectiveness of response inhibition in movements with different degrees of motor complexity when they were executed in isolation and alternately. Sixteen participants performed the Stroop task which was used as a measure of response inhibition. Participants responded by lifting the index finger and reaching the screen with the same finger. Both actions were performed separately and alternately in different experimental blocks. Repeated measures ANOVAs were used to compare reaction time, movement time, kinematic errors and Movement errors across conditions (experimental block, movement, and congruency). Delta plots were constructed to perform distributional analyses of response inhibition and accuracy rate. The effectiveness of response inhibition did not show difference when the movements were performed in separated blocks. Nevertheless, it showed differences when they were performed alternately in the same experimental block, being more effective for the lifting action. This could be due to a competition of the available resources during a more complex scenario which also demands to adopt some strategy to avoid errors.

Keywords: response inhibition, motor complexity, Stroop task, delta plots

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Authors: Heng Chia Ying, Charmaine Tan Chai Nie, Burra Venkata Durga Kumar

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Process scheduling is the method of process management that determines which process the CPU will proceed with for the next task and how long it takes. Some issues were found in process management, particularly for Priority Scheduling (PS) and Round Robin Scheduling (RR). The proposed recommendations made for IPRRS are to combine the strengths of both into a combining algorithm while they draw on others to compensate for each weakness. A significant improvement on the combining technique of scheduler, Incorporating Priority Round-Robin Scheduler (IPRRS) address an algorithm for both high and low priority task to sustain the indefinite blocking issue faced in the priority scheduling algorithm and minimize the average turnaround time (ATT) and average waiting time (AWT) in RR scheduling algorithm. This paper will delve into the simple rules introduced by IPRRS and enhancements that both PS and RR bring to the execution of processes in the operating system. Furthermore, it incorporates the best aspects of each algorithm to build the optimum algorithm for a certain case in terms of prioritized processes, ATT, and AWT.

Keywords: round Robin scheduling, priority scheduling, indefinite blocking, process management, sustain, turnaround time

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Authors: Divya Agarwal, Pushpendra S. Bharti

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Autonomous mobile robots (AMR) are expected as smart tools for operations in every automation industry. Path planning and obstacle avoidance is the backbone of AMR as robots have to reach their goal location avoiding obstacles while traversing through optimized path defined according to some criteria such as distance, time or energy. Path planning can be classified into global and local path planning where environmental information is known and unknown/partially known, respectively. A number of sensors are used for data collection. A number of algorithms such as artificial potential field (APF), rapidly exploring random trees (RRT), bidirectional RRT, Fuzzy approach, Purepursuit, A* algorithm, vector field histogram (VFH) and modified local path planning algorithm, etc. have been used in the last three decades for path planning and obstacle avoidance for AMR. This paper makes an attempt to review some of the path planning and obstacle avoidance algorithms used in the field of AMR. The review includes comparative analysis of simulation and mathematical computations of path planning and obstacle avoidance algorithms using MATLAB 2018a. From the review, it could be concluded that different algorithms may complete the same task (i.e. with a different set of instructions) in less or more time, space, effort, etc.

Keywords: path planning, obstacle avoidance, autonomous mobile robots, algorithms

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Authors: Hala Zaghloul, Taymoor Nazmy

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One of the great challenges of the 21st century is to build a robot that can perceive and act within its environment and communicate with people, while also exhibiting the cognitive capabilities that lead to performance like that of people. The Pulse Coupled Neural Network, PCNN, is a relative new ANN model that derived from a neural mammal model with a great potential in the area of image processing as well as target recognition, feature extraction, speech recognition, combinatorial optimization, compressed encoding. PCNN has unique feature among other types of neural network, which make it a candid to be an important approach for perceiving in cognitive systems. This work show and emphasis on the potentials of PCNN to perform different tasks related to image processing. The main drawback or the obstacle that prevent the direct implementation of such technique, is the need to find away to control the PCNN parameters toward perform a specific task. This paper will evaluate the performance of PCNN standard model for processing images with different properties, and select the important parameters that give a significant result, also, the approaches towards find a way for the adaptation of the PCNN parameters to perform a specific task.

Keywords: cognitive system, image processing, segmentation, PCNN kernels

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Authors: Fu-Chien Hung, Chi‐Wen Liang

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Background: People who suffer from chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) frequently complain about continuous tiredness, weakness or lack of strength, but without apparent organic etiology. The prevalence rate of the CFS is nearly from 3% to 20%, yet more than 80% go undiagnosed or misdiagnosed as depression. The biopsychosocial model has suggested the associations among the CFS, depressive syndrome, and stress. This study aimed to investigate the difference between individuals with the CFS and with the depressive syndrome on psychophysiological responses under stress. Method: There were 23 participants in the CFS group, 14 participants in the depression group, and 23 participants in the healthy control group. All of the participants first completed the measures of demographic data, CFS-related symptoms, daily life functioning, and depressive symptoms. The participants were then asked to perform a stressful cognitive task. The participants’ psychophysiological responses including the HR, BVP and SC were measured during the task. These indexes were used to assess the reactivity and recovery rates of the automatic nervous system. Results: The stress reactivity of the CFS and depression groups was not different from that of the healthy control group. However, the stress recovery rate of the CFS group was worse than that of the healthy control group. Conclusion: The results from this study suggest that the CFS is a syndrome which can be independent from the depressive syndrome, although the depressive syndrome may include fatigue syndrome.

Keywords: chronic fatigue syndrome, depression, stress response, misdiagnosis

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Authors: Diane Prorak, Perri Moreno

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University students may have been born in the digital age, but they need to be taught the critical thinking skills to detect misinformation and social media manipulation online. In recent years, librarians have been active in designing instructional methods to help students learn information evaluation skills. At the University of Idaho Library (USA), librarians have developed new teaching methods for these skills. Last academic year, when classes were taught via Zoom, librarians taught these skills to an online session of each first-year rhetoric and composition course. In the Zoom sessions, students were placed in breakout groups where they practiced using an evaluation method known as lateral reading. Online collaborative software was used to give each group an evaluative task and break the task into steps. Groups reported back to the full class. Students learned to look at an information source, then search outside the source to find information about the organization, publisher or author, before evaluating the source itself. Class level pre-and post-test comparison results showed students learned better techniques for evaluation than they knew before instruction.

Keywords: critical thinking, information evaluation, information literacy instruction, lateral reading.

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Authors: Srushti Bhatt, M. B. Kiran

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Two-sided assembly line balancing problem is yet to be addressed simply to compete for the global market for manufacturers. The task assigned in an ordered sequence to get optimum performance of the system is known as assembly line balancing problem mainly classified as single and two sided. It is very challenging in manufacturing industries to balance two-sided assembly line, wherein the set of sequential workstations the task operations are performed in two sides of the line. The conflicting major objective in two-sided assembly line balancing problem is either to maximize /minimize the performance parameters. The present study emphases on combining different evolutionary algorithm; ant colony, Tabu search and petri net method; and compares their results of an algorithm for solving two-sided assembly line balancing problem. The concept of multi objective optimization of performance parameters is now a day adopted to make a decision involving more than one objective function to be simultaneously optimized. The optimum result can be expected among the selected methods using multi-objective optimization. The performance parameters considered in the present study are a number of workstation, slickness and smoothness index. The simulation of the assembly line balancing problem provides optimal results of classical and practical problems.

Keywords: Ant colony, petri net, tabu search, two sided ALBP

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Authors: Anes Enakoa, Yawei Liang

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Question Answering (QA) system is one of the most important and demanding tasks in the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP). In QA systems, the answer generation task generates a list of candidate answers to the user's question, in which only one answer is correct. Answer selection is one of the main components of the QA, which is concerned with selecting the best answer choice from the candidate answers suggested by the system. However, the selection process can be very challenging especially in Arabic due to its particularities. To address this challenge, an approach is proposed to answer questions with multiple answer choices for Arabic QA systems based on Textual Entailment (TE) recognition. The developed approach employs a Support Vector Machine that considers lexical, semantic and syntactic features in order to recognize the entailment between the generated hypotheses (H) and the text (T). A set of experiments has been conducted for performance evaluation and the overall performance of the proposed method reached an accuracy of 67.5% with C@1 score of 80.46%. The obtained results are promising and demonstrate that the proposed method is effective for TE recognition task.

Keywords: information retrieval, machine learning, natural language processing, question answering, textual entailment

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Authors: Xiang Shijie, Zhou Dong, Tian Dan

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Speaker recognition is a crucial task in the field of speech processing, aimed at identifying individuals based on their vocal characteristics. However, existing speaker recognition methods face numerous challenges. Traditional methods primarily rely on audio signals, which often suffer from limitations in noisy environments, variations in speaking style, and insufficient sample sizes. Additionally, relying solely on audio features can sometimes fail to capture the unique identity of the speaker comprehensively, impacting recognition accuracy. To address these issues, we propose a multi-modal network architecture that simultaneously processes both audio and text signals. By gradually integrating audio and text features, we leverage the strengths of both modalities to enhance the robustness and accuracy of speaker recognition. Our experiments demonstrate significant improvements with this multi-modal approach, particularly in complex environments, where recognition performance has been notably enhanced. Our research not only highlights the limitations of current speaker recognition methods but also showcases the effectiveness of multi-modal fusion techniques in overcoming these limitations, providing valuable insights for future research.

Keywords: feature fusion, memory network, multimodal input, speaker recognition

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Authors: Youru Zhou

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This paper seeks to unveil the quality assurance practices in the Chinese translation industry. Since China’s reform and opening up, the Chinese language service industry has enjoyed impressively rapid growth. However, while still in its early stage of professionalization, the Chinese translation industry is also facing many challenges, such as the lack of clear admission requirements, a powerful regulation authority and a great number of qualified professionals. ‘How quality is assured’ means a great deal to translation in China at this stage. In order to examine the mechanisms in which quality is assured, this paper studied four international and national standards that have gained widespread adoption by Chinese translation companies and examined the content that is relevant to translation quality assurance. Case studies with six selected Chinese translation companies of different sizes were conducted to confirm and exemplify the descriptions on the standards. It has been found that quality in the industry is a relative concept which is mainly determined by the demand of clients. Furthermore, the procedures of translation can vary from task to task dependent on the agreement made between the service provider and clients. Finally, there are companies relying on expert-oriented mechanisms to assure the quality of translation, while other companies and standards insist on process-oriented ones.

Keywords: case study, Chinese translation industry, professional practice, translation quality assurance, translation standards

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Authors: Sarah Mhae Diaz, Erika Anna De Leon, Jacklin Alwil Cartagena, Geordan Caruncong, Micah Riezl Gonzales

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This study examined the intervention of threat and surveillance on the obedience of 100 preschool children through a task variable experiment replicated from the previous studies of Higbee (1979), and Chua, J., Chua, M., & Pico (1983). Nowadays, obedience among Filipino children to authority is disregarded since they are more outspoken and rebel due to social influences. With this, aside from corporal punishment, threat and surveillance became a mean of inducing obedience. Threat, according to the Dissonance Theory, can give attitudinal change. On the other hand, surveillance, according to the Theory of Social Facilitation, can either contribute to the completion or failure to do a task. Through a 2x2 factorial design, results show; (1) threat (F(1,96) = 12.487, p < 0.05) and (2) surveillance (F(1,96)=9.942, p<.05) had a significant main effect on obedience, suggesting that the Dissonance Theory and Theory of Social Facilitation is respectively true in the study. On the other hand, (3) no interaction (F(1,96)=1.303, p > .05) was seen since threat and surveillance both have a main effect that could be positive or negative, or could be because of their complementary property as supported by the post-hoc results. Also, (4) most effective commanding style is threat and surveillance setting (M = 30.04, SD = 7.971) due to the significant main effect of the two variables. With this, in the Filipino Setting, threat and surveillance has proven to be a very effective strategy to discipline and induce obedience from a child.

Keywords: experimental study, obedience, preschool children, surveillance, threat

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Authors: M. Nakisa, A. Maimun, Yasser M. Ahmed, F. Behrouzi, A. Tarmizi

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The practical application of the Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD), for predicting the flow pattern around Multipurpose Amphibious Vehicle (MAV) hull has made much progress over the last decade. Today, several of the CFD tools play an important role in the land and water going vehicle hull form design. CFD has been used for analysis of MAV hull resistance, sea-keeping, maneuvering and investigating its variation when changing the hull form due to varying its parameters, which represents a very important task in the principal and final design stages. Resistance analysis based on CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) simulation has become a decisive factor in the development of new, economically efficient and environmentally friendly hull forms. Three-dimensional finite volume method (FVM) based on Reynolds Averaged Navier-Stokes equations (RANS) has been used to simulate incompressible flow around three types of MAV hull bow models in steady-state condition. Finally, the flow structure and streamlines, friction and pressure resistance and velocity contours of each type of hull bow will be compared and discussed.

Keywords: RANS simulation, multipurpose amphibious vehicle, viscous flow structure, mechatronic

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Authors: John McDowall, Crysta Derham

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Broaden and build theory of emotion describes how experiencing positive emotions, such as happiness, broadens our ‘thought-action repertoire’ leading us to be more likely to go out and act on our positive emotions. This results in the building of new relationships, resources and skills, which we can draw on in times of need throughout life. In contrast, the experience of negative emotion is thought to narrow our ‘thought-action repertoire’, leading to specific actions to aid in survival. Three experiments aimed to explore the effect of briefly presented schematic faces (happy, sad, and neutral) on attentional scope using the flanker task. Based on the broaden and build theory it was hypothesised that there would be an increase in reaction time in trials primed with a happy face due to a broadening of attention, leading to increased flanker interference. A decrease in reaction time was predicted for trials primed with a sad face, due to a narrowing of attention leading to less flanker interference. Results lended partial support to the broaden and build hypothesis, with reaction times being slower following happy primes in incongruent flanker trials. Recent research is discussed in regards to potential mediators of the relationship between emotion and attention.

Keywords: emotion, attention, broaden and build, flanker task

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Authors: Szymon Rutkowski, Tomasz Korbak

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We present a reinforcement-learning-based method of training neural machine translation models without parallel corpora. The standard encoder-decoder approach to machine translation suffers from two problems we aim to address. First, it needs parallel corpora, which are scarce, especially for low-resource languages. Second, it lacks psychological plausibility of learning procedure: learning a foreign language is about learning to communicate useful information, not merely learning to transduce from one language’s 'encoding' to another. We instead pose the problem of learning to translate as learning a policy in a communication game between two agents: the translator and the classifier. The classifier is trained beforehand on a natural language inference task (determining the entailment relation between a premise and a hypothesis) in the target language. The translator produces a sequence of actions that correspond to generating translations of both the hypothesis and premise, which are then passed to the classifier. The translator is rewarded for classifier’s performance on determining entailment between sentences translated by the translator to disciple’s native language. Translator’s performance thus reflects its ability to communicate useful information to the classifier. In effect, we train a machine translation model without the need for parallel corpora altogether. While similar reinforcement learning formulations for zero-shot translation were proposed before, there is a number of improvements we introduce. While prior research aimed at grounding the translation task in the physical world by evaluating agents on an image captioning task, we found that using a linguistic task is more sample-efficient. Natural language inference (also known as recognizing textual entailment) captures semantic properties of sentence pairs that are poorly correlated with semantic similarity, thus enforcing basic understanding of the role played by compositionality. It has been shown that models trained recognizing textual entailment produce high-quality general-purpose sentence embeddings transferrable to other tasks. We use stanford natural language inference (SNLI) dataset as well as its analogous datasets for French (XNLI) and Polish (CDSCorpus). Textual entailment corpora can be obtained relatively easily for any language, which makes our approach more extensible to low-resource languages than traditional approaches based on parallel corpora. We evaluated a number of reinforcement learning algorithms (including policy gradients and actor-critic) to solve the problem of translator’s policy optimization and found that our attempts yield some promising improvements over previous approaches to reinforcement-learning based zero-shot machine translation.

Keywords: agent-based language learning, low-resource translation, natural language inference, neural machine translation, reinforcement learning

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Authors: Kyung-Jin You, Kiwon Rhee, Marc H. Schieber, Nitish V. Thakor, Hyun-Chool Shin

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It remains unknown whether M1 neurons encode multi-finger movements independently or as a certain neural network of single finger movements although multi-finger movements are physically a combination of single finger movements. We present an evidence of correlation between single and multi-finger movements and also attempt a challenging task of semi-blind decoding of neural data with minimum training of the neural decoder. Data were collected from 115 task-related neurons in M1 of a trained rhesus monkey performing flexion and extension of each finger and the wrist (12 single and 6 two-finger-movements). By exploiting correlation of temporal firing pattern between movements, we found that correlation coefficient for physically related movements pairs is greater than others; neurons tuned to single finger movements increased their firing rate when multi-finger commands were instructed. According to this knowledge, neural semi-blind decoding is done by choosing the greatest and the second greatest likelihood for canonical candidates. We achieved a decoding accuracy about 60% for multiple finger movement without corresponding training data set. this results suggest that only with the neural activities on single finger movements can be exploited to control dexterous multi-fingered neuroprosthetics.

Keywords: finger movement, neural activity, blind decoding, M1

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Authors: K. Biswas, U. H. Armin, S. M. J. Prodhan, J. A. Prithul, S. Sarker, F. Afrin

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Alzheimer’s disease (AD) (a progressive neurodegenerative disorder) is mostly predominant cause of dementia in the elderly. Prolonging the function of acetylcholine by inhibiting both acetylcholinesterase and butyrylcholinesterase is most effective treatment therapy of AD. Traditionally Pterocarpus santalinus L. is widely known for its medicinal use. In this study, in vitro acetylcholinesterase inhibitory activity was investigated and methanolic extract of the plant showed significant activity. To confirm this activity (in vivo), learning and memory enhancing effects were tested in mice. For the test, memory impairment was induced by scopolamine (cholinergic muscarinic receptor antagonist). Anti-amnesic effect of the extract was investigated by the passive avoidance task in mice. The study also includes brain acetylcholinesterase activity. Results proved that scopolamine induced cognitive dysfunction was significantly decreased by administration of the extract solution, in the passive avoidance task and inhibited brain acetylcholinesterase activity. These results suggest that bark extract of Pterocarpus santalinus can be better option for further studies on AD via their acetylcholinesterase inhibitory actions.

Keywords: Pterocarpus santalinus, cholinesterase inhibitor, passive avoidance, Alzheimer’s disease

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Authors: Jorge Martinez-Garcia, Ingrid Stelzner, Joerg Stelzner, Damian Gwerder, Philipp Schuetz

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Tree-ring analysis is an important part of the quality assessment and the dating of (archaeological) wood samples. It provides quantitative data about the whole anatomical ring structure, which can be used, for example, to measure the impact of the fluctuating environment on the tree growth, for the dendrochronological analysis of archaeological wooden artefacts and to estimate the wood mechanical properties. Despite advances in computer vision and edge recognition algorithms, detection and counting of annual rings are still limited to 2D datasets and performed in most cases manually, which is a time consuming, tedious task and depends strongly on the operator’s experience. This work presents an image processing approach to detect the whole 3D tree-ring structure directly from X-ray computed tomography imaging data. The approach relies on a modified Canny edge detection algorithm, which captures fully connected tree-ring edges throughout the measured image stack and is validated on X-ray computed tomography data taken from six wood species.

Keywords: ring recognition, edge detection, X-ray computed tomography, dendrochronology

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Authors: Nurah Saleh Alfares

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An aim of TS in EFL is to help learners to understand how they learn, which could help them in using the target language with other learners in language classrooms, and in their social life. The early researchers have criticised the system of teaching methods in EFL applied in Saudi schools, as they claim that it does not produce students who are highly proficient in English. Some of them suggested that enhancing learners’ TS would help to improve the learners’ proficiency of using the EFL. The textbook in Saudi schools is the central material for teachers to follow in the EFL classroom. Thus, this study is investigating the main issues that could promote TS in Saudi EFL: the textbook and the teachers. The purposes of the study are: to find out the extent to which the tasks in the textbook have the potential to support teachers in promoting TS; to discover insights into the nature of classroom activities that teachers use to encourage TS from the textbook and to explore the teachers’ views on the role of the textbook in promoting TS in the English language. These aims will improve understanding of the connection between the potential of the textbook content and the participants’ theoretical knowledge and their teaching practice. The investigation employed research techniques including the following: (1) analysis of the textbook; (2) questionnaire for EFL teachers; (3) observation for EFL classroom; (4) interviews with EFL teachers. Analysis of the third intermediate grade textbook has been undertaken, and six EFL teachers from five intermediate schools were involved in the study. Data analysis revealed that 36.71 % of the tasks in the textbook could have the potential to promote TS, and 63.29 % of the tasks in the textbook could not have the potential to promote TS. Therefore, the result of the textbook analysis showed that the majority of the tasks do not have the potential to help teachers to promote TS. Although not all teachers of the observed lessons displayed behaviour helpful to promote TS, teachers, who presented potential TS tasks in their lesson encouraged learners’ interaction and students’ engagement more than teachers who presented tasks that did not have the potential to promote TS. Therefore, the result of the teachers’ data showed that having a textbook that has the potential to promote TS is not enough to develop teaching TS in Saudi EFL since teachers’ behaviour could make the task more or less productive.

Keywords: English as a Foreign Language, metacognitive skills, textbook, thinking skills

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Authors: Carla Ferreira, Helena Barros

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The paper termed “Design of reinforced concrete with Eurocode 2” presents the theory regarding the design of reinforced concrete sections and the development of the tables and abacuses to verify the concrete section to the ultimate limit and service limit states. This paper is a complement of it, showing how to use the previous tools. Different numerical results are shown, proving the capability of the methodology. When a section of a beam is already chosen, the computer program presents the reinforcing steel in many locations along the structure, and it is the engineer´s task to choose the layout available for the construction, considering the maximum regular kind of reinforcing bars. There are many computer programs available for this task, but the interest of the present kind of tools is the fast and easy way of making the design and choose the optimal solution. Another application of these design tools is in the definition of the section dimensions, in a way that when stresses are evaluated, the final design is acceptable. In the design offices, these are considered by the engineers a very quick and useful way of designing reinforced concrete sections, employing variable strength concrete and higher steel classes. Examples of nonlinear analyses and redistribution of the bending moment will be considered, according to the Eurocode 2 recommendations, for sections under bending moment and axial forces. Examples of the evaluation of the service limit state will be presented.

Keywords: design examples, eurocode 2, reinforced concrete, section design

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Authors: Tian Zhang

Abstract:

Unsupervised object segmentation aims at segmenting objects in sequential images and obtaining the mask of each object without any manual intervention. Unsupervised segmentation remains a challenging task due to the lack of prior knowledge about these objects. Previous methods often require manually specifying the action of each object, which is often difficult to obtain. Instead, this paper does not need action information of objects and automatically learns the actions and relations among objects from the structured environment. To obtain the object segmentation of sequential images, the relationships between objects and images are extracted to infer the action and interaction of objects based on the multi-head attention mechanism. Three types of objects’ relationships in the object segmentation task are proposed: the relationship between objects in the same frame, the relationship between objects in two frames, and the relationship between objects and historical information. Based on these relationships, the proposed model (1) is effective in multiple objects segmentation tasks, (2) just needs images as input, and (3) produces better segmentation results as more relationships are considered. The experimental results on multiple datasets show that this paper’s method achieves state-of-art performance. The quantitative and qualitative analyses of the result are conducted. The proposed method could be easily extended to other similar applications.

Keywords: unsupervised object segmentation, attention mechanism, contrastive learning, structured environment

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Authors: Itumeleng Phage

Abstract:

Students’ comprehension of graphs may be affected by the characteristics of the discipline in which the graph is used, the type of the task as well as the background of the students who are the readers or interpreters of the graph. This research study investigated these aspects of the graph comprehension of 152 first-year undergraduate physics students by comparing their responses to corresponding tasks in the mathematics and physics disciplines. The discipline characteristics were analysed for four task-related constructs namely coordinates, representations, area and slope. Students’ responses to corresponding visual decoding and judgement tasks set in mathematics and kinematics contexts were statistically compared. The effects of the participants’ gender, year of school completion and study course were determined as reader characteristics. The results of the empirical study indicated that participants generally transferred their mathematics knowledge on coordinates and representation of straight line graphs to the physics contexts, but not in the cases of parabolic and hyperbolic functions or area under graphs. Insufficient understanding of the slope concept contributed to weak performances on this construct in both mathematics and physics contexts. Discipline characteristics seem to play a vital role in students’ understanding, while reader characteristics had insignificant to medium effects on their responses.

Keywords: kinematics graph, discipline characteristics, constructs, coordinates, representations, area and slope

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Authors: Jalil Boudjadar

Abstract:

Dynamic Voltage and Frequency Scaling (DVFS) multicore platforms are promising execution platforms that enable high computational performance, less energy consumption and flexibility in scheduling the system processes. However, the resulting interleaving and memory interference together with per-core frequency tuning make real-time guarantees hard to be delivered. Besides, energy consumption represents a strong constraint for the deployment of such systems on energy-limited settings. Identifying the system configurations that would achieve a high performance and consume less energy while guaranteeing the system schedulability is a complex task in the design of modern embedded systems. This work studies the trade-off between energy consumption, cores utilization and memory bottleneck and their impact on the schedulability of DVFS multicore time-critical systems with a hierarchy of shared memories. We build a model-based framework using Parametrized Timed Automata of UPPAAL to analyze the mutual impact of performance, energy consumption and schedulability of DVFS multicore systems, and demonstrate the trade-off on an actual case study.

Keywords: time-critical systems, multicore systems, schedulability analysis, energy consumption, performance analysis

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Authors: Sonda Jallouli, Omar Hammouda, Imen Ben Dhia, Salma Sakka, Chokri Mhiri, Mohamed Habib Elleuch, Abedlmoneem Yahia, Sameh Ghroubi

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Multiple sclerosis (MS) is characterized by gender differences with affecting women two to four times more than men, but the disease progression is faster and more severe in men. Fatigue represents one of the most frequent and disabling symptoms related to MS. Results of previous studies regarding gender differences in fatigue perception in MS persons are contradictory. Besides, fatigue has been shown to affect negatively postural balance and functional mobility in MS persons. However, no study has taken into account gender differences in the response of these physical parameters to a fatiguing protocol in MS persons. Given the reduction of autonomy due to the alteration of these parameters induced by fatigue and the importance of gender differences in postural balance training programs in fatigued men and women with MS, the aim of this study was to investigate the effect of gender difference on unipedal postural balance and functional mobility after performing a fatiguing task in MS adults. Methods: Eleven women (30.29 ± 7.99 years) and seven men (30.91 ± 8.19 years) with relapsing-remitting MS performed a fatiguing protocol: three sets of the 5×sit to stand test (5-STST), six-minute walk test (6MWT) followed by three sets of the 5-STST. Unipedal balance, functional mobility, and fatigue perception were measured prefatigue (T0) and post fatigue (T3) using a clinical unipedal balance test, timed up and go test (TUGT), and analogic visual scale of fatigue (VASF), respectively. Heart rate (HR) and rate of perceived exertion (RPE) were recorded before, during and after the fatiguing task. Results: Compared to women, men showed an impairment of unipedal balance on the dominant leg (p<0.001, d=0.52) and mobility (p<0.001, d=3) via reducing unipedal stance time and increasing duration of TUGT execution, respectively. No gender differences were observed in 6MWT, 5-STST, HR, RPE and VASF scores. Conclusion: Fatiguing protocol negatively affected unipedal postural balance and mobility only in men. These gender differences were inconclusive but can be taken into account in postural balance rehabilitation programs for persons with MS.

Keywords: functional mobility, fatiguing exercises, multiple sclerosis, sex differences, unipedal balance

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Authors: Lana Burmistrova

Abstract:

Introduction: The influence of visual impairments on several cognitive processes used in the music learning process is an increasingly important area in special education and cognitive musicology. Many children have several visual impairments due to the refractive errors and irreversible inhibitors. However, based on the compensatory neuroplasticity and functional reorganization, congenitally blind (CB) and early blind (EB) individuals use several areas of the occipital lobe to perceive and process auditory and tactile information. CB individuals have greater memory capacity, memory reliability, and less false memory mechanisms are used while executing several tasks, they have better working memory (WM) and short-term memory (STM). Blind individuals use several strategies while executing tactile and working memory n-back tasks: verbalization strategy (mental recall), tactile strategy (tactile recall) and combined strategies. Methods and design: The aim of the pilot study was to substantiate similar tendencies while executing attention, memory and combined auditory tasks in blind and sighted individuals constructed for this study, and to investigate attention, memory and combined mechanisms used in the music learning process. For this study eight (n=8) blind and eight (n=8) sighted individuals aged 13-20 were chosen. All respondents had more than five years music performance and music learning experience. In the attention task, all respondents had to identify pitch changes in tonal and randomized melodic pairs. The memory task was based on the mismatch negativity (MMN) proportion theory: 80 percent standard (not changed) and 20 percent deviant (changed) stimuli (sequences). Every sequence was named (na-na, ra-ra, za-za) and several items (pencil, spoon, tealight) were assigned for each sequence. Respondents had to recall the sequences, to associate them with the item and to detect possible changes. While executing the combined task, all respondents had to focus attention on the pitch changes and had to detect and describe these during the recall. Results and conclusion: The results support specific features in CB and EB, and similarities between late blind (LB) and sighted individuals. While executing attention and memory tasks, it was possible to observe the tendency in CB and EB by using more precise execution tactics and usage of more advanced periodic memory, while focusing on auditory and tactile stimuli. While executing memory and combined tasks, CB and EB individuals used passive working memory to recall standard sequences, active working memory to recall deviant sequences and combined strategies. Based on the observation results, assessment of blind respondents and recording specifics, following attention and memory correlations were identified: reflective attention and STM, reflective attention and periodic memory, auditory attention and WM, tactile attention and WM, auditory tactile attention and STM. The results and the summary of findings highlight the attention and memory features used in the music learning process in the context of blindness, and the tendency of the several attention and memory types correlated based on the task, strategy and individual features.

Keywords: attention, blindness, memory, music learning, strategy

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