Resources designed and used in statistics education in Bachelor of Technology courses in France

The French education system has numerous higher education institutions with various specializations. IUTs, established in the late 1960s, provide specific training. These schools offer three-year, practice-oriented education that enables students to work or pursue a master's degree. They are widely accessible and popular, even in small towns, and offer 24 nationally defined curricula in two areas: science and management. The teaching of statistics in IUTs is unique since it is present in almost all specialties. Studying the teaching and learning of statistics in IUTs enables us to comprehend didactic phenomena in a teaching system that has been established for a long time throughout the country and is a privileged field for meeting teachers whose activity has been tried and tested and is part of a continuum. This research explores the factors that influence the format and nature of the resources designed and utilized in these lessons, how they are integrated into teaching, and what functions they serve. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with seven mathematics teachers responsible for statistics courses. Often coming from secondary education, these teachers had to adjust the content taught to the objectives and teaching situations typical of French higher education

Fairness in automated data journalism systems

Automated data journalism is an application of computing and artificial intelligence (AI) that aims to create stories from raw data, possibly in a variety of formats (such as visuals or text). Conventionally, a variety of methodologies and tools, including statistical software packages and data visualization tools have been used to generate stories from raw data. Artificial intelligence, and particularly machine learning techniques have recently been introduced because they can handle more complex data and scale more easily to larger datasets. However, AI techniques may raise a number of ethical concerns such as an unfair presentation which typically occurs due to bias. Stories that contains unfair presentation could be destructive at individual and societal levels; they could also damage the reputation of news providers. In this paper we study an existing framework of automated journalism and enhance the framework to make it aware of fairness concern. We present various steps of the framework where bias enters into the production of a story and address the causes and effects of different types of biases

Tower of Babel Bias: Is There More to Learn about Employee-Driven Digital Innovation?

With its origins in medical sciences, systematic literature reviews (SLRs) have gained popularity and widespread acceptance in a variety of disci-plines. The systematic processes ensure an exhaustive inclusion of all relevant material and strength of conclusions. Three approaches are known to improve the comprehensiveness of SLRs: 1) extending the search with snowballing of references and citations, 2) including “grey literature” (multi-vocal reviews), and 3) verifying the list of included studies with field experts. In this paper, we explore another strategy – inclusion of studies written in languages other than English, the usefulness of which is debated. Our goal is to understand whether the Tower of Babel Bias (exclusion of articles based on language) introduces important gaps in evidence. The results of multilingual extensions an existing SLR on employee-driven innovation that included articles written in Russian language show that the extension provides unique insights and perspectives not elucidated in the research published in English, namely the employee innovativeness. We conclude that multilingual literature reviews may be time-consuming endeavors with very limited return on the invested time but may as well result in enriching the understanding of the topic of interest from a unique perspective, especially with respect to regional peculiarities. Finally, we discuss the challenges related to performing a multilingual review

Prosessledelse og digitalisering

I denne artikkelen utforsker vi om det er en gjensidig sammenheng mellom prosessledelse og digitalisering. Prinsipielt handler prosessledelse om å ha kontroll med virksomhetens prosesser og forbedre dem ved behov, mens digitalisering handler om å utvikle og innføre digitale løsninger basert på moderne digital teknologi. I artikkelen drøfter vi om, og eventuelt på hvilken måte disse påvirker hverandre og om det sterke fokuset det er på digitalisering i dag har innvirkning på prosessledelse som fag. Og hvis digitalisering påvirker prosess- ledelse, vil dermed prosessledelse bli mer relevant som støtte til virksomheters digitaliseringsarbeid? For å undersøke dette henter vi inn erfaringer fra norske virksomheter gjennom en undersøkelse med 104 respondenter. Funnene bidrar til økt forståelse for forholdet mellom prosessledelse og digitalisering, og har implikasjoner for praksis og videre forskning

Recursos y enseñanza por indagación: El papel de los esquemas de los profesores de matemática en servicio

This research analyses the interaction of 62 in-service maths teachers with a resource called Study and Research Path (SRP). The SRP are resources developed to carry out inquiry-based teaching in the framework of Chevallard's anthropological theory of didactics. The aim of the work is to describe the teacher’s schemes in two situations: study and analyse the SRP and then organise a teaching plan. The schemes generated in each situation are described from the theory of conceptual fields and the instrumental approach, analysing the individual written responses of teachers to both situations. The work shows the diversity and richness of the instruments generated by teachers and allows us to understand their difficulties in developing inquiry-based teaching.Esta investigación analiza la interacción de 62 profesores de matemáticas en servicio con un recurso denominado Recorrido de estudio e investigación (REI). Los REI son recursos desarrollados para realizar enseñanza por indagación en el marco de la Teoría Antropológica de lo didáctico. El objetivo del trabajo es describir los esquemas de los docentes en dos situaciones: estudiar y analizar el REI y luego organizar una propuesta de enseñanza. Los diferentes esquemas generados en cada situación se describen a partir de la Teoría de los campos conceptuales y el enfoque instrumental, analizando las respuestas escritas individuales de los profesores a ambas situaciones. El trabajo muestra la diversidad y riqueza de los instrumentos generados por los docentes y permite comprender sus dificultades para desarrollar enseñanza por indagación

Blockchain Technology for Data Transparency in Digital Infrastructures

Blockchain is a new paradigm for data governance across organizations and has frequently been equated to an establisher of trust and to a facilitator of interoperability among parties. Blockchain can also contribute to achieve data transparency in digital infrastructures. This research proposal highlights the importance of data transparency in digital infrastructures, whilst also detailing the main properties of blockchain that can address the challenging aspects of data transparency as a step towards achieving a successful sustainability transition through digital infrastructures. We summarize our paper by proposing research agenda within this area and summarizing the main expected implications from this research

Explainable Visualization for Morphing Attack Detection

Detecting morphed face images has become critical for maintaining trust in automated facial biometric verification systems. It is well demonstrated that better biometric performance of the Face Recognition System (FRS) results in higher vulnerability to face morphing attacks. Morphing can be understood as a technique to combine two or more look-alike facial images corresponding to the attacker and an accomplice, who could apply for a valid passport by exploiting the accomplice’s identity. Morphing Attack Detection (MAD), with the help of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN), has demonstrated good performance in detecting morphed images. However, they lack transparency, and it is unclear how they differentiate between bona fide and morphed facial images. As a result, this phenomenon needs careful consideration for safety and security-related applications. This paper will explore Layer-wise Relevance Propagation (LRP) to determine the most relevant features. We fine-tune a VGG pre-trained network for face morphing attack detection and LRP is then used to investigate the decision-making processes to understand what input pixels take part in the attack detection. This paper shows that CNN considers only a small part of the image, usually around the eyes, nose, and mouth

Editorial, vol 15-1

Editorial for volume 15, issue

Automatic Detection and Fixing of Java XXE Vulnerabilities Using Static Source Code Analysis and Instance Tracking

Web security is an important part of any web-based software system. XML External Entity (XXE) attacks are one of web applications’ most significant security risks. A successful XXE attack can have severe consequences like Denial-of-Service (DoS), remote code execution, and information extraction. Many Java codes are vulnerable to XXE due to missing the proper setting of the parser’s security attributes after initializing the instance of the parser. To fix such vulnerabilities, we invented a novel instance tracking approach to detect Java XXE vulnerabilities and integrated the approach into a vulnerability detection plugin of Integrated Development Environment (IDE). We have also implemented auto-fixes for the identified XXE vulnerabilities by modifying the source code’s Abstract Syntax Tree (AST). The detection and auto-fixing approaches were evaluated using typical Java code vulnerable to XXE. The evaluation results showed that our detection approach provided 100% precision and recall in detecting the XXE vulnerabilities and correctly fixed 86% of the identified vulnerabilities

Fibonacci and digit–by–digit computation; An example of reverse engineering in computational mathematics

The Fibonacci numbers are familiar to all of us. They appear unexpectedly often in mathematics, so much there is an entire journal and a sequence of conferences dedicated to their study. However, there is also another sequence of numbers associated with Fibonacci. In The On- Line Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences, a sequence of numbers which is an approximation to the real root of the cubic polynomial. Fibonacci gave the first few numbers in the sequence in the manuscript Flos from around 1215. Fibonacci stated an error in the last number and based on this error we try, in this paper to reconstruct the method used by Fibonacci. Fibonacci gave no indication on how he determined the numbers and the problem of identifying possible methods was raised already the year after the first transcribed version of the manuscript was published in 1854. There are three possible methods available to Fibonacci to solve the cubic equation; two of the methods have been shown to give Fibonacci’s result. In this paper we show that also the third method gives the same result and we argue that this is the most likely method