Adaptive Comparative Judgement: A Tool to Support Students’ Assessment Literacy

Comparative judgment in assessment is a process whereby repeated comparison of two items (e.g., assessment answers) can allow an accurate ranking of all the submissions to be achieved. In adaptive comparative judgment (ACJ), technology is used to automate the process and present pairs of pieces of work over iterative cycles. An online ACJ system was used to present students with work prepared by a previous cohort at the same stage of their studies. Objective marks given to the work by experienced faculty were compared to the rankings given to the work by a cohort of veterinary students (n=154). Each student was required to review and judge 20 answers provided by the previous cohort to a free-text short answer question. The time that students spent on the judgment tasks was recorded, and students were asked to reflect on their experiences after engaging with the task. There was a strong positive correlation between student ranking and faculty marking. A weak positive correlation was found between the time students spent on the judgments and their performance on the part of their own examination that contained questions in the same format. Slightly less than half of the students agreed that the exercise was a good use of their time, but 78% agreed that they had learned from the process. Qualitative data highlighted different levels of benefit from the simplest aspect of learning more about the topic to an appreciation of the more generic lessons to be learned

An improved architecture for the adaptive discrete cosine transform

This paper presents a new approach to the efficient realisation of the discrete cosine transform for the specific case of interlaced image sequence coding. In such cases, the conventional approach of decomposing each frame or frame difference into 8×8 blocks is often no longer satisfactory and an adaptive architecture capable of processing either 8×8 or two 4×8 blocks is desirable. The approach described is based on the decomposition used by Madisetti, modified to maximise shared hardware resources and to exploit arithmetic redundancy using primitive operator methods. The resulting architecture is compared with alternative implementation options using an area-time metric with savings in excess of 50% having been observed

Can processes make relationships work? The Triple Helix between structure and action

This contribution seeks to explore how complex adaptive theory can be applied at the conceptual level to unpack Triple Helix models. We use two cases to examine this issue – the Finnish Strategic Centres for Science, Technology & Innovation (SHOKs) and the Canadian Business-led Networks of Centres of Excellence (BL-NCE). Both types of centres are organisational structures that aspire to be business-led, with a considerable portion of their activities driven by (industrial) users’ interests and requirements. Reflecting on the centres’ activities along three dimensions – knowledge generation, consensus building and innovation – we contend that conceptualising the Triple Helix from a process perspective will improve the dialogue between stakeholders and shareholders

Performance of the TSUNAMI (II) macrocellular field trial system using a dynamic interference source

The TSUNAMI (II) project has been an investigation into the application of adaptive antenna technology for use in future generation mobile communications systems. The key aims of the project were to investigate the complexity versus increase in system capacity and coverage extension that can be achieved over the existing, non-adaptive networks. May 1998 saw the completion of an 8 month field trial, covering both macrocellular and microcellular trials. These investigations were performed at the Orange Testbed in Bristol, U.K., using a modified DCS-1800 base station. In this paper are presented a subset of the macrocellular field trial results, obtained using spatial and temporal reference beamforming (TRB and SRB) in the presence of a moving, deliberate interference source. The results presented show the comparative performance of several selected adaptive antenna algorithms used by the TSUNAMI (II) testbed. The results of these trials demonstrate how the interference source and chosen algorithm's ability to track wanted to unwanted users influences the overall performance of the adaptive antenna base station (AA-BSS)

Structuring Decisions Under Deep Uncertainty

Innovative research on decision making under ‘deep uncertainty’ is underway in applied fields such as engineering and operational research, largely outside the view of normative theorists grounded in decision theory. Applied methods and tools for decision support under deep uncertainty go beyond standard decision theory in the attention that they give to the structuring of decisions. Decision structuring is an important part of a broader philosophy of managing uncertainty in decision making, and normative decision theorists can both learn from, and contribute to, the growing deep uncertainty decision support literature

What is the capability approach?: its core, rationale, partners and dangers

development theory; human development; quality of life; social values; freedom;

Studying Interaction Methodologies in Video Retrieval

So far, several approaches have been studied to bridge the problem of the Semantic Gap, the bottleneck in image and video retrieval. However, no approach is successful enough to increase retrieval performances significantly. One reason is the lack of understanding the user's interest, a major condition towards adapting results to a user. This is partly due to the lack of appropriate interfaces and the missing knowledge of how to interpret user's actions with these interfaces. In this paper, we propose to study the importance of various implicit indicators of relevance. Furthermore, we propose to investigate how this implicit feedback can be combined with static user profiles towards an adaptive video retrieval model