Interoperability in the OpenDreamKit Project: The Math-in-the-Middle Approach

OpenDreamKit --- "Open Digital Research Environment Toolkit for the Advancement of Mathematics" --- is an H2020 EU Research Infrastructure project that aims at supporting, over the period 2015--2019, the ecosystem of open-source mathematical software systems. From that, OpenDreamKit will deliver a flexible toolkit enabling research groups to set up Virtual Research Environments, customised to meet the varied needs of research projects in pure mathematics and applications. An important step in the OpenDreamKit endeavor is to foster the interoperability between a variety of systems, ranging from computer algebra systems over mathematical databases to front-ends. This is the mission of the integration work package (WP6). We report on experiments and future plans with the \emph{Math-in-the-Middle} approach. This information architecture consists in a central mathematical ontology that documents the domain and fixes a joint vocabulary, combined with specifications of the functionalities of the various systems. Interaction between systems can then be enriched by pivoting off this information architecture.Comment: 15 pages, 7 figure

The Blended Learning Unit, University of Hertfordshire: A Centre for Excellence in Teaching and Learning, Evaluation Report for HEFCE

The University of Hertfordshire’s Blended Learning Unit (BLU) was one of the 74 Centres for Excellence in Teaching and Learning (CETLs) funded by the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) between 2005 and 2010. This evaluation report follows HEFCE’s template. The first section provides statistical information about the BLU’s activity. The second section is an evaluative reflection responding to 13 questions. As well as articulating some of our achievements and the challenges we have faced, it also sets out how the BLU’s activity will continue and make a significant contribution to delivery of the University of Hertfordshire’s 2010-2015 strategic plan and its aspirations for a more sustainable future. At the University of Hertfordshire, we view Blended Learning as the use of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) to enhance the learning and learning experience of campus-based students. The University has an excellent learning technology infrastructure that includes its VLE, StudyNet. StudyNet gives students access to a range of tools, resources and support 24/7 from anywhere in the world and its robustness, flexibility and ease of use have been fundamental to the success of the Blended Learning agenda at Hertfordshire. The BLU has comprised a management team, expert teachers seconded from around the University, professional support and a Student Consultant. The secondment staffing model was essential to the success of the BLU. As well as enabling the BLU to become fully staffed within the first five months of the CETL initiative, it has facilitated access to an invaluable spectrum of Blended Learning, research and Change Management expertise to inform pedagogically sound developments and enable change to be embedded across the institution. The BLU used much of its capital funding to reduce barriers to the use of technology by, for example, providing laptop computers for all academic staff in the institution, enhancing classroom technology provision and wirelessly enabling all teaching accommodation. Its recurrent funding has supported development opportunities for its own staff and staff around the institution; supported evaluation activities relating to individual projects and of the BLU’s own impact; and supported a wide range of communication and dissemination activities internally and externally. The BLU has led the embedding a cultural change in relation to Blended Learning at the University of Hertfordshire and its impact will be sustained. The BLU has produced a rich legacy of resources for our own staff and for others in the sector. The University’s increased capacity in Blended Learning benefits all our students and provides a learning experience that is expected by the new generation of learners in the 21st century. The BLU’s staffing model and partnership ways of working have directly informed the structure and modus operandi of the University’s Learning and Teaching Institute (LTI). Indeed a BLU team will continue to operate within the LTI and help drive and support the implementation of the University’s 2010-2015 Strategic plan. The plan includes ambitions in relation to Distance Learning and Flexible learning and BLU will be working to enable greater engagement with students with less or no need to travel to the university. As well as opening new markets within the UK and overseas, even greater flexibility for students will also enable the University to reduce its carbon footprint and provide a multifaceted contribution to our sustainability agenda. We conclude this executive summary with a short paragraph, written by Eeva Leinonen, our former Deputy Vice-Chancellor, which reflects our aspiration to transform Learning and Teaching at the University of Hertfordshire and more widely in the sector. ‘As Deputy Vice Chancellor at Hertfordshire I had the privilege to experience closely the excellent work of the Blended Learning Unit, and was very proud of the enormous impact the CETL had not only across the University but also nationally and internationally. However, perhaps true impact is hard to judge at such close range, but now as Vice Principal (Education) at King's College London, I can unequivocally say that Hertfordshire is indeed considered as the leading Blended Learning university in the sector. My new colleagues at King's and other Russell Group Universities frequently seek my views on the 'Hertfordshire Blended Learning' experience and are keen to emulate the successes achieved at an institutional wide scale. The Hertfordshire CETL undoubtedly achieved not only what it set out to achieve, but much more in terms of scale and impact. All those involved in this success can be justifiably proud of their achievements.’ Professor Eeva Leinonen, Vice Principal (Education), King's College, Londo

Envisioning Futures of Design Education: An Exploratory Workshop with Design Educator

The demand for innovation in the creative economy has seen the adoption and adaptation of design thinking and design methods into domains outside design, such as business management, education, healthcare, and engineering. Design thinking and methodologies are now considered useful for identifying, framing and solving complex, often wicked social, technological, economic and public policy problems. As the practice of design undergoes change, design education is also expected to adjust to prepare future designers to have dramatically different demands made upon their general abilities and bases of knowledge than have design career paths from years past. Future designers will have to develop skills and be able to construct and utilize knowledge that allows them to make meaningful contributions to collaborative efforts involving experts from disciplines outside design. Exactly how future designers should be prepared to do this has sparked a good deal of conjecture and debate in the professional and academic design communities. This report proposes that the process of creating future scenarios that more broadly explore and expand the role, or roles, for design and designers in the world’s increasingly interwoven and interdependent societies can help uncover core needs and envision framework(s) for design education. This approach informed the creation of a workshop held at the Design Research Society conference in Brighton, UK in June of 2016, where six design educators shared four future scenarios that served as catalysts for conversations about the future of design education. Each scenario presented a specific future design education context. One scenario described the progression of design education as a core component of K-12 curricula; another scenario situated design at the core of a network of globally-linked local Universities; the third scenario highlighted the expanding role of designers over time; and the final scenario described a distance design education context that made learning relevant and “close” to an individual learner’s areas of interest. Forty participants in teams of up to six were asked to collaboratively visualize a possible future vision of design education based on one of these four scenarios and supported by a toolkit consisting of a set of trigger cards (with images and text), along with markers, glue and flipcharts. The collaborative visions that were jointly created as posters using the toolkit and then presented by the teams to all the workshop participants and facilitators are offered here as a case study. Although inspired by different scenarios, their collectively envisioned futures of what design education should facilitate displayed some key similarities. Some of those were: Future design education curricula will focus on developing collaborative approaches within which faculty and students are co-learners; These curricula will bring together ways of learning and knowing that stem from multiple disciplines; and Learning in and about the natural environment will be a key goal (the specifics of how that would be accomplished were not elaborated upon.) In addition, the need for transdisciplinarity was expressed across the collaborative visions created by each of the teams, but the manner that participants chose to express their ideas about this varied. Some envisioned that design would evolve by drawing on other disciplinary knowledge, and others envisioned that design would gradually integrate with other disciplines

RGtk2: A Graphical User Interface Toolkit for R

Graphical user interfaces (GUIs) are growing in popularity as a complement or alternative to the traditional command line interfaces to R. RGtk2 is an R package for creating GUIs in R. The package provides programmatic access to GTK+ 2.0, an open-source GUI toolkit written in C. To construct a GUI, the R programmer calls RGtk2 functions that map to functions in the underlying GTK+ library. This paper introduces the basic concepts underlying GTK+ and explains how to use RGtk2 to construct GUIs from R. The tutorial is based on simple and pratical programming examples. We also provide more complex examples illustrating the advanced features of the package. The design of the RGtk2 API and the low-level interface from R to GTK+ are discussed at length. We compare RGtk2 to alternative GUI toolkits for R.

Genie: A Generator of Natural Language Semantic Parsers for Virtual Assistant Commands

To understand diverse natural language commands, virtual assistants today are trained with numerous labor-intensive, manually annotated sentences. This paper presents a methodology and the Genie toolkit that can handle new compound commands with significantly less manual effort. We advocate formalizing the capability of virtual assistants with a Virtual Assistant Programming Language (VAPL) and using a neural semantic parser to translate natural language into VAPL code. Genie needs only a small realistic set of input sentences for validating the neural model. Developers write templates to synthesize data; Genie uses crowdsourced paraphrases and data augmentation, along with the synthesized data, to train a semantic parser. We also propose design principles that make VAPL languages amenable to natural language translation. We apply these principles to revise ThingTalk, the language used by the Almond virtual assistant. We use Genie to build the first semantic parser that can support compound virtual assistants commands with unquoted free-form parameters. Genie achieves a 62% accuracy on realistic user inputs. We demonstrate Genie's generality by showing a 19% and 31% improvement over the previous state of the art on a music skill, aggregate functions, and access control.Comment: To appear in PLDI 201

Culture and disaster risk management - stakeholder attitudes during Stakeholder Assembly in Lisbon, Portugal

This report provides a summary of the topics discussed and the results of the third CARISMAND Stakeholder Assembly conducted in Lisbon, Portugal on 27-28 February 2018. In order to promote cross-sectional knowledge transfer and gather a variety of attitudes and perceptions, as in the first and second CARISMAND Stakeholder Assemblies held in Romania and Italy in the previous years, the audience consisted of a wide range of practitioners who are typically involved in disaster management, e.g., civil protection, the emergency services, paramedics, nurses, environmental protection, Red Cross, firefighters, military, and the police. Further, these practitioners were from several regions in Portugal, including the island of Madeira. The 40 participants were recruited via invitations sent to various Portuguese organisations and institutions, and via direct contacts of the Civil Protection Department in Lisbon which is one of the partners in the CARISMAND consortium. The event consisted of a mix of presentations and discussion groups to combine dissemination with information gathering (for the detailed schedule/programme see Appendix 1). Furthermore, this third Stakeholder Assembly was organised and specifically designed to discuss and collect feedback on a comprehensive set of recommendations for disaster practitioners, which will form one of the core elements of the CARISMAND Work Package 9 ‘Toolkit’. These recommendations, which have all been formulated on the basis of Work Packages 2-10 results, were structured in four, main “sets”: 1. Approaches to ethnicity in disaster management; 2. Culturally aware disaster-related training activities; 3. Cultural factors in disaster communication, with the sub-sets: a. Cultural values and emotions; (cross-)cultural symbols; “physical” aides and methods; b. Involvement of cultural leaders; involvement of specific groups; usage of social media and mobile phone apps; and 4. Improving trust, improving disaster management. In an initial general assembly, the event started with presentations of the CARISMAND project and its main goals and concepts, including the concept of culture adopted by CARISMAND, and the planned CARISMAND Toolkit architecture and functionalities. These were followed by a detailed presentation of the first of the above mentioned sets of recommendations for practitioners. Then, participants of the Stakeholder Assembly were split into small groups in separate breakout rooms, where they discussed and provided feedback to the presented recommendations. Over the course of the 2-day event, this procedure was followed for all four sets of recommendations. To follow the cyclical design of CARISMAND events, and wherever meaningful and possible, the respective Toolkit recommendations for practitioners provided also the basis for a respective “shadow” recommendation for citizens which will be discussed accordingly in the last round of CARISMAND Citizen Summits (Citizen Summit 5 in Lisbon, and Citizen Summit 6 in Utrecht) in 2018. The location of the Third Stakeholder Assembly was selected to make use of the extensive local professional network of the Civil Protection Department in Lisbon, but also due to Portugal being a traditional “melting pot” where, over more than a millennium, people from different cultural backgrounds and local/ethnical origins (in particular Africa, South America, and Europe) have lived both alongside and together. All documents related to the Working Groups, i.e. discussion guidelines and consent forms, were translated into Portuguese. Accordingly, all presentations, as well as the group discussions were held in Portuguese, aiming to avoid any language/education-related access restrictions, and allowing participating practitioners to respond intuitively and discuss freely in their native language. For this purpose, simultaneous interpreters and professional local moderators were contracted via a local market research agency (EquaçãoLógica), which also provided the basic data analysis of all Working Group discussions and an independent qualitative evaluation of all recommendations presented in the event. The results of this analysis and evaluation will demonstrate that most recommendations were seen by the participating practitioners to be relevant and useful. In particular, those recommendations related to the use of cultural symbols and the potential of mobile phone apps and/or social media were perceived as stimulating and thought-provoking. Some recommendations were felt to be less relevant in the specific Portuguese context, but accepted as useful in other locations; a very small number was perceived to be better addressed to policy makers rather than practitioners. These and all other suggestions for improvement of the presented CARISMAND Toolkit recommendations for practitioners have been taken up and will be outlined in the final chapter of this report.The project was co-funded by the European Commission within the Horizon2020 Programme (2014-2020).peer-reviewe