Cultural dialects of real and synthetic emotional facial expressions

In this article we discuss the aspects of designing facial expressions for virtual humans (VHs) with a specific culture. First we explore the notion of cultures and its relevance for applications with a VH. Then we give a general scheme of designing emotional facial expressions, and identify the stages where a human is involved, either as a real person with some specific role, or as a VH displaying facial expressions. We discuss how the display and the emotional meaning of facial expressions may be measured in objective ways, and how the culture of displayers and the judges may influence the process of analyzing human facial expressions and evaluating synthesized ones. We review psychological experiments on cross-cultural perception of emotional facial expressions. By identifying the culturally critical issues of data collection and interpretation with both real and VHs, we aim at providing a methodological reference and inspiration for further research

MAINTAINING INDIGENOUS LANGUAGE THROUGH UNDERSTANDING THE PHILOSOPHY AND CULTURE

Overseas Chinese, as the third biggest tribe in Indonesia, and one of the big minority groups in other South East Asia countries, speak in various dialects in their daily life. Those dialects are their indigenous languages, based on their ancestors’. Most of them speak in Fukien (Hokkian) or Hakka dialects. Some of them even can speak in the both dialects. They prefer speak in those dialects to speak in Mandarin. The Chinese cultural value and philosophy which are taught by the parents and learned by the children continuously in the family take part in maintaining the indigenous language. Overseas Chinese are still using the language among their family and peer group who have the same cultural backgrounds. This paper will discuss in detail how and what efforts have been done by Overseas Chinese ‘Fukien’ and ‘Hakka’ society in Medan, in order to maintain their dialects, which strongly related and influenced by the Chinese philosophy and culture

Music Note Learning Card Game Design

Within the past several decades, Chinese people\u27s living conditions are getting better because of the quick development in the Chinese economy. People are now paying more and more attention to children\u27s artistic accomplishments in China. Therefore, more and more parents choose to let their children start learning musical instruments when they are young. However, the first step to learn an instrument is learning how to read and understand different note values and basic rhythm patterns. For example, in China, the traditional way of teaching basic rhythmic patterns is that the teacher demonstrates the basic rhythm pattern to a group of students through the blackboard or other media. Then the students follow the teacher and practice together. Because that is group class, it is difficult for the teacher to interact with each student. Therefore, the entire class is more like a music lecture. The students only have a few chances to practice and master the basic rhythmic pattern. In this way, learning basic music theory is undoubtedly dull and challenging for many children. As a result, some children with weak foundations or younger ages cannot understand the class\u27s content. Basic music theory is the most important but also the most tedious part of music learning. So how to stimulate children\u27s interest in learning basic music theory like notes and beats is a big question. This thesis project aims to use interactive and visual design to enhance children\u27s music learning experience. In this thesis, the author demonstrates the process of designing a music notes learning card game. The design combines physical and digital tools and uses the combination of actual note cards and the mobile phone application to create this interactive learning experience for children

MatchZoo: A Learning, Practicing, and Developing System for Neural Text Matching

Text matching is the core problem in many natural language processing (NLP) tasks, such as information retrieval, question answering, and conversation. Recently, deep leaning technology has been widely adopted for text matching, making neural text matching a new and active research domain. With a large number of neural matching models emerging rapidly, it becomes more and more difficult for researchers, especially those newcomers, to learn and understand these new models. Moreover, it is usually difficult to try these models due to the tedious data pre-processing, complicated parameter configuration, and massive optimization tricks, not to mention the unavailability of public codes sometimes. Finally, for researchers who want to develop new models, it is also not an easy task to implement a neural text matching model from scratch, and to compare with a bunch of existing models. In this paper, therefore, we present a novel system, namely MatchZoo, to facilitate the learning, practicing and designing of neural text matching models. The system consists of a powerful matching library and a user-friendly and interactive studio, which can help researchers: 1) to learn state-of-the-art neural text matching models systematically, 2) to train, test and apply these models with simple configurable steps; and 3) to develop their own models with rich APIs and assistance

Culture and E-Learning: Automatic Detection of a Users’ Culture from Survey Data

Knowledge about the culture of a user is especially important for the design of e-learning applications. In the experiment reported here, questionnaire data was used to build machine learning models to automatically predict the culture of a user. This work can be applied to automatic culture detection and subsequently to the adaptation of user interfaces in e-learning

Culture in the design of mHealth UI:An effort to increase acceptance among culturally specific groups

Purpose: Designers of mobile applications have long understood the importance of users’ preferences in making the user experience easier, convenient and therefore valuable. The cultural aspects of groups of users are among the key features of users’ design preferences, because each group’s preferences depend on various features that are culturally compatible. The process of integrating culture into the design of a system has always been an important ingredient for effective and interactive human computer interface. This study aims to investigate the design of a mobile health (mHealth) application user interface (UI) based on Arabic culture. It was argued that integrating certain cultural values of specific groups of users into the design of UI would increase their acceptance of the technology. Design/methodology/approach: A total of 135 users responded to an online survey about their acceptance of a culturally designed mHealth. Findings: The findings showed that culturally based language, colours, layout and images had a significant relationship with users’ behavioural intention to use the culturally based mHealth UI. Research limitations/implications: First, the sample and the data collected of this study were restricted to Arab users and Arab culture; therefore, the results cannot be generalized to other cultures and users. Second, the adapted unified theory of acceptance and use of technology model was used in this study instead of the new version, which may expose new perceptions. Third, the cultural aspects of UI design in this study were limited to the images, colours, language and layout. Practical implications: It encourages UI designers to implement the relevant cultural aspects while developing mobile applications. Originality/value: Embedding Arab cultural aspects in designing UI for mobile applications to satisfy Arab users and enhance their acceptance toward using mobile applications, which will reflect positively on their lives.</p

LANGUAGE CHOICE IN MULTINGUAL COMMUNITIES

This article describe about language varieties in multilingual communities in the norm context . The paper are contains: (1) Introduction (2) Speech Community and Linguistic Repertoire (3) Domain of Language Use (4) Diglossia (5) Polyglossia (7) Code Mixing (8) Code Switching (9) Conclusion. The writer want to explain about varieties of language in daily conversation

Trialing project-based learning in a new EAP ESP course: A collaborative reflective practice of three college English teachers

Currently in many Chinese universities, the traditional College English course is facing the risk of being ‘marginalized’, replaced or even removed, and many hours previously allocated to the course are now being taken by EAP or ESP. At X University in northern China, a curriculum reform as such is taking place, as a result of which a new course has been created called ‘xue ke’ English. Despite the fact that ‘xue ke’ means subject literally, the course designer has made it clear that subject content is not the target, nor is the course the same as EAP or ESP. This curriculum initiative, while possibly having been justified with a rationale of some kind (e.g. to meet with changing social and/or academic needs of students and/or institutions), this is posing a great challenge for, as well as considerable pressure on, a number of College English teachers who have taught this single course for almost their entire teaching career. In such a context, three teachers formed a peer support group in Semester One this year, to work collaboratively co-tackling the challenge, and they chose Project-Based Learning (PBL) for the new course. This presentation will report on the implementation of this project, including the overall designing, operational procedure, and the teachers’ reflections. Based on discussion, pre-agreement was reached on the purpose and manner of collaboration as offering peer support for more effective teaching and learning and fulfilling and pleasant professional development. A WeChat group was set up as the chief platform for messaging, idea-sharing, and resource-exchanging. Physical meetings were supplementary, with sound agenda but flexible time, and venues. Mosoteach cloud class (lan mo yun ban ke) was established as a tool for virtual learning, employed both in and after class. Discussions were held at the beginning of the semester which determined only brief outlines for PBL implementation and allowed space for everyone to autonomously explore in their own way. Constant further discussions followed, which generated a great deal of opportunities for peer learning and lesson plan modifications. A reflective journal, in a greater or lesser detailed manner, was also kept by each teacher to record the journey of the collaboration. At the end of the semester, it was commonly recognized that, although challenges existed, the collaboration was overall a success and they were all willing to continue with it and endeavor to refine it to be a more professional and productive approach