Language, Twitter and Academic Conferences

Using Twitter during academic conferences is a way of engaging and connecting an audience inherently multicultural by the nature of scientific collaboration. English is expected to be the lingua franca bridging the communication and integration between native speakers of different mother tongues. However, little research has been done to support this assumption. In this paper we analyzed how integrated language communities are by analyzing the scholars' tweets used in 26 Computer Science conferences over a time span of five years. We found that although English is the most popular language used to tweet during conferences, a significant proportion of people also tweet in other languages. In addition, people who tweet solely in English interact mostly within the same group (English monolinguals), while people who speak other languages tend to show a more diverse interaction with other lingua groups. Finally, we also found that the people who interact with other Twitter users show a more diverse language distribution, while people who do not interact mostly post tweets in a single language. These results suggest a relation between the number of languages a user speaks, which can affect the interaction dynamics of online communities.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figures, 4 tables, submitted to ACM Hypertext and Social Media 201

Adapting Binary Information Retrieval Evaluation Metrics for Segment-based Retrieval Tasks

This report describes metrics for the evaluation of the effectiveness of segment-based retrieval based on existing binary information retrieval metrics. This metrics are described in the context of a task for the hyperlinking of video segments. This evaluation approach re-uses existing evaluation measures from the standard Cranfield evaluation paradigm. Our adaptation approach can in principle be used with any kind of effectiveness measure that uses binary relevance, and for other segment-baed retrieval tasks. In our video hyperlinking setting, we use precision at a cut-off rank n and mean average precision.Comment: Explanation of evaluation measures for the linking task of the MediaEval Workshop 201

UTwente does Brave New Tasks for MediaEval 2012: Searching and Hyperlinking

In this paper we report our experiments and results for the brave new searching and hyperlinking tasks for the MediaEval Benchmark Initiative 2012. The searching task involves nding target video segments based on a short natural language sentence query and the hyperlinking task involves nding links from the target video segments to other related video segments in the collection using a set of anchor segments in the videos that correspond to the textual search queries. To nd the starting points in the video, we only used speech transcripts and metadata as evidence source, however, other visual features (for e.g., faces, shots and keyframes) might also aect results for a query. We indexed speech transcripts and metadata, furthermore, the speech transcripts were indexed at speech segment level and at sentence level to improve the likelihood of nding jump-in-points. For linking video segments, we computed k-nearest neighbours of video segments using euclidean distance

The monumentalist and utilitarianteaching of the causes of biodiversity and conservation strategies: a study on the didactic transposition of Spanish Secondary Education textbooks

Este trabajo estudia la presencia y complejidad en el tratamiento de las causas de la biodiversidad y de las razones para su conservación que realizan manuales escolares de la Educación Secundaria de España. Para ello, se determinó el ámbito conceptual y axiológico que define la comunidad de expertos, se examinó el tratamiento propuesto en el currículo español y se analizaron 50 manuales escolares (27 de la Educación Secundaria Obligatoria –ESO – y 30 del Bachillerato). Los resultados mostraron que el proceso de transposición didáctica vuelve monumentalista la enseñanza de la biodiversidad, ya que olvida las razones de su existencia, y se enriquece de connotaciones biologicistas y utilitaristas sobre los motivos de su conservación, dejando de lado las dimensiones éticas, filosóficas y culturales. Además, el tratamiento de los manuales escolares de las causas y conservación de la biodiversidad reveló una marcada distancia de lo señalado en el currículum de España.This paper studies the presence and complexity of the treatment of the causes of biodiversity and the reasons for its conservation in Spanish secondary education textbooks. To this purpose, a conceptual and axiological framework defined by an expert community was reviewed, the treatment proposed in the Spanish national curriculum was described and a total of 50 textbooks were analyzed (27 from middle and 30 from high schools). The results showed that the process of didactic transposition makes the teaching of biodiversity monumental, since it omits the reasons for its existence. Consequently, teaching becomes entrenched in biologicist and utilitarian connotations about the motives for its conservation, thereby leaving aside the ethical, philosophical and cultural dimensions. Furthermore, the treatment of the causes and reasons for biodiversity conservation in textbooks revealed a marked distance from the curriculum of Spain, especially for the first year of middle and high school.Fil: Bermudez, Gonzalo Miguel Angel. Universidad Nacional de Córdoba; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; ArgentinaFil: de Longhi, Ana Lia Teresita. Universidad Nacional de Córdoba; ArgentinaFil: Gavidia, Valentín. Universidad de Valencia; Españ

El tratamiento de los bienes y servicios que aporta la biodiversidad en manuales de los educación secundaria española: un estudio epistemológico.

Este trabajo estudia el tratamiento del concepto de servicios ecosistémicos en libros de texto de la educación secundaria obligatoria (ESO) y bachillerato de España. Con el objetivo de definir su marco conceptual se recopilaron publicaciones científicas de la 'comunidad de expertos', que actúa de referente epistemológico en el proceso de transposición didáctica. El concepto de servicios ecosistémicos estuvo presente sólo en el 10 % de los manuales analizados (de un total de 50); sin embargo, en la mayoría de ellos se mencionó algún bien o servicio (sobre todo en libros de ciencias de la tierra y medioambientales). Estos resultados se relacionan con la ausencia de la conceptualización en el currículo español. Los servicios 'directos' de los ecosistemas fueron tratados con mayor frecuencia que los 'indirectos'. Aun así, se encontró un centrismo en las selvas tropicales como las únicas proveedoras de bienes, y escasa representación de los servicios sociales y culturales de la biodiversidad

Search and hyperlinking task at MediaEval 2012

The Search and Hyperlinking Task was one of the Brave New Tasks at MediaEval 2012. The Task consisted of two subtasks which focused on search and linking in retrieval from a collection of semi-professional video content. These tasks followed up on research carried out within the MediaEval 2011 Rich Speech Retrieval (RSR) Task and the VideoCLEF 2009 Linking Task

HIA’15: Heterogeneous Information Access Workshop at WSDM 2015

The HIA’15 workshop aims to bring together information retrieval practitioners from industry and academic researchers concerned with heterogeneous information access and search federation. We would like to create a forum to encourage discussion and exchange of ideas on heterogeneous information access in different contexts. To facilitate the discussion, we encourage submissions on ideas and results from different aspects of heterogeneous information access including aggregated search, composite retrieval, personal search, structured search, etc. Another objective of the workshop is to encourage submissions with novel ideas (e.g. new applications) on heterogeneous information access and potential future directions of this area

A latent variable ranking model for content-based retrieval

34th European Conference on IR Research, ECIR 2012, Barcelona, Spain, April 1-5, 2012. ProceedingsSince their introduction, ranking SVM models [11] have become a powerful tool for training content-based retrieval systems. All we need for training a model are retrieval examples in the form of triplet constraints, i.e. examples specifying that relative to some query, a database item a should be ranked higher than database item b. These types of constraints could be obtained from feedback of users of the retrieval system. Most previous ranking models learn either a global combination of elementary similarity functions or a combination defined with respect to a single database item. Instead, we propose a “coarse to fine” ranking model where given a query we first compute a distribution over “coarse” classes and then use the linear combination that has been optimized for queries of that class. These coarse classes are hidden and need to be induced by the training algorithm. We propose a latent variable ranking model that induces both the latent classes and the weights of the linear combination for each class from ranking triplets. Our experiments over two large image datasets and a text retrieval dataset show the advantages of our model over learning a global combination as well as a combination for each test point (i.e. transductive setting). Furthermore, compared to the transductive approach our model has a clear computational advantages since it does not need to be retrained for each test query.Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (JCI-2009-04240)EU PASCAL2 Network of Excellence (FP7-ICT-216886

La memoria histórica en los libros de texto escolares

Este artículo describe los resultados de la investigación llevada a cabo por la Universidad de León, financiada por el Ministerio de Presidencia, cuyo objetivo ha sido analizar cómo reflejan los libros de texto de Historia de España los contenidos correspondientes al período de la posguerra civil y especialmente los relacionados con la represión de la dictadura franquista y la lucha antifranquista. Se han revisado los manuales de texto, especialmente los de 2º de Bachillerato, por ser el período curricular en el que se trabaja más detenidamente la Historia contemporánea de España. Metodológicamente se ha utilizado el Análisis Crítico del Discurso para indagar sobre la extensión y completud, así como sobre la orientación y visión que presentan de los contenidos, y se han realizado 610 entrevistas a profesorado de Historia sobre su percepción respecto a la adecuación de estos contenidos. Las conclusiones más significativas reflejan que se han empezado a introducir contenidos sobre estos aspectos, aunque no con la suficiente profundidad